NEW YORK STATE ASSEMBLY
ASSEMBLY STANDING COMMITTEE ON HEALTH
PUBLIC HEARING
Legislation To Allow Adoptees To Access Their Original
Birth Certificate
New York City
Room 1923
250 Broadway
January 31, 2014
10:00 am. - 4:12 p.m. Page 2 Standing Committee on Health, January 31, 2014
ASSEMBLY MEMBERS PRESENT:
ASSEMBLY MEMBER RICHARD GOTTFRIED, CHAIR, ASSEMBLY STANDING COMMITTEE ON HEALTH
ASSEMBLY MEMBER DAVID WEPRIN
ASSEMBLY MEMBER CHARLES LAVINE
ASSEMBLY MEMBER JOSEPH BORELLI
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INDEX
John M. Czygier, Jr. 10 Surrogate’s Court, Suffolk County
Panel: Kathleen Rice 35 Nassau County District Attorney Eric Phillips Assistant Ellen Mohr 36
Aaron Britvan, Esq. 42 Chairperson of the Adoption Committee Family Law Section NYS Bar Association
Panel: Joyce Bahr 63 President, New York Statewide Adoption Reform’s Unsealed Initiative Ellyn Essig, Esq Legal Advisor (Accompanied by: Michael Schoer, Brooklyn & Staten Island Coordinator; Larry Dell, PR Director; Jeff Hancock, Regional Director, Western NY; and Marsha Raffloer, Long Island Coordinator, and Dennis Sumlin)
Hon. Peter Kelly 70 Surrogate’s Court, Queens County Executive Chair, NYS Surrogates Association
Adam Pertman 90 President Donaldson Adoption Institute
Dana Stallard, LCSW 107 Spence Chapin Adoption Service
Professor Elizabeth Samuels 114 Baltimore School of Law Researcher on Sealed Birth Certificates
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Peter W. Franklin RPh 129 Adoptees Without Liberty (AWOL)
Joe Soll, LCSW 135 Psychotherapist Adoption Healing, Inc.
Dr. Judy Kelly, PhD, LMHC 140
Doris Bertocci, LCSW 150 Clinical Social Worker/Therapist
Leanne Jaffe, MA, LCSW 163 Psychotherapist/Consultant Adapting to Adoption
Lorraine Dusky 180
Nancy Horgan 199
Michelle Wadowski 210 Facilitator Manhattan Birth Parents Support Group
Panel: Jane Acton 212 Elsa Chung 224
Maureen Sheridan 230
Mary Anne Devine 242
Cindy Garet Sippin 249
Joe Brandt 261
Joe Pessalono 265
Carla Marie Rupp 270
James Lane 272
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Rod Shinners 295
Panel: Theresa Stanton 302 Ron Stanton 302
Michael Schoer 310 Brooklyn & Staten Island Coordinator New York Statewide Adoption Reform’s Unsealed Initiative
Pat O’Brien 318 President New York State Citizens Coalition for Children
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2 (The public hearing commenced at 10:00
3 a.m.)
4 ASSEMBLY MEMBER RICHARD GOTTFRIED,
5 CHAIR, ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON HEALTH: Okay, if
6 people could take their seats, we will begin,
7 we've got a long day. I'm Richard Gottfried, I
8 chair the Health Committee in the New York State
9 Assembly. I want to start off by wishing
10 everyone a Happy New Year. We are joined this
11 morning by two other members of the assembly
12 health committee, Charles Lavine and Joe, Joseph
13 Borelli, and also by David Weprin, assembly
14 member David Weprin who is the sponsor of the
15 bill that is the subject of the hearing.
16 A few procedural announcements, as is
17 the long-standing practice of the Health
18 Committee, all witnesses will be testifying under
19 oath; what that means is when you come up, take
20 your seat, I will ask you if you swear or affirm
21 that the testimony you are about to give is true
22 and if you say yes, you get to testify. For the
23 benefit of the, of the recording mechanism, and
24 ultimately the making of a transcript, if you
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2 could before you begin clearly state your name.
3 We will be going straight through, at some point
4 in mid-day we will take about a ten minute break
5 for, for what in the health world we call
6 ambulation and toileting, but other than that we
7 will be going straight through. We have a lot of
8 witnesses, and let me just say to the witnesses,
9 we definitely want to hear what everyone has to
10 say but in order to enable everyone to have their
11 say before nightfall, if others have made points
12 the same as or similar to yours feel free to say,
13 I agree with so-and-so or I agree with all of the
14 people who have said, whatever. And to the
15 extent you can do that that will help move things
16 along for everyone here today.
17 I'm not going to make an opening
18 statement, I know Mr. Weprin wants to say a
19 couple of words, do either or you folks want to
20 say anything?
21 ASSEMBLY MEMBER CHARLES LAVINE: No, but
22 thank you.
23 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, David?
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER DAVID WEPRIN: Thank
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2 you, Chairman Gottfried. I want to start off by
3 thanking the health committee chairman, Richard
4 Gottfried, for holding this hearing. This has
5 been a piece of legislation that's been around
6 the legislature for many, many years, although
7 it's gotten significant momentum in the last
8 couple years and I don't think we've ever had a
9 public hearing, that I know of, on this piece of
10 legislation. So I want to start off by thanking
11 Chairman Gottfried for bringing this hearing
12 today and, of course, as well as Speaker Sheldon
13 Silver, for bringing this hearing today.
14 We now have over 80 sponsors of a bill
15 that I call the Adoptee Bill of Rights. It only
16 takes 76 sponsors to pass a bill in the assembly,
17 it is a bipartisan sponsorship, we have a
18 significant number of republicans as well as
19 democrats and Senator Andrew Lanza is now the
20 prime sponsor of a companion bill in the senate
21 also known as the Adoptee Bill of Rights, which
22 allows adult adoptce -- adoptees access to their
23 original birth certificate and medical history to
24 treat illness related to family history and
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2 genetics. Amending the existing New York
3 adoption law will provide adult adoptees with the
4 same access to information that a non-adopted
5 person has the legal right to obtain. No one, in
6 my opinion, should be denied the right to obtain
7 information about themselves concerning their
8 medical history and ethnicity and it is
9 unacceptable that adult adoptees are the only
10 group of citizens in New York State that are
11 unable to obtain their birth and family medical
12 records.
13 When several diseases and preventative
14 care treatments are linked to family history and
15 genetics, it is imperative that adoptees are able
16 to receive access to the hereditary history so
17 that medical professionals are given all of the
18 necessary information to cure potentially life-
19 threatening illnesses. As a prime sponsor of the
20 Adoptee Bill of Rights, and on behalf of all of
21 the New Yorkers waiting to acquire a copy of
22 their birth certificate and family history, we
23 look forward to hearing testimony from all of the
24 health professionals, adoptees, advocacy groups,
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2 lawyers, civic organizations, veterans, and
3 constituents affected by this issue throughout
4 the State of New York. Thank you.
5 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
6 We will now proceed to our first witness, John
7 Czygier, who is the surrogate court judge of
8 Suffolk county. While Judge Czygier is coming
9 up, I just want to express again my, my apology
10 for the fact that because of an error in my
11 office, there were several people who did not get
12 early notification of this hearing and I'm glad,
13 Judge, you are able to be here. I, because I
14 think it's very important that we hear your
15 views.
16 JUDGE JOHN M. CZYGIER, JR., SURROGATE's
17 COURT, SUFFOLK, COUNTY: Alright, thank you,
18 again, thank you.
19 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Oh, and do
20 you swear or affirm --
21 JUDGE CZYGIER: Oh.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: -- that the
23 testimony you are about to give is true?
24 JUDGE CZYGIER: Yes, I do.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
3 JUDGE CZYGIER: Again, thank you for the
4 opportunity of allowing me to be here,
5 notwithstanding the short notice, I'll try and
6 put together a presentation that will be brief
7 and to the point. In fact, I did ask that this
8 be adjourned but apparently this has been long-
9 planned, okay, not, not that we knew about it.
10 So anyway, let me just give you my background
11 briefly, I practiced law for 25 years before I
12 became a judge. I've been on the bench about 12
13 years now as a surrogate judge of Suffolk County.
14 In my capacity as a lawyer, in my capacity as a
15 judge, I've become familiar with adoptions
16 because that's what surrogate's court, around,
17 surrogates courts around the state do. Quite
18 frankly, in my court we don't do them that much
19 anymore because the family court has taken it
20 over but we still are the repository of the
21 records of the adoptions done in the past.
22 I am also the president of the
23 Surrogates Association, I'm a member of the
24 Surrogates Court Advisory to the OCA. And you
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2 may say, well why are surrogates interested in
3 this public health issue? Well, it boils down to
4 one simple fact in my mind and that is, as a
5 judge, and as a practicing lawyer when
6 representing a natural parent giving up a child
7 for adoption, I was the one who promised
8 confidentiality to the natural parents. And when
9 they came in and made the decision to give up a
10 child for adoption, they relied on that promise.
11 And this is why I think there's some flaws with
12 the bill as presented.
13 And again, Assemblyman Weprin mentioned
14 there's some iteration of his bill has been
15 around for a couple of years, we've monitored it
16 over those years, and we've always been troubled
17 with it and so I speak on behalf of the
18 Surrogates Association and also the Surrogates
19 Court Advisory Committee.
20 Let me just sort of put this together so
21 it makes some sense, you know, the longstanding
22 public policy of this state has been to strike a
23 balance between biological parents' desire for
24 anonymity, confidentialisy (sic), confidentiality
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2 and privacy, and adoptees' right to access. And
3 for the Surrogates Court, the current law
4 domestic relation law 114, already effectively
5 balances these somewhat competing interests by
6 permitting access to sealed adoption records for
7 good cause shown.
8 Now, the stated justification for
9 statutory change is to afford adoptees the same
10 rights as non-adoptees and the sec-, accessing
11 information related to their birth parents. This
12 premise ignores the fact that natural parents,
13 when giving up a child for adoption have, in most
14 cases, an expectation of privacy, whether it be
15 for religious, financial, medical, or other
16 personal reasons. It can be presumed that the
17 decision to give up a child for adoption is
18 heart-wrenching. It should, it can also be
19 presumed, I think, that that natural parent may
20 not want to relive that decision sometime in the
21 future, based solely on the curiosity of someone
22 who wants to view the birth certificate. And
23 although cloaked as a public health benefit or a
24 aid to the adopted child, I don't see any
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2 standard in the bill as presented that they have
3 to allege a medical reason or a need for a
4 research of the biological parent's history.
5 They simply have to come in, file the papers,
6 show proof, and they get to see the birth
7 certificate. And we all know that the birth
8 certificate doesn't contain any information
9 concerning medical history, for the most part,
10 and, but what it does provide are the names of
11 those people who, with the promise of
12 confidentiality, gave up that child for adoption.
13 Now, there is a process in place, okay,
14 if people have a need to access their sealed
15 adoption file, there's a process in place where
16 they come to the court and on good cause shown,
17 they can access that file but there's a standard
18 there. And it's up to the judges to, to
19 investigate whether or not that cause exists to
20 the level where the promised confidentiality to
21 the natural parents should be reached.
22 The problem here is, if retroactively
23 applied, the right to privacy and confidentiality
24 of biological parents would effectively be cast
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2 aside and promote access, again, merely for the
3 sake of curiosity and eliminate the courts as a
4 gatekeeper. The court of appeals in matter of
5 Linda F., 52 New York 2nd 236, stated, "A natural
6 parent understandingly can feel deep affects when
7 the records of an adoption are opened years after
8 the child was surrendered for adoption. Although
9 the sudden reappearance of the child may often be
10 a source of great pleasure to the natural parent,
11 in other cases it may be a destructive intrusion
12 into the life that the parent has built in the
13 years since the adoption and may be the source of
14 much discomfort. In some cases, it may even open
15 the way for the child or others to blackmail the
16 natural parents by threatening to disclose
17 embarrassing circumstances." These are not my
18 words, ladies and gentlemen, these are the words
19 of the highest court in the state.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Lets, folks
21 we need to maintain order here.
22 JUDGE CZYGIER: I'm just, if people want
23 to shout me down --
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: No, we're
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2 not go --
3 JUDGE CZYGIER: -- don't charge that
4 time against me, okay.
5 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: We're, we're
6 not --
7 JUDGE CZYGIER: I'm giving you my
8 position.
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: We're not
10 going to allow people to shout anybody down.
11 JUDGE CZYGIER: Okay.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Let's listen
13 to one another respectfully.
14 JUDGE CZYGIER: Well, let me sum up.
15 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Everybody
16 will have an opportunity to make their own
17 comments.
18 JUDGE CZYGIER: I think you're
19 overlooking the right of the woman who made a
20 decision to give up her child with the promise of
21 confidentiality. You're, you're making, you're
22 giving the adopted child the unilateral right to
23 come in and say, we're doing away with that
24 promise that the judge made to you and the lawyer
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2 made to you when you gave up the child. So, to
3 sum up, the existing procedure we have to provide
4 for the release of information for legitimate
5 reasons is a procedure that works. The proposals
6 to expand access to information for no
7 discernible reason other than a desire to know,
8 could result in devastating consequences.
9 Indeed, there are mechanisms in place that allow
10 for natural parents and adoptees who wish to
11 reconnect to do so. There are current public
12 health law provisions, adoption support groups,
13 internet services, et cetera. And again, I'm not
14 unsympathetic to the frustration of adoptees, to
15 me it boils down to a balancing of the equities.
16 Leave the existing procedures and mechanisms
17 achieve as fair a structure as is possible to
18 protect all concerned. And in short, it seems to
19 be a solution in search of a problem which sounds
20 trite now but I said it when the bills first
21 started being passed around years ago when I was
22 making comments on it and I say it again. If
23 anyone has any questions, I'll be happy to answer
24 them.
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2 JOYCE BAHR: Yeah, I have a question.
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Please, the
4 only questioning will be done by the legislators
5 up here. This is not a debate, this is an
6 opportunity for everyone to come forward and
7 state their views. Mr. Borelli, do you have a
8 question?
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER JOSEPH BORELLI: Yeah.
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay.
11 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: You referenced
12 a local law, what was that, that, that gives,
13 said something about a procedure for adoptees to,
14 to have the judge?
15 JUDGE CZYGIER: Domestic Relations Law
16 114.
17 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Okay, so did
18 you ever represent a, a birth mother in an
19 adoption proceeding?
20 JUDGE CZYGIER: Sure.
21 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Did you advise
22 them that there is a procedure that their
23 confidentiality might be broken at some point?
24 JUDGE CZYGIER: Well, you see, here's,
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2 and here, that's a good point because you raise
3 an interesting question and in Suffolk County
4 when I was practicing in Suffolk County, and
5 handling adoptions there, the birth mother at the
6 time of the adoption, the birth parents, they
7 had, they had forms to sign. They could consent
8 at the time to allow access to the information if
9 the adopted child ever came forward or they could
10 say, no, I refuse to give consent, keep the file
11 sealed. Now --
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: But you
13 advised your client though that, that there would
14 be an opportunity at some point in the future for
15 that record to be unsealed?
16 JUDGE CZYGIER: Not if they opted for
17 confidentiality. If they said, look, if, if
18 someone wants to come in the future and access
19 this, fine, I have no problem with it. In most
20 cases, the parent would say, no, I'm giving this
21 child up for a reason because if I have a family
22 30 years from now with three children and a
23 husband, I may not want someone knocking at my
24 door saying, guess who I am?
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Was this law
3 on the books say, the last time you --
4 JUDGE CZYGIER: Here's, here's, here's
5 the problem, and again, and this is really the
6 point I was trying to get at with this whole
7 consent form, because you may say in Suffolk
8 County --
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: But I, but I'm
10 trying to get on a different point.
11 JUDGE CZYGIER: Okay.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: So the law
13 existed? It provides a procedure for adoptees at
14 some point in the future, with cause, to get
15 access to their records. That law is in
16 existence.
17 JUDGE CZYGIER: Yeah, sure.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: You
19 represented adopted, birth mothers.
20 JUDGE CZYGIER: Yes.
21 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: And you failed
22 to advise them that at some point there's a
23 possibility of these records becoming unsealed?
24 JUDGE CZYGIER: For good cause shown. I
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2 didn't fail, I didn't fail to advise them, I told
3 them that the only reason, if you si-, if you
4 refuse to give consent, okay, there is a
5 mechanism in place where they could come back but
6 they would have to show good cause.
7 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Yeah, but it's
8 not 100 percent expectation of absolute privacy.
9 That's kind of a myth, in other words.
10 JUDGE CZYGIER: Well, I'm not citing
11 myths, okay, I'm citing based on my experience as
12 a practicing lawyer of 25 years and a judge for
13 12. I'm not citing myths, I'm telling you
14 representing people and having people appear in
15 front of me. The process that was used in
16 Suffolk County allowing that person to sign a
17 consent or non-consent was not uniform across the
18 state so I can't say whether or not that was
19 offered to every birth mother when they came in,
20 to say, okay, if someone wants to know in the
21 future let them know. That's the problem with
22 this bill, because the mother who relied on the
23 lawyer who said, don't worry, it's going to
24 confidential unless there's good cause shown, you
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2 are now have an opportunity for someone to come
3 in and say, here's proof of who I am, I want to
4 see the birth certificate.
5 And again, the, the, it, it, it, you're
6 cloaking this as a, a medical rights bill. It's
7 not a medical rights bill, it's, it's someone
8 looking to find out who their natural parents
9 were and, as I say, there is a process in place
10 right now, if a natural parent currently wants to
11 allow or, their child to find them, their natural
12 child, there's a registry. If both parties want
13 to get together and come together, that's fine,
14 okay. I've had people come back to my court who
15 have signed those confidentiality agreements and
16 say, you know, I've changed my mind, I now want
17 to undo that confidentiality and if someone wants
18 to come in, fine, let them know where I am. I,
19 again, I keep reiterating the, the fact that
20 we're fos-, focusing on the right of the adopted
21 child to undo the right and expectation of
22 privacy of the natural mother.
23 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: So in, in
24 proceedings where adoptees have sought to unseal
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2 records, how much would a lawyer cost? To, to
3 hire an attorney for it?
4 JUDGE CZYGIER: They don't have to.
5 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: They don't
6 have to.
7 JUDGE CZYGIER: We have a form.
8 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Okay.
9 JUDGE CZYGIER: They fill out a form.
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: And how, how,
11 what's the percentage of, of times that it's been
12 granted and, and not granted?
13 JUDGE CZYGIER: Well, basically, because
14 right now what they come in and ask for is to
15 view the adopted, the adoption file because they
16 have a medical problem or reason, okay, but quite
17 frankly, those files very rarely contain any
18 medical information. So in most cases, there's
19 nothing there after re-, we review it, okay.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Mr. Weprin?
21 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Yes, yes. Good
22 morning, Judge. Thank you for coming, we
23 appreciate you bringing your views. The problem,
24 it seems to be that your major objection to the
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2 legislation is the so called promise of
3 confidentiality to the birth parents, is that, is
4 that correct?
5 JUDGE CZYGIER: Correct.
6 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: But there are
7 overwhelming situations, and I've spoken to many
8 birth mothers through this process that they were
9 not promised confidentiality. Would you agree
10 there a number of those situations?
11 JUDGE CZYGIER: I have no empirical
12 knowledge to disagree or agree with you on that.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Okay, and the
14 other thing --
15 JUDGE CZYGIER: Because I don't know
16 what attorneys tell their clients when they
17 represent them. I know what I told my clients.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Yeah, but the
19 other thing is that New York State law does not
20 seal the birth certificate records until the
21 adoption takes place, while the, while there are
22 many, many situations, maybe even an overwhelming
23 amount of situations where someone gives up a
24 child for adoption before the child is actually
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2 adopted. If that is the case, the records are
3 not sealed when they give up the child for
4 adoption and they're not sealed until much later
5 when the actual adoption takes place. Are you
6 aware of that?
7 JUDGE CZYGIER: So are you saying
8 because there's a flaw in the system that way, we
9 should expand the flaw and make this an open
10 adoption state?
11 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Well, I, I
12 don't think it --
13 JUDGE CZYGIER: If that's what you want
14 to do then propose legislation along that tact
15 and let's do it. Let's not call it a public
16 health issue when it's not.
17 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Well, there are
18 a number of states that have adopted a more
19 liberal version. There are provisions, and it's
20 kind of as a compromise in this legislation which
21 would allow the birth mother to be contacted by
22 the Health Department in the event an adult, by
23 the way we're not talking about children, we're
24 only talking about adult adoptees, so when the
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2 adult adoptee contacts the Health Department to
3 get a copy of their original birth certificate,
4 under this legislation the Health Department
5 would then contact the birth mother, if they
6 could find them, or the birth father, and, and
7 ask if they would like to be contacted, would
8 they like to be contacted through an intermediary
9 or would they like not to be contacted. My
10 understanding is in states that have adopted this
11 legislation, and I think we're going to hear from
12 a number of people who are familiar with those
13 state's legislation, the overwhelming percentage
14 of birth parents opt for being contacted. So, in
15 a sense, that this legislation is not only
16 benefitting adult adoptees, it's also
17 overwhelmingly benefitting adult birth parents.
18 JUDGE CZYGIER: Not in every case.
19 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: No, and I, I
20 didn't say every case. Nothing is every, every
21 case.
22 JUDGE CZYGIER: Well, but you see, in
23 every case where there was a promise made of
24 confidentiality, I think that promise must be
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2 honored.
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Okay so --
4 JUDGE CZYGIER: That's my opinion.
5 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: -- that's fine,
6 so would you support the legislation in the cases
7 where there was no promise of confidentiality?
8 JUDGE CZYGIER: I would have to look at
9 the legislation and if, if you want to change the
10 legislation on it, we'll take another look at it,
11 I understand --
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: But we've
13 gotten --
14 JUDGE CZYGIER: -- we'll have further
15 time comment on this. Yes, Chairman?
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Well, I would
17 love to have your comments, how w-, how you think
18 we could amend the bill.
19 JUDGE CZYGIER: Well, I don't think the
20 bill has to be amended, I don't think you need
21 the bill, that's my premise.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Well, that's
23 not the premise of the overwhelming --
24 JUDGE CZYGIER: Okay.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: -- sentiment of
3 over 80 sponsors in the state assembly --
4 JUDGE CZYGIER: Well --
5 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: -- of the 150.
6 JUDGE CZYGIER: -- I don't want to get
7 into how many 80 sponsors read the bill or
8 understand the nuances of the bill or understand
9 what I've s-, a lot of things I've pointed out
10 today about what I see every day in my job but,
11 you know.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Okay, well, I
13 just wanted to point out, it sounds like your
14 objection is on the confidentiality portion and
15 there are overwhelming situations where birth
16 parents were not promised confidentiality. And
17 the other problem is that people of means, who
18 have that desire, adoptees, to find their birth
19 parents, do find those birth parents because your
20 fear about someone showing up at the door, that
21 is happening every single day by wealthy people
22 that have the means to hire private
23 investigators, to use the technology that exists
24 today that did not exist when the records were
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2 originally sealed. And they have found their
3 birth parents, whether they want to be contacted
4 or not. This legislation will allow everyone,
5 poor people as well as middle-class people who do
6 not have the financial means to hire private
7 investigators to actually res-, you know, travel
8 and other things.
9 JUDGE CZYGIER: So I guess you're saying
10 it's not really a health care issue, it's an
11 ability for --
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: No.
13 JUDGE CZYGIER: -- poor people to find
14 their natural parents because rich people can.
15 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Well, that is,
16 that is part of it.
17 JUDGE CZYGIER: Okay, all right.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: That is part of
19 it but there are situations, I think you'll hear
20 testimony today, or we will, from one birth
21 mother who gave up her child for adoption and
22 found out later that her, the birth father had a
23 congenital heart condition and died of massive
24 heart attack in his early 40s and then found out
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2 that his father and grandfather had also died of
3 massive heart attacks in their 40s and she hired
4 a private investigator, spent a lot of money,
5 located her son that she gave birth to --
6 JUDGE CZYGIER: Is this on my time? Or,
7 I'm just, Chairman, see, because you, and let me
8 just point something out because you mention
9 we're going to hear testimony --
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Okay, you know
11 what, we're done.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: The Q & A
13 process is not on anybody's time.
14 JUDGE CZYGIER: Okay.
15 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Except
16 everybody's time.
17 JUDGE CZYGIER: I didn't think it was a
18 question, I thought it was just a speech.
19 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: No, I, I was
20 finished. And I'll, I'll finish that statement.
21 And as it turns out, she contacted him and
22 alerted him about the congenital heart condition.
23 He saw a cardiologist which he'd not, would not
24 have seen in his late 30s when he knew, she knew
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2 he was approaching that age and it, it pote-,
3 potentially saved his life and he's now living
4 and he's in his 50s.
5 JUDGE CZYGIER: Look, with all due
6 respect to, and, and again, you see, here's one,
7 one of the pr-, the problems in that and I'm sure
8 there are plenty of stories like you just
9 indicated of the natural mother who, who wants
10 this disclosure. You're not going to get anyone
11 to come to this hearing and say, look, I'm a
12 natural mother who gave up my child at the age of
13 14 because of family reasons, because of
14 religious reasons, my other alternative was an
15 ab, maybe an abortion but for reli-, religious
16 reasons I decided to go through and have the
17 child because I was told, don't worry, you're
18 gonna have the child, it's going to go to a good
19 home, and no one will ever know, you can live
20 your life and move on. Okay, that's.
21 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Well, I think
22 we will be hearing from people of that situation
23 so.
24 JUDGE CZYGIER: I'm just, remember you
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2 won't be hearing from the people that don't want
3 to come forward because of whatever reasons they
4 can't come forward so they're compelling stories
5 on the other side, I'm sure.
6 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Absolutely.
7 JUDGE CZYGIER: Okay.
8 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Thank you,
9 Judge.
10 JUDGE CZYGIER: Thank you.
11 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, thank
12 you. Oh, there's more ques-...
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER CHARLES LAVINE: May I
14 just ask one --
15 JUDGE CZYGIER: Sure, sure.
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: -- question?
17 Thanks, Judge. Roughly, how many, how many
18 adoptions are there in a county like Suffolk
19 every year?
