Adoptee rights

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Adoptee rights are the legal and social rights of adopted people relating to their adoption and identity. These rights frequently center on access to information which is kept sealed within closed adoptions, but also include issues relating to intercultural or international adoption, interracial adoption, and coercion of birthparents. Adoption reform efforts are often led by adoptee rights activists.

Contents

History

The adoptee rights movement in the United States and other Western countries gained popularity following the increased adoption rates of the Baby Scoop Era, beginning with the end of World War II and ending in the early 1970s. [1]

United States

In the United States, original birth certificates were frequently available to adult adoptees until the mid-twentieth century, when many states passed laws closing birth records. [2] Jean M. Paton, an early adoptee rights activist, established Orphan Voyage in 1953. Orphan Voyage was a support and search network for adoptees looking for their birth families. [3]

As children adopted in the Baby Scoop Era began to reach adulthood in the 1970s, interest in adoptee rights increased significantly. The Adoptees' Liberty Movement Association (ALMA) was founded by Florence Anna Fisher in 1971; within a few years, it had 50,000 members and 50 chapters. [4] ALMA's aims included pressuring states to open their adoption records. Search and support groups sprang up as adoptees sought to find information about their birth families; the American Adoption Congress was started in 1978 as an umbrella organization for many of these groups. [5]

Beginning in the 1980s open adoption became more prevalent, providing access to information for birthparents and adoptees as well as the option to be in contact with each other; most adoptions are now open to some extent. [6] Adoptee rights organizations such as Bastard Nation continue to advocate for the opening of sealed adoption records, in addition to other adoptee concerns. [7]

Issues

Closed adoption

Many adoptee rights concerns center on the negative impacts of closed adoption on adoptees. These include not having information about their own ethnic or religious background, lack of access to medical history, and psychological and emotional challenges relating to attachment. In closed adoptions, adoptees are not permitted access to their own original birth certificate, and governments produce new birth certificates which list the adoptive parents' names as the birth parents. [2] Adoptees' Liberty Movement Association founder Florence Fisher called sealed records "an affront to human dignity." [2]

Citizenship of intercountry adoptees

Children who are adopted across international boundaries are not necessarily automatically considered citizens of the country of their adoptive parents. Certain requirements may be necessary in order for adoptees to apply for and receive citizenship status. In countries such as Japan, Brazil, and Mexico, foreign adopted children must reside in those countries for a specific period to apply for citizenship. [8] Countries such as Brazil, Israel, and Sweden mandate a social and psychological assessment report of the adoptive parents. [8] In the United States, some adoptees were left without clear citizenship when their adoption agencies did not secure appropriate paperwork. [9] The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 provided for citizenship of some, but not all, of those adoptees in the United States; an Adoptee Citizenship Act has been introduced to Congress each year since 2015 to ensure adoptees are not subject to deportation, but has not yet been passed. [10]

Adoptee rights organizations work with legislators to ensure that adopted people have the same access to citizenship that non-adoptees are guaranteed.

Interracial adoption

Transracial adoption—in Western countries, usually involving non-white children and white adults—is a contentious issue. [11] Transracial adoptees often face specific challenges, including a lack of diversity in their environment, racism from adoptive family members, and a lack of connection with their birth culture. [12] In addition, they can struggle with developing a cohesive racial and cultural identity. [12] Adoptee rights organizations provide support for transracially adopted people.

Anonymous infant abandonment

Some adoptee rights organizations are also concerned with the anonymous relinquishment of infants and oppose the implementation of baby boxes, which they believe trivializes the legal abandonment of newborns. [13] The Adoptee Rights Law Center has been a vocal opponent of baby boxes as being a temporary, inadequate solution to problems facing new parents. [14] Anonymous infant relinquishment also echoes the problems of closed adoption, with adoptees left without information about their background or their medical history. [14]

Adoption abolition

In the early 2000s, anti-adoption viewpoints began to become more prominent, prompted by growing recognition of problems within the adoption industry including coercion, corruption, and lack of transparency. [15] Some reproductive rights activists saw adoption reforms as a necessary component of people having the right to make free decisions concerning reproduction. [16] While support for adoption is widespread in the United States and other Western countries, some adoptee activists are supportive of policies that make adoption less frequent, such as providing funding assistance to birthparents instead of adoptive parents. [16] Those who are working towards adoption abolition believe that "if poverty, racism, and health care inequities were properly redressed, adoption would be a last resort." [17]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adoption</span> Parenting a child in place of the original parents

Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting of another, usually a child, from that person's biological or legal parent or parents. Legal adoptions permanently transfer all rights and responsibilities, along with filiation, from the biological parents to the adoptive parents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bastard Nation</span> North American adoptee advocacy and support organization

Bastard Nation is a North American adult adoptee political advocacy and support organization. It was founded in 1996 by denizens of the Usenet newsgroup alt.adoption Shea Grimm, Damsel Plum, Marley Greiner and Lainie Petersen. The original intent of the organization was to support adult adoptees in gaining access to their original birth certificates as a civil right, rather than as a vehicle for facilitating a search, which had been the aim of prior open records organizations. It is also distinguished from search-and-reconnection focused organizations in that it supports the full spectrum of the adult adoptee experience, including adoptees who do not wish to search and adoptees whose reconnections were a bad experience.

