The Psychological Consequences of Ignorance: Adoptees' Right to Know Who their Biological Parents Are1

Most people are unaware of the fact that upon adoption in all states in America except Alaska and Kansas, and most recently Tennessee, a new birth certificate is issued which lists the adoptive parents as the adoptee's birth parents. Adoptees' original birth certificates are then sealed, and access to them by adoptees who are searching for the identity of their birth parents is proscribed by law. The basic rationale upon which these laws rest is that they will set boundaries that will presumably protect and assist adoptive families, and adoptees as well, in their joint task of establishing and developing parent-child bonding in the new adoptive families, and that they will also protect the right to confidentiality of the birth parents so that they can move on with their lives. To accomplish these objectives the door is closed between the adoptee and his birth parents.

There is a growing movement to revoke these laws, which many consider to be unconscionable, and to replace them with new ones. In New Jersey, where adoptees' birth records have been sealed since the passage of Assembly Adoption Bill A-188 in 1940, two identical bills are under consideration, Assembly Bill A-742, and Senate Bill S-287, that would change the current law and authorize adoptees eighteen years of age and older to have access to their original birth certificates. These bills include a provision that birth parents who do not want their identity known would have one year within which to block access. Similar bills are under consideration in other states. Despite strong efforts by the New Jersey Coalition for Openness in Adoption to influence legislators to change current adoption law, many legislators have continued to be opposed to change. Such opposition is not a new phenomenon, and it has been intense. Similar legislation proposed in New Jersey in the past has consistently been defeated.

In this paper I shall advance several arguments in support of the need for change, and answer