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.

Part 5: Response to The Buffalo News 3-Part Series Search for Yesterday: Adoptive, Birth Parents See Reunion Problems: My Natural Father Speaks Out 1984

On August 13, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee's Conflicting Emotions, Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Adoption Reunions are Ongoing, Adoption Trauma, Adoptive Parents, Family Preservation, Family Systems, Natural Fathers, Reunions are not bad

Appearances are deceiving, or are they?

I honestly don’t know where to begin.

Right from the start there are the two adoptive mothers who are defending their rights to someone else’s child:

“I don’t want to sound unsympathetic to birth parents”

She just did by dismissing their loss of their child.

“I wouldn’t want someone else to say ‘she’s my daughter’.”

Wow, such denial of the facts of life coming from an adoptive mother who probably was infertile so she thought adopting (taking) someone else’s child as her own was the best choice for herself and the child. Guess what? Her Korean girl IS some else’s daughter!

This “all or nothing” thinking is what causes problems in adoption.

“…chances for a reunion with her biological family are lessened. We didn’t adopt internationally because of that, but it’s a fringe benefit of adopting from another country…That’s one problem you’d almost never have to deal with.”

Really? This adoptive mother contradicted herself. She told me, via a phone call back in 1984, that the only reason she adopted foreign children is make sure her children would never have contact from their birth families.

So, the adoptee’s right to know her own natural parents and siblings and country of origin is seen by her adoptive mother as a problem that is avoided because the chances of reunion are next to nill because the birth family is in Korea? How convenient for the adoptiveparents, or at least this adoptivemother. Notice that adoptive fathers are absent from this article, and even in the series presented in my previous post. Also note that natural fathers are absent from discussion involving illegitimate births.

How am I able to write about this now, nearly 26 years later? Because I took notes.

I’d like to know what that cute Korean toddler of 1984 has to say now in 2010 when she realizes that (by the will of her loving, forever, real adoptive parents) she was held in captivity because her adoptive parents didn’t love her enough to give her the freedom necessary to build her own self identity.

There are so many blogs out there now written by adoptees of color who were adopted by white people and brought to America. These adoptees do not like what was done to them.

I sure do hope that this family has done quite a bit of healing for the adoptee’s sake, if not for the sake of the misguided adoptive parents.

“I think it would be difficult for any child to have two real mothers and two real fathers…”

Yes, it is a difficult path, but all adoptees DO have two mothers and two fathers and they are most certainly REAL. Both sets are real in the adoptee’s life. To deny that is to warp the adoptee’s sense of self.

The other adoptive mother said:

“But I’m not in favor of my daughter finding her mother and forming a relationship…I think it would take away from our relationship, and I feel there would be a strain on our relationship.”

I still meet adoptive parents today who feel this way. It’s that “All or Nothing” thinking again. The shades of grey are there in real life, but not in adoption. Or that’s just the way adoptive parents want it. The adoptee needs both sets of parents, with or without a relationship, because, whether or not adoptive parents realize it, the adoptee already HAS a relationship with her natural parents. It is the bonds of biology, of genetics, of being hard-wired to haveinherent qualities of temperament and talents and allergies and muscle structure and facial features. With such selfishness of these adoptive parents, it is hard to see any real love there. I see possessiveness and desperate attempts to claim “mine, all mine!”, but this does not speak well of adoptive parent attitudes of 1984.

Like I said, this attitude is still alive in adoptive parents today.

“The birth parents don’t seem to realize the relationship has ended once the papers have been signed. I think it’s a real invasion of privacy when they attempt to meet the child.”

No, it’s the adoptive parents who don’t realize that the relationship between the adoptee and her natural parents continues throughout her lifetime, even if there is no contact. The adoptee feels the loss. The natural parents feel the loss. And we’ve seen natural parents coming out by the thousands, in America and in Korea and elsewhere, to put an end to “taking someone else’s child as your own.”

“Giving birth doesn’t make the parents. It’s the caring and loving and growing with the child that does.”

And natural parents have been coerced into giving up their children to adoption out of shame. They were prevented from the actual parenting of their own children because of that permanent separation. We know from organizations such as Origins and Concerned United Birthparents that these mothers desperately wanted to do the natural acts of parenting, but were forced out of the their child’s lives.

Being pregnant and giving birth are natural events and are most certainly the very essence of life itself. It is the adoptive mother in this article who berates pregnancy and birth because she was deprived of experiencing the very events she puts down.

Hurray for Dr. David Brodzinsky — a former Buffalonian! — for his professional statements. Dr. Brodzinskihas gone on to be a prolific writer on the psychology of adoption. He is the co-author or co-editor of five influential books on adoption, including The Psychology of Adoption (1990); Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self (1992); Children’s Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Issues (1998); Adoption and Prenatal Drug Exposure: Research, Policy, and Practice (2000), and Psychological Issues in Adoption: Research and Practice (2005).

Still, Dr. Brodzinsky’s statement in this 1984 article raises concern:

“He doesn’t see the issue in terms of ‘rights’. Adoptive parents have the same rights or lack of rights as all parents have…”

Auh, what about the adoptee’s rights?

The International Adoption Reform Movement has made great progress since 1984: Bastard Nation, the American Adoption Congress, Council on Equal Rights in Adoption, Adoption Crossroads, Origins, Concerned United Birthparents, Senior Mothers and hundreds of adoptees’ blogs, mothers of loss blogs, oh, and The Evan B Donaldson Adoption Institute, to name a few entities out there promoting adoptees’ rights.

Now, about my natural father’s photo in the paper and his statements.