20 JUDGE CZYGIER: See, I couldn't tell you
21 that, I really, and the reason they took it out
22 of Surrogates Court is because there were so many
23 that the family court really is geared up to do
24 them. They have a better investigative system.
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2 And, and let me just say this, as far as
3 statistics go, we get fewer and fewer
4 applications every year from people coming in
5 asking for the files. I don't know why, it's
6 just, we only get about a dozen a year really.
7 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: So, now, that's
8 a dozen in the Surrogates Court or a dozen --
9 JUDGE CZYGIER: Surro-, Surrogate,
10 Surrogates Court.
11 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: -- co-, county
12 wide?
13 JUDGE CZYGIER: No, Surrogates Court.
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: And do you
15 have any census county wide? No?
16 JUDGE CZYGIER: No, I really don't, I
17 can't, I'm sorry, I'm not prepared to address
18 that.
19 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Alright.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: So out of all
21 those adoptions, and again there were, you've
22 told us there were so many that they ended up not
23 going to Surrogates Court but to Family Court,
24 out of all, you know, the proceedings involving
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2 ad-, adoptees, how often does it occur in a
3 county like Suffolk, that the birth mother comes
4 to court or does whatever administratively has to
5 be done, to waive confidentiality?
6 JUDGE CZYGIER: Well, you see, I don't
7 think she does have to come to court because she
8 could go to the registry and that would kind of
9 circumvent the whole thing.
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: And, are there
11 --
12 JUDGE CZYGIER: But I, again, I don't --
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: -- a number, a
14 rough number of occasions on which that occurs?
15 JUDGE CZYGIER: I, well, well, like I
16 said, the, the natural mother coming to telling
17 to my court, I've, I've done it only once, you
18 know. I've only had one natural mother come and
19 say, you know, I'm at a point in my life where
20 maybe I would like to reconnect and find out what
21 happened to the child. Only once.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: Thanks, Judge.
23 JUDGE CZYGIER: Okay, thank you so much.
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
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2 JUDGE CZYGIER: Okay.
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Our next
4 witness is the district attorney of Nassau
5 County, Kathleen Rice. Um-hum. Oh, okay. And
6 joining her is a person listed as witness number
7 17 on the list, Ellen Moore. Yes?
8 MS. KATHLEEN RICE, NASSAU COUNTY
9 DISTRICT ATTORNEY: Gentlemen, thank you so much
10 for having us. I, I'm actually here just to
11 introduce my aunt here.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, before
13 you begin will --
14 MS. RICE: Yes.
15 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: -- you both
16 swear or affirm that the testimony you are about
17 to give is true?
18 MS. RICE: Absolutely.
19 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, and if
20 you could each state your names.
21 MS. RICE: My name is Kathleen Rice, R-
22 I-C-E.
23 MS. ELLEN KELLY MOHR: My name is Ellen
24 Kelly Mohr.
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2 MS. RICE: Good morning, gentlemen.
3 Thank you so much for having us, I think this is
4 an incredibly important issue. I am here just to
5 introduce my aunt who lives in Charlottesville,
6 Virginia and we went to pick her up to bring her
7 here so that she could offer her testimony today
8 before you so, my aunt, Ellen Kelly Mohr.
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Go ahead.
10 MS. MOHR: Thank you, gentlemen. My
11 name is Ellen Kelly Mohr and I was born into a
12 wonderful family in 1926. A family that cared
13 for me, loved me, and created a life for me that
14 can only be described as a fulfillment of the
15 American dream. A dream that lead me to serve
16 the Catholic Church as a nun in countries across
17 the world. I was one of the lucky ones, as
18 Catholic Charities put it.
19 At the same time, moments earlier on
20 that March day in 1926, I was born to a mother
21 and father who I've never had the opportunity to
22 know. What I know now, after nearly four years
23 of investigating, is that my birth parents were
24 Irish immigrants. I was born in New York City,
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2 my birth mother was 27 and my father 30. My
3 biological father died while my mother was five
4 months pregnant with me. My birth mother at some
5 point returned to Ireland to care for her family
6 back home. My biological parents had four other
7 children. I have at least four siblings whom
8 I've never met who may be living today.
9 It took me 80 years to summon the
10 strength to start searching for my parents. It
11 took me another four to learn even the slightest
12 thing about where I came from. The steps I took
13 to discover this information were lengthy,
14 onerous, and required far beyond what most who
15 are adopted have to commit to this process.
16 Filling in the gaps between what limited
17 information I've learned has been even harder yet
18 it's also much more important. I don't know my
19 parent's names, I don't know where they were
20 born, I don't know anything of their medical
21 histories; histories that may very well bear on
22 my own health.
23 The secretiveness of this process is not
24 an aid to families; it is not an aid to the
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2 children given to wonderful adoptive parents.
3 The secretiveness of this process is quite
4 clearly a hindrance to understanding family and
5 to understanding much about your own health,
6 life, and place on this earth. As in my case,
7 often times the searches for these answers don't
8 come until later in life, by older children like
9 myself who didn't until their later years, feel
10 as though a search for their biological parents
11 was anything other than a slight to their
12 wonderful adoptive parents.
13 There are many men and women in my
14 circumstances who are searching for parents in
15 the later years of their lives, searching for
16 parents that are almost certainly not living. We
17 must right this wrong and allow for adult
18 children to know a vital portion of their past
19 lives so that they can live full lives in the
20 years that follow.
21 Adoption is a wonderful process yet many
22 children born to parents they will never know go
23 through life with small holes in their hearts.
24 Oftentimes, time only expands this void. This
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2 legislation can help fill it, not only for me but
3 for the children born this afternoon at hospitals
4 across New York. One day, they should have
5 access to their pasts so that they can be
6 stronger and more complete in their futures.
7 Please, change this law and allow for adoptive
8 sons and daughters to understand where they came
9 from so that they will always have a better idea
10 of what was before them and what is in front of
11 them. And lastly, I, I just say, well, like, who
12 am I? I can't do anything, I have no surname and
13 I think we, we're all entitled to that. Thank
14 you.
15 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you,
16 can, can you tell me, and you may have covered
17 this in your, in your testimony and I'm sorry if
18 I, if I missed it, how did you come to know that
19 you were adopted and how did you learn what a, as
20 much as you have learned?
21 MS. MOHR: I have the most wonderful
22 story, when I was probably four years old, I, my
23 father was a judge in New York, New York Circuit
24 Court of Appeals, he was with Milbank, which, he,
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2 my mother, my adoptive mother, we used to listen,
3 I used to listen to Orphan Annie on the radio and
4 my mother would come through every day with milk
5 and cookies and say, Daddy Warbucks walked all
6 over the world looking for Annie and he and Sandy
7 just was so tired at the end of the, you know,
8 their travels, and just as your father and I
9 walked all over the world looking for you. And
10 we were so tired and we walked and we walked and
11 we walked, well, they had never been outside of
12 Forest Hills, so then they, when I went to the,
13 the emphasis was that I was chosen.
14 So when I went to the first grade, and
15 when you think the Catholic school, you know, you
16 had about 80 children in the first grade, and so
17 I had a little friend by the name of Mary O'Leary
18 (phonetic) and I used to think, if I had a little
19 argument or something with Mary O'Leary I used to
20 think, poor Mrs. O'Leary, her mother had to take
21 her but I was chosen. And the same thing with a
22 little boy, Paul Coldmyer (phonetic), you know,
23 poor Ms. Coldmeyer, she had to take Paul but I
24 was chosen. So, thank you.
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2 MS. RICE: So no, tell them about you
3 going to Catholic Charities and getting the
4 information that you do know.
5 MS. MOHR: Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, I went
6 to Catholic Charities and there's a certain
7 amount of information that you can get, you know,
8 that is open but the basic information I could
9 just never get my name.
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Um-hum.
11 MS. MOHR: Or, so that leaves me with
12 the most important thing unanswered, who am I?
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, thank
14 you.
15 MS. MOHR: Thank you very much.
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Other, other
17 questions?
18 MS. RICE: Thank you very much.
19 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you,
20 thank you for coming.
21 MS. MOHR: Thank you.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, our
23 next witness is Aaron Britvan.
24 MR. AARON BRITVAN, ESQ., CHAIRPERSON OF
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2 THE ADOPTION COMMITTEE, FAMILY LAW SECTION NYS
3 BAR ASSOCIATION: Yes, here.
4 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay.
5 MR. BRITVAN: May I take a little water,
6 please? Oh, okay.
7 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: He came from
8 Boston on a plane, the 14th, so if we could move
9 him that would be good.
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: And do you
11 swear or affirm that the testimony you are about
12 to give is true?
13 MR. BRITVAN: I do.
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, if you
15 could state your name and --
16 MR. BRITVAN: Well, the first thing I'd
17 like to say under oath is this is a tough act to
18 follow.
19 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Yes.
20 MR. BRITVAN: Aaron Britvan, you want my
21 address?
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: No.
23 MR. BRITVAN: Okay, if I may read from
24 my statement, it may go eas-, a little earlier.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Um-hum.
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Sure.
4 MR. BRITVAN: Honorable members of the
5 committee, I thank you for the opportunity to
6 address the committee in relation to the bill
7 known as Bill For Adoptee Rights. Although I
8 chair the adoption committee of the Family Law
9 section of the New York State Bar Association,
10 time constraints have prevented sufficient time
11 and review by the bar as to any position on this
12 bill. However, I've been authorized to give
13 testimony as an individual. The salient portions
14 of the present bill address the right of adoptees
15 in New York State 18 years or older to obtain an
16 appropriate copy of his or her original birth
17 certificate and/or the information appearing on
18 such certificate.
19 In addition, the bill also supports the
20 rights of adoptees to obtain a litany of specific
21 information relating to the birth parent of his
22 or her heredity inclusive but not limited to the
23 religion, occupation, nationality, and ethnic
24 background of the birth parents at the time of
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2 the adoptee's birth.
3 In addition, the bill provides for a
4 contact reference to be completed at the option
5 of the birth parent and indicating is set forth
6 on page three of the bill, line 17 through 47.
7 However, for further clari-, clarity there is an
8 open question as to whether a no contact
9 preference will permit issuance of a birth
10 certificate or whether a birth certificate can be
11 issued with identification and information
12 redacted. I just say that for clarity's sake.
13 Further, is the proposed bill and its provisions
14 retroactive and, if so, what are the rights of
15 the adoptee when their birth took place at a time
16 prior to the ultimate effective date of the law?
17 I come before you as an individual
18 attorney involved in adoption law for over 30
19 years and having been involved in many, many
20 adoptions. More important, I come to you also as
21 an adoptive father or an adult adoptee who came
22 into our life at the age of three days. I am
23 proud that my oldest daughter, Lauren, is also an
24 attorney who has been admitted to the Bar of New
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2 York State. After the birth of Lauren we were
3 blessed with two biological daughters, Dena and
4 Nicole, and accordingly have performed the
5 proverbial hat trick.
6 In my primer, in my practice which has
7 existed for many years, I have come to realize
8 that the courts and the legislature in New York
9 State have always sought a balance to protect the
10 respective rights of the adoptive triad, made up
11 of the birth parents, the adoptive parents and
12 most of all the adoptee whose best interest we
13 are all hoping to serve.
14 In the first instance, may I state that
15 I have no issue with the concept of the adoptee's
16 right to obtain all information relating to the
17 birth parents inclusive of the information we are
18 here to mention, you know, relating to religion,
19 occupation, age of the parents, ethnic
20 background, and the like. Supposedly such
21 information can be obtained and ultimately stored
22 with the adoption end of, information registry,
23 you know, as set forth in Section 4138c of the
24 public health law. Under the circumstances, the
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2 adoptee may only obtain from said agency non-
3 identifying information subject to the direction
4 of the birth parent as indicated on the contact
5 preference form. However, I find nothing in the
6 proposed bill which directs a birth par-, parent
7 or adoptee as to even the existence and
8 availability of registration with the registry.
9 I believe that the lack of direction as to the
10 ability to obtain information is unknown to most
11 individuals, including the adoptees and their
12 birth parents.
13 To overcome this I suggest that the
14 contact preference form should be presented to
15 birth parents upon their execution of a surrender
16 to an agency or at the time of the execution of a
17 consent in private adoption. The form should
18 also indicate for information's sake the contact,
19 how contact may be made by the registry at any
20 time. I think that the registry has not worked
21 well because no one knows how to get there.
22 The signatory birth mother should be
23 advised in writing that preferences theret-,
24 theretofore, may be modified by the birth
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2 parents, that any preference is open to
3 modification by the birth parents at any time
4 thereafter and possibly indicate the right of the
5 adoptee to receive, to receipt of a copy of the
6 original birth certificate any time upon reaching
7 the age of 18. It shou-, it should further
8 indicate that the birth parents can provide
9 additional medical information thereafter to the
10 registry.
11 I also suggest that the preference form
12 and the surrender of, of consent form that there
13 be information indicating the existence of the
14 registry as I indicated earlier and that such
15 other departments which can provide information
16 as to modifying change of preference and/or the
17 right to provide additional medical information.
18 Such information be provided to the bir-, to the
19 birth parent together with the adoption consent
20 or the surrender of the child to an agency.
21 I make reference now to Section 115b of
22 the domestic stipulation law and copy of the bill
23 as set forth in my statement. And the point here
24 is that a contact preference and information
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2 about the registry in this bill which is only
3 about four years old, indicates that it's done at
4 the time a consent is signed and the birth parent
5 or parents are given information that they can
6 make contact in the future or change their
7 preference.
8 I respectfully suggest that the sponsor
9 of the present bill review and determine even if
10 there's any benefit to seek an amendment to 115b
11 subdivision 9 so as to modify saying, to indicate
12 the ability of the adoptee to obtain a copy of
13 the original birth certificate at the age of 18
14 or later. Finally, it is important that we deal
15 with medical history and the contact preference.
16 Particular reference is made to that portion of
17 the bill indicated on page ni-, 5 lines 40
18 through 56. It should be noted that what was
19 formerly known as guardian ad litem is now known
20 as attorney for the child so that should be
21 automatically corrected.
22 I certainly recognize the importance of
23 obtaining medical he-, health information but
24 reference is made on line 42 of the duty of a law
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2 guardian, which should be attorney for the child,
3 to obtain comprehensive completion of medical
4 information, this is the important thing, prior
5 to acceptance of the termination of parental
6 rights or the entry of a certificate of, a
7 certificate of adoption. Which means that can be
8 held off if it appears that not sufficient
9 medical information has been obtained.
10 Based upon my experience, it should be
11 noted that in the normal proceeding for adoption,
12 there is no appointment for a guardian ad litem
13 or an attorney for the child, it is more common
14 that an attorney for the child would be appointed
15 on issues of custody, revocation of consent, or
16 any contested court proceeding where a ch-,
17 wherein a child and his or her best interests are
18 involved.
19 At this juncture, I have the following
20 concerns in reading this portion of the bill
21 where it is stated that to ensure the
22 comprehensive completion and filing of medical
23 information, and that's supposedly by the
24 attorney for the child, that same be completed
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2 prior to the acceptance of a termination of the
3 birth parent or the parental rights or the entry
4 of a certificate of adoption which means I don't
5 know how it is calculated where, even if you
6 could have a guardian ad litem, how does he or
7 she ensure that this is all the information there
8 is? And if they don't have it in the sense, know
9 that this is all that we have and they want
10 further search, it can hold up an adoption and
11 technically hold up the termination of parental
12 rights and it doesn't work that way.
13 It would be in direct conflict with the
14 best interest of the child if an adoption is not
15 finalized or if a birth parent can't give a
16 statement or terminate voluntarily, you know, her
17 rights, you know, where they can no longer be
18 contested. Normally, the termination of parental
19 rights in a private adoption, normal private
20 adoption, occurs by operation of law and under
21 the law a birth parent has 45 days from the
22 signing of the consent to notify the court if
23 there's any desire to revoke that consent. If
24 nothing is done within the 45 days without going
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2 to court or anything else, there's an automatic
3 termination of the right as of the 46th day, no
4 steps have to be taken as long as the birth
5 parent has not revoked within 45 days.
6 So there's some conflict, I'm just
7 bringing up, in the nature of the bill by saying
8 that there can't be any finalization or there
9 can't be any termina-, there is a termination.
10 Statutorily, a adoption ostensibly cannot be
11 finalized in less than three months but normally
12 the way things are today, it usually takes three
13 to six to seven months to finalize it based upon
14 court proceedings, backlog, and what have you.
15 But to say that you cannot finalize an adoption
16 until all medical is obtained, would damage that
17 portion of the bill.
18 Although obtaining medical information
19 of the adoptee or birth parents certainly serves
20 the child's best interest there is no question
21 that the delay of finalization under these
22 circumstances will conflict with, and severely
23 counter, the best interests of the child.
24 Procedurally, it should be noted that the private
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2 adoption termination and I already discussed 45
3 days.
4 My final question is, well, I'd like to
5 make a statement again, there's no automatic
6 appointment of a guardian ad litem, it's
7 directing a guardian ad litem or attorney to
8 obtain the medical information. That is not,
9 there is none, there's no appointment, the
10 proceeding just goes. Only if there's a contest
11 on the proceeding will a guardian be appointed so
12 the way it is written, nothing can happen so I
13 think there has to be clarity there.
14 Final thing, is if there is an attorney
15 for the child or guardian ad litem, as the judge
16 may seem fit, who is financially responsible for
17 the payment to the guardian ad litem? Is it that
18 they make a stipend from the court in which event
19 it might create a situation where there are
20 financial implications to the bill? Or is it
21 paid by the adoptive parents, which adds to their
22 cost of the adoption? Understand also, there is
23 no conflict between the adoptive parents and the
24 child in getting medical information and,
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2 obviously, I'm talking about the adoption of a
3 young infant, newborn, whatever the case would
4 be. And it is important for them to have it
5 because they're going to be bringing up the
6 child, they are the parents, it's their
7 responsibi-, responsibility to maintain the child
8 in good health and what have you and, therefore,
9 getting as much information as possible is
10 important.
11 It is also important, as indicated and
12 now exists, that the ba-, birth parent know that
13 at any time that they find additional information
14 about their health they can either confidentially
15 or otherwise submit that to the registry. But
16 very important is to let them know how to make
17 contact with the registry. That is my statement.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: I have a
19 question.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you,
21 before we go to questions, it would be very
22 helpful if you could e-mail, attach your
23 testimony to an e-mail to us so we can have the
24 written, the full written statement.
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2 MR. BRITVAN: It was, I, it should
3 already be here because I spoke to one of the
4 aids and it was already e-mailed.
5 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Oh, okay,
6 fine.
7 MR. BRITVAN: It was an e-mail to
8 Assembly Person Weprin.
9 FEMALE ASSISTANT: Yeah, We have, we
10 have it. Yeah, I, we, I gave it to Lizz.
11 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Oh, okay,
12 all right, thank you.
13 FEMALE ASSISTANT: Do you have it, you
14 should have it.
15 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Well, we, we
16 don't need that now, I just wanted to make sure
17 we have it for the future. Mr. Borelli?
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Mr. Britvan,
19 let me start off by saying, thank you for being
20 an adoptive parent, you know, adoption is a great
21 thing and without adoptive parents, it wouldn't
22 happen. You mentioned that you believe that
23 adoptees should be given access to information
24 that you deem pertinent, medical, ethnicity,
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2 that's correct, right?
3 MR. BRITVAN: Yes.
4 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: So I was given
5 that, I'm an adoptee, and I was given that and at
6 16 years old my, my parents let me see that and I
7 found out that I was half Italian and half Irish
8 and I was happy. So, you know, identifying with
9 an ethnicity, I was happy, it's a, they're
10 wonderful people.
11 Ethnicity's important to an adoptee as
12 it is to a person who's born and, and resides
13 with their birth parents but then, a couple years
14 later, thanks to DNA, I found out that I was not
15 Irish, that the paperwork that I was given and
16 lived my whole life believing, was incorrect
17 because the paper relied on a 16 year old woman
18 who was scared to identify the ehtnicity of a man
19 she may have only met once. Maybe he had blue
20 eyes and blue hair, he was probably chubby and
21 probably had thinning hair but you're alo-, and,
22 and then that same document goes on to provide
23 medical history, how can we verify that that
24 medical history, taken at one moment in time when
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2 this woman is 16 years old, it negates everything
3 that's happened to her or the father, after that
4 moment, for me it's 32 years. So, so why is it
5 okay to be missing or potentially not have
6 correct information and, at the very least, not
7 have a continual medical record going to the per-
8 , going through the person's life?
9 MR. BRITVAN: Well, you have to
10 understand that in the practice, getting medical
11 records is not the, I mean, just a matter of
12 asking the birth mother something, how do you
13 feel? You got a headache, anything? We get
14 medical records from the treating physicians and
15 if they can be filed, you know, with the
16 registry, that's fine.
17 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Is that for
18 the mother or for the maternal moth-, maternal
19 grandmother, the paternal grandmother, all that?
20 MR. BRITVAN: No, no, it's only for the
21 birth parent.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: So then we
23 don't know the genetic history of, of things, you
24 know, genetic issues that may skip generations?
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2 MR. BRITVAN: I've always agreed with
3 you when I speak to my clients and tell them, we
4 ask them to id-, identify, you know, their
5 background, in other words, is there any cancer
6 in your family, et cetera. We can only rely upon
7 the information given by the birth parent,
8 there's no way we can call in relatives to
9 examine them or what have you. When you adopt,
10 and I don't mean to, you know, to be flowery with
11 this thing, the interesting thing is that the
12 love of the child, the bonding with the child, is
13 immediate, and as I said, the adopting parents
14 are very concerned about the health and what they
15 can do or what they should know in caring for the
16 child.
17 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: I, I agree
18 with 100 percent and I, I was fortunate, I was
19 adopted by a wonderful family, and I know that
20 even some of the things I say on this issue is
21 difficult for them and it's, it's obviously, and
22 everyone perhaps in this room knows it's, it's a
23 tough issue for me to deal with, but, you know,
24 my parents and I still don't have that, that, the
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2 answer to the question I've asked, how do we know
3 the information is correct and then how do we
4 know what happened to the birth mother or the
5 maternal grandmother and so on and so forth after
6 the birth of the child?
7 MR. BRITVAN: There is no provision for
8 that in the law and I think it would be
9 impossible to obtain.
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Correct. I, I
11 agree with you now and that's, I hope, hopefully
12 we're going to change that. But would this bill
13 then give people an avenue to explore? I mean,
14 it's not, it's not a concern for you, all right,
15 it's not a concern for you as, as, as a, as an
16 adoptive parent, yeah, I think if you wear your
17 hat as the adoptive parent would be concerned,
18 but as an adoptee, you know, I, I'm concerned I
19 may develop some type of genetic disease. If I
20 want to, if I, if I have symptoms why is it so
21 wrong that I seek out medical history for or,
22 recent medical history for, from my genetic
23 ancestors?
24 MR. BRITVAN: If you find the birth
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2 parent and they can tell you the information,
3 that's fine, we are suggesting that if the birth
4 parent learns anything new about their genetic
5 background, hopefully they can and hopefully they
6 will file that with the registry. But you can't
7 make people do it, there's nothing illegal by
8 withholding information, we all want to serve the
9 best interest of the child in what capacity.
10 You know, there are birth mothers that
11 are very honorable, they want what's best for the
12 child, but we're also, in light of what you're
13 saying, we're moving towards open adoption and if
14 you're gonna have open adoption, you can get a
15 birth certificate anyway and that's, I think,
16 important. Today, they have what they call
17 packer agreements, where there are post-adoption
18 agreements between the birth mother and the
19 adopting family as to contact, as to photographs,
20 as to staying into contact with each other.
21 Adoption over the past 10, 15, 20 years has been
22 changing and it is changed.
23 And knowing as much as you can about the
24 child's health and by its, you know, background
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2 of grandparents or whatever, it is important,
3 could be important and what have you. In my
4 case, my daughter came and we, was adopted in
5 Pennsylvania, she was three days old, we got no
6 information. We did get a copy of her original
7 birth certificate, that was made available to her
8 at any time after we got her, it wasn't that we
9 were going to say, let her be 13 or 14 or 15 and
10 we'll come back from Temple or Church and we'll
11 discuss it. My daughter was advised of her
12 adoption before she could understand the word
13 adoption. And anything she needed, because it
14 was for her interest, I would do, I would, you
15 know, do anything to help her. There were times
16 when I asked her, do you want to do the search,
17 are you ready, do you, do you have any feeling of
18 need? And this only applies to her, her answer
19 was, you know, I'm curious but I have no real
20 need to do any searches.
21 And that can change also, like the
22 testimony of the prior witness, things change,
23 and anything you can do as, you know, maybe
24 contrary to what the judge said, this is what the
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2 position is today, confidentiality. Change that,
3 all right, you might almost say then, we don't
4 need a preference, forget the preference if we're
5 not going to honor it anyway, why put preferences
6 in. And then you wonder, why is there a
7 preference if you're not going to follow it? So
8 --
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you.
10 MR. BRITVAN: -- I like the concept of
11 the bill, I think it needs some modification.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you,
13 we'll look at your written comments.
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: So let me just,
15 in the interest of full disclosure, mention Mr.
16 Britvan, you and I have worked together on some
17 bills that have become law that have brought the
18 adoption process more into the 21st century, and
19 for that I and all of us are appreciative. And
20 when you speak of health, the health of the
21 adopted child, we're not simply speaking, are we,
22 about the physical health, we're speaking about
23 the emotional and the mental health as well, are
24 we not?
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2 MR. BRITVAN: We're talking about
3 everything we can find out.
4 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: And that's,
5 that further emphasizes what Ellen Kelly Mohr
6 described as her having a small hole in the heart
7 because she wasn't able, it was so difficult to
8 find out her background, correct?
9 MR. BRITVAN: That's correct.
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: All right, and
11 so let me just finally state to my colleague
12 that, I don't know how, there's an inherent sense
13 of a questionable reliability in what adoptive,
14 birth mothers say but that same inherent sense of
15 a questionable credibility applies whether we're
16 adopted or not and I just want to mention to you
17 that I grew up thinking I was simply eastern
18 European Jew, but my brother had his DNA tested
19 and it turns out it's not just eastern European
20 Jew, we didn't know, there's Spanish, Greek,
21 Italian, northern Russian, and for goodness sake,
22 Finnish DNA traits so we're all kind of in that
23 same boat to one extent or another, although I do
24 appreciate the intense interest that adopted
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2 children would have and would rightly have in, in
3 knowing the truth. But we don't always know the
4 truth, even if we're, even if we're not adopted.