The international adoption of South Korean children started around 1953 as a measure to take care of the large number of mixed children that became orphaned during and after the Korean War. It quickly evolved to include orphaned Korean children. Religious organizations in the United States, Australia, and many Western European nations slowly developed the apparatus that sustained international adoption as a socially integrated system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Family reunion</span> Congregation of members of an extended family

A family reunion is an occasion when many members of an extended family congregate. Sometimes reunions are held regularly, for example on the same date of every year.

International adoption is a type of adoption in which an individual or couple residing in one country becomes the legal and permanent parent(s) of a child who is a national of another country. In general, prospective adoptive parents must meet the legal adoption requirements of their country of residence and those of the country whose nationality the child holds.

Closed adoption is a process by which an infant is adopted by another family, and the record of the biological parent(s) is kept sealed. Often, the biological father is not recorded—even on the original birth certificate. An adoption of an older child who already knows their biological parent(s) cannot be made closed or secret. This used to be the most traditional and popular type of adoption, peaking in the decades of the post-World War II Baby Scoop Era. It still exists today, but it exists alongside the practice of open adoption. The sealed records effectively prevent the adoptee and the biological parents from finding, or even knowing anything about each other. However, the emergence of non-profit organizations and private companies to assist individuals with their sealed records has been effective in helping people who want to connect with biological relatives to do so.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adoption in California</span> Overview of adoption in the U.S. state of California

More adoptions occur in California each year than any other state. There is domestic adoption, international adoption, step parent adoption and adult adoption.

In the United States, adoption is the process of creating a legal parent–child relationship between a child and a parent who was not automatically recognized as the child's parent at birth.

Open adoption is a form of adoption in which the biological and adoptive families have access to varying degrees of each other's personal information and have an option of contact. While open adoption is a relatively new phenomenon in the west, it has been a traditional practice in many Asian societies, especially in South Asia, for many centuries. In Hindu society, for example, it is relatively common for a childless couple to adopt the second or later son of the husband's brother when the childless couple has limited hope of producing their own child.

Interracial adoption refers to the act of placing a child of one racial or ethnic group with adoptive parents of another racial or ethnic group.

Sealed birth records refers to the practice of sealing the original birth certificate upon adoption or legitimation, often making a copy of the record unavailable except by court order. Upon finalization of the adoption, the original birth certificate is sealed and replaced with an amended birth certificate declaring the adoptee to be the child of his or her adoptive parents, "as if" born to them. Many states, provinces and countries adopted this practice in the early to mid-20th century with the aim of protecting the adopted person from the shame of an illegitimate birth. Sealed or closed birth records are generally associated with closed adoption. Open records is generally referred to as the practice of opening original birth records to adult adoptees, and should not be confused with open adoption, which can occur with or without sealed records, depending on the laws of the state or province in which it is carried out.

The language of adoption is changing and evolving, and since the 1970s has been a controversial issue tied closely to adoption reform efforts. The controversy arises over the use of terms which, while designed to be more appealing or less offensive to some persons affected by adoption, may simultaneously cause offense or insult to others. This controversy illustrates the problems in adoption, as well as the fact that coining new words and phrases to describe ancient social practices will not necessarily alter the feelings and experiences of those affected by them. Two of the contrasting sets of terms are commonly referred to as positive adoption language (PAL), and honest adoption language (HAL).

Jane Jeong Trenka is a South Korean activist and an award-winning writer. She is the president of the organization TRACK.

The American Adoption Congress (AAC) was an international adoption-reform organization created in the late 1970s as an umbrella organization for adoption search, support, and reform groups. Initiated by Orphan Voyage founder Jean Paton, people representing many groups gathered in regions around the United States and began planning the incorporation. The first AAC Conference was held in Washington, DC in May 1979. The second was in Anaheim, CA in 1980, and the third at the TWA Training facility outside Kansas City in 1981, where the AAC was reincorporated and gained 501(c)3 tax exempt status. AAC conferences were held annually around the United States from 1979 until 2020, when the conference, its last, was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to adoption:

Concerned United Birthparents, Inc. (CUB), a non-profit organization established in 1976, is one of two primary nationwide organizations offering support to the biological parents of adopted people in the United States. The organization is credited with the creation of the term "birthparent."