First thing that must be said: He did not want to be identified in my book, so I changed his name and any other identifications that could lead to him today. BUT, he chose to go public in 1984. He called the newspaper to defend himself. For what? I have always had respect and love for him, and especially his third and present wife, my loving step mother. Nothing I ever wrote put him down in any way.

As a result of this article, at that time in 1984, my natural father and I healed a five-year period of silence between us. We continued in a growing and loving father-daughter relationship. He was actively involved with my two children, two of his many grandchildren, and we shared tender moments. My father tearfully relayed to me what happened when my mother died — a story he had not been able to tell me in detail until after 1984. He cried when he told me that he “gave the baby — you — up, up, … up for adoption.” I could see remorse in his face and in his heart.

Since the printing of this article, my father and I talked of how newspaper reporters make situations worse by exaggerating points. He wanted to be sure the public knew he “abided by the law” and stayed away from me while I was growing up.

My father and I talked of how the articles did not accurately portray how the adoptee and her adoptive family and natural family are effected by a reunion that went out of control. Too many people butting in, saying harsh words, trying to interfere with the adoptee adjusting to her reunion.

When this article was written, there were unspoken words between my father and I. In 1979, he thought that all I wanted was to get my hands on my sealed records, to talk about the past, to ask about my deceased mother. His worst fear was that I’d hate him for what he had done. After the publishing of this article, we came together to discuss our sore spots, coming away with a greater understanding of each other. We have spent an immense amount of personal energy since then in building a personal relationship that is much different from the relationships he had with his other children from his first wife and the children he has with his present wife. We accepted each other and what the past has done to us.

One summer night in 1987, just shortly before midnight, I knocked on my father’s door. I was despondent because my adoptive mother had just been diagnosed with cancer. I told my father I can’t bear to lose another parent to cancer. My first mother died of cancer, my adoptive father died of cancer. Slowly, my adoptive mother’s cancer went into remission, only to resurface in recent years, but that night my natural father said to me:

“I will always be here for you. We may not have the legal binds, but we have something stronger. We not only have the ties of blood, but we have the emotions in our hearts.”

Sadly, through the passage of time, and the realization that I went full steam ahead, completed and published the memoir I said I was going to write since 1976, those old fears and resentment rose up again. When asked to, my father read a rough draft of my book in 2004. He clarified points. I made corrections he asked me to make and said I represented him in a clear manner. He read another draft of the book again in 2008. This time he said it all could have been avoided if he had gotten some help. I agree. He was alone in his decision to split up his family.

Then, in 2009, I added a Social Work Assessment, of which, my father did not understand. He reacted out of emotion and fear that I do not love and respect him. That is not true. I do love him and respect him. The Social Work Assessment of my adoption was written in analytical style and encompasses all parties to my adoption. My natural father did not understand it. There were other aspects that entered into why we are again not speaking to each other: a disagreement between my natural father, my adoptive mother, and myself; so, my natural father and I parted ways again.

I went ahead with my goals. The book is out now. My adoptive mother doesn’t like it. My natural father doesn’t like it. No one looks good in this book, including me. The true destruction of adoption in my life had to be told, with or without the approval of others.

I wrote it to prevent another family from being permanently separated by adoption.

I wrote my book to make sense of my life with the facts as they were presented to me.

~ ~ ~ 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.

Part 4: The Buffalo News 3-Part Series Search for Yesterday (Adoptive Parents Dilemma) 1984

On August 11, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoption Psychology, Adoptive Parents, Family Systems

I’ll let this article speak for itself:

But the newspaper reporter couldn’t just end the series. She had to re-print the undated article by Geoffrey Taylor of the Associated Press “Registry Opposed by Judges”:

This article was originally published by The Buffalo News four months earlier, on July 12, 1984, under the name of “Judges Deny File Access to Adoptees”:

This type of negative publicity influences public opinion, including our legislators. Over the decades, there has been a tendency to make this an “either – or” topic: either you have a good reunion, or you have a bad one, with nothing in between. In the mental health fields, such as social work or psychology, we see that life itself is a collection of shades of grey. Life is a series of good and bad experiences with lots of ups and downs. People go with the flow. Same is true with searches and reunions. Many adoptive parents of the past are now viewing their adoptees with greater understanding of their losses due to the adoption itself and are more open to search and reunion.

Legislation and public opinion toward adoptee and natural parents’ access to the true original birth certificate has slowly gained momentum. It depends on who you talk to.

~ ~ ~ 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.

Part 3: The Buffalo News 3-Part Series Search for Yesterday (Adoptees) 1984

On August 10, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee Birth Certificates, Adoptee's Conflicting Emotions, Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Adoption Reunions are Ongoing, Adoption Trauma, Adoptive Parents, Family Preservation, Family Systems

Here is the main article that offended my adoptive family and natural family because I went public — I put my face and name in the newspaper. Though I had been interviewed for newspaper and radio and public television on and off since 1976, and had been writing Letters to the Editor since 1975 (paid articles didn’t come along for a few more years at this time), this article with a larger-than-the-others photo of me really annoyed my relatives. This wasn’t my idea – the photo – it was the newspaper reporter’s idea. My natural family and my adoptive family would have much preferred that I kept quiet. I was labeled as conceited. I had been reunited and the secret outed ten years earlier, but certain people in both my adoptive family and natural family were angry for me putting my face and name in the public’s eye. But this was not the first time I had done so. I had been writing in the newspaper, and have been interviewed in the paper, since 1975, at the age of 19. I had been interviewed on radio and TV for several interviews beginning in 1976. Those tapes have long ago disapeared as they warped with age. If they hadn’t, I’d print transcripts of those 2 and 4-hour interviews.

In the nearly-full-page photo and article posted here, please note that the reporter misquoted me several times. That will be discussed following the article itself. Two other adoptees, one age 19 and the other age 18, were interviewed as well.