5 Thanks, Mr. Britvan.
6 MR. BRITVAN: Thank you.
7 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
8 MR. BRITVAN: Thank you very much.
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: The Gaelic
10 tribes and others wandered all over Europe, which
11 is why there are fair-skinned red-haired people
12 in Turkey and Spain and Ireland and the Ukraine,
13 some of whom are my ancestors. Okay, our next
14 witness is Joyce Bahr, joined by Ellen Essig, and
15 they will also be accompanied by several other
16 folks from the Unsealed Initiative. As I
17 understand it only Joyce, only Ms. Bahr and Ms.
18 Essig will actually be testifying.
19 MS. JOYCE BAHR, PRESIDENT, NEW YORK
20 STATEWIDE ADOPTION REFORM'S UNSEALED INITIATIVE:
21 Ms. Essig is not present today.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Oh, okay, so
23 join us.
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Some of these
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2 people are in there, how many?
3 MS. BAHR: Okay, would you like me to
4 sit in the --
5 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Yes, please,
6 yeah.
7 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: We can bring
8 more chairs to the table if they want to come to
9 the table.
10 MS. BAHR: Oh, okay.
11 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: We can bring
12 chairs over.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Yeah,
14 whatever works.
15 MS. BAHR: Why don't you sit up, you can
16 sit up here, move up here. Okay, my name is
17 Joyce Bahr, I'm president, president of New York
18 Statewide Adoption Reforms Unsealed Initiative
19 and I am founder of Manhattan Birth Parents
20 Support Group.
21 I am a reunited, reunited mother who
22 surrendered to adoption in 1966 and I was
23 reunited by Lutheran Child and Family Services in
24 Chicago with my son in 1986. I know firsthand
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2 that the focus of surrendering to adoption was on
3 stressing mothers to stay away from the home of
4 the adoptive parents. So social workers, many of
5 them nasty, used the words, do not disrupt which
6 was said many times.
7 My pa-, my parents present (sic),
8 presence was required by law in Illinois when I
9 signed the surrender paper terminating my
10 parental rights. There was no mention of
11 confidentiality for me in the presence of my
12 mother. My mother did clear it up with the
13 agency worker that I would not get any
14 confidentiality but I could possibly be reunited
15 with my son once he turned 18. I left the agency
16 with feelings of hatred for the way in which I
17 was treated and I carried that anger with me for
18 19 years.
19 I want to bring to your attention a
20 study conducted by the New York Law Forum in
21 1973, and this study is included with my test-,
22 with my testimony, this study concluded that
23 denying the adoptee, the adoptee the right to
24 know may be detrimental to his psychological
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2 health and the adverse affects may be lifelong.
3 The name of this study is the Adoptees Right To
4 Know His Natural Heritage. This study finds that
5 the scales in this balan-, balancing procedure
6 should be tipped in the favor of the protection
7 of the rights of the adopted person that sealed
8 records statutes discriminate against one group
9 of people on the basis of their status as
10 adoptees by, by denying them access to their
11 original birth certificates. Denying the adoptee
12 this information is a violation of the equal
13 protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
14 Continuation of this study in
15 psychological harm psychologists have concluded
16 that the denial of such information may result in
17 serious problems including severe learning
18 difficulties, accentuated feelings of insecurity,
19 and a lack of self identity. Determining
20 identity is more complex for the individual who's
21 antre-, ancestry is unknown to him. There is
22 ample evidence that the adopted person retains
23 the need for seeking his antre-, ancestry for a
24 long time. What he is really seeking is to
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2 achieve a unity and persistence of personality in
3 spite of the break of continuity of his life.
4 One study revealed that the withholding
5 of information about one's biological parents
6 where the adoptee was in an, in an insecure
7 adoptive environment increased feelings of
8 insecurity and frustration. Some adoptees felt
9 they could, they could adjust to any truth since
10 any certainty was better than the floor of
11 uncertainty which surrounded them. Others
12 developed neurotic fears about the risk of
13 inherited diseases.
14 Clinical social workers, I'd like to
15 mention, two pioneers in adoption reform,
16 clinical social worker and psychotherapist,
17 Annette Baran, spoke out in the 1970s saying
18 secrecy is psychologically destructive, that the
19 adoptee's knowledge of his birth parents is
20 crucial to his or, or her identity. The other
21 pioneer is Ruben Pannor, an adoption social
22 worker and author of the book, The Adoption
23 Triangle, with Annette Baran. He felt adoptees
24 have an intrinsic right to know their ancestry.
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2 He was an early advocate for open adoption and he
3 was key in influencing the U.S. Department of
4 Health Education and Welfare to lobby for federal
5 legislation for the rights of adoptees and birth
6 parents in the 1970s.
7 And last, I'm going to my reunion with
8 my son and my own personal observations. There
9 are many adoptees who are not able to attend a
10 lobby meeting or this hearing today. They may be
11 very angry, they may have feelings of
12 abandonment, they may suffer with grief and
13 anguish, they may be very frustrated and even
14 claim to be anti-adoption. In the mid-1970s, I
15 met a 35 year old adoptee who I came in contact
16 with on a regular basis. He was very angry and
17 one day he told me he would really like to know
18 who his mother is. I was quite surprised because
19 I was lead to believe adoptees would never want
20 to know who their biological parents were. I did
21 not equate his anger with being adopted but I was
22 wrong.
23 My son was angry and going in a bad
24 direction, by luck, but by luck I met two
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2 adoptees in the same week, in 1985. They
3 influenced me and helped me to become empowered
4 to contact the adoption agency. My son and, and
5 I reunited in 1985 when he was 19. It didn't
6 take long for his parents to let me know he had a
7 much better attitude, he was headed in a bad
8 direction and my quest to find him was beneficial
9 for both of us.
10 Healing my repression and my postponed
11 grief, I can attribute to our reunification.
12 There is something to say about psychological
13 healing, how badly it is and needed and how the
14 passage of the bill adop-, bill of adoptee rights
15 A909 is the best thing to do. Finally, I'll
16 close with a line from a poem that Lisa Benny
17 (phonetic) adopted in New York from Italy,
18 published; please give me my truth and I'll go
19 for it will heal my right to know. Thank you.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
21 Questions? Thank you very much, we appreciate
22 all of you coming here today.
23 MS. BAHR: No questions?
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Nope, no
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2 questions.
3 MS. BAHR: Okay.
4 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
5 Okay, our next witness is Peter Kelly, the
6 surrogate court judge of Queens County who is
7 executive chair of the New York State Surrogates
8 Association.
9 HON. PETER KELLY, SURROGATE'S COURT,
10 QUEENS COUNTY; EXECUTIVE CHAIR, NYS SURROGATES
11 ASSOCIATION: Good morning, sir.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Good
13 morning, Judge, do you swear or affirm that the
14 testimony you're about to give is true?
15 HON. PETER KELLY: I certainly do.
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
17 HON. PETER KELLY: Good morning, I want
18 to thank the committee for allowing me to address
19 you as the executive chairperson of the New York
20 State Surrogates Association. I also would like
21 to thank Chairman Gottfried for his comments
22 about the technical glitches that arose with
23 respect to the scheduling.
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Yeah.
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2 HON. PETER KELLY: Because, quite
3 frankly, the last minute notification that was
4 given to the association and, and the timing of
5 this hearing during the same week that the New
6 York State Bar Association is having their annual
7 meeting, quite frankly, left a feeling with some
8 of our members that the opinions of the
9 association really weren't welcome or important
10 to be considered so I thank you for your
11 comments, okay.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Certainly.
13 HON. PETER KELLY: With respect to my
14 statement, essentially as to the merits of the
15 bill, no group or association is opposed or could
16 possibly be opposed to encouraging what's termed
17 in the bill as lifelong health and well-being of
18 adoptees, or for that fact, of birth parents or
19 anyone else in the State of New York. Likewise,
20 the Surrogates Association fully supports an
21 adoptive person's right to access medical
22 information wherever it be located in order to
23 filis-, facilitate diagnosises (sic) and
24 treatment as well as the timely gathering of such
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2 information as early as possible in the adoption
3 process.
4 But it is painfully obvious that the
5 proposed legislation does absolutely nothing to
6 further these interests in any fashion beyond
7 what is already provided for by the current
8 statutory mandates which provide for the
9 collection of medical information and the release
10 of such information upon a proper application.
11 In fact, it is clear that this rational is simply
12 a smokescreen for the true purpose of this bill,
13 which is the forced revelation of a birth
14 parent's identity without their consent and is in
15 actuality a violation of their human rights.
16 The first fallacy of the legislation is
17 that is provides for so-called equal
18 consideration for adopted and non-adopted persons
19 regarding the identity of their parents. The
20 bill presupposes totally inaccurately that all
21 non-adopted persons know the identity of their
22 parents or for that matter, are aware of their
23 current whereabouts. Nothing could be further
24 from the truth. I see numerous cases every day
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2 where a birth parent's identity or location is
3 unknown or unascertainable and their children
4 have no possible way of rectifying this
5 situation.
6 More shockingly, the legislation is a
7 veiled attempt at revoking 100s of years of
8 practice and procedure in the field of adoption
9 by an inaccurate description of what the
10 legislation proposes. While change and adaption
11 is not something to be feared in the law and
12 should be embraced, change of longstanding and
13 well-reasoned tenets should only be embraced when
14 the proposed benefits outweigh any harm.
15 This proposed legislation does not
16 satisfy that test. Simply put, a person's
17 identity is solely the property of that
18 individual and no one else. It cannot be
19 seriously argued that it is the property right of
20 any other person regardless of their
21 relationship. There is absolutely no basis in
22 law or in logic to mandate disclosure of such
23 information to an adopted person against the
24 wishes of the birth parent regardless of the
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2 purity or the emotional motives for such a
3 request.
4 Quite frankly, if it is within the
5 province of a birth mother to decide whether or
6 not to bring a pregnancy to term, why is it not
7 also her decision whether or not to reveal her
8 identity after the birth of a child? Most
9 egregiously, this legislation provides that the
10 identity of the birth parent be made public in
11 spite of the state's past promises of anonymity.
12 On that basis alone, the retroactive application
13 of this legislation is totally unjust.
14 The current statutory scheme provides
15 for a state registry where adopted persons and
16 birth parents who have surrendered children for
17 adoption can register. If there is a matching
18 interest on both parts contact will be arranged.
19 Yet, the proposed legislation removes the
20 decision of whether a birth parent's identity
21 should remain secret from the province of the
22 birth mother or father and places it in the hands
23 of the adoptee.
24 Finally, the bill's supposed protection
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2 features are elusory at best. The provisions
3 relating to the personal contact form provide
4 absolutely no privacy for the birth parents as
5 their identity is set forth on the birth
6 certificate and their location can be ascertained
7 regardless of whether they state they do not wish
8 to be contacted. This, of course, presupposes
9 such a form is timely generated and is properly
10 maintained and delivered.
11 In any event, the right not to be
12 contacted is not the same as the right to keep
13 one's identity a secret. It also presupposes
14 that persons will abide by the provisions set
15 forth on the form which, honestly, will not
16 happen. We have an entire branch of government
17 that exists solely because people do not do what
18 they are supposed to do.
19 It appears only the parties totally
20 dissatisfied with the current statutory scheme
21 regarding the method of providing personally,
22 personally identifying information are a
23 miniscule portion of adopted persons who, who's
24 attempts at locating their birth parents have
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2 been rebuffed. Now, why do I say that? In the
3 hundreds of thousands of adoptions that have
4 taken place in Queens County Surrogates Court
5 since the 1930s, only a very miniscule fraction
6 of requests for the unsealing of adoption records
7 for the sole purpose of the acquisition of
8 identifying information has been made.
9 There does not, from my empirical
10 knowledge, appear to be any great grounds swelled
11 by the vast majority of birth parents or adopted
12 persons to have the current system totally
13 revoked. That experience is born out by the
14 other surrogates of this state.
15 With that being said, if the legislature
16 seeks to improve the collection and the filing of
17 non-identifying information, most importantly
18 health information that is certainly an avenue
19 that should be explored. Likewise, if the
20 legislature in its wisdom, wishes to require that
21 all parties in adoptions reveal their identities
22 and we become an open adoption state, then such
23 legislation should specifically be proposed and
24 offered for passage.
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2 This bill, however, does neither of
3 those things. While it is certain that some
4 adopted persons feel terrible anguish in not
5 being able to obtain the identity of their birth
6 parents, their feelings are no different from
7 those of many other persons who have suffered
8 childhood injuries or illnesses or who live in
9 family situations that were less than idealic
10 (sic) and wish that the past would be different.
11 Those feelings are not a sufficient basis to
12 totally revamp the entire adoption process
13 insofar as the privacy rights of a birth parent
14 is concerned.
15 The Surrogates Association is willing to
16 endorse any legislation that would improve the
17 administration of justice or establish a
18 meaningful remedy for individuals who are in need
19 thereof. Regrettably, this proposed legislation
20 does neither and in fact, in the opinion of the
21 majority of our members would cause more harm to
22 a greater number of persons that it would in fact
23 assist. Therefore, we must oppose its passage.
24 That concludes my statement. I welcome any
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2 comments or questions.
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
4 Questions? Yes, Mr. Weprin.
5 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Good morning,
6 Judge.
7 HON. PETER KELLY: Hello, Mr. Weprin.
8 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Great to see
9 you again.
10 HON. PETER KELLY: Great to see you
11 again.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: But based on
13 your statement, it sounds like you would consider
14 supporting an open adoption state bill.
15 HON. PETER KELLY: Speaking for the
16 association, because I can't speak, obviously,
17 for myself, if that became the wish of the
18 legislature, with input from all various
19 associations, I don't know that, that necessarily
20 you would get immediate opposition. Okay, I
21 can't speak the m-, the, the issue has not been
22 proposed in the fashion. What we're saying is
23 basically, if that's the goal, if, if the goal is
24 essentially you're looking in the future ma-, to
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2 make sure that the birth parents maintain some
3 sort of relationship with the adopted child and
4 visa (sic) versa then, you know, propose
5 legislation in that regard.
6 The, the, the true problem here is that
7 there's been a promise made to birth parents when
8 they surrendered their children and, and they
9 were told they could not have their identities
10 revealed. You know, to your point, your
11 questions to surrogate charter before, the, the
12 identity that they were, the information they
13 were informed that could be revealed was the
14 health information, the non-identifying
15 information and that is available. And, and I
16 think quite frankly, we still do some adoptions
17 in Surrogates Court, not many anymore because,
18 and, and I'm going to put a little lobbying in
19 here, because of the budget situation with the
20 judiciary aren't, the person who did home visits
21 retired and we have no one to replace them so all
22 we can do is, you know, I'll be finalizing
23 adoptions for, for processes that have been
24 started, not anything in the future.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Yeah, what
3 about, Judge, in the case of parents that were,
4 or birth mothers that were not promised
5 confidentiality and we, we just had testimony
6 from one a couple of minutes ago that she was not
7 promised confidentiality. Would you object in
8 that situation?
9 HON. PETER KELLY: I-, if somebody has
10 not been promised something, what's to enforce?
11 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Okay, so I
12 gather that also --
13 HON. PETER KELLY: But, but, you know,
14 again, you're saying that this is what happened
15 or one anecdotal reference that this is what
16 happened is, is one thing. Having had to look
17 through adoption files because people have made
18 requests because of their health for me to search
19 to see what was in the records, there, there,
20 they all contain confidentially, excuse me,
21 confidentiality papers and agreements.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Okay, what if,
23 what if, so I also gather from the gist of your
24 comments that you would ob-, not, not object to
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2 going forward if legislation became law that
3 adoptees had access to their original birth
4 certificate and that was known at the time of
5 adoption then you would not object to
6 prospectively going forward.
7 HON. PETER KELLY: I'm not sure what
8 you're tal-, that the --
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: In other words,
10 it's not like that you are totally objecting --
11 HON. PETER KELLY: -- I would, I am
12 totally oppo-, I would be opposed as would the
13 association to any legislation that would provide
14 an adopted person access to their original birth
15 certificate for any adoption that's taken place
16 so far because, if the birth parent, because
17 regards to what you're saying, there is an
18 agreement in there that that information should
19 be kept secret. If the birth parent chooses, and
20 they have the right to, to register with the
21 Department of Health to have their whereabouts
22 notified, they can do that.
23 I would think one thing you should do,
24 and I think everybody would, would totally be in
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2 favor of would be some mechanism perhaps of
3 either making it easier for people to contact the
4 registry or publicize the existence of the
5 registry. I don't know how well-know-, you know,
6 I don't know how well-known that that registry is
7 or, or how effective it is.
8 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Yeah, there's
9 been a lot of problems, apparently, just from the
10 test-, testimony that we've heard and, and will
11 hear and, and in general. But I'm just saying,
12 philosophically, it sounds like the argument
13 against this legislation by the association would
14 not object to prospe-, to future adoptions --
15 HON. PETER KELLY: We would be --
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: -- if there was
17 no confidentiality.
18 HON. PETER KELLY: We would be open to
19 review any bill that's proposed. We have no hard
20 and steadfast rule against this or for that, we
21 take every bill on its merits as it's proposed.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Okay, thank
23 you, thank you, Judge.
24 HON. PETER KELLY: Okay, thank you,
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2 Assembly. Thank you. Anything else?
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: You had
4 mentioned the word elusory in your comments and I
5 just, with the success of private investigators,
6 search angels, that sort of thing, a large or
7 significant portion of adoptees who have begun
8 searching for their birth parents have been able
9 to, to actually find their birth parents, birth
10 parents from the period of time which you
11 described as where the state guaranteed their
12 privacy, so wouldn't that privacy then be the
13 elusory thing?
14 HON. PETER KELLY: No. How is it elu-,
15 it's not elusory on the part of the g-, see the
16 difference is you're talking about efforts made
17 so region, well, not so region but outside the
18 judicial function making attempts to do things.
19 We have no control over that. I'm specifically
20 talking about what you're seeking to do is remove
21 the, the, the governmental function and that's
22 the problem.
23 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: That's exactly
24 what we're trying to do but --
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2 HON. PETER KELLY: Exactly, and it's
3 wrong.
4 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: So you're
5 going to tell a 18, 14, 13 year old woman that
6 there is a guarantee of her privacy for the rest
7 of her life when you really know that's not true,
8 right?
9 HON. PETER KELLY: No, that's wrong,
10 that's a wrong statement there. That's how many
11 times you beat your wife, that kind of a, a
12 question. You're presupposing an issue, you
13 understand what I'm saying, there, there, okay.
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: When did you
15 stop beating your wife?
16 HON. PETER KELLY: Yeah, exactly. It,
17 it's an evidentiary.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Yup.
19 HON. PETER KELLY: Okay. You're, you're
20 presupposing something in your question. I
21 don't, to my experience, there, there is no
22 waiver of confidentiality unless the parties have
23 agreed to in the adoption, from what I have seen.
24 They're, you know, I, I, can I speak to what goes
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2 on with every little conversation between an
3 attorney and their client or an agency and a
4 parent? Obviously not. And would I be foolish
5 enough to think everything is done absolutely
6 according to hoyle in every single adoption? No,
7 absolutely not.
8 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: So, Judge,
9 thanks. Thanks for your test-, thanks for your
10 testimony. And I got the, I got the, did you
11 stop beating your wife --
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Yeah, yeah.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: -- line but on
14 the subject of suppositions.
15 HON. PETER KELLY: Yeah.
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: Inherent in
17 your opposition to the approach that this bill
18 takes --
19 HON. PETER KELLY: Right.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: -- is there not
21 a certain supposition that the birth mother and
22 the child, in essence, have equal bargaining
23 rights and given that in these days, we have
24 legally provided greater rights or we're more
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2 conscious about the rights of children than we
3 were 40, 50 years ago, even 20 or 30 years ago.
4 Is, is that not someone problematic for the, for
5 the heart of your argument?
6 HON. PETER KELLY: No, I, I don't
7 believe it is and I, I don't think that's the
8 sup-, supposition isn't the fact that they have
9 equal bargaining rights, I think that when
10 promise has been made as it has in the past to a
11 person that if you do X, we will do Y. I don't
12 think it's, it's morally it, it almost verges on
13 moral reprehension to say a few years later,
14 well, we're not doing what we said we were going
15 to do --
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: So --
17 HON. PETER KELLY: -- and for the
18 government to be, or at least the judiciary to be
19 involved in that, I think, is abhorrent.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: So, and, and I
21 appreciate your reticence to foster anything that
22 would result in a, a judge or the judicial system
23 being accused of not honoring its promises. I
24 practiced in courts for many, many years and
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2 mostly promises were honored, although certainly
3 not always but your, your view provides
4 infinitely superior rights to the birth mother
5 than it does to the child. After all, the, the
6 child has no, and this is not, this is not for
7 public, you know, applause or anything like that,
8 but just from the point of view of, of legal
9 argument or legal discussion, good intellectual
10 discussion.
11 HON. PETER KELLY: Yeah, okay.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: What rights
13 does, what rights does the child have?
14 HON. PETER KELLY: The, the child, to be
15 honest with you --
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: I expect no
17 less.
18 HON. PETER KELLY: -- what, what ri--,
19 what right does any, you know, we're not talking
20 again, I, child, adult, okay, the, the adopted
21 person's rights towards the reve-, the revelation
22 of their parent's identity, I don't think they
23 have any. I think it's, again, the fundamental
24 right, your identity belongs to you, not to
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2 anybody else.
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: No, no, no, no,
4 please.
5 HON. PETER KELLY: And, and, and thi-,
6 thi-, thi-, my parent's identity is not my
7 property right. That was their property right to
8 bestow upon me and if they told me their last
9 name was Gigenhoffer (phonetic) then that's what
10 I would be known as this date, okay. I have no
11 reason to doubt their identities or who they are
12 but, essentially, I think that's kind of the
13 intellectual disconnect here and the, the, the
14 thought processes and the anguish comes from, I
15 don't know my heritage, I don't know this, I
16 don't know this, this is something I should have.
17 And, and to a certain extent, emotionally, I
18 understand that. Logically, though, my father,
19 if he was absent and never grew up with me and I
20 didn't know his identity and he didn't tell me
21 anything that was his right to give.
22 You know, it would be, if any member of
23 this legislature, how would you feel if any
24 member, if one of your children at any time could
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2 say, you have to reveal some secret you have
3 about your past that maybe you didn't want to
4 know, I, I doubt there's anybody in the
5 legislature on this staff that doesn't have
6 something that they have not disclosed to their
7 children about their past life and my whole view
8 and the Surrogates Association view is that
9 should be the cho-, the choice of revealing
10 should be with the birth parent. If ongoing, the
11 State takes the position that it's, it's much
12 better for the well-being and the health of the
13 parent and of the child that the way th-,
14 adoptions are held should be changed, then by all
15 means do that, but I do-, I don't think you can
16 change horses in midstream is essentially what
17 I'm saying.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: I understand.
19 Judge, thank you very much.
20 HON. PETER KELLY: Okay, thank you.
21 ASSEMBLY MEMBER LAVINE: And thanks for
22 your good work as well.
23 HON. PETER KELLY: Thank you, okay,
24 thank you.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
3 In order to accommodate the transportation needs
4 of an out-of-state witness, we are going to go
5 out of order to number 14, Adam Pertman, of the
6 Donaldson Adoption Institute.
7 MR. ADAM PERTMAN, PRESIDENT, DONALDSON
8 ADOPTION INSTITUTE: Thank you. And thank you
9 for going out of order so I can see my kids.
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: All right,
11 and before you begin, do you swear or affirm that
12 the testimony you're about to give is true?
13 MR. PERTMAN: I do.
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: And if you
15 could just officially state your name and fire
16 away.
17 MR. PERTMAN: Sure, my name is Adam
18 Pertman. I'm president of the Donaldson Adoption
19 Institute, a national non-profit research
20 organization based in New York. For the record,
21 the institute is independent, non-profit, non-
22 partisan, and we don't make any money off
23 adoption, we are essentially a think-tank that,
24 that develops best practices in adoption through
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2 research.
3 I don't usually bring this up but I will
4 today for a reason, I'm also the author of a book
5 titled Adoption Nation. The first edition of
6 which came out over a dozen years ago and a
7 recent update was just published and the reason I
8 bring that up is to say that I have been studying
9 adoption history, adoption research, adoption
10 realities and interviewed hundreds and hundreds
11 and hundreds of adopted people, birth parents,
12 adoptive parents, for a dozen years. And I bring
13 that up because there has been so much mythology
14 and misunderstanding of adoption history that has
15 been mentioned during the, this hearing this
16 morning that I started grabbing, taking notes so
17 in addition to, and I'm going to try to do this
18 by bullet-points so I don't take up too much
19 time, but I think it's important that the record
20 be clarified.
21 A lot of premises have been put on the
22 table as though they were true when adoptions
23 history and the research don't indicate that and
24 so I think it's really important, a-, and I will
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2 also give my testimony which is research based,
3 in addition to hopi-, hopefully clarifying some
4 points that were raised this morning. You can
5 get good anecdotes to prove anything so I commend
6 all side for bringing their anecdotes to the
7 table, their experiences to the table, it's
8 important, we learn a lot from them.
9 But good law is made in a different way,
10 good law is made with the anecdotes illustrating
11 reality, illustrating research, illustrating what
12 is best practice. That's what I hope I will
13 bring to the table today so I want to just start
14 with a couple of broad statements and then move
15 on to some specific ones.
16 One, the history of adoption is not one
17 of free-choice for a lot of women who decided, oh
18 gosh, I'm 18 and I don't, and s-, you know, I'm
19 having a tough time so I'm going to sign this
20 agreement and give my baby away and move on with
21 my life. That's not the reality of adoption
22 history. These women lived in a world in which
23 their priests, their parents, their doctors,
24 their friends, all stigmatized them and said,
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2 you're not going to keep that baby. So whatever
3 they signed or didn't sign and, by the way, if
4 someone has a court document that is a real
5 agreement to confidentiality, we would like to
6 see it because we, as a man of research, we've
7 simply never found one.
