Dear Governor Quinn:
Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization urges you to veto HB 5428, a so-called “adoptee rights” bill promoted as a progressive piece of legislation to correct Illinois’ long-standing Draconian treatment of its adoptees and their families of origin. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The bill’s stated purpose and its final product are diametrically opposed.
The introduction to the bill reads: The General Assembly recognizes that it is the basic right of all persons to access their birth records, and, to this end, supports public policy that allows an adult adoptee to access his or her original birth certificate. The rest of the bill guts the “recognition of that “basic right,” putting unreasonable and outrageous restrictions on that “basic right:”
HB 5428 separates adoptees into two classes by date of birth and then into numerous subclasses of “access” and “contact” eligibility dependent on parental and state “consent.”
HB 5428 “grants” rights to some at the expense of others.
HB 5428 criminalizes adoptees that use information from the Illinois Adoption Reunion and Medical Exchange to locate and contact families of origin.
HB 5428 dictates relationships between adults.
.HB 5428 is a bill that adopted persons and their families of origin did not ask for and do not want. It has virtually no support from adoptee rights and adoption reform organizations in Illinois and throughout the country.
HB 5428 is NOT an original birth certificate access bill. HB 5428 is NOT an adoptee rights bill. HB 5428 is NOT an adoption reform bill.
Instead HB 5428 is an abomination that stalls genuine adoption reform in the state for decades.
Please veto HB 5428 and ask the legislature to come back with a clean bill that treats all Illinois adoptees as fully equal to non-adopted Illinoisans.
Yours truly
Marley Elizabeth Greiner
Executive Chair