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Though the author of the article, newspaper reporter Paula Voell, gave a good overview of the plight of adoptees in search, she misquoted me. I did not search for my natural family, rather, I was found by my natural family.

My natural and adoptive relatives who read the first few paragraphs were upset when they read, “To obscure their true origins, some were told their mothers died in childbirth…the false information…” Both of my families were devastated by this statement which linked me to the two other adoptees who were lied to about their natural mothers’ deaths. For days after this newspaper article’s publication, I received numerous angry phone calls and hate mail from relatives wanting to know why I had told the reporter these lies. Fact is, I didn’t lie. It was the interpretation of the readers that led to their reactions to me and to the article. Also, even though I had been told (during my childhood) that my natural mother died, HOW and WHEN she died was not told to me while I was growing up. MANY stories were told to me by many people after I was found at age 18 and many of these stories conflicted with each other.

My relatives were also upset over this paragraph: “While family members and neighbors knew that her mother had been ill, she had been advised not to become pregnant and had subsequently died while giving birth to her…” Both of my families were angry that I relayed distorted information to the reporter. Relatives telephone me and angrily yelled: “That’s not what happened! We told you what happened, you can’t get it straight that your mother did not die in childbirth! She died two or three months after your birth and she died of cancer and not because she was pregnant with you!”

The constant yelling at me about my mother’s death further eroded my emotional state. Grief at having lost my mother and having that knowledge denied to me for the first 18 years of my life in the true aspects and facts of her death were overshadowed because of the constant bombardment from relatives telling me their versions of the truth.

What I told the reporter was the collective “truths” told to me by many relatives (both natural family and adoptive family). The reporter shortened the stories to suit the length of the newspaper article.

The article had some accurate passages, however, which angered my relatives even more than the misquotes: “Why should one group know everything and the adoptee not know anything?” and “Adoptive parents are confused. We adult adoptees are coming out and saying ‘You did it all wrong.’ They need guidance, too.”

Both adoptive and natural relatives attacked me because of key phrases like “you did it all wrong”. Many aspects of my adoption were wrong. Over and above my own adoption, the system of adoption has people tied up. The SYSTEM needs to change. That was my message then, as well as now. Change the system, and eventually people’s attitudes will change, too. And yes, my adoptive parents lied to me and prevented me from knowing key truths about my life, and for that, they, and other relatives who kept their secrets, were wrong.

Today, it seems that many members of both my extended adopted family and natural family are still upset that I have gone public.

I wrote my memoir, Forbidden Family, with falsified names. Names of dead people are used but names of the living are changed. This still upsets people. I wrote the truth of what happened to me, the adoptee, and my adoptive family and my ex-husband and my children as a result of other people’s misinterpretations and judgments of me. I cannot be responsible for other people’s opinions of me, I can only be responsible for myself. I wrote a book of truth. I wouldn’t have written a book of lies. Every page was carefully vetted by editors, counselors, a literary attorney. Trafford Publishing’s legal division also approved of the content of the book.

My purpose then — when I began writing about my adoption publicly in 1975 in Erie, Pa and in Buffalo, New York in 1976, and in this interviewed newspaper article in 1984 — and now in 2010 — is to write my truth and to promote adoption reform.

~ ~ ~ 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.

Part 2: The Buffalo News 3-Part Series Search for Yesterday (Natural Mothers) 1984

On August 9, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoption Loss, Adoption Trauma, Family Systems, Natural Mothers

Part 2: The Buffalo News 3-Part Series Search for Yesterday (Natural Mothers) 1984

In the early 1980s, because of my participation in local adoption reform support groups and writing numerous Letters to the Editor, I was contacted by a reporter to be a part of this newspaper series. I will highlight one article per day of this series as each was written on a different day. Copies of these articles, along with these notes, will be posted in My Archives Pages in this website.

The first in The Buffalo News series “Search for Yesterday” is the following article.

Of note is natural mother and author Lorraine Dusky (Birthmark, 1979). The fictitiously-named Ms. Higgins is a natural mother who was not known by any members of the local adoption group in Buffalo at the time.

Times have changed. With the Internet, underground searches are not necessary as anyone can search for just about anyone they want to find, with or without adoptee access to their original birth certificates, and with or without Mutual Consent Registries.

It must be stated that there are many facets of adoption, search and reunion. This newspaper series focused mainly on the emotional aspects. The real civil rights aspects — sealing and falsifying adoptees’ birth certificates and denying us access — was not a high priority in the news media back in 1984. Is it really a priority today?

~ ~ ~ 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.

Join the great discussion at Take Away Community on Adoptees’ Access

On August 4, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptees' Civil Rights, Amended Birth Certificate, False Information on Birth Certificate, Original Birth Certificate

There’s a great discussion going on at Take Away Community:

Adoptees Fight for Access to Original Birth Certificates

Monday, August 02, 2010

Read the article, listen to the radio interview, and post your own comments.

Even though we’ve been saying the same thing for decades, adoptees and our natural parents are still being ignored by lawmakers.

Many thanks to Diane Crossfield of the Adoptee Rights Coalition for speaking out and against Tom Snyder who chairs the family law section of the New Jersey State Bar Association who is in opposition of adoptees’ access to their original birth certificates.