8 FEMALE: Yeah.
9 MS. BAHR: Amen.
10 MR. PERTMAN: We've simply never found
11 one. Were there verbal statements of that, of
12 that sort from lawyers, from social workers, and
13 so forth? Of course, there were, of course,
14 there were. And there were also verbal
15 assurances, oh, don't worry, you're going to see
16 your child once she's 18. So where, how come we
17 keep one promise that was verbally given and not
18 another?
19 The history simply isn't one of free-
20 choice and this, and a lot of the testimony you
21 have heard presupposes that choice. And I will
22 add, just sort of from a personal vantage because
23 I'm always intrigued by this notion, how many of
24 you would like to be kept to a promise, let's say
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2 that young woman, Susan X, was 17 and she had a
3 baby and she really wanted to place that baby up
4 for adoption and move on and society stigmatized
5 that she didn't want it, she didn't want to deal
6 with it, how many of us would want to be held by
7 law to a promise we made at the age of 17? Or to
8 something we signed by 17, without ever asking,
9 do you still want this? Did you change your
10 mind?
11 And we don't do that, we infantilize
12 adopted people when we call them children and
13 some of them are 70 years old and we infa-, and
14 we infantilize all of these women by saying the
15 State will decide what's good for you're not
16 allowed to decide what's good for you. Well, we
17 have done the research, everybody wants to say
18 good things and God bless them for it about
19 protecting birth parent rights, and a par-, and
20 adoptee rights, and everybody's rights. We've
21 actually done the research, we actually have some
22 idea of what works and what doesn't.
23 To make a very sharp point, what does
24 work is the single biggest healing factor for
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2 women who have parted with children to adoption
3 is knowing that their kid is okay. It is the
4 opposite, it is the opposite of the stereotype,
5 the, the seeking privacy, anonymity, secrecy
6 forever, we don't see it, it's not in the
7 research, the research indicates anywhere from
8 95% up want to know and they're fine with giving
9 up their names. They created this child, they
10 want to know if she's okay, or if he's okay.
11 MS. BAHR: Yes.
12 MR. PERTMAN: So, so policy and law that
13 keep these records sealed, and by the way there
14 are lots of other reasons why adopted people want
15 the records other than reuniting, but the policy
16 and law, if it is ostensibly to protect the
17 health, mental health and well-being of birth
18 parents, the research doesn't, it shows exactly
19 the opposite. It shows exactly the opposite. I,
20 and I, I have sent you all the research, I sent
21 you written comments, I'm going to resend them, I
22 want to make sure they do get into the record,
23 and I urge you to look at them.
24 I mean, you're going to hear a lot of
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2 good stories today and I hope their illustrative
3 of something but I think we have to know what the
4 knowledge base is. So the knowledge base for our
5 birth parent work is a, a report, a year's long
6 research effort that ended in a report called
7 Safeguarding the Rights and Well-Being of Birth
8 Parents.
9 We actually learned a few things in ac-,
10 in studying it. We did the same for unsealing
11 records, which is called, there are three, we
12 did, we put out two papers in that regard, For
13 the Record is one and two, when they deal with
14 different aspects of this and they all come to
15 the same conclusions.
16 As another report that we put out, a
17 study that we put out sha-, on how to shape
18 positive identity for adopted people. And all of
19 the reports, and they don't start out this way,
20 we start out as researchers trying to figure out
21 what's up and what would constitute best
22 practice, and all three of those, coming at
23 different directions of adoption because that's
24 what we do, coming at different directions of
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2 adoption, all three wound up with recommendations
3 that these records be unsealed because it is not
4 just about curiosity. And again, that just
5 trivializes it, it is about need. And not just
6 the need to know whether I have a genetic disease
7 but to, if, if, if I am entitled to my own
8 identity, well, there are lots of little girls
9 who are Chinese and their parents are Byte
10 (phonetic) and without some information who, what
11 is their identity?
12 Now you can extrapolate from that and
13 say that, if I am entitled, if an adopted person
14 is entitled to his or her identity, how do you
15 get that without knowledge? How do you get it?
16 How do you get it without knowing your
17 background? Is that little Chinese girl's
18 identity, her Jewish American parent's identity?
19 How does she get hers? Now, in those cases we,
20 in our research and in our recommendations we
21 offer other ways to help her reinforce her
22 identity but in, peop-, in cases such as yours,
23 the simple one is to ask. And we know from the
24 research, they want to be asked. We're
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2 protecting a bunch of, quote, protecting, a
3 bunch, a cohort of women who don't want your
4 protection and who aren't being asked and so in
5 our research we have asked, okay.
6 The other major overall point that I
7 want to make for the sake of argument, everybody
8 is sincere in stating that they have genuine
9 concerns. I get that, and their experience
10 teaches them something about those concerns and
11 in other states in which I've testified, those
12 concerns are much broader; they're about abortion
13 rates, and about adoption rates, and they're a
14 whole lot of concerns that a lot of people have
15 expressed over the years about what will happen
16 if legislation like this passes.
17 It's no longer an experiment, it's no
18 longer a hypothesis, we can talk until we're blue
19 about what might happen and we don't have to
20 guess. There are a dozen states have given all
21 or nearly all adopted people within them the
22 right to have their original birth certificates
23 just as you are considering. Legislation just
24 like yours in one form or another, there are
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2 another dozen states that have given a lot, not
3 complete, some prospectively, retroactively, all
4 sorts of weird configurations, and you know what
5 happened in those states, and all these concerns
6 were raised in every single one of those states,
7 and now we have a good decade or so to see what
8 happened and now we can know.
9 And you know what happened? Nothing,
10 nothing. A lot of people got their birth
11 certificates, some of them used their birth
12 certificates to search. Most of them didn't
13 because the Internet allows them to do it without
14 the birth certificate.
15 And a quick comment about the contact
16 reference form, is it true that someone can
17 ignore it? Yes. But current law forces people
18 not to know what that birth parent might want.
19 Adopted people, adopted adults, we're
20 talking 18 and over, right, adopted people are
21 not ingrates, they're not children searching for
22 new mommies and daddies, they're looking for the
23 same things that all of us, and assume is a
24 birthright, and that is identity and they're
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2 deprived of a piece of it simply because of that
3 piece of paper. For many of them, all they want
4 is that paper, they don't want to search for
5 whatever reasons, they want to be like everybody
6 else, they want to fill that hole.
7 And for most of them, most of them, they
8 already have another means of finding so this is
9 just putting them on a level playing field and
10 that's what this does. It's, it, there's no
11 evidence in any state in any of the research that
12 this ruins people's lives, that it undermines
13 their, their relationships; none of that appears
14 to happen. Will it happen at some point? Yes,
15 it will. And it'll be big news. But you know,
16 divorced dads snatch their kids? And we don't
17 assume, oh my God, we can't have divorce, look
18 what happens. We do, I agree wholeheartedly,
19 wholeheartedly that the benefits have to outweigh
20 the risks but in the lab-, the real-life
21 laboratories of other states, we can see what the
22 risks are, what, what played out, and what
23 benefits there have been. And the benefits
24 appear to have been substantial and the risks
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2 seem never to come to pass and I'm sure one will
3 and it'll be a big deal but we can't let that
4 drive public policy.
5 Okay, I don't know where I am. And I
6 will try to wrap it up in, in just a couple of
7 minutes.
8 Sealing original birth certificates, I
9 think is, I'm an adoptive parent, I'm not here in
10 that capacity, I agree with some things,
11 viscerally, with some of the work we do and some
12 sort of makes me uneasy but it is the work we do,
13 I'm here as a researcher and I, I want to stress
14 that. But as an adoptive parent did I have some
15 of these fears, concerns, before we adopted our
16 kids? You bet I did. And then I found out I was
17 wrong. I did. Because the real-life, flesh and
18 blood human beings who created my children are
19 exactly that and they deserve to be treated with
20 a respect that current law does not give them.
21 The research, again, is crystal clear. We can
22 say what we want about the promises that were
23 made but again, and again, we don't know, we, we
24 haven't seen the paper containing those promises
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2 but we can say, we can believe that if we wish
3 but the reality is that adoption history, the
4 history, the legislative history, you can look it
5 up in New York, you can look up in 48, 7 other
6 states because two never sealed their, the birth
7 certificate, you can look it up.
8 The legislative history, this was, these
9 records were not sealed in order to protect birth
10 mothers from anything, they, it was exactly the
11 opposite in every single state when they were
12 sealed until the, roughly the middle to late 20th
13 century, in every single state they were sealed
14 for exactly the opposite reason, to explicitly,
15 to keep that woman away from the adoptive family.
16 And so the, this notion of protection is
17 mythology, it's not rooted in history and it's
18 not rooted in the research of what we understand
19 the needs are.
20 And because this is a health insurance
21 and it keeps being raised as a health issue, I'm
22 sure I'm going to forget something but I'm going
23 to wrap it up, again, we trivialize it by making
24 it curiosity. We trivialize it by saying
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2 somebody may have a genetic disease.
3 Our research on positive identity
4 development in adoptees makes it extremely clear
5 that it's about psychological mental health. No,
6 adopted people are not all debilitated but they
7 have an issue that is imposed on them. These wo-
8 , the women of the past, that was the other big
9 thing I wanted to say and forgot, we're talking
10 about a retroactive fix bill, New York is already
11 an open adoption state, every el-, every state of
12 the union is already an open adoption state
13 because that's all that's happening nowadays.
14 The birth certificates are still sealed but that
15 child, as likely as not, is being babysat by his
16 birth mother. But they can't get the birth
17 certificate because, God forbid, he'll know her
18 name. I don't think it works that way. So we
19 already have gotten, are getting there, I should
20 say, we already are getting there but reality on
21 the ground has far outpaced, far outpaced
22 legislation.
23 So this is retroactive, this is
24 punishing the people who were, who were a part of
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2 that stigmatized age, women who weren't allowed
3 real free choice, adopted people who felt
4 embarrassed to ask anything because they were
5 told they weren't supposed to or they weren't
6 told they were adopted. And by the way, be-, the
7 last publication which was on the Internet's
8 impact on adoption, very, very clearly, starkly
9 lays out that this i-, how ret-, how retroactive
10 this is because today almost everybody can find
11 somebody. So we're talking about fixing what
12 happened before, did anybody see the movie
13 Philomena?
14 MS. BAHR: Yes.
15 MR. PERTMAN: It's about a birth mother
16 from Ireland who searched for her son and finds
17 that he had died. And that's what's happening in
18 state after state, New York included, while
19 politicians and policymakers ponder, what should
20 we do for the future, well, for the future,
21 almost everybody is going to find who they want
22 to find, they're going to know all this stuff but
23 the Philomenas of the world, and there are so
24 many in the United States, the Philomenas of the
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2 world are going to die or their children are
3 going to die and they're never going to get what,
4 the only thing that the research indicates,
5 really helps them heal. Thank you for listening
6 to me today.
7 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Oh, thank
8 you.
9 MR. PERTMAN: I will say that,
10 prospectively, if you want any research on any of
11 this and I have provided it in, electronically,
12 but we would be delighted to provide the research
13 we have done or look up whatever, wholes, pieces,
14 that you feel you need.
15 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Well, thank
16 you very much and, I must say, I, I think your,
17 your testimony has been very refreshing and I
18 really appreciate it and I, I think we're going
19 to very much value the material that your, that
20 you have sent in and, and will send, and mindful
21 of your need to get to Penn Station, any
22 questions?
23 MR. PERTMAN: And I've a half hour so
24 feel free.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: I just, I just
3 have one. Dr. Pertman, what state is the state
4 we should be looking at as far as that of
5 adoptive laws that basically demonstrate the
6 statistics that you've indicated?
7 MR. PERTMAN: The, the stronge-, the,
8 the best recordkeeping to date that I'm aware of,
9 is Oregon. Though, there are lots of, there's
10 some recordkeeping in most of the states, it's
11 not perfect, and by the way, in terms of when,
12 given the opportunity to say no on a preference
13 form, it's something, I can't even remember, it's
14 certainly less one percent but I think it's like
15 .4 percent. I'm not saying that those women, you
16 know, should be trampled or be denied the right,
17 but there are all sorts of laws, if you're
18 stalking, and adoptees aren't stalkers, and, and
19 this, the, the current law presupposes they'll do
20 something wrong, right. If we didn't think
21 they'd do something wrong we'd just give it to
22 them and I don't presuppose that adoptive people
23 are going to do something wrong and the
24 indications from the s-, from Oregon and other
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2 states is that it doesn't happen, and it's really
3 solid statistical research-based proof that we're
4 talking about a tiny percentage of women. And
5 should, maybe we should look at something to, for
6 them after the fact, some counseling, some
7 assistance or so-, that would be great but you
8 don't hold back 99.4 percent because .6 percent
9 might have an issue, and I stress might.
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
11 very much.
12 MR. PERTMAN: Thank you very much.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, our
14 next witness is Dana Stallard from Spence Chapin.
15 And do you swear or affirm that the testimony you
16 are about to give is true?
17 MS. DANA STALLARD, LCSW, SPENCE CHAPIN
18 ADOPTIVE SERVICE: Yes, I do.
19 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: I do, please
20 again, state your name for the record.
21 MS. STALLARD: Good afternoon, my name
22 is Dana Stallard, I'm a social worker at Spence
23 Chapin Services to Families and Children which is
24 a non-profit adoption organization in Manhattan.
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2 As a New Yorker, I truly believe that New York
3 State has always been known for its progressive
4 and innovative approach to policy change. I feel
5 that the bill of adoptee rights is a necessary
6 and monumental step in the right direction and
7 that is why I am here to urge you to pass this
8 bill.
9 Today, I represent the collective voice
10 of the adoption triad with whom I work with each
11 day at Spence Chapin offering post-adoption
12 services. These are adult adoptees, birth
13 parents, and supportive, and adoptive parents,
14 all who are in support of passing this bill. I
15 am an, an adoption professional and also an adult
16 adoptee. I hope that you will be in support of
17 passing this bill as well so that New York State
18 can continue to be a leader and represent the
19 adoption community in what is truly in their best
20 interests.
21 The landscape of adoption has
22 fundamentally changed, there has been a
23 tremendous shift in the way we both facilitate
24 and understand adoptions today. Historically,
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2 the sealed records policy was not only accepted
3 by the greater public but was almost necessary
4 during a time period where society was openly
5 disapproving of out of wedlock pregnancies and
6 single mothers. We now understand just how
7 complicated and nuanced adoption is and we are
8 able to adjust our practices accordingly.
9 For example, research has proved that
10 open adoptions can have an enormously positive
11 effect on all members of the adoption triad and
12 this is precisely the direction that adoption is
13 moving. And although we've come a long way as
14 far as openness in adoptions today, the battle to
15 open adoption records is still ongoing. For
16 adoptee that, adoptees that do not have knowledge
17 about their origins, there is often a deeply
18 rooted psychological need to learn the identities
19 of their birth parents.
20 The clients for whom I provide post-
21 adoption supportive services have expressed the
22 following sentiments to me: "I feel as though I
23 am not a complete person. A piece of my puzzle
24 has always been missing." And the most haunting:
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2 "I am an alien, I do not know my origins."
3 Just last week, an 83 year old adopted
4 gentleman called our agency. He wanted to know
5 more about his birth family, his origins, and
6 where he comes from, and for me it was truly
7 heartbreaking to have to tell him that he does
8 not have a right to know the name of the woman
9 who gave birth to him or even what name was
10 chosen for him when he was born. This man will
11 likely die before he finds out who gave him
12 birth, who gave him life, I'm sorry.
13 Mental health issues for adoptees are,
14 unfortunately, not uncommon. Adoptees may
15 experience varying degrees of grief, loss, they
16 can become anxious depressed, and rejecting of
17 themselves and others. For many, it becomes
18 difficult to form and maintain relationships
19 because there may be an innate fear of
20 abandonment, making it difficult to trust others.
21 Continuing to withhold birth records from
22 adoptees will only further these devastating
23 effects.
24 The restriction the New York State law
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2 places on adoption information is not only
3 heartbreaking for adult adoptees but also for the
4 majority of birth parents with whom I work with
5 each day. As Adam Pertman just stated, the
6 traditional assumption about birth parents is
7 that opening adoption records will subject them
8 to shame, guilt, and unwanted surprise contact.
9 For example, their adopted son or daughter will
10 show up unexpectedly ringing their doorbell
11 during a big holiday dinner. Those who are not
12 in support of the bill argue that birth parents
13 will no longer have control of the situation and
14 their privacy will be violated. However, the
15 provisions in the bill specifically state that
16 birth parents will have the option to confirm in
17 writing that they prefer not to be contacted.
18 The bill of adoptee rights will allow
19 birth parents the opportunity to resolve these
20 negative feelings and learn about their birth
21 child after years of worrying and remediating.
22 Today this was just very clearly evidenced by
23 Joyce's testimony. Even those who were
24 originally adverse to a reunion will often change
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2 their mind after being contacted because they
3 realize the power and healing affect that this
4 can have.
5 We at Spence Chapin believe that this is
6 a fundamental right of adoptees to know their
7 original identities as well as the identities of
8 their birth parents. Not only will this allow
9 for them to achieve their own identity
10 development but it will provide closure and help
11 to find answers to what can be a lifelong and
12 never ending search for self. Regardless of the
13 laws governing adoption records and New York
14 State in the past, we now need to move forward
15 and understand how important it is to adjust the
16 needs and the rights of the adoption triad in
17 present times. We have the opportunity to change
18 the lives of these New Yorkers and I am,
19 therefore, urging you to pass the bill of adoptee
20 rights immediately. Thank you.
21 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you,
22 thank you very much. I have a question.
23 MS. STALLARD: Sure.
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Do you have
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2 a sense of to what extent Spence Chapin's views
3 are shared by other adoption agencies around the
4 state?
5 MS. STALLARD: I've, my understanding is
6 that most of the adoption agencies with whom we
7 collaborate with are on the same page as us and
8 that we feel like this is a very basic and
9 fundamental right of adopted folks and, at least
10 in our agency, everyone that I'm working with on
11 a day to day basis, is also in support of this
12 bill passing.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Is there a,
14 an association of adoption agencies?
15 MS. STALLARD: I'm not sure.
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: That you
17 know of.
18 MS. STALLARD: I'm sure there is but I'm
19 not aware.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, thank
21 you. Questions?
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Yeah, along the
23 same lines as Chairman Gottfried's questions, if
24 you could provide us, if you didn't mind, doing a
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2 little research as to which other adoption
3 agencies share that view and submit those names
4 to us because that would be very helpful in
5 addressing some of the objections of opponents as
6 we go proceed with this legislation?
7 MS. STALLARD: Sure, yes.
8 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: That would be
9 very helpful.
10 MS. STALLARD: Okay, I will do that.
11 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Thank you.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
13 very much.
14 MS. STALLARD: Thank you so much.
15 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, our
16 next witness is Elizabeth Samuels. And do you
17 swear or affirm that the testimony you're about
18 to give is true?
19 PROFESSOR ELIZABETH SAMUELS, BALTIMORE
20 SCHOOL OF LAW, RESEARCHER ON SEALED BIRTH
21 CERTIFICATES: Yes, sir.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: And would
23 you state your name and talk a little more
24 closely to the microphone?
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2 PROFESSOR SAMUELS: Okay, can you hear
3 me?
4 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Yes.
5 PROFESSOR SAMUELS: Okay, well first of
6 all, Chairman Gottfried and members of the
7 committee, thank you so much for the opportunity
8 to testify and thanks also to all the sponsors of
9 the bill. My name is Elizabeth Samuels and I'm a
10 law professor at the University of Baltimore in
11 Baltimore, Maryland, at the University of
12 Baltimore School of Law. I teach there in the
13 areas of constitutional law and family law and
14 since the 1990s my scholarship has focused pretty
15 much in large part on adoption law, particularly
16 on the history and the current status of laws
17 governing adoption records.
18 What I hope to do is, is very briefly,
19 in five minutes, summarize five points that I
20 believe do support the passage of this bill and
21 then I hope to be able to answer any questions
22 that you might have. I have laid out these
23 points in somewhat greater length in my written
24 testimony and then that testimony, of course, has
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2 citations to my scholarly work, all of which, of
3 course, is available online and in those pieces,
4 of course, I explain perhaps at intermitable
5 (sic) length with an ungodly number of footnotes
6 supporting my research.
7 What all of this adds up to is my belief
8 that when one has an accurate understanding of
9 the history and the, the legal history and the
10 social history of adoption law and adoption
11 records that that understanding lends strong
12 support, as has already been testified, to this
13 bill in New York. And my most recent research,
14 which I will mention in a moment, involves a
15 study of a collection of surrendered documents
16 that were signed by birth mothers in 26 different
17 states during the years from the late 1930s to
18 1990, and I think they are extremely helpful in
19 understanding what the analysis of these
20 documents, what they have to say, I think, is
21 extremely helpful.
22 But first of all, I would like to, to
23 say, again, just as a summary point and it really
24 supports, I think, what Member Berolli was
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2 getting at, the law has never guaranteed lifelong
3 anonymity for birth parents and when two of the
4 states that have restored access that was
5 formerly denied to adult adoptees, Tennessee and
6 Oregon, the laws were challenged, restoring
7 access in state and federal courts and the courts
8 held that the laws did not violate, they did not
9 violate federal or state constitutional law, they
10 did not violate state statutory law which is, is
11 very similar New York law, and they didn't
12 violate any precepts of contract law. And in all
13 the other states that have restored access there
14 have not been legal challenges.
15 Again, as I think has come out clearly,
16 adoption records have been accessible in New York
17 as they were in Tennessee and Oregon by court
18 order, if necessary, without notice to or
19 participation by birth parents. Around the
20 country, it's typically been up to the adoptive
21 parents and not the birth parents whether even to
22 change the child's name or have a new birth
23 certificate issued.
24 So secondly, regardless of any legal
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2 guarantee of lifelong anonymity, it, as has been
3 testified and I think the documents particularly
4 illustrative of this, birth mothers have not been
5 offered a, a choice of, or guaranteed even
6 confidentiality, by adoption agencies and by
7 other facilitators. The documents that I
8 collected, and there are 75 of them again from 26
9 states, a dozen are from New York, they're from
10 private and public agencies, they're, and, and
11 from private and public agencies, from state to
12 state and decade to decade they are basically the
13 same in their legal import and, and their
14 provisions. And as Adam testified, no opponent
15 of adult adoptee access to original birth
16 certificates has ever produced a dissimilar
17 document.
18 What, in these documents, the birth
19 mother, and she signs them to surrender as was
20 mentioned, the child, the rights to the child
21 before there's any adoption proceeding. And she
22 does not retain or gain any rights of any kind in
23 these documents, she's never promised any even
24 confidentiality. In fact, she's not promised
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2 that the child will be successfully placed for
3 adoption. That's the hope, of course, a
4 successful adoptive placement but it's not a
5 promise and it may not occur, there can be
6 permanent long-term foster care or
7 institutionalization and it's specifically
8 provided that she will not have notice of any
9 future proceedings regarding the child.
10 However, 40 percent of these documents,
11 including three-quarters of the ones I have from
12 New York, again the New York ones are also from
13 the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, they do include
14 promises about the future. It is the birth
15 mother who makes the promises. She promises she
16 will not induce the child to leave the family or
17 the institution in which she's placed, she
18 promises that she knows she has no right to know
19 the child's new name or whereabouts, she promises
20 she won't interfere with or harass the adoptive
21 family.
22 For example, actually a 1966 Spence
23 Chapin Adoption Service surrender document says
24 as follows: "The undersigned does hereby agree
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2 and pledge not to interfere with the custody,
3 control, care, or management of said child in any
4 way or encourage or allow anyone else to do so."
5 That's a, a typical provision.
6 Thirdly, and I'll pose this as a
7 question, did birth mothers, even though they
8 signed these documents and the law did not
9 guarantee lifelong anonymity, did they desire it?
10 As you've heard and I will add in my own research
11 into the history, the evidence is that birth
12 mothers who sought confidentiality sought it from
13 either their own families or from members of
14 their community, not that they were looking for
15 being forever unknown from the child that they
16 bore and forever unable to know if that child has
17 lived or died and how that child has fared in
18 life.
19 And, of course, that historical evidence
20 is entirely consistent with also what you've
21 heard, that the practice today, or the evidence
22 today is that the overwhelming majority of birth
23 mothers, some 95 percent up are even open to
24 contact with their now adult children and that
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2 the norm today in domestic infant adoption is
3 openness. It seems to be tho-, those facts are
4 consistent with the history that that was not
5 what birth mothers were seeking.
6 Fourth, and consistently with what the
7 first three points, when if these records were
8 closed around the country to inspection by the
9 parties to the adoption as well as to the public,
10 they were closed to predict, they, all the
11 legislative history show that they were closed to
12 protect adoptees and adoptive family's privacy,
13 and understandably. To protect adoptive families
14 from possible interference or harassment by birth
15 parents, not to protect the birth parent's
16 lifelong privacy. And the, the surrender
17 documents that I studied I think are just one
18 piece of evidence among many of that historical
19 fact.
20 The fifth point I would make, and again,
21 it made at greater length elsewhere, is that in
22 those states that never denied access, and as
23 Adam testified in those states that have now
24 restored access, access has really proved to be
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2 beneficial and it has not been harmful. In those
3 states we don't have this kind of arbitrary and
4 artificial division between adoptees, who without
5 the birth certificate are able to find out
6 information about their original identity, and
7 those who are not.
8 In those states, as you've heard, birth
9 parents have been given an opportunity to express
10 their preferences that they didn't have before.
11 In the cases in which the birth parents and the
12 adoptees wish to meet and are both living, there
13 have been countless successful reunions. And,
14 and most importantly, in those states, the
15 adoptees, I think, have, have been restored to a
16 basic human right to information and government
17 records about their own identity. So, in sum,
18 those are my basic points and I would welcome any
19 questions and, again, think that having an
20 accurate understanding of this history of the
21 evidence really supports doing in New York what
22 other states have successfully done. Thank you.
23 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you,
24 would you comment just as a legal constitutional
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2 whatever matter, balance the question of what has
3 been said as the, the birth parent's right to his
4 or her identity and to basically control who gets
5 to know that with the adult adoptee's right to
6 have that knowledge?
