NORTH CAROLINA: SECRETS AND SHAME PROMOTE ADOPTION
Shortly after I posted my Tar Heel blog this morning, I received an email alerting me to an editorial in today’s Raleigh News & Observer—The Parent Search–which picks up the tea and sympathy where the Tar Heel scraped off. “It’s perfectly understandable why an adoptee would…”the N&O writes, as it sharpens its ax. Like the Tar Heel, the N&O fears that adult adoptees getting their very own personalized true and original birth certificates unsealed and unimpounded from the State of North Carolina will “harm” adoption. It offers compromise: * Maybe a state-run contact registry for adults (though apparently records access opponents believe these evil databases “could deter potential adoptive parents for fear they would lose the child’s love once a birth parent was found.”) *Maybe a way for “birth parents” to reveal “limited information about themselves–their medical histories, for instance, or their land of origin.” Land of origin? Yes, in North Carolina, state-mandated forged birth documents just don’t change the names of the kid and the parents; they also change the place of the adoptee’s birth! Do we need any more than that to tell us that adoption in the US is a witness protection program? That falsified birth certificates Continue Reading →