Here are my three comments directed at Erich and the opposition. So what if my comments are repetitious to what I’ve said before. I’ll be saying the same message until all adoptees have equal access to their sealed birth certificates and until the amended birth record is a thing of the past:

I have been fighting for my rights to my original birth certificate in NYS since 1974 when I was 18 years old and found by full blood siblings my adoptive parents did not ever want me to know. This discussion currently revolves around not-married natural parents and illegitimate adoptees and an assumption that all natural parents must hide in shame of unmarried sex. Not all adoptees are of illegitimate birth. I am a half orphan. I was born to married parents, Mom died, leaving behind a newborn and 4 other children. The Catholic Church stepped in and suggested to our father that the only way to proceed was to give up the newborn so she could have two parents and keep the others. My birth certificate was intact for the first year of my life. I lived as a foster child with my pre-adoptive parents for 9 months before my adoption was finalized, after which my birth certificate (of a legitimate birth) was sealed, and a new “amended” birth certificate was issued claiming that my new parents were my parents of birth — thus claiming they were my biological parents. My true mother of birth was stripped of her right to be my mother for all eternity — and she did not give her consent for my adoption! Her “right to privacy or confidentiality” was never in question, but her right to be my mother was obliterated. My natural father, however, signed an agreement that stated he “hereby consents to said adoption and covenants and agrees to acquiesce therein and to refrain from doing or causing to be done any act or thing whatsoever which will in any way interfere with the rights, duties and privileges of said child when so adopted.” He was never told that my birth certificate would be altered and sealed. He was verbally told to stay away from my adoptive parents but they were not told to stay away from him. Other adoptees who are forced into adoption slavery are those who were also born legitimately but were kept in foster care and freed for adoption, step-parent adoptees and full and half orphans. The full spectrum of adoptees must be considered to see the full inequality of the sealed and falsified birth certificate issue. What is needed is to replace the amended and falsified birth certificate with a Certificate of Adoption, and better yet, eliminate adoption, period. Guardianship and kinship care are far superior to the irrevocable finality and destruction of adoption. Also, keep in mind that natural parents, particularly the mothers who give birth, are forbidden any copy of a birth record — as if the birth never took place. The only reason my natural father had my birth certificate was because I was born within a marriage and adoption was not the priority at my birth — the fact that my mother was dying was the priority. Adoption as practiced in America is terribly wrong on so many levels.

and

Erich- Searching and Reunion have nothing to do with unsealing birth certificates.

Protecting parents who do not wish to be found is purely an American ideal. This question is not an issue in other more progressive parts of the world.

Parents who give birth, or who sire a child are obligated to be named on a birth certificate for the person they created. Those are the facts of life. Would you suggest that unmarried fathers should not be forced to take paternity suits and pay child support? These men don’t want to be found but they are found, even if they are married to someone else and have a first family.

Women whose names are on an original birth certificate factually gave birth. Removing their names from a birth certificate to “protect” them from embarrassment is fictionalizing the truth of what happened in the birth of a real person. It is also fraud.

As I stated in a previous post, my natural mother died 3 months after my birth. She did not relinquish me for adoption, my natural father did so 1month after Mom’s death. There was no shame in my birth, yet the law sealed my actual birth certificate from me and issued a false Certificate of Live Birth with the following information on it: that a woman gave birth to me, (who factually did not), that this birth was a “single” birth, that the birth took place in a designated hospital at a specific time. NONE of those facts took place. Those details were taken from my actual birth certificate and re-stated on my amended birth certificate. The mother named on my new birth certificate did not factually give birth to me, therefore, the amended Certificate of Live Birth issued one year and three months after my actual birth is factually incorrect. NO hospital records recording that mother’s labor and delivery will ever be found, yet my amended birth certificate clearly states that she gave birth to me vaginally in a single, not twin, not triplet, birth. How do you justify that, Erich?

The gov altered my identity. To be factually correct, the facts of my adoption ought to be presented on a Certificate of Adoption. But the American government has not caught on to what is done in other more progressive countries, such as The Netherlands. There, each adoptee has one and only one unsealed birth certificate, and one adoption certificate and BOTH of these documents are needed for identity purposes.

For more information, please visit my website: http//forbiddenfamily.com and buy my book, Forbidden Family. My adoptive mother threw my original birth certificate and adoption papers at me when I was first reunited with siblings she never wanted me to know. I have published these documents in my book. Even though I have all of my personal papers, and no other new information will be found, I am still legally banned from receiving my original birth certificate from New York State. I am 54 years old and sick of government interference in my life.

and

Erich- your sudden politeness and wishing “us” luck in working this out does nothing to actually change the laws, nor change public opinion. In the past as well as present, unmarried women who give birth are considered as deviants, as pointed out by Carol Whitehead. So, their illegitimate children were, and are, also considered deviants because they are illegitimate bastards, politely known as adoptees. However, as I have pointed out, many adoptees are not illegitimate, we are half and full orphans, or other legitimately-born people who were adopted out of foster care or by stepparents. Yet, as the law was written nearly 80 years ago to “legitimize” illegitimates, adoptees who were legitimately born and then adopted face misplaced stigma and discrimination. These are all moral judgments yet when one looks at the current state of affairs – pun intended or not – of unmarried couples living together and producing children, and so many divorces and remarriages giving rise to so many blended families, why is it still considered deviant behavior for adoptees to want truthful birth certificates? Many people answered your questions, Erich, now, I’m asking you to address all the points I’ve raised in my posts here. Clearly, with white Christians rushing to adopt all those black unfortunate orphans from Haiti and Africa, (and other racial children from Korea and China and South America) there are many children being removed from their families who are not orphans at all and who are not illegitimately born yet these adoptees are subject to the same mangled birth certificates as illegitimate white, domestically born, bastards. No one deserves to be mislabeled and mistreated due to the assumptions and value judgments of others. I am a legitimate half orphan bastardized by adoption. What do you say to that, Erich? How about all of you who oppose adoptees’ access to the truth of our births? How many more decades will pass before you self-righteous bigots stay out of our lives and give us back our civil rights? Just how many priests have fathered illegitimate bastard children? Is that the real reason the Catholic Church opposes adoptee access to our sealed birth certificates? Why are our birth certificates falsified at all? Why not do what other more progressive countries do – issue a Certificate of Adoption and keep both documents unsealed?