7 PROFESSOR SAMUELS: Well, I, I guess I'd
8 say they're, you know, two different parts to
9 that. I mean, one is this allegation that
10 there's been some guarantee or promise which I
11 think is not the case so there's not a danger of
12 breaking that guarantee or that promise or
13 negating what was offered as a choice.
14 Otherwise, of course, a birth is a public event
15 as the courts have held in these cases and when
16 either parent is ready, willing, and able to
17 raise the child, that parent has a right to do so
18 and, of course, the other parent is liable to
19 help support the child and can be sued publicly
20 and held accountable. There, it's, it's a
21 strange concept, I think, to say that that child
22 was born does not have an equal right to the
23 document, public document recording his or her
24 birth.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Um-hum.
3 PROFESSOR SAMUELS: And there's no
4 constitutional right to place a child for
5 adoption. An adoption has to be approved by a
6 court, the adoptive parents have to be approved
7 as suitable, so again, there's, there's no re-,
8 kind of reproductive right to place a child.
9 Again, either parent becomes publicly accountable
10 and responsible for the child if the other parent
11 wishes to raise the child.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you,
13 other questions?
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Yeah, Professor
15 Samuels, were you here when the two surrogate
16 judges testified?
17 PROFESSOR SAMUELS: Yes.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: What, what gave
19 them the impression that there was, because it
20 seemed to pretty, you know, consistent that there
21 was a promised anonymity, confidentiality, given
22 to the birth mothers and that seemed to be the
23 gist of their major objections.
24 PROFESSOR SAMUELS: Well, before I try
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2 and answer, I will say I was startled to hear
3 that in the record there was some promise because
4 I, there is no such thing, written thing or
5 guarantee by law so I don't know where that comes
6 from. But I would say, and I've written many
7 pages with many footnotes, that the social
8 history is very complex and that we did go
9 through a period in the 50s after the war of a
10 real, you know, the women went, went back to the
11 home, the men came home from the war, everyone
12 was supposed to be married and have 3.4 children
13 and adoption was seen as a solution to the
14 problem of the shamed, unwed mother, who by
15 giving up the child could then be restored and
16 redeemed to her rightful place as a wife and
17 mother and we could seal the records, produce a
18 false birth certificate, the birth certificates
19 say the child was born to the adoptive parents,
20 so the child then has the privacy protected but
21 with this false document, and, you know, and
22 everyone would go about their business and
23 benefit from this and the record for the adopted
24 child, when you went into the court and county
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2 records would be identical to the biological
3 child.
4 And, you know, there was a period of
5 matching eye color, hair color, IQ, when children
6 were kept for 6, even up to 12 months to make
7 sure that they were a-okay to be adopted, you
8 know, they really. So there's this kind of whole
9 culture, I think of the, there's no difference
10 between the adoptive family and the biological
11 family and I think there kind of, this, it arose,
12 because the records were sealed, because it was,
13 you know, considered a beneficial thing there was
14 kind of a belief that it should be secret, that
15 some people shouldn't want to know, that they
16 won't want to know.
17 But curiously, when I went, I, my
18 research actually started because I saw all these
19 people searching for one another benefitting for
20 their reunion, from their reunions, so initially
21 I got my research assistant and we said, let's
22 find out why it was thought beneficial, back when
23 these records were initially sealed to the
24 parties, to have lifelong secrecy. So the first
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2 thing I discovered was that the records were
3 sealed much later than we in the academy had
4 generally believed.
5 As late as 1960 in half the states, the
6 records were available and in some other states
7 where they'd been sealed, there was still access
8 to court records by adult adoptees and even adop-
9 , their adoptive parents, adoptive parents of a
10 minor adoptees. So first of all, it all had
11 happened later. Secondly, what I found was that
12 in the 40s all the experts recommended that there
13 be access and there continued to be access.
14 The National Association of Vital
15 Statistics executives, the first uniform adoption
16 act in 1953 recommended, recommended that the
17 general practice be sustained, although New York
18 had been an early outlier the other way but
19 recommended that the general practice be
20 maintained of adult adoptee access to the
21 records. So it, it really in a sense, perhaps
22 this is way too complicated an answer I'm trying
23 to give but it was a complex social as well as
24 legal kind of series of interrelated events that
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2 kind of lead to this kind of mindset but I think
3 what the yea-, the witnesses are telling you
4 today and what you all who are sponsoring the
5 bill know is this was just kind of an experiment
6 that didn't work. It kind of like, I mean some
7 people wanted it because they could cover their
8 tracks, there are, there is some skullduggery but
9 most people, I think, passed these laws thinking
10 it was a good and helpful thing and it just has
11 turned out not to be.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Do we have
13 copies of your research and reports? Have you
14 submi-, contributed them to the committee?
15 PROFESSOR SAMUELS: I, I will send them,
16 I gave you the citations and the, the links on
17 the Internet but I will send the full copies.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: That would be
19 very helpful. Thank you very much.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
21 Just, without citing inflammatory examples, this
22 wouldn't be the first time in legal and social
23 history that something that was being done to a
24 group of people was characterized as being done
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2 for them.
3 PROFESSOR SAMUELS: That of course, that
4 was really the theme of my article.
5 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Yeah.
6 PROFESSOR SAMUELS: That, here it is,
7 where the 95 percent of birth mothers are open to
8 and supportive and yet the opposition, when they
9 come to testify, the opposition is they're trying
10 to be protected.
11 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Hm-hmm,
12 yeah. Okay.
13 PROFESOR SAMUELS: Thank you.
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
15 very much.
16 PROFESSOR SAMUELS: Thank you.
17 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, our
18 next witness is Peter Franklin. Good afternoon,
19 and do you swear or affirm that the testimony
20 you're about to give is true?
21 PETER FRANKLIN, RPH, ADOPTEES WITHOUT
22 LIBERTY (AWOL): Yes, I do.
23 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, and if
24 you could just state your name for the record and
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2 begin.
3 MR. FRANKLIN: My name is Peter
4 Franklin, I'm from New Jersey, thank you for
5 hearing all our testimony. Just for a quick
6 second, anyone who supports this bill, could you
7 please stand up just for a second?
8 PROFESSOR SAMUELS: Supports it?
9 MR. FRANKLIN: Supports it, thank you.
10 Okay, please have your seats. It looks like the,
11 did the judges leave?
12 PROFESSOR SAMUELS: Yes.
13 MR. FRANKLIN: I'm insult-, I'm insulted
14 by that and you, and you gentlemen should be
15 insulted as well because they're not listening.
16 PROFESSOR SAMUELS: Thank you.
17 MR. FRANKLIN: But I had the great
18 fortune to be adopted.
19 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Well, let
20 the, let me just say, we're, we do impose
21 obligations on them to do things like preside in
22 their courts so, anyway.
23 MR. FRANKLIN: Okay.
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: We'll make the
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2 testimony, we'll make the testimony available to
3 the, to the judges that testified.
4 MR. FRANKLIN: Thank you for doing that.
5 So back to my, my personal story, I was adopted
6 in England but, but raised in New Jersey.
7 England has open records since 1975 and I had a,
8 a wonderful reunion with my biological family.
9 It turned out that my mother relinquished six
10 children for adoption and today five out of the
11 six of us have found each other. I found out
12 that my older, I met my older sister and a few
13 years later she died from multiple sclerosis.
14 Yeah, medical's not that big of a deal, right?
15 So, and I met, you know, a lot of my other
16 siblings and we have a, like, great
17 relationships. My birth mother, I'm in contact
18 with, but not, not as close as my siblings.
19 But just one more comment on the medical
20 thing which I can't believe is, is being
21 diminished here, my daughter had a seizure when
22 she was a child and before I had searched and the
23 doctors wanted to know a family history and it
24 was a really tough decision, do I medicate my
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2 daughter for the next three years of her life
3 until she reaches puberty. And based on that not
4 having the family history, my daughter took
5 Tegretol for three years, she never had another
6 seizure but I worry to this day what taking an
7 unnecessary medication for years is going to have
8 on her health so this goes, spans generations.
9 But just a bit about England, they're
10 very progressive, they've banned anonymous sperm
11 donation because they believe everyone has a
12 right to know who they are and research in
13 England shows that, not only birth mothers that
14 are found, but non-searching birth mothers, 94
15 percent want contact.
16 I've been serving in the military for
17 nearly 23 years and right before I deployed to
18 Iraq I ran into a soldier who was looking for his
19 birth family and he was from Florida. This
20 soldier did four tours in Iraq and the State of
21 Florida wouldn't give him his birth certificate.
22 I think that's an incredible injustice, Michael
23 Schoer is here, he's been down range but he comes
24 home and his state, his government looks him in
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2 the eyes and says, we can trust you with a loaded
3 weapon to go protect your state but not your
4 birth certificate. It's unfair, and if you think
5 it's unfair to Michael and me and other soldiers,
6 if you think it's unfair to people that need
7 their medical history, if you think it's unfair
8 to late discovery adoptees, well, it's late,
9 it's, it's unfair for everyone and we have to
10 just stop this discrimination.
11 And I think what's really critical here
12 and I hope we can say this more in the front of
13 this argument, that we have to define the debate
14 properly and we've allowed the opposition to this
15 to define the debate. But I would like to define
16 the debate as the adoption community which
17 includes birth parents, adoptive parents, and
18 adoptees, and we're going up against lawyers and
19 certain bishops from the Catholic church, that's
20 the true debate but we've let them define it and
21 to try to pit birth mother versus adoptee and
22 that's false and is proven out through the
23 evidence and the research by the people who
24 testified before me. So I, I think what we have
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2 to do is, in some ways, the people that are
3 opposed to this, ask them what their other
4 motives are.
5 And until that starts happening,
6 reporters are going to get it wrong and we're
7 going to read about it in the paper, birth
8 mothers versus adoptees and once we hear that
9 statement, we've, we're losing so let's, let's
10 stop that. So I will make, you know, one more
11 comment, when the judges get uncomfortable, when
12 you start asking them to show you the statute,
13 show me the re-links in the paper that prove what
14 they're saying is true. They get nervous and
15 they bring up the adoption word and that is meant
16 to distract you from the true issue.
17 Now, we are not a fetus that just
18 escaped abortion. We're human beings, we're
19 citizens of this state and we deserve our rights
20 so don't be distracted by that, it is completely
21 untrue that a birth mother would select abortion
22 because adoption is not secret enough. In the
23 very limited research exists is actually the
24 opposite, they are find, they found that women
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2 chose abortion because they did not want to live
3 with the bewilderment of secretive, a secret
4 adoption. Thank you.
5 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
6 very much, questions?
7 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: No questions.
8 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you,
9 we appreciate your being here today. Our next
10 witness is Joe Soll.
11 MR. JOE SOLL, LCSW, PSYCHOTHERAPIST,
12 ADOPTION HEALING, INC: Good morning.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Good
14 morning. Do you swear or affirm that the
15 testimony you're about to give is true?
16 MR. SOLL: I do.
17 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: And state
18 your name?
19 MR. SOLL: My name is Joe Soll. I am an
20 adopted person and author, a psychotherapist with
21 30 years of experience working with other
22 adoptees, first families, and adoptive families.
23 And I stand before you today with a unique
24 perspective and understanding, both personally
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2 and professionally, of the psychological,
3 sociological, and sometime physical effects of
4 not knowing one's first family.
5 Antiquated laws such as Domestic
6 Relation Law 114 and others like it permanently
7 severing all ties between an adoptee and his or
8 her first family were enacted at a time when the
9 legal and medical community didn't know what we
10 know and were based on inaccurate and incomplete
11 information and social norms that do not exist
12 today and this lack of knowledge can affect the
13 adopted person's entire life. The laws as they
14 exist, do not reflect a knowledge and
15 understanding we have now and, therefore, need to
16 be changed.
17 In your deliberation please consider the
18 following; first, I believe there's a
19 misinterpretation of Domestic Relations Law 114
20 because other sufficient cause is not defined,
21 there is no promise of confidentiality. Second,
22 Eric Erickson one of the most famous
23 psychotherapists and creator of identify in the
24 lifecycle said to not know one's fore bearers for
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2 two generations prevents one from achieving a
3 sense of actuality, a built in sense that one is
4 real and the, and that the events in one's life
5 are real, a true existential necessity.
6 A mental health professional, I believe
7 that not knowing our fore bearers, especially
8 those who brought us into this world, is a matter
9 of grave importance and can be horribly painful,
10 painful beyond what anyone can imagine. This
11 lack of knowledge is real, pervasive and can
12 affect every aspect of one's life until one
13 learns one's truth no matter what the truth is.
14 I think it is a most human of endeavors to wish
15 to find one's roots and a human right to know
16 one's truth and for many, it is a psychological
17 necessity.
18 Thousands of years ago, Cicero said:
19 "Not to have knowledge of what happened before
20 you were born is to be condemned to live forever
21 as a child". Winston Churchill said: "The
22 further backward you can look, the further
23 forward you will see". And Alex Haley said: "In
24 all of us there is a hunger narrow and deep to
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2 know our heritage, to know who we are, and where
3 we have come from and without this enriching
4 knowledge there is a hollow yearning no matter
5 what our attainments in life, there is a vacuum,
6 an emptiness, and a most disquieting loneliness".
7 In 1992, Dennis deLeon, the Human
8 Commission of Rights, the Human Rights
9 Commissioner under Mayor Dinkins, said in public
10 in front of the media: "It is a human right to
11 know your background, your parentage, you have a
12 right to it, it is a human right and it is
13 justice for you and we are behind you".
14 And finally, I'd like to read the
15 following written by the Honorable Wade
16 Weatherford, Junior, a South Carolina Circuit
17 Court Judge, in opening the birth certificate to
18 an adult adoptee, he said: "The law must be
19 continent with life, it cannot and should not
20 ignore broad historical currents of history.
21 Mankind is possessed of no greater urge than to
22 try to understand the age-old questions of who am
23 I and why am I. Even now the sands and ashes of
24 the continents are being sifted to find where one
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2 made our first steps as man. Religions of
3 mankind often include ancestor worship in one way
4 or another and for many the future is blind
5 without sight of the past and these emotions and
6 anxieties that generate our thirst to know the
7 past are not superficial and whimsical, they are
8 real and they are good cause under the law of man
9 and God."
10 And finally, one last thing, I've been
11 searching for my original family for 32 years to
12 no avail and three weeks ago, on the morning of
13 January 18th, at the age of 74, I found out that
14 my mother, who lived across the river from me,
15 was searching for me my entire life until she
16 passed away in 1987. My adoptive family wanted
17 me to find her, I wanted to find her, and she
18 wanted to find me. I spent over 30 years
19 searching for my own flesh and blood and was
20 denied this most basic human right. And if
21 adoption is about the best interest of the child,
22 should not the law then be the best interest of
23 that child when he grows up? I implore you to
24 help enact this most human of legislation. Thank
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2 you.
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you,
4 and I, I think your, your last point about the
5 best interests of the child being central to all
6 of this, is a very good one. It is that, that
7 concept as the sort of prime directive is or is
8 supposed to be, you know, throughout all of our
9 child and welfare legislation. And I would say
10 maybe except on this one point so thank you.
11 Questions?
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you very
13 much.
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
15 very much.
16 MR. SOLL: Thank you.
17 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, our
18 third witness named Kelly, Judy Kelly. And do
19 you swear or affirm that the testimony you are
20 about to give is true?
21 DR. JUDY KELLY, PHD, LMHC: I do.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, and
23 state your name and...
24 DR. KELLY: My name is Judy Kelly and
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2 I'm a licensed mental health counselor, I have a
3 PhD in psychology, and I'm a reunited birth
4 mother.
5 I relinquished my son in 1967 when I was
6 18. 30 years later I hired a private
7 investigator and I found him. In the following
8 year I conducted research and wrote my master's
9 thesis on the traumatic effects of relinquishment
10 on birth mothers. Since then I have provided
11 individual post-adoption and reunion counseling
12 to birth mothers and for nine years I facilitated
13 the Manhattan Birth Parents Support Group. My
14 son and I have been reunited now for the past 15
15 years.
16 So I am here today to advocate for the
17 passage of Assembly Bill A909. I'm here today to
18 advocate for the birthright of all adopted sons
19 and daughters to have legal access to their very
20 own birth information and I do find it
21 incredulous that one's own birth information can
22 be legally withheld, and this is an injustice.
23 Injustice is defined as the violation of
24 another's rights or of what is right, and
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2 withholding and denying access to the original
3 legal registration of one's own birth is just not
4 right. It is indeed, a violation of adoptee's
5 civil and human rights, it's not right, it's not
6 fair, it's unjust.
7 Adoptees have suffered and continue to
8 suffer in justice as a result of the very system
9 that's designed to dispense justice. Adoptees
10 should be granted the same right to their own
11 birth information that every other citizen has.
12 New York adoptees should be able to access their
13 birth certificates as do adoptees in other states
14 that have open access, like Alabama, Alaska,
15 Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire,
16 Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and
17 Washington.
18 Oregon was the first state to change
19 their laws back in 2000 and I supported their
20 efforts then. At that time, I was so optimistic
21 that New York would be right behind. Now, 14
22 years later we are still fighting for restoration
23 of this most basic human right. Why? Why have
24 these bills not reached passage year after year?
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2 Some argue that permitting access will
3 violate confidentiality allegedly promised to
4 birth mothers and I attest here that I never
5 sought confidentiality as a birth mother,
6 anonymity was forced upon me. Even if some birth
7 mothers sought and were promised confidentiality,
8 this would've been a promise or privilege rather
9 than a legal right protected by law, and
10 sometimes some rights must take precedence over
11 other rights. I say that the right of the
12 adoptee to know his or her legal identity must
13 supersede any alleged promise of confidentiality.
14 Withholding this information is a
15 punitive act taken against, from those members of
16 the adoption triad who were never consenting
17 parties to the adoption. I never received any
18 copies of my surrender papers, I was never
19 represe-, had legal representation, I don't know
20 if I was ever actually promised confidentiality
21 in the surrender papers but I do know that I
22 never wanted it.
23 The overwhelming majority of birth
24 mothers I have encountered have longed for
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2 contact and even among those who did not, contact
3 often triggered a psychologically healing journey
4 that promoted the resolution of what's known as
5 disenfranchised grief, it's grief that's hidden
6 from and unacknowledged by society. In the
7 research I conducted, 51 percent of the birth
8 mothers surveyed indicated they had experienced
9 severe depression since relinquishment. 94
10 percent responded that they did not receive
11 adequate counseling at the time of
12 relinquishment, I certainly did not, and 95
13 percent responded affirmatively to items
14 measuring unresolved grief. Knowing what has
15 happened to their children is part of their
16 healing journey as it was mine.
17 Today we know that nearly all
18 characteristics are influenced by both genetics
19 and environment, nature and nurture, and our
20 identity is formed by both. A birth certificate
21 is a fundamental part of one's identity. Those
22 of us who are not adopted may take for granted
23 the knowledge of our roots, our cultural
24 heritage, our genetic ancestry, knowledge of our
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2 family medical background.
3 But for those of you are not adopted
4 just imagine for one moment the void of not
5 having that knowledge, in effect, being
6 generation zero. When I sent my son the first
7 picture of myself, he immediately shaved his
8 mustache and beard and looked into the mirror,
9 holding my photo up next to his face so that he
10 could see all those features that we shared,
11 which are many. This was the first time in his
12 life that he saw the face of someone who looked
13 like him. When I made my first visit to his home
14 and met his adoptive parents, his mother greeted
15 me with open arms and she said how happy she was
16 that I could answer questions for him that she
17 could not. My son's wife told me how they both
18 had waited anxiously to see the appearance of
19 their first child. It seems that my son, David,
20 thought he might be of Afro-American descent
21 because of his musical rhythm and talent at
22 basketball. He was desperately searching for any
23 clue to answer that basic question, who am I. He
24 is actually of Irish, American, Czech, and French
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2 descent.
3 Since connecting to his biological
4 origins, he has discovered parts of himself that
5 he didn't know were there. For instance, David
6 had latent musical talent that he began to
7 develop only after meeting my musically gifted
8 brother and has now become an integral part of
9 his life.
10 So I'm here today to ask for the
11 restoration of a right that adoptees once had,
12 presumably birth records of adoptees were sealed
13 in New York decades ago to shield the adoptees
14 from the stigma associated with illegitimacy and
15 adoption.
16 Fast forward, according to the National
17 Center for Health Statistics, in 2012, 41 percent
18 of all births in the U.S. were out of wedlock.
19 Few people today would challenge the legitimacy
20 of these 1,609,619 individuals born out of
21 wedlock. Today we live in the information age,
22 for better or for worse we have entered into an
23 age where our personal information is out there
24 for all to see, yet adoptees are prohibited and
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2 prevented from accessing the most basic of
3 information concerning their very own identity,
4 their very own birth. Sealed birth records do
5 not shield the adoptee from stigma, instead today
6 the sealed birth record is the stigma.
7 These laws are archaic and must be
8 changed, our laws, I lost my place, our laws are
9 not stagnant, excuse me, they change to reflect
10 changing morays, they change to eliminate
11 discrimination, laws prohibiting women from
12 voting were changed, laws prohibiting interracial
13 marriages were changed, laws were changed to
14 ensure marriage equality, and now is the time to
15 guarantee that adoptees are no longer
16 discriminated against and have equality under
17 law.
18 I never ever desired confidentiality, I
19 never ever desired that my son, David, be
20 restricted access to his birth information, and
21 yet today his original birth records remain
22 sealed. It's not right, it's not fair, it's
23 unjust.
24 You have heard from Ellen Mohr, an 87
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2 year old adoptee who's desperately seeking
3 information about her biological identity. The
4 state, however, denies her this information.
5 Why? Whose interests are being served by
6 withholding this information? Adoptee rights are
7 being violated now and the law must change. We
8 need you to pass the Adoptee Bill of Rights and
9 bring adoption law out of the dark ages now.
10 Please, do not allow New York to be among the
11 last of the 50 states to do the right thing.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
13 Questions?
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Yeah, it's
15 kind of a, it's a, an emotional day for a lot of
16 people so forgive me if I'm asking a personal
17 question. Your son's father, was he involved in
18 the adoption process with you?
19 DR. KELLY: He was aware of it.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Okay, now,
21 did, did he provide all the information, what you
22 provided about your ancestry and medical history?
23 DR. KELLY: No.
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Did you, did
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2 you know his ethnicity?
3 DR. KELLY: At that time, I only knew
4 one piece of it. As it turns out, he, there were
5 many other, others involved.
6 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: At the time,
7 did you sort of maybe guess what he was and?
8 DR. KELLY: Um-hum.
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: So,
10 essentially, your son, if he had his non-
11 identifying information, would've believed he was
12 somebody who he may not have been?
13 DR. KELLY: Right.
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you.
15 I'm sorry to even have to ask that but I wanted
16 it on the record.
17 DR. KELLY: That's no problem.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Thank you very
19 much.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
21 very much. Okay, we are going to take about a
22 ten minute break and then we will be back.
23 OFF THE RECORD
24 [Parties confer, unintelligible, 20
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2 seconds, 02:36:56]
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, if
4 everyone could take seats, we're going to resume.
5 That's quite a-, yes, they're ver-, very handy.
6 OFF THE RECORD
7 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, our
8 next witness is Doris Bertocci.
9 MS. DORIS BERTOCCI, LCSW, CLINICAL
10 SOCIAL WORKER/THERAPIST: Thank you for letting
11 me testify today.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Do you swear
13 or affirm that the testimony you're about to give
14 is true?
15 MS. BERTOCCI: Yes.
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: And state
17 your name for the record.
18 MS. BERTOCCI: My name is Doris
19 Bertocci. I hope that a certain numbing has not
20 set in for you and I will delete the things that
21 have already been said so everything I say is
22 going to be new.
23 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay.
24 MS. BERTOCCI: I am a clinical social
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2 worker practicing privately in Irvington,
3 Westchester County. My area of expertise is not
4 in the adoption field but in college mental
5 health and I have 35 years on the campus of
6 Columbia University. Nevertheless, there, on a
7 random basis I treated a number of students whose
8 difficulties involved typical complexities that
9 psychotherapists encounter in young adults who
10 are adopted. And I want to add here that you
11 hear the word knowledge of their origins,
12 knowledge of their birth certificates, but I'm
13 here in particular to speak of the psychological
14 impact of the sealed record which is just as
15 profound as the intellectual knowledge that
16 adoptees are needing.
17 Despite all the brilliance of Columbia
18 students and academic achievements, each of these
19 students was profoundly impacted by having to
20 live in a kind of emotional suspension, stuck
21 developmentally and at times struggling with poor
22 concentration. At a school like Columbia, that's
23 a disaster.
24 This is because at a critical time that
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2 their peers were in the process of moving on to
3 form their identities separate from their
4 families, make choices in relationships and
5 prepare for their careers, the adopted students
6 were stalled, distracted, and even clinically
7 depressed. Virtually all of their relationships
8 were affected, and this is the psychological
9 part, and they had to live with an intolerable
10 anxiety about their medical health and unknown
11 vulnerabilities. They had contempt for their
12 fraudulent amended birth certificates which
13 represented barriers to their being able to get
14 on with their lives.
15 I am active clinically in the psychology
16 of adoption and I've published on the complex
17 psychological meanings of the adopted person's
18 need to search for their biological parents.
19 What I don't usually reveal professionally is
20 that I was born in New York State and languished
21 for nine months in several foster homes until
22 placed for adoption through the New York State
23 Charities Aid Society. I was a ward of the state
24 so one might say that the state legislature owned
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2 me at that time.
3 I was severally traumatized by the
4 nonsense of the adoption agencies at that time
5 that decided that it was so important for these
6 lovely potential adoptive parents to have perfect
7 babies that, and in those days intelligence of
8 these babies was terribly important to them, so
9 they intentionally made babies wait for a full
10 year but they didn't want these babies to make
11 attachments to the foster parents. Psychologists
12 know that this is catastrophic but I was one on
13 the assembly line and somehow survived it. I was
14 underweight and according to the papers, could
15 only cry throughout the intelligence tests that
16 agencies insisted on putting babies through to be
17 sure they weren't retarded. Because of my
18 ominous test results my adoptive parents were
19 tactfully advised not to expect too much.
