Hmmm. For 80 years in New York State, adoptees have been issued Amended Birth Certificates to replace our Actual Birth Certificates (notice I did not say “Original Birth Certificates – if we keep the language of the government policy makers, we are falling in line with them), changing our identity at birth, name at birth, and our parents of birth with our new name, new parents and sometimes a new birth place and birth date (time of birth is only recorded on the Actual Birth Certificate). At first, this was to hide illegitimacy, but this really was done to give the adopting parents the upper hand: they were now visibly, on paper, parents. Instead of creating a Certificate of Adoption, New York State (along with the rest of the United States) took the politically correct road to appease the sensibilities of the new adoptive parents. They were, and are still given a piece of paper that documents that they gave birth to the child named. This goes against logic. Everyone knows that this “birth” did not happen, so why are we all pretending?

How absolutely preposterously wrong!

In reality, a person is born only once. Everyone knows this. Yet the government creates these false birth certificates as a public show of political-correctness.

Adoptees’ Actual Birth Certificates are sealed and can never be unsealed. This is to benefit only the adults involved, not the child whose birth is recorded. Correction – this decision does not benefit the natural parents at all. This act wipes them off the legal record of birth. It is not enough for them to sign away their parental rights, but they are obliterated from the public record of birth.

In her article, Jennifer Lahl (writing about her state of California) states

Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles) authored Assembly Bill 1951, which amends the California Vital Records Birth Certificate law in order to “modernize” California birth certificates by allowing each parent to self-identify as mother, father, or simply “parent.”

Gomez said, “I authored this bill to say that it’s okay to have two mothers or fathers. I believe that parents do see themselves as a mother or a father and that they want to express that on their child’s birth certificate. We should give people the flexibility to accurately reflect their relationship with their child.”

We all know why this bill, which will become law next year, was written. It was to appease gay men and lesbian women who are creating children through sperm donation, egg donation and surrogacy, or by adoption.

If Assemblyman Gomez would take a long look at his own statements, he would realize how ridiculous they are. No one in their right mind would say to any child that you have two mothers because we wanted it that way, when, in school (and life), this will backfire. The child will learn the truth – that a baby is created by one egg, one sperm, and gestated in one uterus. It is definitely NOT okay to have two mothers or two fathers or parent one and parent two named on a certificate that is designed to record the child’s real birth, and not some politically correct mushy sentiment of the two legal and social parents.

What is right – and what would officially record the real truth –  is to have a birth certificate and then an adoption certificate. The adoption certificate not only would show the truth, but it would also serve to “accurately reflect their relationship with their child” – and on THIS document, then, two mothers or two fathers can be named as mother and mother, or father and father, or parent one and parent two. It is important to make the distinction between biological facts and legal facts. The legal parentage, in the case of adoption, also spells out the parents who will be raising the child – they are the social parents.

No one seems to understand what adoptees and donor-conceived people already know: we really DO have two sets of real parents. We really do have two mothers and two fathers; some of us actually were adopted more than once so we have another set of legal parents. One set of parents created us; we share our DNA with them. The other set raised us. We share our memories, daily life, and love with them. Some of us, though, were raised by adoptive parents who did not treat us with love, kindness nor respect, but we cannot get out of the adoption contract easily. And for most of us, we do have love for our genetic parents.

But society says we can have ONLY one set of parents. That is very clear by the new law that will take effect in California.

Not all angles have been discussed, nor planned for in the legal documentation of the splitting-hairs of parentage. There is the surrogate mother, who might be paid a fee and lying in a poor house in India, or she might be in a rich neighborhood in LA, making babies because pregnancy comes easy for her and she wants to be altruistic in making a baby for someone else. Her name, and that of the egg donor, and that of the sperm donor, belongs on the child’s birth certificate. If you doubt that, ask anyone who is the product of such arrangement. Think you want a baby so desperately that you are willing to burden your future child with this for her or his lifetime? What about future generations? Messing with human natural selection and human consequences will NOT be felt by the arranging parents. They will get what they want – the pleasure of parenting. But the child so produced will experience lifetime ramifications for the cavalier decisions made by those in charge.