~ ~ ~ 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.

Check Out Amanda’s “When Will I Get Over It”

On July 29, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee's Conflicting Emotions, Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Adoption Trauma

Over at The Declasified Adoptee, Amanda has a great post on “When Will I Get Over It”.

This has been asked of me countless times over the years. Amanda has a great list of “whens”. I added to her list with the comment:

“How about “when adoption ceases to exist”?!

Australia phased out child adoptions. America needs to do this as well. Kinship care and guardianship need to replace child adoptions.

Great post Amanda.

Go read a great mind.

RePost: Graying Adoptees Still Searching for Their Identities

On July 28, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee Birth Certificates, Adoptees' Civil Rights, Amended Birth Certificate, Original Birth Certificate, The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute2 Comments

The following is a great article to dispel myths surrounding adoptees’ and natural parents’ access to birth records, however, the focus centers around illegitimacy. My birth records were sealed and falsified and I am not illegitimate. The laws do not even apply to me, yet, I am bound by them because I am adopted. This is why I chose to post this entry under the screen name of “legitimatebastard”. The law treats me as if I were a bastard. I resent being placed in this predicament by outdated laws that do not apply to adoptees today.

Read the article and then contribute to the discussion at the link:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/adult-adoptees-fight-access-original-birth-certificates/story?id=11230246&page=1

Graying Adoptees Still Searching for Their Identities

Only 9 States Allow Adult Adoptees to Find Original Birth Certificates, But Changes Being Pushed

55 comments

By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES

July 27, 2010

Carol Cook of Blairstown, N.J., grew up thinking she was a WASP with Native American blood, a splash of ethnicity that pleased her because she had majored in anthropology in college.

But at 33, the executive secretary and mother of two inadvertently discovered a secret her entire family had held from her: Cook was adopted, born in a Catholic hospital and was likely Italian.

“I suspect the [secret] evolved and it became more impossible to tell me,” she said. “I had good parents. But suddenly I was not the person I thought. I was a totally different nationality. I was floored.”

Now she is 68 and a grandmother, but Cook’s struggle to find her identity is never-ending. In New Jersey — and in all but nine states — it’s against the law to for her to get her original birth certificate.

Today, most adoptions are open, but for a generation of graying Americans like Cook, the doors to their identities are irrevocably closed shut.

Now, in growing numbers, adult adoptees are trying to overturn legislation that sealed up records, but in most states they are fighting an uphill battle.

New Jersey is the latest battleground over laws that were originally intended to protect the birth child and her mother from moral shame, but many say are now antiquated and cruel.

Since 1980, efforts to unseal birth records in New Jersey have failed, but an open adoption records bill that recently passed a Senate committee will go before the state Assembly this fall.

Birth parents would have 12 months to request that their names not be made public or to state how they would want to be contacted by a birth child.

Lawmakers in at least 11 states are now considering the issue and in the last decade seven states have expanded access, according to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, an organization dedicated to education and research.

Today, birth records are broadly available to adult adoptees in Tennessee, Alabama, Delaware, New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon and Illinois, as well as Kansas and Alaska, where they were never sealed.

Just this month, the institute issued a report recommending every state enact legislation restore rights to adult adoptees.

“How a human being comes into a family should not dictate what rights they have,” said Executive Director Adam Pertman. “There has to be a level playing field.”

Adoptees also need access to medical records, according to Pertman, noting that the surgeon general says that knowing family history, “is the most important thing for health.”

The 46-page policy brief also contends that the vast majority of birth mothers do not want to be anonymous to the children they relinquished.

“The single biggest factor that helps women heal and deal with loss and the grief they feel when placing a child up for adoption is knowing the child is OK,” said Pertman.

In New Hampshire, where birth certificates were unsealed in 2005, out of 24,000 records only 12 birth mothers stipulated that they wanted no contact with their birth children, according to research.

“Knowing who you are and where you come from, it turns out, is not just a matter of fulfilling curiosity, it’s something that helps human beings develop more fully psychologically to understand and feel better about themselves,” he said.

As for Cook, she said she doesn’t feel “connected.”

“I have friends who are really into genealogy and when they start talking about it, I shut down,” she said. “I don’t want to be rude, but it’s upsetting.”

In 1975, an older half-sister who knew Cook was adopted told an aunt, who shocked her with the news.

“I asked me mother if it was true and she said, ‘yes,'” according to Cook. “I was standing in the kitchen and literally slid down the wall. Everything just went out from under me.”

Her mother told her she was born at Columbus Hospital in the Italian section of Newark, N.J., nothing else. The hospital has since closed and Catholic Charities told her they have no records.

For a time, Cook attended some advocacy groups and even called the records office to see if she could get her birth certificate.

“I got this nasty person who said, ‘Why do you even want to know it, like I was some kind of horrible person. I really just couldn’t face it.”

When Cook goes to the doctor’s office and forms ask for her health history, she writes “not applicable.”

Cook’s granddaughter was diagnosed with celiac disease and she has wondered if the genetic disorder came from her side of the family. “Whether it has any bearing, I don’t know,” she said.

Religious Groups Oppose Access to Original Birth Certificates

The New Jersey bill faces opposition from New Jersey Right to Life, the Catholic Church, the New Jersey Bar Association, the National Council for Adoption and even the ACLU, who defend the privacy rights of birth parents.

