Open 98 Action Alert!

URGENT ALERT - YOUR HELP NEEDED IN WA STATE

Sunday, Feb 8

Well guys, the Tacoma News Tribune came out against our bill in the SUNDAY paper as their lead editorial, reprinted below. This could be disastrous, so everyone please flood them with letters.

Write to: The Editor
The News Tribune
PO Box 11000
Tacoma, Wa. 98411
Fax: 253-597-8451
E-mail: leted@p.tribnet.com

Please sign your name and include, for verification purposes only, your street address and daytime telephone number.

TACOMA NEWS TRIBUNE

Adoption privacy must be honored

Adoption might be thought of as a social contract whose terms have changed dramatically in recent years.

A generation ago, legal adoptions were typically handled with the utmost confidentiality. The transaction often was as compartmentalized as an espionage operation, with neither the biological nor the adoptive parents knowing the others' identity. Biological parents - many of them unwed mothers - were commonly told that the records would remain permanently sealed.

In an era in which out-of-wedlock births carried enormous social stigma, this assurance helped the biological mother and father put the traumatic pregnancy behind them and get on with their lives. In any event, adoption was generally understood to be a proceeding that completely erased one parental relationship and replaced it with a new one. The transfer was treated as final, inviolable and irreversable.

Adoption has since lost much of its secrecy, and today it is less often seen as an absolute termination of biological ties. Some adoptions today are "open," with the parties involved fully aware of each others' identities. Even children raised under more traditional adoptive arrangements are tracking down their "natural" mothers or fathers with increasing frequency once they've reach adulthood.

Such searches have become much easier now that citizens can access vast databases of birth records via the Internet. In Washington, a state-sponsored intermediary service helps adoptees reach biological parents through confidential go-betweens. These intermediaries locate parents and ask if they are willing to communicate directly with the inquiring sons or daughters - but the parent retains the option of refusing contact and remaining anonymous.

Two legislators now want to go further. State Rep. Suzette Cooke (R-Kent) and Sen. Jeanne Kohl (D-Seattle) have introduced bills that would give adoptees a right to birth certificates bearing the names of their biological mothers and fathers. A similar bill was enacted four years ago, but it applied only to adoptions occurring after 1993. The Cooke-Kohl bill would be retroactive; it would effectively undo the confidentiality of all previous adoptions in this state.

This is a step too far. One can sympathize with the hunger of some adoptees to discover their biological roots, but at some point their interests have to be balanced against the interests of biological parents who - in a different era, under different rules - were assured their identities would be kept confidential. Many of them have no wish to reopen a painful episode of their past. The appearance of a child long ago given up for adoption might, for example, be profoundly distressing for an older woman who has never told her husband or family of her teenage pregnancy.

The release of birth certificates for post-1993 adoptions is fair; in these cases, the birth parents know eventual disclosure of their identities is part of the deal. But disclosure should not be forced, long after the fact, on those who were given every reason to believe their privacy would be honored. The Cooke-Kohl bill wouldn't merely change the rules of adoption in the middle of the game; it would change the rules long after the game was over.

February 08, 1998


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