20 My search became activated when I was in
21 my early 30s. In fact, I was born with a heart
22 defect and my daughter was born with a heart
23 defect. My inability to provide her doctors with
24 information about my family history was probably
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2 one of the main things that compelled me to
3 search.
4 Suffice it to say that after nine
5 agonizing months of searching I found my birth
6 mother. It is not true to say that most people
7 who find their birth mothers have the money to do
8 it, that's simply not accurate. Tens of
9 thousands of adoptees throughout the state have
10 done exactly what I did which was get around the
11 system. In fact, it's probably why I became a
12 social worker. My guidance counselor said,
13 you're very social and you work hard, why don't
14 you be a social worker. But in fact,
15 unconsciously I had heard the words social worker
16 from my parents and I knew they had a lot to do
17 with my connection with my birth mother. So
18 really, and I learned this years later, I became
19 a social worker so that I could figure out how
20 they think, what they do, so that I could beat
21 them at their own game. I didn't know it at the
22 time.
23 I learned from my birth mother that soon
24 after she had placed me, she became an amateur
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2 astrologist desperately trying to follow me
3 through the starts and sending me messages
4 regarding my safety. She had been continuing to
5 do this up until we spoke for the first time.
6 Mainly, I'd like to site four issues
7 relating to the wording of the bill. I believe
8 that an explanatory section is needed
9 accompanying the bill, written for the public, so
10 that these issues can be clarified.
11 First, for me the greatest confusion
12 involves the references to the two forms that
13 birth mothers can complete to be filed with the
14 original birth certificate. The forms are
15 relatively new ideas so they are relevant only to
16 recent, current, and future adoptions. I think
17 it has to be remembered that adoptions have been
18 going on since 1935 so there are different phases
19 of what has gone on over time. For the vast
20 majority of adopted people these forms are not
21 relevant because they are too recent. I think
22 there needs to be greater clarity that the
23 adopted person has a legal right to their
24 original birth certificate regardless of whether
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2 there are any attached forms or papers. The
3 references to the forms in the way the bill is
4 worded sounded like conditions that need to be
5 met before the original birth certificate is
6 released.
7 Second, I have reason to believe that
8 the presentation of proof could be another
9 potential problem. I'm going to summarize this
10 and simply say it's important to have live
11 personnel in Albany to answer questions because
12 they're not going to be as simply as interstate
13 problems, there are going to be a lot of other
14 things. It's terribly frustrating to have to
15 just stay and read for a very long time, various
16 online instructions that aren't relevant to what
17 you're trying to find out.
18 I believe the bill as written, with only
19 perfunctory reference to medical information
20 gives very short shrift to the many complex
21 health and emotional issues for every adopted
22 person. This would be another reason for the
23 bill to be accompanied by an explanatory section
24 spelling out, and these are very complex, you
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2 can't just say medical, it's neurological,
3 psychological, biochemical, and genetic. It's
4 now the 21st century, when this information along
5 with updated family histories will become
6 critical for the medical record of every person
7 in this state.
8 Fourth, the latter part of the bill
9 refers to adoption procedures and the term law
10 guardian is used. To my knowledge, no adopted
11 person in this state has ever had any law
12 guardian or guardian ad litem to represent their
13 own best interests separate from the interests of
14 the potential parents. As in child custody
15 litigation, and by the way I specialize in
16 treating parents who are in custody litigation,
17 and I've learned a great deal about the thread
18 that cuts through both adoption and this area of
19 family law.
20 The truth is that family law has always
21 been focused primarily and often exclusively on
22 the interests and rights of adults, while
23 ownership of the child is exchanged. I wish I
24 could take credit for this but somebody else
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2 observed that the only other class of people who
3 have been denied their own birth certificates are
4 the American slaves. I find it very alarming
5 that so many of today's adoptions are handled by
6 private lawyers and I hope that the state
7 legislature can do something about this. With no
8 training whatsoever and the impact on the
9 children's lives of their role in getting the
10 papers signed.
11 It was clear to me that the two judges
12 that spoke knew nothing whatsoever about the real
13 psychological issues. There is no professional
14 screening of these parents and when you hear
15 about the horrors of children being abused and
16 neglected by their adoptive parents, you can't
17 wonder why, there's no screening of these people.
18 This is not the domain of lawyers to do, and no
19 required protocol regarding maintenance of
20 records in perpetuity for the child, the lawyers
21 can basically just handle signing of the papers
22 and that's that. I know of instances, in fact,
23 where with private lawyers handling this, there
24 have been clear conflicts of interest.
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2 And God knows what becomes of the birth
3 mothers and the way they are treated by these
4 lawyers or other entities when they decide to
5 place their children for adoption. If opponents
6 of this bill are so concerned about birth mothers
7 of yore perhaps they can stand up to the plate
8 now and right a bill requiring in private
9 adoptions the sensitive and professional handling
10 of today's birth mothers both prior to and
11 following the time that she places her child for
12 adoption.
13 These children need the state's
14 protection as all adoptees have always needed but
15 never gotten. In sealing the birth records, New
16 York State has pushed aside its usual protocol of
17 careful inquiry, evidence, and properly signed
18 contracts, and to this day it has never
19 understood or cared about the huge price that so
20 many adopted people have always paid for this
21 secret deal. A deal that was made over them when
22 they were helpless babies.
23 For future reference, my recommendation
24 is that the state require that every child have
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2 her or his own representation consisting of a
3 state appointed team, namely a guardian or
4 attorney for the child and a qualified adoption
5 professional.
6 What I want to say most emphatically is
7 that adoption is first and foremost about the
8 needs of the helpless adopted child, not only at
9 the time the papers are signed but throughout
10 their lives. In sealing the record, the state
11 did not make a primary commitment to the welfare
12 of the child for life, which morally and
13 ethically is what adoption should be about.
14 But concern of opponents now is with
15 protecting the birth mother despite the fact that
16 there was no spoken commitment to her at all,
17 simply assumptions and biases of the 1930s, 80
18 years ago. The state did betray the trust of
19 mos-, most birth mothers who as far as we've been
20 able to determine never intended full
21 confidentiality from their child. Even in the
22 minority of cases now in which birth mothers
23 would object to the opening of the record this
24 would represent a conflict of interest, we know.
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2 But to this I say that the conflict,
3 like any other, needs to be resolved in favor of
4 the party least responsible for the circumstances
5 in the first place, you know who that is.
6 Whenever any child is born, every mother has a
7 moral responsibility to ensure the safety and
8 welfare of her child. If the mother is a birth
9 mother planning to place her child for adoption,
10 whatever her wishes may be about confidentiality,
11 they cannot eclipse the human rights of the
12 child. At a junction such as this I believe that
13 honesty is the best policy.
14 In my view, all the state needs to do is
15 admit that the record was sealed in a different
16 time and culture when the preoccupation of
17 adoption workers, most of whom by the way, were
18 not professional, was with shame and secrecy and
19 when there was insufficient information at that
20 time about what the impact of sealing the record
21 would really be over time. I want to offer you
22 the following consideration that Adam Pertman
23 just mentioned in passing; since opponents of the
24 bill are so concerned about protecting only the
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2 birth mother of the past they in the public can
3 know about a form of protection for birth mothers
4 that is already available to them in the system.
5 I refer to the licensed professional
6 social work and mental health systems that have
7 full confidentiality built into their code of
8 ethics and protected by law. Any birth mother's
9 wishing to avail themselves of supportive help
10 and psycho-educational services regarding the
11 very sensitive issues involved in opening the
12 record should have access to an interactive
13 Website through the State Health Department drawn
14 up and overseen by qualified professionals,
15 please not computer techies, that will direct
16 them to the appropriate resources and communities
17 throughout the state. In fact, I would be happy
18 to offer my assistance with this.
19 To conclude, opening the record should
20 certainly have priority now but it is only the
21 beginning of what needs to be done in order to
22 meet the needs of everyone but giving priority to
23 the human rights of the child in the most
24 compassionate way. Thank you.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
3 very much. Questions? Okay, thank you. Is Dawn
4 Smith Pliner here? No, okay, then our next
5 witness is Leanne Jaffe? No, oh, okay. Are you
6 Leanne Jaffe?
7 MS. LEANNE JAFFE, MA, LCSW,
8 PSYCHOTHERAPIST/CONSULTANT, ADAPTING TO ADOPTION:
9 I'm Leanne, yes.
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Oh, she is
11 here, okay.
12 MS. JAFFE: Oh.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: There you
14 go.
15 MS. JAFFE: Oh, Jo-, okay, hi, hello,
16 thank you for being --
17 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, do you
18 --
19 MS. JEFFE: Oh.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: -- do you
21 swear or affirm that the testimony you're about
22 to give is true?
23 MS. JAFFE: Yes, I do.
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay.
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2 MS. JAFFE: Okay, thank you members of
3 the assembly. My name is Leanne Jaffe, I'm here
4 in a dual capacity today. I am a clinical social
5 worker in New York State and I'm also here as an
6 adopted person, an adopted adult. I've been
7 involved with Joyce Bahr's organization, with the
8 Evan Donaldson Institute, with Spence Chapin,
9 many of the voices you've already heard from
10 today.
11 Working on this issue, just for my part
12 alone, for 20 years in New York State, I know
13 some people have been at this longer. I want to
14 highlight a couple of things, I'm going to try to
15 keep my comments coherent, I have notes that I
16 wrote in response to some of the other comments
17 that we've heard today.
18 First and foremost, I want to say this
19 really is, it, it's just plain and simply, a
20 human rights issue, and I want, I want to focus
21 on a couple of points here, and I speak from my
22 professional experience, I worked as a foster
23 care case worker in the public child welfare
24 system here in New York, I also work in private
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2 adoption, I counsel families, I train social
3 workers and educators.
4 You have heard from voices both in
5 support and in opposition to this bill that the
6 trend in practice is way ahead of policy and
7 legislation. People are already doing open
8 adoptions, women who are contemplating making
9 adoption plans for their babies are more likely
10 to choose an open adoption than to choose a
11 closed adoption or to choose an abortion, and I
12 want to say something, I, I was very curious
13 about the judge's comments about written
14 documents about confidentiality in records. I
15 have participated as an adoption and foster care
16 social worker in termination hearings and all
17 they are is termination hearings, and Professor
18 Samuels told us about her scholarly research into
19 what records show.
20 We in the community have been saying for
21 decades, produce a document that substantiates
22 this claim of written confidentiality and there
23 has not yet been one produced. I can tell you
24 that a termination of parental rights is just
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2 that, it is only a termination of parental rights
3 and, as Professor Samuels told us earlier, after
4 that happens the birth parent's role is, is cast
5 aside in what happens to the, then that makes
6 the, that baby or that child, quote unquote, a
7 ward of the state, the state is the temporary
8 parent deciding who will then become either the
9 foster or adoptive parents to follow. The birth
10 parents are not involved in discussions about
11 what will happen, about what will happen or be
12 contained in the records, they have not been
13 given a choice, there is this implicent (sic)
14 code of secrecy and silence that's really just
15 about shame which is just residual ideas of the
16 past.
17 We're not practicing adoptions that way
18 anymore, adoptive parents don't want to be kept
19 in the dark about what their kids might need so I
20 really want to stress, again, there, there really
21 is not evidence for this claim of a promise of
22 confidentiality to women contemplating adoption
23 plans.
24 I also want to emphasis something you've
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2 heard about other states that have open records
3 for adopted people 18 and over, and I want to
4 talk a little bit about Oregon. Number one, I'm
5 not sure if you're aware but not only did that
6 pass in that state, that was actually a valid
7 initiative, it was a referendum so it was
8 literally the people of Oregon who decided that
9 adopted persons at the age of 18 deserve to have
10 their original birth certificate. And the
11 argument that was made that was successful is
12 that it's about rights, not relationships. The,
13 to, to say to an adopted person, your birth
14 certificate will remain a state secret unless
15 people give permission for it to be open is to
16 tell someone no less than it's fine with us for
17 you to live as less than a human being because
18 that's what that says.
19 So we heard some challenging of the
20 ideas of curiosity, that that really trivializes
21 a very, very basic human need to know. I, you
22 know, if, so what defines us as human beings is
23 consciousness, to not know who or where you come
24 from is to really hinder your ability to be a
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2 conscious person in the world. There's lots of
3 data, there's lots of research that talks about
4 the need of post-adoption services for adoptive
5 families.
6 I want to highlight the point that what
7 happens in the concept of self in the adopted
8 person when you grow up knowing that the state
9 has said you don't have a right to your birth
10 certificate, every other American citizen has a
11 right to their birth certificate. We heard from
12 Professor Samuels, they are public documents,
13 it's, they are public record but adoptees have
14 been created as a class of people, also I want to
15 make the point that sealing records is the only
16 law in this country for which there is never an
17 age of emancipation. And we are accustomed to
18 many laws made, Assembly Member Gottfried, you
19 had made the very astute insight that
20 historically laws are framed as being for people
21 when they're really to people, and a lot of laws
22 that are crafted around best interests of the
23 children and safety of children, as, as well
24 meaning adults we say that it's for them and then
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2 we recognize that there's a certain age of
3 emancipation.
4 Again, with adoption, this is the only
5 law, Adam used the term that it enphantalizes
6 adoptees, it does, and this affects a person's
7 self-concept of who they are in the world and
8 there's research that supports this and I would
9 be happy to forward that to you as well. So I, I
10 found myself having a reaction when Judge Kelly
11 was, was saying I understanding the feelings of
12 adopted people wanting to know, and I wrote a
13 little note to myself that, so I work in mental
14 health as a psychotherapist and private practice,
15 I specialized in adoption but not exclusively,
16 feelings are my purview, that's my area of
17 expertise that I can competently claim, I do not
18 claim to be an expert in the law but we have
19 heard from other experts here today, so I think
20 just to say that the feelings of adopted people
21 really are important enough and don't have the
22 status of a right to a, a very basic human right,
23 again, to be an American citizen and have their
24 original birth certificate the same way everyone
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2 else does.
3 Because, again, to deny us that, to make
4 someone's birth certificate a state secret is, is
5 just to deem them a second class citizen. Based
6 on the circumstances of our birth over which we
7 have no control, Doris had just made that point
8 earlier, I'm rushing through my comments so that
9 I, I try to get everything here.
10 And, and then there was another comment
11 that Judge Kelly had made that there are many
12 people who may not be fully aware of their
13 parentage because someone in their family may
14 have kept it from them, it may be a family
15 secret, a skeleton in the closet, and I have some
16 very furious notes saying, but the state hasn't
17 kept it from them. And that's a very, very
18 different experience, the state has not kept if
19 from them, in this situation the state is
20 actively involved and saying to human beings, you
21 don't have the right to know who you come from,
22 everyone else does but you don't because of the
23 circumstances of your birth.
24 Again, this is a relic of, of really an
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2 old way of thinking, as I said before, adoption
3 isn't practiced that way, we don't, and, and I
4 marvel that when we have women saying, I
5 relinquish children, I made an adoption plan, I
6 did not want confidentiality, I was not given a
7 choice, and then we still have this mythologized
8 very pedestrian argument, but there might be a
9 woman somewhere who might get really upset. My
10 response is, as a clinician, is then give her
11 post-adoption services as everyone involved in
12 adoption really should have.
13 And, by the way, Assembly Member Weprin,
14 you had asked if there's a coalition in New York
15 State of agencies who are also in support and I
16 said, yes, it's actually called the New York
17 State Citizens Coalition for Children. I know
18 many people in this room themselves or their
19 organizations may be a member, it's a statewide
20 coalition of service providers to families in
21 adoption and foster care and other general family
22 related issues, they actually have their annual
23 conference in Albany near the --
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Could you leave
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2 that contact info when you leave?
3 MS. JAFFE: Yes, I will, yes, I will.
4 MR. SCHOER: That's what I'll be talking
5 about when I give my testimony.
6 MS. JAFFE: Oh, thank you. Okay, so
7 there you have it, I wanted make sure I said
8 that. Yeah, and, then there wa-, there was
9 another comment that the law shouldn't be changed
10 because they were based on well-reasoned tenets
11 and I quote directly from Judge Kelly, and I
12 wanted to say, I'm so glad he said that because I
13 think that other people who have spoken about
14 research have shown, they really weren't well-
15 reasoned at all. And so again, as a social
16 worker, as an adopted person, you know, going
17 back 80 years ago as Doris had said that when
18 some of these laws were thought of, although
19 still, still active even in the 60s and 70s when
20 I was born, they're, they're fear based and shame
21 based and, as a society, we have really moved
22 away from that and it's really just not necessary
23 anymore. And there's one more thing I wanted to
24 say before, before I close, so here's another
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2 point I wanted to make. I, I'm here in support
3 of the bill although I, I will say actually, for
4 me, it doesn't even really go far enough and I
5 say that to address any concerns about
6 compromise.
7 I don't think that any adoption should
8 be done with an inherent protection of the rights
9 of the adopted person and, and the birth parents
10 and, again, people are doing this underground
11 anyway, they're not waiting for the law to catch
12 up. But I had said to someone earlier, even 18
13 years is a long time to wait for the state to
14 say, you know, when you're 18 then you can start
15 writing letters, then maybe you can make some
16 inquiries, and if you're lucky someone may still
17 be alive and if you're lucky then the whole
18 machine of the bureaucracy that needs to be put
19 in place might result in you having some kind of
20 information about yourself.
21 So I see this as a compromise bill and,
22 in my view, it doesn't go far enough, although I
23 am here supporting it today. I, I'd like to see
24 the need for it, in general just be abolished.
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2 Okay, oh, if anyone has a question, I'll stop and
3 take a question.
4 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay,
5 questions?
6 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: No, we very
7 much appreciate you, your testimony and you've
8 offered your case very well, I, I wish the judges
9 were here to hear some of this testimony.
10 MS. JAFFE: I do, I do, too, I do, too.
11 Thank you.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: We'll, we w
13 --
14 MS. BAHR: Are they going to get all the
15 testimony?
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: We will, we
17 will be sending them certainly a lot of the
18 testimony.
19 MS. JAFFE: Thank you.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: I just
21 wanted to, just make one comment, if, if you're
22 done?
23 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Yes.
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Your
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2 question why way 'til 18, is a very good question
3 and I don't know that there's a good answer.
4 MS. JAFFE: I ca-, I can tell you sort
5 of what the conventional wisdom is and in, in a
6 rhetorical sense, again, as a practitioner in the
7 field, although we're, we're learning more, you
8 know, and, and, and this speaks to a point, too,
9 regarding the point of view of birth mothers, I
10 reunited with my birth family. I'm an Ohio born
11 adoptee though a New York State citizen and I
12 care about this state so I'm here today, even
13 though it doesn't personally affect me. I found
14 my birth parents, Ohio code at the time said that
15 if the birth parents agree then the records can
16 be opened, so we met, had our reunion, and they
17 wrote to the court and said, our, we sanction our
18 daughter knowing who we are because, of course,
19 that already happened.
20 The conventional idea, and many birth
21 mothers have said they, and my birth mother said
22 this to me, I just assumed that when you're 18
23 you're allowed to search. By the way, I do a lot
24 of psycho-education, I have adult adoptees in my
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2 practice who, that, them, their parents and their
3 families have said, when you're 18 then we can do
4 a search. This is the conventional wisdom that's
5 out there, it's, it's a misnomer, it's, and I
6 have to say to people, there's no law that says
7 you cannot search.
8 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: It, it's right
9 up there with the confidentiality misnomer.
10 MS. JAFFE: It, it, it, it's exactly,
11 they're really very intertwined. The idea is
12 that 18 is the general age of emancipation for
13 everything else in our society, some things are
14 21, right. And so it sort of fits that, oh, you
15 know, the, the, even though they're still
16 teenagers, they're, they're old enough and have
17 enough grasp of complex thinking to be able to
18 take in some of this.
19 Some of my mentors in the field have
20 actually pointed out, and, and this is part of my
21 argument for why earlier is better really from
22 day one; number one, 18 is oftentimes when people
23 are going away to leave college and, and it's
24 really not the best match of a time for a young
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2 adult who's leaving home to be taking on what is
3 arguably one of the most personally
4 transformative experiences of your life to go
5 from not knowing anything to possibly even
6 meeting a real human being.
7 By the way, I want to add to the point,
8 many people get their birth certificates and
9 don't act on it, they just want their birth
10 certificate and again, that's why I stress the
11 point that it's, it's really about rights. I, I
12 don't think there's a good enough reason to say
13 to an American, you don't have the right to have
14 your original birth certificate even though every
15 oth-, every other person in this country does.
16 And that the one that we have is, is a fraudulent
17 document and, and, and I encourage you to think
18 about what that does to the psyche of the adopted
19 person and, and how you even view government
20 documents in general.
21 My own birth certificate says that my
22 parents were in Ohio in 1970 and they very well
23 were not. So, again, the age of 18 is generally
24 the age of emancipation.
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2 Birth parents are expecting the call,
3 that's what my birth mother said to me and many
4 birth mothers here, we just thought that when
5 you're 18 that's when you would be allowed to
6 search and so they're sort of, they're passively
7 waiting for their kids to come back to them as
8 grown-up people. I argue that the psychological
9 development of the adopted person as well as the
10 experience, you know, we heard comments about.
11 I think it was, Aaron, Aaron Britvan and
12 we've spoken at the same conference, we're both
13 regular speakers at adoptive parents committee,
14 which is a grassroots organization of adoptive
15 parents in New York that came together because of
16 a lack of post-adoption services and a lack of
17 education and they came together to educate
18 themselves and I've been participating in their
19 conferences and workshops for ten years, he made
20 a comment when you adopt a baby, the bonding is
21 immediate, and he, and I think he emphasized,
22 especially for the adoptive parents.
23 So I wanted to comment on that because I
24 think it's a lot more complex, and again, I'm
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2 dealing with this, the psyches and the minds of
3 individual family members, adoptive parents,
4 birth parents, and adoptees. So here's what I
5 would say and what I always say, babies bring out
6 the love in people, this is true, right? Babies
7 bring out the love in people. But there is a
8 chasm to pass between bonding and having a baby
9 experience being held lovingly, I don't know if
10 you're aware, there's actually a field now called
11 infant mental health.
12 There's a field called infant mental
13 health and they're looking at emotional
14 development, development of the brain and the
15 mind from, from, immediately from birth through
16 their first early years. It's recognized,
17 there's medical data that it does represent a
18 trauma at not only the separation at birth,
19 research has given us terms like genealogical
20 bewilderment to describe the mental landscape of
21 the adopted person, gap in identity is another
22 term that research has coined to, to describe the
23 adopted person's experience. So bonding in a, in
24 a real true sense is hindered in this big
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2 absence, it's really kind of the, the birth
3 parent is really, has been the elephant in the
4 room and that's why changes have been made and
5 I'll stop there.
6 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
7 MS. JAFFE: Thank you very much.
8 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, again,
9 to accommodate a couple of out-of-town witnesses,
10 we're going to go out of order and go first to
11 Lorraine Dusky.
12 MS. LORRAINE DUSKY: My name is Lorraine
13 Dusky, I am one of the --
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Do you swear
15 or affirm that the testimony you are about to
16 give is true?
17 MS. DUSKY: I sw-, absolutely.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
19 MS. DUSKY: I am one of the people that
20 everybody, the people against this bill have been
21 here arguing to protect. I mention that in 1979
22 I wrote a book called Birthmark and I was a, a,
23 it was about the process of giving up my child
24 and I came out publicly.
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2 I instantly became an expert on birth
3 mothers and adoptees because I received hundreds
4 of letters from all over the country, pe-, I mean
5 young adoptees wrote me who were 14 thinking that
6 they were the, they were my children. I mean, I
7 answered all of these letters, I had phone calls
8 from adoptive parents who would hang up thinking
9 that I was the mother. Since then I wrote, I've
10 written many articles about this for everything
11 from the New York Times to, oddly enough, Town
12 and Country, and Cosmopolitan and each time I
13 receive hundreds of letters so I have been in
14 touch with many, many adoptees and birth parents
15 over the years and heard about the pain and
16 anguish that they have endured, either not know-,
17 not knowing from both ends. I also, I want, so
18 that, that is who I am.
19 I'm going to begin with testimony that
20 Mr. Gottfried may not remember but I'm going to
21 remind him, if I had known that someday I could
22 meet my daughter it would have been so much
23 easier to sign those papers. My social worker
24 and I went over this point again and again and
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2 again, never, never could I see her, not ever,
3 she said, time heals all wounds. It does not
4 heal this one. I said those words at a hearing
5 at the New York State Senate Assembly on April
6 28th, 1976. The hearing was called Sealed
7 Adoption Records and Identity. Assemblyman
8 Gottfried was co-chair of that hearing, held for
9 the same purpose we are here today, to consider
10 giving the adoptees the right to learn their true
11 identities. That was 37 years ago, I have
12 arthritis, Chairman Gottfried has a great gray
13 beard and thousands more of adoptees in New York
14 State have died without the legal right to answer
15 the question that most of us here today, well,
16 there's many adoptees, I can't say most, know
17 it's an uncomplicated question, we just know who
18 am I. We know who we are because we are born to
19 our parents. What are we still doing here today?
20 I will summarize this story because it
21 does hit on many of the points, my own personal
22 story, I started writing back to the agency when
23 I was five. I mean, I argued so long with a
24 social worker about ho-, the sealed records
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2 provision of the law and she finally sat back and
3 put down her pencil and said, well, we can't help
4 you. I was in a strange city, I was freaked out
5 that my parents might know that I was even having
6 a baby, the father was pushing the adoption, I
7 really felt I had no choice. I did not know how
8 to arrange a private adoption so that I could
9 know these people, which it would have been my
10 choice.
11 I started writing to the agency in
12 Rochester when I was five. By the time she was
13 six, and I would get a letter back that she was
14 fine and happy with her parents, by the time she
15 was six she began having grand mal seizures and
16 her, her doctor, when her parents started writing
17 to the agency asking for information, they a-,
18 they act-, they actually got no letter and I
19 wrote three more times and they would say each
20 time, she's fine and happy.