For 30 years, Pam Hasegawa of Morristown, N.J., has been fighting to change a 70-year-old law in New…

For 30 years, Pam Hasegawa of Morristown, N.J., has been fighting to change a 70-year-old law in New Jersey that denies adoptees their original birth certificates. A grandmother and adoptee, Hasegawa still doesn’t have access to her birth certificate, but believes her mother may have been Scandinavian.

(Courtesy Pam Hasegawa)

“Birth parents who place children for adoption should have the right to keep their identities private, both prospectively and retroactively,” is the stance of the New Jersey Coalition to Defend Privacy in Adoption.

“It almost makes us sound like terrorists who are going to creep into people’s lives and destroy them,” said Cook.

Pam Hasegawa, an adoptee and grandmother who has led the 30-year fight in New Jersey with the New Jersey Coalition for Adoption Reform & Education, said their argument is “full of holes.”

Today, with open adoptions the norm, “most birth mothers choose to meet with the family and to know each other’s names, and if they can, get the birth certificate or a copy of it before it’s finalized to give to the adoptive parents,” she said.

Historically, birth records were closed to protect children from the stigma of being born “out of wedlock” and having “illegitimate” stamped on their birth certificates.

It also was designed to protect the adoptive family from intervention or, as older adoption contracts state, “molestation” by a birth mother.

Hasegawa always knew she was adopted, but later learned more detail about her birth mother’s identity through letters written to an adoptive aunt. Her birth parents had married in Paris, but after her father was killed, her mother had to return to the United States and, without help, reluctantly gave up her daughter.

Hasegawa said birth mothers were never promised anonymity. They were forced to sign papers that relinquished their babies, giving up all rights to knowing their fate — if they were later sick, died or even if they were ever adopted.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, most states had sealed adoption court records completely but, typically allowed adult adoptees to obtain their original birth certificates, according to adoption researcher Elizabeth Samuels, a law professor at the University of Baltimore.

“In the 1950s when adoption was more popular, they wanted to hide the shame of the illegitimate family and the adoptive family didn’t want interference in creating the perfect family,” she said. “The adoptive birth certificate should reflect the new person.”

In 1960, the laws in 40 percent of the states still permitted adult adoptees to inspect them, but between then and 1990, all but a handful of the rest of the states closed the birth records to adult adoptees.

When mores changed, a generation of adoptees began searching for their birth parents, and adoptive parents felt threatened that their children wouldn’t love them, according to Samuels.

The focus of protection shifted away from the birth mother and her child to the rights of adoptive families. Efforts to keep records closed were led by adoption agencies, attorneys general and legislators, but not by the birth mothers themselves.

Today’s adoptive parents are more apt to fight for the “rights of the child and their origin,” said Samuels. And birth mothers are speaking out.

In 1979, Mary Lou Cullen gave up a son in a closed adoption when she was just 19, never telling a soul, not even her husband or later three children. She was contacted by her birth son Nathan, who is now 30, by letter eight years ago.

“He said, ‘If you don’t want any communication, that’s fine, but if you do, this is how you can get a hold of me.’ I never even second guessed or had a moment of hesitation, knowing I was going to contact him,” said the Marshfield, Massachusetts, mother of three more children. “But I had a whole lot of people to tell.”

Birth Mother Supports Reform

The reunion and revealing her secret was “stressful,” said Cullen, who is now president of Concerned United Birthparents. But after working it out, birth mother and birth son have become close.

Jean Sacconaghi Strauss, a documentary filmmaker and adoptee, chronicles finding her birth mother…

Jean Sacconaghi Strauss, a documentary filmmaker and adoptee, chronicles finding her birth mother Lee Iacarella Beno, then reuniting Beno with her own birth mother Mary Brown Milosey. The three generations of women, all adoptees, reunited more than three decades after Strauss was born and have since become good friends.

(Courtesy Jean Sacconaghi Strauss)

Even though both Nathan’s adoptive parents and birth parents supported the reunion, he can still not access his birth certificate in Ohio, where he was born.

“Once Nathan met me and my family, he said he felt like it completed him,” said Cullen, now 50. “For me, it was very difficult for a number of years, but it’s my truth and I don’t need to deny it anymore or hide it or cover it up. I can live my honest truth.”

“On top of that, I got to meet my first born, who I never thought I would see again,” she said. “I had no idea what had happened to him. And I was able to deal with the grief that I had never dealt with before.”

But Jean Strauss, a filmmaker who for 30 years has has chronicled the lives of adult adoptees in books and documentaries, admits, “It’s not all about reunions.”

Her film on adult adoptees searching for their identities, “For the Life of Me,” premiered at the Cleveland International Film Festival in March.

“Owning your own information is a very powerful thing,” said the now mother of two. “You are a human being and this belongs to you.”

Born Cecelia Ann Porter in California in 1955, where records are still sealed, Strauss hired a private investigator to find her birth mother after her beloved adoptive mother died in 1988.

“I was terrified I might hurt her,” said Strauss, who described her adoptive mother as “my best friend.”

When they reunited, Strauss was 33 and her birth mother Lee Beno was 54. Six years later, they located Beno’s 80-year-old birth mother, Mary Miklosey, who had grown up in an orphanage where she had been sent when her own mother died.

“The two of them hadn’t seen each other in 60 years,” said Strauss, who told the story in her short film, “The Triumvirate.”

“It’s given me a tremendous sense of freedom,” Miklosey said in the film. “I can say, this is my daughter and my granddaughter and look at the world and say I have a family.”

Strauss also learned she had seven brothers and sisters and for the first time found others who “biologically related to me.” Tragically, a younger brother died of lymphoma, a new relationship she lamented was cut short because of the secrecy of adoption.

“I can’t tell you how it changed me to find out the information,” she said. “I felt so empowered by it and it’s what drives me to help other people to have the truth.”

