The Great State of Maine, one of six free states, is an example for the rest of our Nation. Here is a link to their Birth Records Law for Adoptees: no impact on taxpayers, equality for all Maine Born Citizens.
Author: legitimatebastard
Doris Michol Sippel is the author of “Forbidden Family: An Adopted Woman’s Struggle for Identity,” 3rd Edition, available from Amazon. She is the owner of Identity Press.
Doris Michol Sippel was born legitimately in January of 1956. She became a half-orphan at the age of three months when her mother died. At the finalization of her adoption the following January, a Surrogate Court Judge sent orders to change her name in accordance with the 1936 New York State law that requires the creation of a new birth certificate for each child who is adopted. This law assumes that the child was born illegitimately; therefore, adoption legitimizes the child by providing a new mother who is legally married to the child’s new legal father.
Even though Doris had a legitimate father, adoption law provided her with a different legal father, hence legitimizing her unnecessarily. On March 4, 1957, the state issued Doris a substitute “amended” birth certificate in the name of Joan Mary Wheeler, falsely naming her new “parents” as if they conceived, and gave birth to her. By law, as in all adoptions, Doris’s birth certificate was then repossessed, its official certification revoked, and the document was sealed forever.
Both of these acts erased her natural-born identity and family. Legally, she and her family ceased to exist.
Lawfully, Doris became Joan, but that was not, and is not, the truth of her reality. Since her reunion in 1974, she claims both identities: a legitimate bastard in one family and a half-orphan in the other. Her dual identity is real, but the state recognizes only her legally manufactured identity. For this denial of her civil rights, she is supposed to be a grateful “adopted child” forever.
Doris Michol Sippel legally reclaimed her name on June 13, 2016. Her birth certificate is still sealed by New York State.
New York Times Obit for Betty Jean Lifton
Rest in Peace, BJ. You were one of the first adoptees in the adoption reform movement to write and tell the adoptee’s truth. Thank you for that, and thank you for your friendship. – Joan Wheeler
New York Times Obit for Betty Jean Lifton
Betty Jean Lifton Dies at 84; Urged Open Adoptions
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: November 26, 2010
Betty Jean Lifton, a writer, adoptee and adoption-reform advocate whose books — searing condemnations of the secrecy that traditionally shrouded adoption — became touchstones for adoptees throughout the world, died on Nov. 19 in Boston. She was 84 and lived in Cambridge, Mass.
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Betty Jean Lifton in 1985. She lectured widely about potential psychological effects.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, her husband, the psychiatrist and author Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, said.
Ms. Lifton, who lectured widely about the potential psychological effects of adoption, was best known for a nonfiction trilogy: “Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter” (McGraw Hill, 1975), in which she recounts her adulthood search for her birth mother; “Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience” (Dial, 1979); and “Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness” (Basic Books, 1994).
An outspoken proponent of open adoption, Ms. Lifton was often interviewed on the issue in the news media. (Nine states now allow adult adoptees access to their original birth certificates.)
She was a past board member of the American Adoption Congress; in recent years she also worked as a psychological counselor, with a practice centered on adoptees and their families.
When “Twice Born” was first published, there were few books about the adoptee experience. Adoption in general was a veiled topic, and adoptees — assuming they were told anything — rarely knew their given names, their birth parents’ identities or the precise circumstances of their adoptions.
As a result, generations of adoptees grew up with a void where their personal histories should be and, Ms. Lifton argued, with deep feelings of confusion, grief and loss.
“When I was born, society prophesied that I would bring disgrace to my mother, kill her reputation, destroy her chances for a good bourgeois life,” she wrote in “Twice Born.”
She added: “I say that society, by sealing birth records, by cutting adoptees off from their biological past, by keeping secrets from them, has made them into a separate breed, unreal even to themselves.”
The book’s publication, which gave momentum to the emerging adoption-reform movement, prompted an outpouring of mail from people with similar stories. These letters, and subsequent interviews with adoptees, informed the next installments in Ms. Lifton’s trilogy, in which she examined the psychological toll that closed adoption can take, and the psychological affinities many adoptees appear to share.
While some critics seemed discomforted by Ms. Lifton’s use of mythic metaphor (“I write of perilous journeys of the spirit, of labyrinths, of ghosts, of strangers with mysterious origins, of princesses and princes asleep under spells,” she said in “Twice Born”), others praised her willingness to speak frankly about a taboo subject.