21 She was not fine, she was having
22 epileptic seizures that were probably caused by
23 the birth control pills that I took when I was
24 ad-, when I was pregnant when the doctor told me
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2 I was not pregnant. So for about four months, I
3 took birth control pills. I've done a, a fair
4 amount of research and it does look that that is
5 probably the cause of, of the epilepsy that she
6 had. When I finally, at one point, this became
7 some news when DES bec-, came in the news about
8 the, the effect DES given to pregnant women could
9 have, I wrote to the, I started asking doctors
10 about this and I was writing medical instit-,
11 articles, and that absolutely she, not only did
12 her do-, everybody needed to know this and she
13 needed to be checked so they finally sent them a
14 letter but by then she was 12 and it was sort of
15 like, so what, because she continued to have
16 those seizures.
17 So at, at that time, when I, I called
18 her parents when she was 15, I used four month's
19 rent, I used actually money that I had left over
20 from Birthmark, and I hired a private searcher
21 and her information almost overnight because he
22 had found the clues in the book and was able tom
23 from the book to find out who she was.
24 Well, I got a phone call before
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2 Thanksgiving and the following weekend, I was in
3 their home in Madison, Wisconsin. Her parents
4 were relieved, not only because they could find
5 out information, my health information, and also
6 you, there has been a question here about
7 information about the father, I gave, the father
8 and I gave complete health information, none of
9 this was passed on to her adoptive parents. I
10 mean, like my mo-, my father's heart attack and a
11 whole bunch of other things, and he did the same
12 thing. They were not even told that he was Irish
13 and they thought she was ju-, I'm Polish, they
14 thought she was Polish teenager, I was actually a
15 reporter for the Ro-, Rochester, Nicheb-, I'm
16 not, the Democrat and Chronicle at the time.
17 And so that all this information that I
18 thought they had, they didn't have. So then the
19 mother who is a nurse, the adopted mother, she
20 thought I was in a mental institution because I
21 had epil-, because her daughter had epilepsy. I
22 don't what connection this is, Dust Aski
23 (phonetic) had epilepsy, nobody in my family was
24 in the mental hospital at, as she thought. But
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2 this had obviously seeped down to their daughter,
3 that sh-, that somehow she came from damaged
4 goods and so when I got there her self-esteem I
5 would say was pretty much at, at ground zero and
6 it helped tremendously that she knows, knew me
7 but it took a long time to sort of build her up
8 and I don't think I was ever able to do that and
9 the epilepsy has continued throughout her life.
10 So it's j-, it's not just, my case may be special
11 but there are thousands of other people like this
12 so maybe they don't have epilepsy but they have
13 more than just, you know, a feeling that they
14 need to know, it's a deep crying part of their
15 being that, that this law is keeping from them.
16 I was not only not in a mental institution, I was
17 in Albany a few months after she was born working
18 for the Nick News covering the legislature on i-,
19 on oddly enough, ad-, the abortion bill that was
20 going through the legislature. I then gravitated
21 to the --
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Nice of you
23 not to make a connection between a mental
24 institution and the New York State legislature.
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2 MS. DUSKY: Well, that's up for you to
3 make.
4 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: And Chairman
5 Gottfried may be the only member of the
6 legislature that was still there at that time.
7 MS. DUSKY: I think so, I think so, I
8 don't --
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Well,
10 actually --
11 MS. DUSKY: -- who else was there?
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: -- that was
13 1970, I didn't arrive until '71, just if we're
14 being picky.
15 MS. DUSKY: Okay, Joe Pisano was the
16 other guy who was the chair there.
17 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: All right.
18 MS. DUSKY: I went to New York, I became
19 a magazine editor and writer, but at the same
20 time I was also seeking psychotherapy, I was also
21 taking uppers, I was having sort of a
22 sophisticated New York life but I was a
23 completely depressed person, I was suicidal at
24 times and I would always blame it on my daughter.
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2 Today I speak not only for myself but
3 for the millions of mothers who had no choice but
4 to agree that our children be issued new and
5 amended birth certificates and that our, our
6 identities be locked up in some dusty vault
7 somewhere. To say that this is cruel and unusual
8 punishment for our sin is to diminish the true
9 scope of what this means to the vast majority.
10 We do not forget, we do not go out and
11 make new lives for ourselves without remember our
12 lost children. We are lost without knowing who
13 they are. We are always looking in the face of
14 someone our children's age and saying, is that my
15 daughter, does my daughter look like that, could
16 that be him? This is constant, you go to a sho-,
17 you go shopping, you go to a family wedding, you
18 go, you go to a reunion, you're always looking at
19 kids your own kid's age and wondering what they
20 look like or if that person is them. A great
21 many women, in fact, I, we know most, want to
22 know those records open, not, not concealed to
23 protect them but we want them open hoping that
24 our children will find us.
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2 Researchers have documented the overall
3 devastating impact of relinquishing a child by
4 querying birth mothers decades later. I'm going
5 to quote now from a book that comes from England
6 and the notes are, the footnotes, my papers tell
7 you the book: "While only an insignificant
8 proportion of birth mothers have been diagnosed
9 with a mental health problem before adoption,
10 three percent, in the time between parting and
11 contact", that's contact with their child, "24
12 percent of them had a psychiatric diagnosis,
13 mainly for depression".
14 And then the Donaldson Institute, which
15 was Adam's institute, he reiterates his findings
16 in a birth control, birth mother paper: "A
17 significant proportion of women who place
18 children in closed adoption have experienced
19 chronic unresolved grief". That was me until I
20 broke the law. Despite the damning effects of
21 sealed records on most first mothers, the
22 opposition touts us out the woman in the closet,
23 the woman who has never told her husband, her
24 other children, the woman who's life will unravel
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2 if her lost child emerges. But shear
3 embarrassment, no matter how mortifying, is not
4 reason enough to deny anyone his identity. Data
5 from those states that open records pre-, prove
6 beyond a shadow a doubt that these women are
7 truly a small minority.
8 I've attached a form about data from six
9 states that have opened their records since 2000.
10 Since that time, only 579 mothers have re-, have
11 requested no contact, which, while close to 3,000
12 adoptees have asked for their original birth
13 certificates. That means that the vast
14 majorities are out there hoping and waiting,
15 actually the number, if you take the number of
16 sealed birth records in those states and you
17 compare it to the people who have filed a no-
18 contact form, you get 1 person out of 1,429, so
19 you compare those, those two records.
20 This law was never designed to protect
21 us, as we've heard before, our names were not
22 obliterated if there was no adoption, our welfare
23 was never the law's intent. It was to reinforce
24 the notion that adopted children had only one set
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2 of parents to protect, and to protect adoptive
3 parents from, from people like myself. The
4 children, the needs of children who grow up to
5 become adults and the women who bore, bore them
6 were patently ignored. No matter how pathetic we
7 were once, we and the times have changed, we
8 deserve no special treatment at the expense of a
9 whole class of people separated only from the
10 rest of us by adoption.
11 The state affords no protection to any
12 other group, people can't hide from previous
13 marriages, men who don't want to be named in
14 paternity suits have no such power, nor should
15 the states be in the business of protecting birth
16 mothers when it comes at the cost, the great cost
17 that it has. I repeat, simple embarrassment is
18 not reason alone to protect anyone from his true
19 identity. To mo-, a, a, there was some talk
20 about the registry, the big problem with the
21 registry is that there is, adoptees often do not
22 have the correct or enough information to make a
23 real match.
24 The other thing is that most birth
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2 mothers don't even know about the registry, and
3 the second point is, they, many birth mothers
4 feel they don't have the right. I mean, when,
5 when you give up a child, it's kind of pounded in
6 you that you must leave this family alone, that
7 you are kind of like off the page, go away, go
8 away, go away. They need to have them,
9 themselves, the birth mo-, many of them have a
10 sense, I can't interfere, I can't contact this
11 person, I have to wait until they contact me, and
12 often it is too late before this happens because
13 so many adoptees, out of fear of hurting their,
14 their adoptive parents, wait until the adoptive
15 parents die.
16 My husband's best friend did this and he
17 found that both of his parents had died and the
18 only people left are some half-brothers and he,
19 and it's a complicated, extra-marital affair and
20 he doesn't know if they know and so he's been
21 afraid to contact them. But he had to wait until
22 both parents died, and mentally for himself.
23 In conclusion, I want to add some words
24 that came out of a model adoption act that the
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2 then U.S. Department of Health Education and
3 Welfare issued in 1980 after holding numerous
4 hearings around the country with input from
5 adoptees, adoptive parents, social workers, birth
6 parents, and of course, yours truly. Because the
7 words seem to sum up so much about what I think
8 of what is wrong with sealed records: "There can
9 be no legally protected interest in keeping one's
10 identity secret from one's biological offspring.
11 Parents and chil-, child are considered co-owners
12 of the information regarding the event of birth.
13 The birth parent's interest in reputation is not
14 alone, deserving of constitutional protection."
15 These words echo a similar opinion by an Oregon
16 court when the open records law was challenged
17 there because there was an 18 month period
18 between the time that the law passed and the time
19 it came into effect, and so it went through two
20 courts, there is, and this is their final, these,
21 this, I'm not quoting directly, I'm summing it up
22 but they said, there is no fundamental right to
23 adoption nor is there a fundamental right to
24 privacy between the mother and child.
Geneva Worldwide, Inc. 256 West 38 th Street, 10 th Floor, New York, NY 10018 Page 194 1 Standing Committee on Health, January 31, 2014
2 I'm saying that closed records were
3 wrong when they were conceived, they are wrong
4 today. It is time, it is time to right this
5 wrong, to give everyone their original birth
6 certificates, and leave behind this relic of the
7 past that dates from 1935 in New York, and pass
8 the Adoptee Rights Bill. Neither Chairman
9 Gottfried or I have another 37 years to fight for
10 this. I hope that you can find the will and the
11 heart to pass the Adoptee Rights Bill A909 with
12 no caveats. Thank you for your time today.
13 And as, as I said, I attached a page
14 that lists the number, the states that have
15 opened the records and then it lists the number
16 of people who have asked for no contact. No
17 contact, you know, adoptees are not out there,
18 like, you know, hunting to just shoot birth
19 parents down or to embarrass them or hurt them,
20 there have been, in the states where there have
21 been no contact provisions and people have a-,
22 have applied, 80, 79 of them in the state of
23 Oregon did it in the first 18 months during the,
24 during the lawsuit when, when it gets the most
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2 publicity. Since then I think the number is only
3 up to 86 so it's not even one a year that has a-,
4 is adding to that number so that the number of
5 the people who ask for no contact usually are the
6 birth parents who come forward right away and it,
7 and the number doesn't change. But if, if it's
8 1,129, I think it is, who want no contact, it
9 can't, they can't be the reason that this law is
10 still in effect. Thank you.
11 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
12 very much.
13 MS. DUSKY: Any questions?
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Is there and
15 if there is, why, why is there this misconception
16 that all birth mothers live the remainder of
17 their life after giving their child up for
18 adoption in some shameful scorn where they have
19 this, you know, complicated life where
20 everything's a secret and, and, is there an
21 assumption that they have never told their
22 family? Why, why is that?
23 MS. DUSKY: I think the re-, I mean, it
24 i-, I did it, I gave up my child like, like Joyce
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2 Bahr did and some other women, the 1966 seems to
3 be a big year, I mean, it was like, you know, if
4 you, it, it was, it's a big year in giving up
5 children, and it was so shameful and I think
6 somehow that attitude has prefaced, is just a
7 pervasive one, especially in the legal
8 profession, they see the birth mothers at the
9 time they are giving the children up. I mean, I
10 was freaking out that the pa-, that, that it was
11 going to be in the Democrat and Chronicle tha-,
12 because they were publishing births, the father
13 was the political reporter for the newspaper, I
14 mean, my parents were back in Michigan, I did not
15 let them know. I told one girlfriend, I mean, I
16 was living in hiding and I, I had no idea that,
17 you know, ten years later I was going to be,
18 actually I was on the front page of the
19 Knickerbocker News, birth mother comes out of
20 closet, I mean, you know, there are many birth
21 mothers here today and I know many of them, but I
22 mean, some of them have told their husbands and
23 they're not open like me, I mean, I've been on
24 the Today's Show, I get, you know, nasty letters
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2 in the mail from people.
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: So, so you
4 would maybe agree that one of the stigmas
5 associated with, with adoptee rights is that we,
6 we freeze a moment in time --
7 MS. DUSKY: Yes.
8 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: -- where the
9 adoptee is a child and the birth mother is in
10 some situation that's potentially shameful --
11 MS. DUSKY: Right.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: -- or mistaken
13 or something and, and we never get to move past
14 that at all.
15 MS. DUSKY: Right, it's extremely
16 traumatic to have this going on to you and you
17 don't, I mean in '66, I didn't, I mean, I, I hid
18 my pregnancy under big sweatshirts and I, my baby
19 was born a month early. I don't think the, the
20 landlord in my building knew, I mean, and I was
21 like, oh my God, you know, hiding and that, I
22 think that is the, the person that the, today
23 that these judges still see and that is in their
24 mind. You know, I mean not every mother has told
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2 and is going to tell the neighbors but, you know,
3 I'd say, I would say the vast majority have told
4 their husbands and in many, we're finding out as
5 more and more research comes out, many of them
6 get married later on and go on to have other
7 children so many adoptees have full siblings that
8 they, that, you know, they're kept from knowing.
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Now, have you
10 --
11 MS. DUSKY: Now, there are some in the
12 closet, I'm not going to say that there aren't,
13 you know, and I have talked to many confidential
14 and intermediaries from other states and they,
15 the ones that I have talked to who are actual
16 birth mothers, they have a much higher rate of
17 talking to the ones who are still in the closet
18 because they can s-, you know, kind of bring them
19 along more easily.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: I, I think
21 your ahund-, 100 percent right.
22 MS. DUSKY: Thank you.
23 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: I think you
24 make a very good point.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you.
4 MS. DUSKY: Pass it.
5 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: And again
6 going out of order, our next witness is Nancy
7 Horgan.
8 MS. NANCY HORGAN: Hello.
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: And do you
10 swear or affirm that the testimony you're about
11 to give is true?
12 MS. HORGAN: It is true, 100 percent.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, and
14 state your name and --
15 MS. HORGAN: My name is Nancy Horgan,
16 and if I just might make a couple of comments on
17 the fact that, how much I appreciate, I'm from
18 Rhoda Island, I appreciate the opportunity for
19 this assembly to hear this today. There was, to
20 my knowledge, no public discourse on the sealing
21 of these records. No one was able to hold a
22 hearing like this and say, everybody stand who
23 wants these records closed, they were just closed
24 for reasons that we all don't understand or sort
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2 of understand but there was nobody listening at
3 that time to decide, is this a good idea going
4 forward. It went forward and it's been a failed
5 experiment.
6 The other thing is, we heard someone
7 talk today about a smokescreen, that this health,
8 this is a health bill and it's a smokescreen for
9 people just being curious, I a-, I agree that
10 there's a smokescreen going here, 100 percent,
11 you heard it in Rhode Island for 30 years and we
12 worked on the passage of our legislation there
13 but the smokescreen isn't about the needs of the
14 adult adoptee. The smokescreen is crafted by the
15 people who, in my opinion, have money involved in
16 continuing the status quo and their smokescreen
17 to protecting us, the birth parents, has to stop.
18 That's the smokescreen going on here, there is
19 one and that's it.
20 The other thing is that the state is not
21 the only repository of information, okay. Birth
22 mothers are found all the time up and down the
23 street in every state, everywhere. No hari-kari
24 is going on, there's no big headlines or issues
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2 or lawsuits or, you know, suicides that we're
3 aware of that are in such mass that we need to
4 keep these records closed because someone might
5 find out, they're already finding out everywhere.
6 Some mothers don't want contact, absolutely, I
7 know some.
8 I've been in contact with birth mothers
9 that are so steeped in shame, it's been
10 reinforced in their life for so many decades,
11 they can't step away from it. I also know the
12 adult adoptee children of these birth mothers who
13 honor that necessity to deal with this issue in
14 their own way. Adult adoptees aren't inherently
15 bad people, the last thing they want is more
16 rejection. They don't really go into this to
17 ruin the lives of women who said, I haven't told,
18 I can't tell. I know some, there's some in my
19 own family.
20 I'm 63 years old, I spent the last 60
21 years as a citizen of Rhode Island. In 1968,
22 while no 17 year old unmarried father had any
23 such restriction, I was removed from school,
24 prohibited by law to attend while I was pregnant.
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2 I was immediately deemed to be of no worth to my
3 unborn child, as a more deserving adoptive
4 married couple was sought.
5 Ultimately, I was set for, I was sent to
6 a home for unmarried mothers to await delivery.
7 This home, although filled to capacity with
8 pregnant and adolescent women during my entire
9 stay, offered no visits to any hospital, we never
10 saw the inside of a delivery room, we had no
11 childbirth classes, we had no counseling of any
12 options regarding the future plan for our
13 children. I was offered no information regarding
14 my rights as his mother. Indeed, in spite of my
15 strenuous objections, I was not even offered an
16 option to hold my child once he was delivered. I
17 was not offered an opportunity to see my child
18 until I signed termination papers and in the end,
19 I was not ever offered even a moment to hold him
20 and to say good-bye. That was denied to me. And
21 in an, in an act I could not, that could not be
22 seen as more deplorable, I was not offered a
23 chance to recover from a frightening, difficult,
24 and painful childbirth alone, before I was asked
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2 to acknowledge that I was not able to parent my
3 child and to surrender my rights as his mother.
4 In order to return home, I was offered
5 no option other than to agree to eliminate the
6 father of my child from my life. I was not
7 offered an option to grieve the loss of this baby
8 but I was told to never speak of this child
9 again. I was to live as though this life-
10 changing experience had never occurred, I was not
11 offered the option to retain even one beloved
12 memento of this, my first pregnancy, but advised
13 not to complain when, when asked to dispose of
14 any material of evidence of this birth. I was
15 not offered nor allowed one shred of legal
16 documentation to his birth or his adoption
17 including documents I was advised to sign. They
18 just simply took him away. But what I was
19 offered something, and what I was offered from
20 all fronts was the no choice, sealed for life
21 adoption system.
22 I did not choose this system that was in
23 place in Rhode Island with all its secrets and
24 lies and myths and one choice options. But
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2 because I was unmarried when I delivered this
3 baby boy in 1968, it chose me. And in no
4 uncertain terms I was told to forget he happened
5 and go on with my life but he wasn't gone from my
6 life and I was not gone from his. We were both
7 present to and absent from each other. We tried
8 to adapt to a circumstance that basically very
9 few humans are asked to do. Living with this
10 unresolved grief and confusion of a quasi loss
11 overshadowed the joy I sought for in my 20 year
12 marriage at the time and the successful raising
13 of two more children.
14 And I might just say, losing a child to
15 adoption is like losing a child in the woods and
16 you know they're out there somewhere. And the
17 moral push as a mother is to find and help this
18 child, you don't know where they are. It
19 overshadows just about everything you do. I knew
20 he was out there somewhere but I had no idea
21 where.
22 And finally in an effort to take control
23 of my life, when I was 38 I did find the resolve
24 to turn from the choices that were made for me to
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2 make my own choice to find my son. In 1989, in
3 spite of the no-choice system firmly in place in
4 Rhode Island that prohibited by then 21 year old
5 son and I from identifying to each other, we did.
6 We actually did, Rhode I-, the State of Rhode
7 Island isn't the only repository of information,
8 either.
9 Even as an unelighted (sic), unenlight-
10 soc-, even as unenlighted (sic) as society was in
11 1989, our reunion did not cause the sky to fall
12 as predicted. To the contrary, an enormous
13 amount of healing began to take place in both of
14 our lives, and now 25 years later we are as close
15 as any mother and son could possibly be as he
16 sits in this room with me today. He is still a
17 much loved member of his adoptive family and his
18 original family on both sides cherishes his
19 existence and participation in our shared
20 experiences. It has been these choices, not the
21 ones forced upon me in 1968, that it said that I
22 had, I didn't have, that has brought our families
23 an enviable and deserving measure of closeness.
24 It was in 1989 that I joined the growing
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2 movement in Rhode Island to address the issue of
3 the no-choice sealed for life adoption system. I
4 already knew my son at that time but as with all
5 Rhode Island born adult adoptees, he was
6 discriminated against with regard to being able
7 to access his true unaltered birth certificate,
8 like every other non-adopted citizen. He has a
9 right to have what my other children have and
10 although we as advocates of truth knew that we
11 were on the right side of history, we had a
12 thunderous pushback for decades, just like in New
13 York from powerful, a handful of powerful
14 lawmakers who tied up the bills even for heavily
15 restricted passive registries for decades. We
16 were told that access to information would spawn
17 lawsuits against the state if previously sealed
18 information were to be made available to
19 registrants. Even if all parties to the adoption
20 and the court agreed to it, that it would spell
21 the end of adoption in Rhode Island.
22 Many of us who have lived through this
23 experience, spent another quarter century in
24 Rhode Island struggling to educate the woefully
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2 uninformed public and members of our general
3 assembly until we met with success in 2011. And
4 since that law restored unrestricted access for
5 adult adoptees became effective in July 2012, the
6 Rhode Island Department of Health has issued
7 nearly 1,000 original birth certificates. With,
8 I might say, no fanfare at all. Life just went
9 on. No sky has fallen, no headlines of lawsuits
10 have been filed. Unrestricted access created
11 nary a peep from any corner. It simply serves
12 those who choose to take control of their lives
13 and make their own adult choices. And this
14 includes original parents. By provision of the
15 contact preference form, original parents can
16 finally inform an adult adoptee of their choice
17 not to be contacted if this is their desire, and
18 there are some out there.
19 People who wish to be left alone can
20 remain protected by the police department, it
21 cannot and should not be a matter of the state.
22 The contact preference form allows the only
23 option for original parents to express a true
24 choice without infringing on the rights of their
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2 adult offspring to know the truth.
3 And with the respect to the State of New
4 York, you are engaging in a huge disservice to
5 original families by implying that you can
6 guarantee their anonymity. Acknowledging that in
7 2014 guaranteed anonymity is simpler, is simply
8 no longer the case would help all parties make
9 informed choices on how to proceed. Ditching the
10 secrets and shame would be the obvious remedy as
11 opposed to continuing to serve up false hope that
12 the state can protect the secret.
13 Thousands of reunions have occurred
14 since adoption records were sealed retroactively
15 in 1940, including the people that were promised
16 that they would be opened. The human desire
17 cannot be altered with the stroke of pen. The
18 draconian state mandated no-choice sealed for
19 life system does not stop families from reuniting
20 with each other, it just costs them small
21 fortunes and creates undue hardship, hurt, and
22 havoc in lives of those who are seeking answers.
23 Every person sitting here today,
24 although there's two, I thought there would be
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2 ten, has the opportunity to, to overcome this
3 insidious, hollow opposition in the State of New
4 York. We had it in Rhode Island, too, we had
5 every single same argument. We promised. The
6 opposition doesn't have a leg to stand on. Few,
7 if any, of them have walked in the shoes of a
8 surrendering parent or an adult adoptee. Their
9 fears are unfounded and yet they are able to
10 survive due to the pressures of the burgeoning
11 adoption industry and politics, and I urge you to
12 take the bold step that our state has taken and
13 be done with this travesty of justice. I urge
14 you to seek support from your colleagues to pass
15 this long overdue legislation and until then, we
16 will not rest. Thank you.
17 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
19 very much. Our next witness is Michelle
20 Wadowski. And do you swear or affirm that the
21 testimony you're about to give is true?
22 MICHELLE WADOWSKI, FACILITATOR;
23 MANHATTAN BIRTH PARENTS SUPPORT GROUP: Yes.
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: I do, thank
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2 you, if you could just state your name and go
3 ahead.
4 MS. WADOWSKI: My name is Michelle
5 Wadowski, I'm the current --
6 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: And if you
7 could speak a little more closely into the
8 microphone.
9 MS. WADOWSKI: Is this better?
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Maybe a
11 little, okay, great.
12 MS. WADOWSKI: How's that? My name is
13 Michelle Wadowski, I'm the current facilitator of
14 the Manhattan Birth Parents Support Group. 37
15 years ago this month, I relinquished my son for
16 adoption. The day I signed the papers for my
17 son's adoption, I was never promised
18 confidentiality, and I never wanted
19 confidentiality. I relinquished my son so he
20 could have a better life, something I was not
21 able to give him at that time in my life. I did
22 not relinquish him because I needed to hide. The
23 forced anonymity imposed on me was society's
24 judgment trying to tell me that there was shame
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2 in relinquishing a child for adoption. I have
3 not done anything to be ashamed of, I have given
4 my son a life and he has become a contributing
5 member of society.
6 An adoptee should have the same right as
7 every American to know about their birth, to have
8 access to their original birth certificate. Most
9 Americans take an interest in their family
10 history, to know their identity. Without access
11 to their birth record, records this right is
12 denied. An adoptee should have the same right as
13 every American to know their medical history;
14 without access to their birth records, this right
15 is denied.
16 Both of my parents died fairly young,
17 after meeting me, my son was able for the first
18 time to give his doctor information on his family
19 history. Because of this he was able to make
20 major changes to his lifestyle so as to improve
21 his health. The question is, why is access to
22 adoptee's birth records so controversial. I have
23 been in reunion with my son for seven years,
24 during that time he has been able to learn about
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2 his history, improved his health, and we have
3 developed a relationship. This relationship did
4 not interfere with the relationship with his
5 family. If anything, their relationship has
6 improved. Transparency in this case has only
7 improved the lives of all involved. It is 2014,
8 the time for secrecy in adoption is past.
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
10 very much. Questions? Thank you. Okay, our
11 next witness is Claudia Corrigan Darcy? Left,
12 okay. Jane Acton and Elsa Chung? And do you
13 both swear or affirm that the testimony you are
14 about to give is true?
15 MS. JANE ACTON: We do.
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
17 MS. ACTON: Thank you, I am an adoptee
18 and I'm here, my, my point is specifically to
19 touch on --
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Could you
21 just state your name for the record?
22 MS. ACTON: Oh, oh, sorry, my name is
23 Jane Acton.
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay.
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2 MS. ACTON: Yes. And I, my testimony is
3 to, to counter a specific argument that those
4 judges had made which was talking about other
5 roots that are available to adoptees other than
6 the original birth certificate, so to touch on
7 those specific other options that they were
8 alluding to. So thank you for the opportunity to
9 present testimony supporting legislation to allow
10 adoptees like myself to have access to our
11 original birth certificates.