The “stigma of illegitimacy” that sealed up records has disappeared, notes Strauss, but the world is “much different now.”

Across the border from Kansas in Missouri, an adult adoptee must have the the adoptive parents’ permission.

“Can you imagine being 40 or 50 years old and having to get permission?” she asked. “You have to prove your adoptive parents are dead. If you jump through those hoops and contact the birth parents, they have to give permission. If you are 50, the odds are pretty high that your birth mother is dead.”

In the most restrictive states adult adoptees must pay court and lawyer fees to show cause why their birth certificates should be released.

“It’s a capricious process where some judges say, ‘sure’ and others say, ‘no way, even if your life is threatened,” according to Pertman of the Donaldson Institute.

“People in all 50 states every day are finding their birth parents through the Internet, Facebook and private detectives,” said Pertman. “So what’s the argument and if you don’t believe they are evil people, why not just give them to them.”

As for Carol Cook, she still longs to know who she is — so much so, that she has recently ordered a DNA kit to at least find clues to her genetic roots. Though even if the law passes and she can get her birth certificate, Cook said her parents are likely dead.

“Everyone knew I was adopted except me,” said Cook. “I think that has affected me in some ways. I find it difficult to trust people, It’s not overt. I just can’t get real close to people…I couldn’t let the rest of my life fall apart but it would be nice to know if I can find something out.”

posted by legitimatebastard ~ ~ ~ Joan M Wheeler, BA, BSW, author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009.

Newly Discovered Family Keepsake: 1956 Baby Shower Card

On July 27, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee's Conflicting Emotions, Adoption Loss, Adoption Trauma, Death and Dying, Family Preservation, Family Systems

In clearing out the attic over the past several months, I’ve discovered a few items that hold opposite meanings for myself and my adoptive mother: Greeting cards. But not just any type of greeting card. There are Baby’s First Christmas, Baby’s First Birthday, Baby’s First Valentine. The one that struck me the most, however, was the 1956 Baby Shower Card that reveals the promise of “increasing” happiness with the addition of a baby girl but ignores reality of loss of that baby’s family of birth. Such is the reality of adoption.

Here’s the front of the card:

1956 Baby Shower Card

Here’s the inside showing the cut-a-way window. The last names of the “girls at the shop” have been deleted.

1956 Baby Shower Card - inside 1a

Here’s another view of the inside of the card with the secondary card opened:

1956 Baby Shower Card - inside 2

Note the words:

“A darling little baby girl

To steal your hearts away —“

Evidently, as a child, I stole their hearts away.

Definitely, they knowingly stole me from my family.

I gained an adoptive family, but lost the family that I had.

It is inhumane what was done to me and my siblings in the name of adoption. They did it – my adoptive parents – knowingly, willfully and intentionally. They did it out of love. And with Jesus’ blessings. Good Catholics they were.

And for this I am to be grateful.

No question about it, for me, there is no way to get through this pain but radical acceptance of the reality. Do I need to mention that I have no forgiveness for the parents and extended family involved with the coverup of the truth at my expense? I am not required to give forgiveness as it was not earned, nor even asked for, except by my adoptive father immediately after he spoke with my natural father on the phone in 1974 just days after I was found.

For whose happiness did I enter their family? Theirs. I was manipulated and tricked into believing the life they fed me. I developed close attachments and love with aunts, uncles and cousins who later turned out to hate me (but other cousins and aunts and uncles were not that way). I loved my adoptive parents, but I was cheated out of life with the siblings I was never supposed to know. Meanwhile, my natural father lost his newborn daughter and his other children lost their baby sister.

Let this be a lesson to adoptive parents everywhere: be as honest as you possibly can with your adoptee. Honesty is the best policy. For when there are secrets and spiteful rage to keep the adoptee from ever knowing the truth, the adoptee suffers at the hands of the very people who are suppose to love that adoptee unconditionally. Withholding vital information and preventing a minor child contact with full or half siblings is a cruelty worthy to be called child abuse of both the adoptee and her siblings left behind.

Yes, today my elderly adoptive mother shares her joyous memories with me of the day she and my father “got” me. She talks of the baby shower that welcomed me into the family. I acknowledge her joys. This is her journey through life. I try to make her as comfortable as possible by listening to her.

I also acknowledge my profound sadness at what I lost: my entire family of birth. My father, my siblings, my aunts, uncles and cousins, and I lost my natural mother due to her early death, a death that lead to my father’s mistaken belief that the only course of action was to give me up to a completely closed adoption. We lived less than six miles apart, but this magical social construct of adoption robbed me of my family, robbed my siblings of their baby sister, and robbed my father of his daughter. The only ones who got away with any happiness and security were my adoptive parents. They got the baby they could not produce on their own. Eighteen years of infertility and voila – a baby is suddenly available by the death of her mother. Take the baby and run. Have a baby shower and pamper that baby girl with all their love. And for what? For 18 years of lies to the adoptee and 36 years of hell to pay after I was found by the very siblings my adoptive mother so adamantly declared I should never know.

The past 36 years have been filed with accusations that I have been disloyal and ungrateful. Why? For accepting the truth of my birth and adoption? Why is it always the adoptee who is expected to accept other people’s viewpoints and opinions? Is it worth it to be permanently separated by arbitrary laws and social constructs to create a falsehood within which the adoptee is expected to live? No, it is not.

I have been told with flippant comments from non-adoptees that “that’s the way it was done back then”.

So? That doesn’t make it right. I am the one to suffer the consequences of other people’s actions. My life as an adoptee was not worth the cocoon-sheltered childhood and the emotional and psychological abusive adult life I have had to endure because of adoption.

Now I must slowly say goodbye to a misguided elderly adoptive mother, make her journey to life’s passing as gentle as possible, and struggle to comprehend the devastation left behind.