Her other books include “The King of Children” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988), a biography of the Polish Jewish doctor, writer and children’s advocate Janusz Korczak, who was killed in Treblinka. She also wrote for children, including books about adoption and many titles inspired by Japanese folk tales.
Blanche Rosenblatt, as she later learned she was originally named, was born in Staten Island on June 11, 1926. Her mother, Rae Rosenblatt, who was 17 when Blanche was born, and her father, a bootlegger and bon vivant, were unmarried, a scandalous condition then. (In the first edition of “Twice Born,” Ms. Lifton gives her birth mother the pseudonym Bea Silverstein.)
Ms. Rosenblatt eventually gave up Blanche to a foster home. At 2 ½, she was adopted by a Cincinnati couple, Oscar and Hilda Kirschner, who renamed her Betty Jean.
When Betty Jean was 7, Hilda Kirschner informed her that she was adopted, adding that her birth parents were dead. Such falsehoods, Ms. Lifton later wrote, were par for the course at the time.
Betty Jean Kirschner earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Barnard College in 1948; in the 1990s, she earned a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from the Union Institute.
In 1952 she married Dr. Lifton, a psychiatrist who went on to write many influential books, including psychological studies of war and the Holocaust. The couple lived for several years in Hong Kong and Japan.
After returning to the United States, Ms. Lifton, long haunted by her opaque past, contacted the agency that had handled her adoption. She learned that her parents were probably still alive and began scouring public records for traces of them. Bit by bit, the information she gleaned led her to her birth mother.
They met several times in the years that followed. Though their communication was often strained, for Ms. Lifton, as she made clear in her writing, it was absolutely necessary. She later searched for her birth father, only to learn he had died not long before.
Besides her husband, Ms. Lifton is survived by their two children, Kenneth and Natasha Lifton; four grandchildren; and a half-brother, Donald Billings.
She dedicated “Journey of the Adopted Self” to her two mothers, who, she wrote, “might have known and even liked each other in another life and another adoption system.”
A version of this article appeared in print on November 27, 2010, on page A17 of the New York edition.
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Truth in Adoption: Taking the Mystery Out of My UnSealed Adoption Records
November 20th is National Adoption Day. To “celebrate”, I spent the day in mourning for the family from which I was taken. It is a fact of life that for every adoptive family to be happy, there is a family that had to be broken in order for the adoptive family to get their precious baby. I lost my entire family because of adoption. For this, I am not happy. I am not grateful. I am not glad that I was not aborted. I almost died at my premature birth; many day go by with my wishing I had died so that perhaps my mother could have lived. I never blamed my father for my relinquishment for he was grief-stricken, faced with immediate decisions, and he made those decisions under duress. I was raised in a loving home as an only child, showered with love and affection. However, the lifetime of deceit, intentional lies and actual disdain and panic that I would one day meet the very siblings my adoptive parents fought to prohibit me from knowing — that is what is despicable about my adoption. That, and the fact that my name was changed, my identity was changed, for no good reason. A lifetime of pain and loss for me and my children.
Happy National Adoption Day. NOT.
…
These are the papers that I obtained from Surrogate’s Court, Erie County, New York:
On Oct 24, 1956, my natural father and pre-adoptive parents met in Surrogate’s Court. They signed a joint contract “Consent to Adopt and Agreement to Adopt”.
Notice that the paper states that my natural father “will not interfere with the rights, duties and privileges of said child when adopted. He was not, as opponents to open records claim, granted any special confidentiality by the consent to adoption papers that he signed when he relinquished his parental rights to be my legal father. My father told me, when we discussed this a few years later, that the judge told him to stay away from the newly formed adoptive family. There was no verbal or written promise of confidentiality granted to my natural father.
Here is the agreement signed by my natural father and my pre-adoptive parents:
Here are the other papers released to me by the Surrogate Court Judge.
As you read these papers, keep in mind that while my adoption was treated as a closed adoption, both sets of parents knew of each other before I was conceived. My adoptive parents (before they became my parents) and their extended families were present at the funeral of my natural mother to pay their respects at her passing. As you read these papers, keep in mind that the five children involved had no say in what the adults did to permanently separate them as a sibling group. With so much information exchanging hands, with so much at stake, this adoption should never have taken place.
