The New Jersey Some-Adoptees-Are-More-Equal-Than-Others bill passed the NJ Senate today, 26-12-1.
No doubt its well-intentioned supporters consider passage a victory for adoptee rights. It is not.
S1087[pdf] is more of the same old same old with a new twist of the knife-in-the-back. Sure everybody can get their original birth certificate…but birthparents can make the state remove their names from it and create a second forged birth certificate even more insulting than the amended birth certificate. I guess nobody ever told the folks up there that the “original birth certificate” had to be complete and accurate. As long as it’s branded “original” I guess that makes everything OK. Holy Immaculate Conception!
YOU ARE NOT WORTHY
What is really ingenious about this bill is that politicians don’t have to change their attitude toward adoptees one degree. They can bestow a birth certificate favor on the adopted without restoring the birth certificate right. Nothing has changed.
The white-out opt-out affirms the doctrine of adoptee suspectability. Under S1087 adoptees remain a stigmatized legal and social class. Our identity rights are tossed around by the new and special whim-and-quirk right of a few birthparents who signed their children into the adoption mill 20, 30, 50 or more years ago, to now legally determine–unlike any other parents–what information is revealed on the birth certificates of their adult offspring. Adoptees can never be trusted. Adoptees never grow up.
Once this special right is codified under S1087, what other means will it be put to? Embarrassed that your son died of AIDS? Remove “cause of death” from the death certificate. Don’t want your neighbor to know your property tax rate? Hand the clerk a bottle of WhiteOut. Squeamish that your husband might discover Gilbert Gottfried was your first husband?….
It used to be that records were just sealed. That made things easy. Over the last 20 years, however, the baby step strategy of the compliant grateful adoptee Deform Gang, willing to throw away the rights of all for the reunions of some, have created secrecy contracts between the state and birthparents where none existed before. Their disclosure vetoes, contract vetoes, and white-outs make the full restoration of the right of identity nearly impossible since once some are “given” their “rights” the issue can’t or won’t be revisited for the left-behinds. Favors are doled out to adoptees on a “by permission” basis. We have no rights, at least that neither politicians or deformers acknowledge.
Give me a tussle with NCFA pussycats any day.
If S1087 were only about New Jersey, it would be bad enough. Unfortunately, if the bill passes, it will likely be used as a model for other states where “activists” seem ignorant of the lessons of history–that clean records laws can and will be passed. According to Sunday’s Oregonian, since the passage of Measure 58, 9,129 Oregon adoptees have received their original birth certificates. Bastardette can only wonder why those who are willing to take less don’t look to Oregon, or Alabama, or New Hampshire, and demand more. Don’t all adoptees count?
Luckly, the bill still has to be heard by the Assembly.
The disclosure veto, identity-deletion is awful, and shouldn’t be! but who determined that falsified (aka amended) BC’s, and sealed OBC’s, be codified into law in the first place and why. On both ends, its sick. What if the mother wants disclosure but a father doesn’t, granted his name is on the OBC?
Did the NJ legislators just finish reading George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” It appears they became fixated on the political strategy of the pigs who led the fight for animal rights with the slogan, “All animals are equal.”
The truth, much to the dismay of the rest of the barnyard, was that once the battle had been won it was clear that not all animals were equal. When challenged why none of the animals except pigs had full equality, the pigs responded with the truth: “Pigs are more equal than other animals.”
It is this convoluted understanding and practice of equality that the NJ legislators have imposed on adopted adults. According to the senators of NJ, all adoptees are equal but birth parents will determine which adoptees are more equal than others.
The ability to obtain one’s original birth certificate is a right and not a privilege. The only people now denied that right in NJ are criminals in the witness protection program and adopted adults whose birth birth parents deny them that right.
How ironic that birth parents who gave up all parental rights when their child was relinquished to adoption, perhaps more than 50 years ago, now have the right to come back into the lives of their adult sons and daughters to deny them what is rightfully theirs: the document that defines their true identity and membership in the human race; that is, their original birth certificate.
Msgr. John W. Sweeley, Th.D.
The issue here is not simply access to a birth certificate. What is at issue is an adult adoptee’s right to be treated the same as anyone else, including other adult adoptees.
How do they come up with such ridiculous ideas? A forged birthcertificate to be presented as the original birthcertificate?
And isn’t the idea of getting the real birthcertificate so adopted people can find out who they are?
Or if that line offends some people,so that they can find out who their familie are?