There have been several high-profile cases of deportation of Korean adoptees from the United States. Prior to the passage of the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, the adoptive parents of adoptees had to file for their child to naturalize before the age of 16. Many parents were unaware of this requirement, assuming that their adopted children automatically derived citizenship from them, and therefore did not apply. The Child Citizenship Act sought to remedy this issue by extending citizenship to all international adoptees who were under 18 at the time that the bill was passed, but did not apply retroactively. This left those adopted by American families prior to 1983 vulnerable to deportations.

Adoption in South Korea, specifically the low rates of domestic adoption in their history, has been a point of discussion for the country, causing new policies to be passed over the years. South Korea, at the conclusion of the Korean War in 1953, began to partake in transnational adoption. As these overseas adoptions increased over the next couple of decades, South Korea pushed to encourage fewer transnational adoptions and more domestic adoptions. The high number of children put up for adoption each year in South Korea can be attributed to a variety of factors: the lack of support for unwed mothers, as well as social stigma, contributed greatly to these numbers. Several organizations have been created to support unwed mothers and combat stigma. There has been changes to adoption policies throughout the decades as well. The Special Adoption Act was passed in 2011 with the intention of boosting domestic adoptions. However, the unexpected outcome of more abandoned children ensued following the amendment taking effect.

Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children is a New York-based licensed and Hague-accredited non-profit providing adoption services, which includes the continuum of counseling and support services to members of the adoption triad: birth parents, adoptive families, and adoptees. They provide interim care for infants as the biological parents make a plan for the child's future, and also specialize in the adoption of older children, sibling groups and children with special needs.

Jean M. Paton was an American adoptee rights activist who worked to reverse harmful policies, practices, and laws concerning adoption and closed records. Paton founded the adoptee support and search network Orphan Voyage in 1953, helping connect adoptees with their birthparents, and was instrumental in the creation of the American Adoption Congress and Concerned United Birthparents in the 1970s.

References

  1. ↑ "Adoption". Britannica. 1 November 2024. Retrieved 12 November 2024.
  2. 1 2 3 "Adoption History: Confidentiality and Sealed Records". The Adoption History Project. University of Oregon. Retrieved 12 November 2024.
  3. ↑ "Adoption History: Jean M. Paton, The Adopted Break Silence, 1954". The Adoption History Project. University of Oregon. Retrieved 12 November 2024.
  4. ↑ Risen, Clay (10 October 2023). "Florence Fisher, Advocate for Opening Adoption Records, Dies at 95". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 November 2024.
  5. ↑ Kahan, Michelle (1 September 2006). ""Put Up" on Platforms: A History of Twentieth Century Adoption Policy in the United States". The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare. 33 (3): 65. doi:10.15453/0191-5096.3181. ISSN   0191-5096 . Retrieved 12 November 2024.
  6. ↑ Grotevant, Harold D.; Miller Wrobel, Gretchen; Von Korff, Lynn; Skinner, Brooke; Newell, Jane; Friese, Sarah; McRoy, Ruth G. (1 July 2008). "Many Faces of Openness in Adoption: Perspectives of Adopted Adolescents and Their Parents". Adoption quarterly. 10 (3 & 4): 79–101. doi:10.1080/10926750802163204. PMID   20802843 . Retrieved 13 November 2024.
  7. ↑ Lipe, Alex. "The Adoption Industry and the Adoptee Rights Movement – Commodities, Conflict, and Cooperation". Commodities, Conflict, and Cooperation. Evergreen State College. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
  8. 1 2 Global Legal Research Directorate staff (February 2021). "Citizenship Through International Adoption". Law Library of Congress. Retrieved 12 November 2024.
  9. ↑ Galofaro, Claire; Tong-Hyung, Kim (25 October 2024). "Thousands of children adopted by Americans are without citizenship. Congress is unwilling to act". AP News. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
  10. ↑ Luce, Gregory D. (26 May 2021). "FAQ: Adoptee Citizenship Act". Adoptee Rights Law Center. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
  11. ↑ "Adoption History: Transracial Adoptions". The Adoption History Project. University of Oregon. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
  12. 1 2 "4 Unique Challenges Faced By Transracial Adoptees". American Adoptions. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
  13. ↑ ""Legalized" Baby Abandonment Laws: Baby Drop Boxes". Bastard Nation. 18 February 2020. Retrieved 12 November 2024.
  14. 1 2 Vollers, Anna Claire (26 February 2024). "More places install drop-off boxes for surrendered babies. Critics say they're a gimmick". Stateline. Retrieved 12 November 2024.
  15. ↑ Matchar, Emily (1 September 2013). "Meet the New Anti-Adoption Movement". The New Republic. ISSN   0028-6583 . Retrieved 12 November 2024.
  16. 1 2 Sisson, Gretchen; Harrison, Jessica M. (7 December 2021). "What We Get Wrong About Adoption". The Nation. ISSN   0027-8378 . Retrieved 12 November 2024.
  17. ↑ Merritt, Michele (17 October 2022). "We Should Be Fighting for a World Without Adoption". The Nation. ISSN   0027-8378 . Retrieved 12 November 2024.
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