My Final Order of Adoption:
~ ~ ~ Joan M Wheeler, BA, BSW, born Doris M Sippel, author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009.
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Truth in Adoption: How I Petitioned for My Adoption Files
I was reunited with my natural family in 1974. By 1981, I had petitioned Surrogate’s Court for my Final Order of Adoption, even though I already had a copy (see yesterday’s post).
In 1985, I petitioned Surrogate’s Court of Erie County, New York for all of my sealed adoption files. I wanted every piece of paper they had on my adoption: the signed relinquishment papers, petition to adopt, and any other paperwork. I wanted permission to seek my birth certificate, too, but was told that petitioning for the birth record was a separate process.
Being politically correct for the time period, I used the terms “birthparents” and “birth mother” and “birth father”. Today, I would use the terms “natural parents” and “natural mother” and “natural father” because those words accurately describe the relationship. Also, these are legal terms used to designate between the natural parents, foster parents, and adoptive parents of an adoptee, although, as you will see tomorrow, the term used in legal documents to describe my natural father is “father”. That’s because he is my father and was my legal father until after he signed relinquishment papers.
So, I began with the simple petition to the court:
With the help of a law student who gave me specific statements to use and a form to follow, I typed up the following (reproduced here minus specific identifiers and other information not releveant to the general public):
My request for sealed reports and documents from Vital Statistics Office, Catholic Charities of Buffalo, and Millard Fillmore Hospital were denied. With my natural father’s permission, I obtained my medical records and my mother’s medical records from her admittance to the hospital while pregnant with me until her death three months after my birth. Because the records that were released to me from Surrogate’s Court contained most of the information I sought, I did not pursue further petitioning to Catholic Charities. Dialogue between my natural father and I filled in the blanks of where I was from birth until placed in the custody of my pre-adoptive parents, a four month period not covered by documents held by Surrogate’s Court.
Tomorrow I will present the papers I received from Surrogate’s Court.
~ ~ ~ Joan M Wheeler, BA, BSW, born Doris M Sippel, author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009.
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Truth in Adoption: I Was the Skeleton in the Closet
For the duration of my childhood, I was raised with the belief that my birth was “the skeleton in the closet” and that I was to never ask about it. I was simply told two different stories during my childhood. The stories were never discussed, just stated.
The first story was told to me when I was a child of about four or five years old. I remember it clearly. My mother came up to me, knelt down on the floor and said, “You are adopted. Your mother had too many children so she gave you to us”. Then, my mother kissed me, got up, and left the room. My little world was shattered. My mother wasn’t my mother. She just told me I had another mother. Even a five year old knows that mothers love their children, so why would my mother just give me away?
The second story, told to me by my adoptive mother when I was about ten years old, went something like this, “Your mother died of cancer just three months after giving birth to you. Your father thought it best that you live with us”.
What is a child supposed to do with that information? I felt a huge hole in my heart, but did not know it was grief. I stuffed my feelings down inside me, just as I stuffed inside the information stated to me when I was five. What does a child do with the statement “your mother had too many children so she gave you to us”? I was too numb to realize that “too many children” meant that I had sisters and brothers. I was raised an only child, so I longed for siblings to play with, but I dared not think about it too much for if I did, then I might actually acknowledge that I had siblings out there somewhere.
Then there were parties for the children (adoptive cousins) who were my parents’ God Children. A fuss was made: a card, a cake, gifts for the God Children from my parents to the God Children. These children were my cousins, so it was just another party for kids. But when I asked who my God Parents were, my adoptive mother said, “We don’t know who they are.”
Liar.
She knew, but she did not want to tell me.
I sat there at a party for my parents’ God Daughter and stared at my mother. It was clear I was to never talk about the subject again.
For those of you who think that this is the way it was done in the 1950s and 1960s, think again. To dismiss the importance of the cruelty done to me by washing it away with a blanket statement to excuse the problem because of the social time it happened is to tell me that the issues don’t need to be brought up now: “For God’s sake, it is over and done with.” “Don’t live in the past.” “Get over it.” “It’s the way it was done, so let it be.” “Things are different now.” Are they? Are adoptive parents more careful with their adoptees’ feelings and facts of life? I doubt it.
