Argumentative Essay: Access To Open Adoption Records

Kyla Huggins

Professor Stanley

English exposition

1 March 2015

Access to Open Adoption Records There has been controversy over whether adoptees should be allowed access to their birth records for thirty years. Adoption records include but is not limited to their original birth certificate which is what many adoptees yearn for. Those who support an adoptees right to access their birth records believe it is fundamental for them to know who they truly are. Other who oppose believe it is important to protect the promised anonymity of the birth mother or father. I believe that adoptees at the age of eighteen should be allowed access to their birth records. Sealing birth records did not begin until the mid-1920s. States did not begin capitalizing

That is not considered equal treatment if adoptees do not have the same access available to them. Burke stated, “If we approach open records as a civil rights issue, then we want to be the same as everyone else and not have extraordinary rights.” (par. 5). Opponents use the birth parents right to privacy as their main argument. But there are many birth parents who genuinely do want to be in contact with their child, but were not even given that option. Somewhere throughout the adoption process the birth parent signs a contract to waive their parental rights. Lorraine Dusky claimed, “The relinquishment papers gave me no opportunity to confirm or deny whether I might want to know her one day.” (par.

Putting aside the search for birth parents, people should be able to know vital information about themselves. Adoptive parents have expressed dissatisfaction that birth parents have recently started requesting some form of openness in the adoption. Open adoptions and open adoption records should then prove to encourage rather than discourage future adoptions.

People who oppose to unsealed adoption records reiterate that some birth parent just don’t want to be found. A free-lance writer Robert Kirner was another person that found a way to find his birth mother without his original birth certificate by hiring a searcher. His mother did not want to be in contact with him. "The refusal left me numb." Kirner stated. Opponents also argue that once the privacy of adoption records are no longer private it will pave the way for other private records ( doctors, therapists, etc.) to become public as well.

They also claim that if a mother is not able to keep her confidentiality she will resort to abortion. Statistics from the American Psychiatry written by Paul K.B. Dagg, M.D, show that “We know from informal studies that when women who have placed a child through a confidential adoption arrangement become pregnant again, they choose abortion because they found the confidential conditions of adoption unbearable.” (par.