~ ~ ~ Joan M Wheeler, BA, BSW, author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009.

Obituary: Annette Baran dies at 83; crusader for open adoption

On July 20, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Death and Dying, Family Systems, Obituaries, True Birth Certificate for Donor-Conceived, Uncategorized

There are two published obituaries for Annette Baran. One is in the LA Times and the other is in KansasCity.com. Both are open to comments. The Kansas City Obituary is a reprint of the LA Times article. Please note the separate link for comments to the Kansas City article. Thanks to Mirah Riben for the notice of these publications.

http://www.kansascity.com/2010/07/18/2092196/annette-baran-author-crusader.html#ixzz0u8kicSB6

http://www.kansascity.com/2010/07/18/2092196/annette-baran-author-crusader.html#Comments_Container

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-0719-annette-baran-20100719,0,2544355.story

The clinical social worker and psychotherapist co-wrote an influential book that helped popularize the argument that an adoptee’s knowledge of birth parents is crucial to his or her identity.

Annette Baran, seen at home in 1981, was a clinical social worker and psychotherapist who co-wrote “The Adoption Triangle,” an influential 1978 book credited with giving early shape to the open-adoption movement. (Bob Chamberlin, Los Angeles Times / July 18, 2010)

By Valerie J. Nelson, Los Angeles Times

July 19, 2010

Living with a secret is psychologically destructive — that concept was nearly an anthem for Annette Baran, a clinical social worker and psychotherapist who co-wrote “The Adoption Triangle,” an influential 1978 book credited with giving early shape to the open-adoption movement.

Baran died July 11 at St. John’s Medical Center in Santa Monica of complications from an infection, said her son Joshua. She was 83 and lived in Santa Monica.

“If there ever was an activist who changed the world of adoption, it was Annette,” said Joyce Maguire Pavao, founder of the Center for Family Connections, an educational and counseling center in Cambridge, Mass., that specializes in adoptions.

From the late 1950s to 1974, Baran was director of adoptions at was then called Vista Del Mar Child-Care Service in West Los Angeles and placed more than a thousand babies, her family said.

Her acceptance of working in an era of sealed records and secrecy surrounding adoption eroded after a birth mother insisted on meeting the potential adoptive parents, Baran later said.

As Baran watched the back-and-forth between the couple and birth mother, she said she thought, “This is pretty good. Why does this have to be secret?”

As time went on, she also encountered many adoptees searching for their birth mothers who were in psychological pain, said Betty Jean Lifton, an adoption reform advocate.

“She thought, ‘Oh my god, what have I done?’ It really radicalized her,” Lifton said. “She was waking from the great sleep that social workers were in and realizing how secrecy in closed adoption affected people.”

Moved to crusade for open adoption, Baran joined a novel research project started by a UCLA psychiatrist, Dr. Arthur Sorosky, who noticed that his patients who had been adopted tended to have identity problems. Another Vista Del Mar social worker, Reuben Pannor, collaborated with them.

When they solicited opinions on open adoption — the idea that birth parents and adopted family know who each other are — they received more than 600 letters and interviewed many of the writers.

“The Adoption Triangle: The Effects of the Sealed Record on Adoptees, Birth Parents, and Adoptive Parents” resulted from that study. It helped popularize the argument that an adoptee’s knowledge of birth parents is crucial to his or her identity.

Adopted adults “told us the reunion with birth parents made them feel normal and whole, for they finally experienced genealogical connections,” the researchers wrote in 1980 in a letter to The Times.

For birth parents, there is “always a lingering pain for that child given up for adoption,” they wrote. “Birth parents do not know if that child is alive or dead, well or ill.”

“All adoptees, if they have a shred of intelligence, have to assume somebody dumped them,” Baran told the Chicago Tribune in the 1985, displaying the forthrightness that was a hallmark. Knowing about their background can ease those fears, she said.

The book significantly altered people’s attitudes about adoption, according to several histories of adoption in the United States. The authors “quickly became the intellectual patron saints of the adoption rights movement,” E. Wayne Carp wrote in the 2000 book “Family Matters.”

Today, varying levels of open-adoption practices have become the norm, said Chuck Johnson of the National Council for Adoption.

In the early 1980s, Baran was again ahead of her time when she began investigating the secrecy surrounding birth by artificial insemination, colleagues said.

With Pannor, Baran interviewed donor offspring, donors and parents years after the fact and wrote the 1989 book “Lethal Secrets: The Shocking Consequences and Unsolved Problems of Artificial Insemination.” The authors advocated for a child’s right to know and were critical of the business of artificial insemination.

“No child is the product of a teaspoon full of sperm,” Baran said more than once while arguing that donor records should be made public. “A child has a father — a genetic father. And to be denied half of one’s genetic origins is really unfair.”

She was born Annette Dolinsky on Jan. 7, 1927, in Chicago to house painter Hyman Dolinsky and his wife, Lillian. Her brother, Meyer Dolinsky, wrote for television.

Growing up, she spoke Yiddish as her first language and as an adult hosted a Yiddish-speaking group in an effort to keep the language alive.

At UCLA, she earned a bachelor’s degree in social work and followed it with a master’s in the same subject at USC.

After working at Vista Del Mar, Baran directed an adolescent drug treatment program at UCLA, and as a psychotherapist in private practice often counseled adoptees.

“She became the Joan of Arc of open adoption,” her son said. “To the adoptees, she was their hero. At conferences, they would cheer her and weep.”

In addition to her son Joshua, she is survived by her husband of 62 years, architect Ephraim Baran; another son, David; a daughter, Naomi; and two grandchildren.

valerie.nelson@latimes.com

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