What was said to me as a child stayed with me, creating lasting impressions. These statements haunt me now in the form of traumatic flashbacks. These, and other comments and exchanges, created the PTSD that I must live with now.
Oh yes, here’s one other snappy comment made by my adoptive mother to me when I was a child. My mother was angry with me because a neighbor’s child, my playmate of about eight years old, told her mother that I said I was adopted. The mother then reported the news to my mother, who retaliated to me with fierce anger.
“Joanie,” she yelled, “Other people don’t need to know our skeletons in the closet!”
I was filled with shame for telling another child that I was adopted. I was ashamed of myself, but did not know why I deserved to feel this way.
So, today, as the pro-adoption crowd proudly goes on with their happy “National Adoption Awareness Month” of November, I would like to begin by warning adoptive parents everywhere not to make the same mistakes that my adoptive parents made.
There will be more mistakes discussed here in the days ahead.
~ ~ ~ Joan M Wheeler, BA, BSW, born Doris M Sippel, author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009.
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Chicago Tribune’s Article “Open to Interpretation” and My Response
The Chicago Tribune published this article on birth certificate access and reunions:
Open to interpretation
Despite new laws granting access to birth records, many adoptees struggle in search of their past
While people are catching on that it is descriminatory to keep adoptees’ birth certificates sealed, many are missing the point that illegitimacy may have been the cause of the sealed and falsified laws, but there is much more going on.
Because I have been lumped into the category of being illegitimate when I am not, I resent the stigma placed upon me. I resent the stigma placed on my fellow adoptees because this is an out-dated stigma. All humans have value, no matter what the circumstances at birth and childhood.
Here is my posted response to the above article:
The stigma of illegitimacy does not apply to all adoptees. There are adoptees who were adopted by their step parents, adoptees who were taken from married parents and put into foster care and fast tracked into adoption, there are adoptees who were half or full orphaned by the death of one or both parents. In all of the above cases, none of these adoptees were from illegitimate births.
To hold all adoptees in the legal prison of sealed and falsified birth certificates based solely upon the social stigma of illegitimacy is truly discrimination against the class of people known as adoptees. Clearly, it is not the condition of illegitimate birth that makes the government seal and then falsify a new birth certificate for each adoptee, it is the condition of being adopted that sets the series of events into motion that automatically seizes an infant’s or older child’s birth certificate, seals it, and replaces it with a falsified document that states that two biologically unrelated people (to the child) created said child and gave birth to said child.
To stop the discrimination, we must end the process of automatically sealing and falsifying birth certificates of adoptees. Retain the birth certificate as an operable document and then issue an adoption certificate: that is how it is done in more progressive countries, such as The Netherlands.
~ ~ ~ Joan M Wheeler, BA, BSW, born Doris M Sippel, author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009.
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Natural Mother’s Birthday Today
Happy Birth Day Mother. May you smile from the spirit world, knowing that you were, and are, loved, and missed.
My mother would have been 85 years old today, if she lived. She died 54 years ago at her age of 30 years, 5 months and 24 days. Mom lived long enough to have to five children, four girls and one boy, but not long enough to raise us. Mom gave us life and then she was gone.
I mark her birth day with both celebration of a life and a mourning of her death. Mom was born carrying the eggs that would produce her children.
I lived inside her body for 32 weeks of a difficult pregnancy. Mom was dying while pregnant with me.
There are some who claim that a baby does not know and cannot remember that far back, but they are wrong. As I nestled inside her, I heard her voice and that of my father and my four older siblings. I heard her heartbeat. Mom’s body moved and with each step she took, I rocked back and forth. An unborn baby does not forget these primal beginnings.
I wonder what my mother’s primal memories and childhood memories were.
My mother died before she could share her stories with her children. She died before she could fully enjoy being a mother taking care of her children throughout their lifetimes. A mother’s love was cut short when she died.
Not a day goes by without me thinking of my mother’s birth and death. A life cut short. And when she was gone, the lives of her children would be forever damaged by events that further destroyed our family: coerced relinquishment of the youngest child to an arranged adoption, displaced younger children, a sudden marriage for our father that forced thee remaining children into simultaneously grieving their mother’s death and having a new step mother to raise them.
