I am a New York State Adoptee living in Town of Tonawanda near Buffalo

Assembly District 140

Senate District 60

 

Tuesday June 21, 2017

Subject: VOTE NO on S4845-B & ADVANCE S5169-A (same as A6821-A)

 

Dear New York State Senators:

This is my second email to you following the New York State Assembly vote of 120 Yes and 27 No for A5036-B.

I am including here links to two video clips of two Assembly members who were influenced to VOTE NO as a direct result of reading emails from adopted citizens.

https://www.facebook.com/adopteerightslaw/videos/1921502868131546/

Hon. Dean Murray

https://www.facebook.com/adopteerightslaw/videos/1921534404795059/

Hon. Robert C. Carroll

To All New York Senators: I urge you to watch and listen to these two members of the New York Assembly. They listened to us. I am asking you to listen to us. An Adoptees’ Rights Bill MUST be about Adoptees and Adoptees ONLY. Senate Bill S4845-B, with the amendments, has become a bill about protecting mothers’ perceived rights to confidentiality.

I urge you to VOTE NO on S4845-B.

Senate Bill S4845-B must NOT be passed into law. It is not about restoring adoptee civil rights to have access to our sealed birth certificate; this bill caters to the whims of a few scared mothers who inflict their pain onto adoptees who will then pay the price of their ignorance. If passed into law, this will further erode the civil rights of New York State’s adopted citizens. No other group of people must ask parental permission and be subjected to a judge’s final say to do anything in life.

Signed relinquishment removes ALL parental rights. Why would you vote to give some parental rights back to parents of adopted adults? Children become autonomous adults at the age of majority.

Signed relinquishment does not remove parents’ names from their child’s birth certificate. After relinquishment, the child is in the custody of the adoption agency, the state, or foster parents, or prospective adoptive parents. If the child is never adopted and ages out of foster care, that child maintains the birth certificate for life – without the relinquishing parents’ consent or power to redact their names from the birth certificate.

A child’s name and parents’ names are only removed from the official birth record upon the final order of adoption, not relinquishment. It is at the finalization of adoption that the judge orders the name and birth certificate to be sealed and a new one issued to replace it.

If you didn’t know that, you should. You are our law makers and you should know that the mothers you might be trying to protect actually have no right to even ask if their child has actually been adopted and they have no right to seek out the adoptee during the first 18 years of the relinquished child’s life. The judge tells relinquishing mothers and fathers to stay away from the adoptee and the adoptive parents. That is why the records were sealed – to prevent the natural parents from interfering with the new family.

Yes, I know there is open adoption. But even in open adoption the records are sealed. That makes no sense.

It seems to me that there might be a consensus to move toward pushing this bill forward into law because other states have passed similar confidential intermediary and redactive bills into law, favoring the unproven myth that mothers were promised confidentially.

Do you know the history of sealed records in America? I urge you to consider that each state in the United States passed laws in the 1930s to revoke and seal birth certificates of every child who was adopted to hide the stigma of being born an illegitimate bastard. The false birth certificate changed the legal status of the child; adoption by a legally married mother and father legally legitimized the bastard.

In today’s society, we know that not all adoptees were born bastards, and those who were, do not deserve the stigma. Many of us were removed from married parents and then adopted. Many of us were adopted by their step parents. Some adoptees were adopted by their grandparents, or aunts and uncles, or older siblings. In these in-family adoptions, the birth records are still revoked and sealed and new birth certificates are created according to the order of adoption.

Orphans are also adopted. (I am a half orphan – my mother died when I was 3 months old. My father gave me up for adoption). That means orphans, too, were born of married parents and then adopted.

But the New York State law that was passed in 1935 was meant to hide illegitimacy. What purpose does revoking and sealing the medical record of live birth and replacing it with a fictitious birth certificate do to legitimately-born children?

Why should adoptees, regardless of the circumstances of birth and adoption, be subjected to punitive laws that rob us of our natural born identities? These standards do not apply to non-adopted people. Altering facts presented on any other birth certificate would be perjury. But in adoption, it is acceptable. And expected.

The issue at hand isn’t about natural parents who want to hide. The issue – and the TITLE of the original Bill was ADOPTEE BILL OF RIGHTS. It was supposed to be about the civil rights of all adopted people to the truth of our births. With the amendments, S4845-B has turned its focus toward the misguided notion that mothers need protection.

Adoptees ceased being under the control of our adoptive parents when we reached the age of majority. Now New York State’s badly-amended bill will force us to ask parental permission from our natural parents who gave us up for adoption, and we will be subjected to a judge’s decision over whether or not we can have our birth certificate. The bill will give redaction power to the natural parents if they do not want to be known.

What other parent has the right to remove their name from their child’s birth certificate? None.

It would be an education for you to see all of my birth certificates: my hospital birth certificate, my short form birth registration, my long form medical record of live birth, my short form amended birth certificate issued upon adoption, my long form birth certificate issued upon adoption. To see all of my birth certificates, follow this link to my article published on my website: https://forbiddenfamily.com/2017/03/24/presenting-my-sealed-birth-certificate-and-falsified-one-as-evidence-of-new-york-state-fraud-revoking-sealing-and-falsifying-adoptees-birth-certificates-is-unconstitutional/ Presenting My Sealed Birth Certificate and Falsified One as Evidence of New York State Fraud – Revoking, Sealing and Falsifying Adoptees’ Birth Certificates is Unconstitutional

Once you see the evidence I present, I hope you will change your mind to VOTE NO on S4845B.

Please move Senate Bill S5169-A (same as A6821-A) forward as it focuses on Adoptee Rights without parental permission.

 

Sincerely,

Doris Michol Sippel

Born January 7, 1956.

Adopted as Joan Mary Wheeler on January 14, 1957.

Legally reclaimed name of birth on June 13, 2017.