If only our mother had lived. If only she could have celebrated 54 more birth days with her children and her husband. The possibilities, gone now, remain mysteries. My mother’s birth remains a chance event in the scheme of life. Her innate talents and intelligence, hard wired in her genes, passed down into me, and into her grandchildren I bore. Perhaps one day, my children will have children of their own, passing millions of years of evolution through genes from my mother.
I don’t have my mother’s birth certificate. I do have her death certificate. It states her birth date and death date. Concrete evidence of her birth and her death anchor me to reality. These are the facts withheld from me because of my adoption. I wrote my book and write this blog as a testiment that no adoptee should have to suffer from the lack of information neccessary to come to grips with life and death in order to live a productive life. No adoptive parent has the right to withhold this information from their adoptee as my adoptive parents did when they adopted me. They knew the whole truth and deliberately lied to me. The adoption system and society’s mythical beliefs worked together to make sure I was denied pertinent facts of my personal life history.
…
…
…
~ ~ ~ Joan M Wheeler, BA, BSW, born Doris M Sippel, author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009.
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Not illegitimate
Not illegitimate
Humboldt Beacon
Posted: 09/16/2010 10:47:21 AM PDT
Dear Editor,
There are obvious limitations of the current debate on adoptees’ access to their birth certificates, but people rarely think of adoptees as legitimately born.
Adoption is not only about single mothers of loss and adoptees who were illegitimate bastards. Half and full orphans are victimized by sealed and falsified birth certificates, too. The law sealing adoptees’ birth certificates was written to hide illegitimacy. Adoptees are “legitimized” by the new, amended birth certificate showing two married parents.
But I am not illegitimate! I had two legitimate parents before being relinquished and adopted! The original intent of the sealed record law does NOT apply to me or my natural mother, or my known natural father.
I’m not the only half orphan victimized by sealed and falsified birth records. Millions of other half and full orphans (domestic and foreign born) are also held captive by laws made exclusively to cover up illegitimacy. Because I am made to be a bastard by the law that confines me, I stand up for other bastards and half and full orphans who are adopted.
Though I live in New York State, orphanhood is universal. Adoptees’ rights to our sealed birth certificates are also universal. Unseal adoptees original birth certificates NOW and put a stop to falsifying new birth records that replace adoptees true record of birth. Instead, issue certified Certificates of Adoption. Leave all birth certificates intact, free from governmental confiscation and falsification.
Joan Wheeler born Doris Sippel
Reunited adoptee found by full blood siblings in 1974 at age 18
Buffalo, New York
Editor’s note: this in response to a Letter that appeared in last week’s Humboldt Beacon by Mara Rigge of Trinidad, Calif.
~ ~ ~ Joan M Wheeler, BA, BSW, born Doris M Sippel, author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009.
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My Letter to NJ-ACLU Exec Dir Deborah Jacobs: Not All Adoptees are Illegitimate
If you’ve been following my posts at various sites you know the content of the following letter already. Considering that ignorance is abundant in adoptoland, I thought I’d write directly to the Executive Director of New Jersey’s American Civil Liberties Union to explain, in detail, that not all adoptees are of illegitimate birth.
Here is a copy of my letter to Deborah Jacobs:
Dear Deborah Jacobs:
This letter will serve as part of your education into the matter of birth, baptism, and adoption of a half-orphaned adoptee: me.
You are misguided about adoptees’ birth certificates. Please be sure that you copy and share this letter, in its entirety, with Edward Barocas, Legal Director of the NJ-ACLU, and any other person or agency with which you will determine the fate of adoptees’ lives.
There are obvious limitations that you (and the NCFA, the Right to Life, Catholic Conference) have overlooked. The law was written to hide illegitimacy: the adoptee is “legitimized” by the new, amended birth certificate showing two married parents, but adoption is not only about single mothers of loss and adoptees of illegitimate birth, half and full orphans are victimized by sealed and falsified birth certificates, too.
I am a half orphan trapped with illegitimates and their natural mothers. My mother was married and died when I was three months old. At her funeral, a Catholic priest told my grieving father that “the baby needs 2 parents”. What about the other four older children? Didn’t they need two parents? Their mother just died, so, not only did they lose their mother, they lost their newborn sister to adoption. We grew up separated by law — and by six miles. Our family was destroyed by relinquishment and adoption. Family Preservation could have prevented further damage to five siblings and our father. Guardianship was not necessary, and certainly, permanent relinquishment and adoption of the newborn was not necessary. The only ones to benefit were my adopting parents.
My mother didn’t sign relinquishment papers, my father did, so your posse of unwed mothers who want to remain anonymous shouldn’t have influence over my father’s situation, or over me, or others like me.
No one, not one single authority figure, legislator, or priest, has EVER acknowledged my loss or my dead mother’s loss. SHE lost her right to be named on my legal birth certificate! (My OBC was legal for 1 year and 3 months before the finalization of my adoption.) Sure, my mother was DEAD, but, according to the ACLU, the dead do not matter. My mother is named on my OBC because she gave birth to me, but my amended BC states someone else gave birth to me, her daughter via a traumatic life-threatening birth for a dying mother. So much for respect for the dead and my LEGITIMATE mother!
I am not illegitimate! This law does NOT apply to me or my natural mother. The only aspect that applies to me is sealed and falsified birth certificates. Yet, the ACLU, NCFA, the Right to Life and the Catholic Conference hide behind a bunch of mothers, raped or otherwise shamed into relinquishment, as if they control the entire class of adopted people and all other parents of adoption loss.
I am not the only half orphan victimized by sealed and falsified birth records. Millions of other half and full orphans (domestic and foreign born) are also held captive by laws made exclusively to cover up illegitimacy.
Anyone who assumes that all adoptees are illegitimate and need to be kept away from our own birth certificates for our own protection and that of our disgraced mothers is not considering all facts. One size does not fit all. I was born legitimate, there is no shame in my birth, yet the ACLU claims that a bunch of whinny women who want to remain anonymous are held in better social and legal status than I am. Where are my civil rights and that of other orphaned adoptees? Get out of my life Right to Life, NCFA, ACLU and New Jersey Catholic Conference: you do not speak for me and you are not protecting my civil rights. There is no need for me and my fellow adoptees (illegitimate or orphaned) to be treated as inferior human beings.
My natural father was NOT promised confidentiality nor privacy. He was verbally told to stay away from his daughter and that he would not contact me until after I turned 18. He signed a court document promising that he would not interfere with my adoptive parents or my life.
My natural father gave my certified birth certificate (in my birth name) and my baptismal certificate to my adopting parents at the time he relinquished me to them. My adoptive mother kept them, and my Final Order of Adoption, and my falsified Baptismal Certificate in my adoptive name (I was baptized at the bedside of my dying mother) in a safety deposit box. After my siblings found me in 1974, my adoptive mother threw all of my personal documents at me in a fit of rage. There was no need for this rage as I did not cause the problem. The onus of secrecy (and damage done) was and is on my adoptive parents and the court.
Though I have all of my documents, and have been reunited for 36 years, and there is nothing in any sealed birth certificate that would pose any threat to anyone, I am still legally banned from obtaining a certified copy of the record of my own birth. (Some states allow for adoptees to receive an uncertified informational copy, but that further erodes adoptees’ civil rights by not certifying the truth of their births). There is NO justification in preventing me, a 54 year old American citizen, from my own birth record! This affects not only me, but my two grown children and their future children, too.
The human cost in preventing adoptees from accessing the truth of their birth can be measured in emotional deprivation, mental health, physical health, spiritual health, religious beliefs, and death and dying. Let’s put the shame where it belongs: on governmental bodies, adoption agencies, attorneys and religious entities who claim moral and legal superiority over others. It is time for moral and legal justice in adoption and birth certificate law to prevail in favor of adoptees’ civil and moral rights.
I am not the only half orphan victimized by sealed and falsified birth records. Millions of other half and full orphans (domestic and foreign born) are also held captive by laws made exclusively to cover up illegitimacy. Because I am made to be a bastard by the law that confines me, I stand up for other bastards and half and full orphans who are adopted.
Though I live in New York State, orphanhood is universal. Adoptees’ rights to our sealed birth certificates are also universal. Unseal adoptees original birth certificates NOW and put a stop to falsifying new birth records that replace adoptees true record of birth. Instead, issue certified Certificates of Adoption. Leave all birth certificates intact, free from governmental confiscation and falsification.
In America, for no other reason than the finalization of adoption is a person’s birth certificate taken, sealed from view except by court order, and a falsified document issued to replace the true facts of birth. There is something fundamentally wrong with that universal practice. However, it is not universal across the globe. The Netherlands respects the births and adoptions of all adoptees by not issuing a changed birth certificate upon adoption and by both the birth certificate and adoption certificate open to all adoptees and parents. Adoptions in New Zealand and Australia are being phased out in favor of guardianship and family preservation.
I am enclosing scanned images of all of my birth, baptism and adoption records. Here is a list of what follows this letter (note no information is deleted). Though I have all of these documents, I am STILL legally banned from obtaining them in New York State, and, the New York Mutual Consent Reunion Registry is of no use to me as my mother is dead and cannot give her written permission for any information to be released to me. This is so even after a 36 year reunion.
This is a list of my birth, baptism and adoption records (no information deleted):
- Hospital Birth Certificate
- Certificate of Birth Registration (Short Form) Name at Birth (Front and Back)
- Certified Birth Certificate – Name at Birth
- This is To Certify – (Short Form) Name After Adoption
- Certified Certificate of Birth – Name After Adoption
- Certificate of Birth and Baptism – Name at Birth and Baptism 3-4-56
- Certificate of Birth and Baptism – Name After Adoption 5-27-1959
- Petition to Adopt – names of all parents, description of natural family members and ages of children, results of investigation of adopting parents
- Petition to Adopt and Consent to Adoption – names of all parents
- Final Order of Adoption – names of all parents and both names of adoptee
Now that you have read my letter and have seen my documents, do you still believe that a few whinny women whom you claim (their letters to you could be faked) want to be anonymous shall dictate over my life? Abortion has nothing to do with my birth circumstances, unless you want to consider that a medical abortion was offered to my parents to save the life of my dying mother. Guess which way my married parents chose? Their decision had nothing to do with illegitimacy and getting rid of an unwanted pregnancy. The women you seek to protect have a beef with their life circumstances — they need to seek professional therapy to deal with their feelings over being raped and relinquished a child to adoption — but they created children who are American citizens. Civil rights of autonomous individuals supersede the rights of any parents, except in adoption, and that is wrong. Adoptees should not be bound by adoption contracts. Because they are bound now, this is modern day slavery.
Government seizure of birth certificates for infants who are in the process of being adopted is certainly a form of slavery. A birth certificate records the facts of a specific event. Those facts cannot be changed physically because the genes live on in the adopted person and future generations, with or without factual documentation. When a person’s birth certificate is changed by the government under the guise of protection from illegitimacy, the individual is thought to be reborn through adoption. Illegitimate infants are “legitimized” by the adoption process, giving a fatherless child two legitimate parents on a new Certificate of Live Birth. The idea reeks of eugenics of decades long gone in which unwed mothers were considered imbeciles (Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell — Google it), so why does this practice continue? Both practices need to be abolished: the continued sealing of birth certificates of adoptees, and, falsifying new birth certificates. To add injury to this barbaric legal practice is the fact that not all adoptees are of illegitimate birth: millions of adoptees were born to married parents and one or both parents died, resulting in the adoption of the half or full orphans whose birth certificates are also seized, falsified and kept from the adopted person for life. It is not the circumstances of birth, but the condition of being adopted that perpetuates these atrocities.
I suggest you and your comrades also watch the following video: Response of Origins Inc to Apology of Western Australia to Unmarried Mothers.mov … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1aP2JnpU4. No mother (and you might be a mother) can watch this educational video and not be affected by the atrocities committed against not married mothers whose infants were violently ripped from them. This continues to this day in American Crisis Pregnancy Centers run by religious organizations. Adoption is a crime against women and children BY other women who want other women’s babies.
Yours Very Truly,
Joan Wheeler born Doris Sippel
Adoptee reunited in 1974 at the age of 18 when found by full blood siblings my adoptive parents never wanted me to know
~ ~ ~ Joan M Wheeler, BA, BSW, born Doris M Sippel, author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009.
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Video Response to Apology of Western Australia to Unmarried Mothers by Origins Inc
Video Response of Origins Inc to Apology of Western Australia to Unmarried Mothers.mov
“Official response of Origins Inc to the upcoming apology of the Western Australian State government to mothers unlawfully separated at birth from their offspring. The WA apology flagrantly excuses serious breaches of the Common law and human rights covenants and is not acceptable for that reason.” LizzyBrew
FORBIDDEN FAMILY 
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