12 I am an adopted adult, age 42, the
13 medical history, genetic history, and ancestral
14 roots of adoptees like myself and my children are
15 being subjected to laws that reflect the shame
16 and secrecy of a time period that is no longer
17 the societal norm. My right to know my history
18 should not be revoked or put into the hands of
19 third parties because of the date of the birth,
20 of my birth, and the societal norms of that past
21 era.
22 I am a New York City resident from the
23 Bronx where I have lived for 15 years and where I
24 am raising my family, and this is my daughter. I
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2 wish to share a brief description of my journey
3 through the roots that, that those judges were
4 talking about, to access my personal information
5 because the unnecessary obstacles and needless
6 third party involvement I have experienced
7 reflect on so many levels why adult ad-, adoptees
8 should be treated just like any other citizen.
9 We should, we should be able to apply
10 for and receive our own legal documents of birth
11 at the age of majority without restriction, a
12 right so many other citizens take for granted. I
13 have learned very recently that I was born to
14 high school sweethearts from neighboring small
15 Midwest farms who tried to bridge their
16 relationship while attending different colleges.
17 That is so easy to relate to but what happened to
18 her was indicative of that time period in 1971.
19 She was sent all the way across the country alone
20 to hide away and was given room and board with a
21 family on the condition that she serve as care-
22 giver and children for those months. So there
23 she was caring for someone else's children while
24 going through the struggle in her own personal
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2 life, regarding her own maternity that would soon
3 be relinquished.
4 My closed adoption was not, I'm sorry,
5 filed in New York but in a location with similar
6 discriminatory laws as New York. My record of
7 birth could only be opened by a judge, I'm sorry,
8 in, who had the co-
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: That's okay,
10 take your time, have some water.
11 MS. ACTON: For, for a good cause. And
12 so I spent a long time wondering, decades
13 wondering what good cause was. I tried various
14 reunion registries to no avail because my ju-,
15 I'm sorry, registries are not a solution.
16 Pregnant mothers like mine were sent away,
17 geographic borders crossed, she never went back
18 to that pla-, she never went back there, people
19 move.
20 So my mother encouraged me to petition
21 the court anyways about a year ago because she
22 loves me and wants me to be healthy, wants my da-
23 , my daughters to be healthy and wants to know
24 who I am and where I came from. And so it was my
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2 mother that spawned this, for me to go further.
3 She had nursed my father through many bouts of
4 cancer until he passed away along with his two
5 brothers from the same disease, so she knows how
6 important medical history is.
7 When I received the su-, the sub-, the
8 judges were talking about the highest court in
9 the state, well, I thought -- thank you very much
10 -- I got the court order from the highest court
11 in the state, of that state, and it listed, to my
12 surprise, reason to break the seal of adoption as
13 an optional field, so I left it blank, I was
14 scared to say the wrong thing. It was approved
15 by the judge with no reason of good cause even
16 needing to be explained, it was obvious to the j-
17 , courts, the system, the laws require that form
18 but it was obvious to the judge that the adoptee
19 access to this information is in itself, good
20 cause. It also reflected the number of cases now
21 flooding courts across the country. Without
22 standards defining good cause, the, there, sorry,
23 this is arbitrary and inequitable treatment.
24 There was no need for this layer of government
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2 intervention when there was nothing to judge and
3 no explanation of good cause needing to be
4 explained.
5 As it is in New York, I was forced as an
6 adoptee to then use a confidential interm-,
7 intermediary system to access my information.
8 This was through the organization that
9 facilitated the adoption which was Catholic
10 Charities that also operates in New York.
11 Confidential intermediaries are not effective
12 substitutes, I first had to pay Catholic
13 Charities $100 for non-identifying information.
14 It was a single page of four short paragraphs and
15 I now realize two errors that were caused by
16 their carelessness. The physical description of
17 my natural father was the physical description
18 written of my natural mother. I al-, I always
19 knew from my adopted mother that he was a light-
20 haired Scandinavian so growing up I always knew
21 that he was the, kind of the one I came, you
22 know, biologically came from but verbatim, word
23 for word, her description, her hair color, her
24 eye color, were written as his hair color and eye
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2 color. The Catholic Charities description of him
3 matched verbatim her description as well as her
4 eye color. I have since met him and eye color
5 does not change.
6 Further, the heritage of her father was
7 a similar cut in case job. Her surname is
8 clearly Irish and her father was Irish yet the
9 description of her in my non-ident-, of her
10 father in my non-identifying information matched
11 word for word the heritage of his father and his
12 Scandinavian heritage. Why should my roots and
13 i-, ethnicity be held hostage to a cut and paste
14 job?
15 Next, I had to pay Catholic Charities
16 $500 to conduct a search to see if they would
17 agree to contact, as that was the only way for me
18 to obtain this access to my information.
19 Personally, I have problems with the Catholic
20 church, I was educated in schools and the
21 archdiocese of Boston during a time when a
22 pedophile was knowingly transferred to my school
23 by Cardinal law. I don't want to spend a
24 significant amount of money to this organization
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2 despite the many good works that they do but I
3 had no choice of where to spend my money, and
4 that's a lot of money when you're raising kids in
5 New York.
6 As part of, of their protocol of
7 Catholic Charities, I had to provide evidence of
8 my psychological wellbeing by ha- by having a
9 Catholic Charities form completed but it could be
10 completed according to Catholic Charities by any
11 licensed social worker and it did not have to be
12 a social worker familiar with adoption or
13 children's issues. So therefore, I phoned an old
14 friend from college who is a licensed social
15 worker and who's job in Boston is placing elderly
16 assisted, elderly in assisted living homes in
17 Massachusetts and he completed their attestation
18 form over the phone. Here was yet another person
19 who did not need to be involved in my personal
20 business but who was required to be through this
21 archaic structure that these judges were
22 referring to designed to preserve
23 confidentiality.
24 Further, as an adop-, as an adoptee I
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2 was the only one required to be evaluated,
3 psychologically evaluated in this search process.
4 My biological parents were never asked to be
5 psychologically evaluated as part of this
6 reunion. Then, my materials for Catholic
7 Charities were complete June 1st of this past
8 year and Catholic Charities said they would place
9 a call to her right away so I was patient, let
10 them, you know. So I called Catholic Charities
11 August 15th, having heard nothing to find that
12 they hadn't made a call and put a blame on me in
13 jest by saying, the squeaky wheel gets the
14 grease. They said I should call again in a
15 week's time if I didn't hear from them. A week's
16 time passed and they still hadn't reached out to
17 her but said they would do as soon as we hung up.
18 They called her and she was spooked, of
19 course, understandably on the phone and hung up
20 on them. But then she immediately called her
21 local Catholic Charities to vet the phone call,
22 immediately called the, the social worker back
23 and asked them for my phone number. I asked the
24 Catholic Charities, I was nervous about complain-
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2 , and my mother would say, my, my mother, my
3 adoptive mother as for clarification, who was
4 saying, get your money back, they're not
5 providing the service. You have no, you have no
6 choices as an adoptee, you ha-, I'm scared to
7 complain, you know, and so I, I asked her how
8 many, you know, cases she has on her desk and she
9 said she had ten. Now, that's $6,000, you know,
10 there's an economy that is behind this reunion
11 system that the judges did not mention and that
12 was very clear, I think, in my situation.
13 My birth mother said that she expected
14 to hear from me when she -- when I was 18 and 21
15 and assumed that meant that I was okay, so like,
16 like was just mentioned she felt that she didn't
17 have the right to, to look. And that proves that
18 she was not granted anonymity and confidentiality
19 because she said that she told her teenaged
20 daughters about, about me, when I was approaching
21 the age of 18, for some reason she thought that
22 that was when I would first be reaching out. So
23 the, the name of my biological father was
24 mistakenly blipped out by Catholic Charities in
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2 my next phone call with them. Perhaps they
3 assumed that my biological mother had mentioned
4 it and I didn't ask, I'm an adult, I work with
5 each person independently, I don't put people in
6 awkward situations, I'm not a villain. But they
7 blipped out his name in error but I decided to
8 pretend I didn't hear it and I glossed over the
9 oversight and I thought I would go through the
10 natural search channels to pursue a connection to
11 him.
12 For weeks I was told he was hard to get
13 a hold of, hard to find, however, I knew because
14 I knew his name now, that he was a partner of a
15 law firm with an e-mail, a phone number, and a
16 work phone number. Some lawyers, perhaps you
17 know, have like where they went to law school,
18 where they did their undergrad, it's, it's there
19 and he was a college, he's on file. So policy
20 assu-, that assumes that adoptees will do
21 something harmful ina-, and inappropriate with
22 this information in which, to which other
23 citizens have, is offensive and wrong.
24 I would've handled my own personal story
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2 in a far more sensitive and professional way than
3 this agency social worker and this archaic
4 structure. No one should have the power to
5 subject a person to a lifetime restraining order
6 that bars her and her children from knowing their
7 own personal history. The law should trust
8 adults to behave as adults but adoptees are
9 forever treated like the infants we were decades
10 ago. I have been through inane hoops and
11 obstacles that really serve no purpose.
12 I haven't told my natural mother of the
13 struggles with this system because she has been
14 through so much already. In 1971, she was not
15 thinking about access to my medical history,
16 these issues were not discussed with mothers at
17 the time, I don't believe. I am the victim of
18 discrimination when I am forced to submit to the
19 powers of others concerning my most personal
20 details of my life. I am not a child yet the
21 intermediary process has placed me and other
22 adoptees in New York forever in this childlike
23 position.
24 This bill would be fair and provide fair
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2 and equitable access to personal information for
3 all citizens born in the state. Bear in mind, I
4 have still not been allowed to see my original
5 birth certificate so I hope my testimony shows
6 that the system that they were talking about
7 requires me to contact them. And I'm happy, you
8 know, to, to make that connection with them but
9 it requires that they be contacted, it requires
10 so much n-, it's not, it doesn't serve the
11 purpose. Thank you.
12 MS. ELSA CHUNG: Hello, my name is Elsa
13 Chung and I am 12 years old. I am a 7th grader
14 at Riverdale Country School. I always look for
15 ways to improve the world around me. One thing
16 that will indefinitely improve our society is
17 this bill.
18 My mom is an adoptee who was reunited
19 with my biological grandparents a few months ago.
20 Many people are not that lucky and do not have
21 access to their own personal history. A great
22 thing about living in New York is learning about
23 our state's history and the important
24 contributions our ancestors have made in the
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2 formation of our country, state, and this great
3 city.
4 I have studied the impact that settlers
5 and immigrants have made in shaping our culture.
6 In school, I have been asked to do projects on my
7 family's history in this country. Until now,
8 this meant only connecting to my father's history
9 as an immigrant from South Korea in the late
10 1990s. Until a few months ago, I did not know
11 that my ancestors were part of a wave of
12 immigrants from Norway to America in the 1800s to
13 settle as pioneers in the plains of the upper
14 Midwest. I had studied the movement of
15 immigrants to the western part of America but I
16 did not realize that I was connected to that time
17 period. Instead, since my sister and I knew so
18 little of our roots on my mom's side we would
19 joke around, when the Vikings from the Capital
20 One commercial came on tv, what's in your wallet,
21 we would joke around and say that they were our
22 ancestors. We did not know that our ancestors
23 were more than silly Vikings we saw on T.V.
24 This bill does, this bill does not only
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2 affect the adoptee but his and h-, his or her
3 children, too, this bill affects me. This bill,
4 with this bill we can learn about our personal
5 history and, and our connection to this, to the
6 city and state and country.
7 My ancestors came through New York but I
8 did not know that until now. This was not my
9 biological grandmother's fault, she was doing
10 what she felt was her only option at the time.
11 She could not foresee the impact this would have
12 in preventing my generation from learning our
13 history, too. She is a loving woman and she even
14 sent my sister and me a lovely book of Shel
15 Silverstein poems when she connected with us a
16 few months ago.
17 Please pass this bill to help my
18 generation, too, as we all have the need to
19 connect to the world we live, live in and the
20 nation we are part of. Thank you.
21 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Terrific.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Yeah, Ms.
23 Chung, would you like an internship? Love to
24 have you volunteer and maybe do a research
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2 project on this legislation. Would you be
3 interested?
4 MS. ACTON: She, she --
5 MS. CHUNG: Yes.
6 MS. ACTON: She, she's presenting to her
7 school on this issue.
8 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Okay, I have a
9 staff member in the back, Celia, if you want to
10 contact Ms. Chung about an internship on this
11 project after, after her testimony.
12 MS. CHUNG: Thank you, thank you.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: A question?
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: A question to
15 Ms. Acton, did you say, for the purposes of
16 clarifying, can you tell us what state that is in
17 just so --
18 MS. ACTON: I knew you were going to ask
19 that and I'm happy to --
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Just so we can
21 base legislation not on it.
22 MS. ACTON: -- I'm happy to show it to
23 you this way. I'm very s-, as an adoptee you get
24 very scared by saying the wro-, to, I'm very
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2 nerv-, my brother for example --
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: He's an
4 adoptee also?
5 MS. ACTON: --is an adoptee, and I'm
6 very nervous that it can get back to, to them
7 that I am complaining because then he is going to
8 be searching and he has medical issues that I
9 don't, I actually have retirement issues, they
10 all live until 100 so I have to pump up my 401k
11 but, but I'm very nervous as an adoptee and I'm
12 going to do it right now. This is where I went
13 through.
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you.
15 MS. ACTON: But I am very nervous
16 because the, the person that does the non-
17 identifying information and the, these
18 confidential intermediaries have so much power,
19 they could just say, can't be found, this, you
20 know, they, they write a blurb that, so I'm very
21 nervous that my, my family and others can be
22 screwed over.
23 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: And the other
24 question I have is to Ms. Chung. How great was
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2 it to learn about your ancestors and how they
3 came to the Midwest and helped build a nation?
4 MS. CHUNG: It was amazing. I, I
5 learned and I could think, and I said, oh, I'm
6 finally related to that time period. I, I just
7 studied it, I didn't realize that I, I was
8 connected to that movement and now I can say, oh
9 --
10 MS. ACTON: You're Norwegian, yeah.
11 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: I'm jea-, I'm
12 jealous of you, I'm very, I really am. And, and
13 the second is, how proud of your mom are you?
14 MS. CHUNG: Oh, I'm very proud, she's
15 awesome.
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: She, good,
17 good. Thank you.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
19 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: We think she's
20 awesome, too.
21 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, our
22 next witness is Maureen Sheridan. And do you
23 swear or affirm that the testimony you're about
24 to give is true?
Geneva Worldwide, Inc. 256 West 38 th Street, 10 th Floor, New York, NY 10018 Page 230 1 Standing Committee on Health, January 31, 2014
2 MS. MAUREEN SHERIDAN: Yes.
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
4 and state your name and go ahead.
5 MS. SHERIDAN: My name is Maureen
6 Sheridan, now. I was born Beth Lyons (phonetic)
7 at St. Johns Hospital in Queens in early January
8 in the mid 1970s and was adopted through the
9 Catholic Home Bureau several months later. I
10 spent the months in between in the New York City
11 foster care system. I've been told through the
12 years that I was a good baby because I never
13 cried and I used to think that was a compliment.
14 Now, as someone who works and studies in the
15 mental health related field, I wonder what
16 happened in those months from the separation from
17 my birth mother through being matched with my
18 adoptive parents that taught me when I was that
19 little tiny infant that crying was of no use.
20 I always knew I was adopted through a
21 closed adoption, just like everyone else I knew
22 who was my age and adopted. I didn't start to
23 look into my adoption history until I was in
24 college, mostly because I assumed there is
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2 nothing I would be able to learn and because I
3 didn't want to hurt my adoptive parents.
4 I started looking for information when,
5 within several months, two different medical
6 professionals told me it might be important for
7 me to learn about my medical history. Once might
8 have suspected I might be diabetic and the other
9 one I had a suspicious mole removed and biopsied.
10 Both times I had been asked about that history
11 and had to reply, I'm adopted, I don't know.
12 I then went on to receive my non-
13 identifying information for the first time almost
14 20 years ago now, and learned some of my birth
15 family's medical history, that is through 1975.
16 The information that was there was minimal, my
17 birth mother after all was young then. The only
18 thing I learned about her health was that she had
19 had extensive dental surgery when she was 16. I
20 also learned that they were poor, that her father
21 was extremely hot-tempered and abusive and that
22 she was convinced to give me up by her mother and
23 her sister so they could keep the pregnancy for
24 him, from him. My biological father did not know
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2 I existed at the time of my birth.
3 So after I finished my first graduate
4 school program and was working at the University
5 in Pennsylvania, I made four separate trips to
6 the New York Public Library, painstakingly
7 combing through the birth book for my year, which
8 is how I came to find out that my birth mother,
9 birth mother had named me. This is the first
10 time it had really struck me that she hadn't just
11 given me away or abandoned me, she had cared
12 enough to give me a name.
13 Unfortunately, that's about as far as
14 I've gotten in finding out much more about my
15 original identity, by birth family, or their
16 medical history, my medical history. I haven't
17 stopped trying to find out more, I lost $1800 I
18 couldn't afford during that job that paid me
19 $24,000 a year out of grad school, to a predatory
20 private investigator that had promised me
21 everything and gave me nothing in my search for
22 answers and kept asking for more money. That's
23 what happens sometimes with private
24 investigators.
Geneva Worldwide, Inc. 256 West 38 th Street, 10 th Floor, New York, NY 10018 Page 233 1 Standing Committee on Health, January 31, 2014
2 I have traveled out to the library in
3 Queens and taken time off from my job now, which
4 is busy as the director of student support and
5 crisis management in my current university, to
6 look up obituaries on micro-fiche, going through
7 them day by day, month by month, to look for
8 others with my original last name. I have spent
9 hours on ancestry.com armed with the little
10 information I do have and while I've made some
11 potential progress, I still don't have any solid
12 leads.
13 I once tried to request my birth
14 certificate under my birth name thinking it was
15 worth a chance. Of course, I was told I wasn't
16 entitled to that information; I am not entitled
17 to my own birth certificate. Like so many
18 others, my adoption records burned in a fire in
19 the mid-90s, Catholic Home Bureau. The hospital
20 I was born in has since closed, the lawyer that
21 handled the adoption has retired and doesn't seem
22 to have retained any records, my adoptive parents
23 now completely supportive have requested them and
24 received nothing. The records that are, I was
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2 adopted in Suffolk County, the county of that
3 great judge that spoke before, who's not, the
4 county's not known for letting you go through
5 their court process.
6 Sometimes it almost feels like I don't
7 exist. I will keep looking, though, and one day
8 I will find what I'm looking for, I just hope
9 that I find a person, preferably my birth mother,
10 who can tell me the rest of our story and not a
11 grave to visit like so many others. If she wants
12 contact, that is, if she doesn't it would be
13 difficult but I would understand as long as I
14 could get more extensive updated past 1975
15 medical information. It shouldn't be this hard,
16 why is it this hard.
17 And now it's not just about me anymore,
18 it is also about my children. When my daughter
19 was born, I didn't expect to become so
20 overwhelming, overwhelmed to meet somebody, to
21 hold somebody who was biologically related to me.
22 I had never seen someone who shared my features,
23 somebody I could look at and see myself reflected
24 back even in the smallest of ways. It was, by
Geneva Worldwide, Inc. 256 West 38 th Street, 10 th Floor, New York, NY 10018 Page 235 1 Standing Committee on Health, January 31, 2014
2 far, the best most amazing awe-inspiring moment
3 of my life. So after she, the first person I
4 ever met who shared my blood, my child who I felt
5 this overpowering, all encompassing love for,
6 died suddenly in infancy as-, asked once more --
7 and I hardly ever do cry really -- asked once
8 more for my medical history and whether we had a
9 history of sudden death in our families. My
10 husband was able to say, no. I had to say, once
11 again, I was adopted, I don't know. I couldn't
12 even give her that.
13 I've gone on now to have two sons, when
14 Liam, my first, was five mo-, six months my
15 husband walked into daycare to the paramedics
16 rushing in. It was Liam, they said he had
17 stopped breathing. He started breathing again on
18 his own, we were cautioned to take him to the
19 hospital just in case, we spent the next several
20 days, six actually, at Cornell, watching them
21 attach electrodes to his head. Since he was six
22 months old, they had to attach the full adult
23 amount of electrodes, stuck needles in his heel
24 and monitor his heart. He was a breath-holder
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2 from when he was two months old and got upset.
3 So to this day, we're not really sure what
4 happened that day, whether he was crying and they
5 didn't pay attention to him and he passed out,
6 and his test results were ambiguous so he
7 could've just been crying to the point of holding
8 his breath. To be on the safe side, he had a
9 halter monitor, took medication to keep his heart
10 beating at a certain rate, and had a pediatric
11 cardiologist until he was one. He's a healthy,
12 almost five year old, boy now but back then, over
13 and over again to the rounds on the papers, to
14 every different doctor we talked to, I had to
15 say, I'm sorry, I don't know, I was adopted.
16 When our second son, Elliott, was born
17 they had detected what they thought might be an
18 abnormality that indicated lung QT syndrome.
19 Lung QT syndrome causes 3,000 to 4,000 sudden
20 deaths in children and young adults each year.
21 It is also very under-diagnosed because it can't
22 be tested for after death. Additionally, you are
23 at increased, increased risk if anyone in your
24 family has ever had it, which is why it's really
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2 important to know if you have a history of sudden
3 death in your family, and there I was at another
4 doctor's office and during another harrowing
5 wait, this time with a four week old infant. We
6 were incredibly relieved to find out he didn't
7 actually appear to have it after all and Elliott
8 is now a happy, rambunctious three year old. But
9 in the meantime, while I was waiting to find out,
10 I said it to him this time, too, I'm sorry,
11 Elliott, I'm adopted, I don't know.
12 We would like to have one more child but
13 I'm getting close to 40 now and I'm not sure that
14 I really want to do it without knowing more about
15 my medical history. Unsealing my birth
16 certificate would lead me to finding out answers
17 that could help us make a more informed decision.
18 I don't want to have to say to another child that
19 I'm sorry, I don't know, I'm adopted.
20 Taken from the American Medical
21 Association's Website, gathering a complete and
22 accurate family medical history is extremely
23 important as genetic medicine explains more
24 diseases. In fact, the surgeon general has named
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2 Thanksgiving as Family History Day, since several
3 family members gather on Thanksgiving Day it is a
4 great opportunity to talk to family members and
5 learn more about their history. Other medical
6 organizations and associations also have
7 statements about the importance of family history
8 but what about those of us who sit around the
9 Thanksgiving table with a family that we love
10 very much but who can't tell us anything about
11 our own health histories?
12 When can I stop feeling somehow
13 responsible for failing my children because I
14 can't fill out that section on the medical
15 questionnaire or provide answers during medical
16 rounds when my child is in the hospital bed?
17 When will adoptees be able to access their own
18 biological health histories just like everybody
19 else? Unsealing birth certificates would be a
20 step in that direction. And, yes, access to
21 health information is my biggest motivation in
22 speaking to you today but there is also another
23 very important reason, too.
24 Before my adoption was finalized my
Geneva Worldwide, Inc. 256 West 38 th Street, 10 th Floor, New York, NY 10018 Page 239 1 Standing Committee on Health, January 31, 2014
2 birth mother went to court in Suffolk County to
3 try and get me back. When I first heard that
4 story, I actually was, under the impression it
5 was after it was finalized. I just learned
6 several months ago this wasn't true. I felt
7 sorry, I felt terrible for my adoptive parents,
8 how terrifying that must have been for them. But
9 I now really feel horrible for that young girl
10 who had no access to resources, who made her way
11 to that court out in Suffolk County to try to get
12 custody of me back. My parent's lawyer had told
13 them not to worry, he would take care of it. The
14 case never made it out of that judge's chambers
15 and my parents were just told that it was no
16 longer an issue. Who knows what the lawyer, the
17 social worker who was working with my parents and
18 very supportive of them being my parents, and the
19 judge said to that young girl to get her stop, to
20 drop the case. I would like to know if she would
21 like to tell me, I just have to find her first.
22 I've heard that 95 percent of birth
23 mothers are happy to be reunited with their
24 children that they have lost to adoption, most of
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2 them were not promised confidentiality as you've
3 heard from others today, so much as told to
4 contact, not to contact or look for those
5 children because it would harm those children.
6 Many were coerced into giving their children so
7 who is this law protecting? Not that 95 percent,
8 not adoptees, not the parents of adult adoptees.
9 Is it that very small minority that the law
10 allegedly, allegedly protects, what the damage it
11 does to the rest of us. Martin Luther King
12 Junior said that an unjust law is a code that a
13 numerical or power majority compels a minority
14 group to obey but does not make binding on
15 itself. This is difference made legal. You have
16 the power to change this unjust law and allow
17 adoptees the same rights as everyone else. Will
18 you?
19 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: What, what
20 hospital were you born in?
21 MS. SHERIDAN: St. Johns Hospital in
22 Queens.
23 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: I was born
24 there also, it's been closed for about six years
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2 now.
3 MS. SHERIDAN: Yeah, I actually tried
4 to, I looked at their storage facility and
5 actually made a request with my birth name and
6 the days I assumed I would've been in the
7 hospital to see if any of the records came up but
8 they said they had no record of me, either.
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: I was, I'm a
10 Catholic Home Bureau baby as well, so it, but, I
11 was born upstate, in, also the hospital had
12 closed so there's nothing there.
13 MS. SHERIDAN: Yes, and then, the fire
14 happened after I got my non-identifying
15 information the first time so they can't get
16 anymore, all the adoption records were lost. I
17 got it again recently this past year and it was
18 actually different than the first non-identifying
19 information I got so I'm not sure what's right.
20 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: And as long
21 as we're sharing, I was born in French Hospital
22 on West 29th Street and it has been an apartment
23 building since about when you were born.
24 MS. SHERIDAN: Thank you.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you for
3 coming.
4 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, let's
5 see, our next witness is Mary Anne Devine.
6 MS. MARY ANNE DEVINE: Hi, I'm Mary Anne
7 Devine.
8 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: And do you
9 swear or affirm that the testimony you're about
10 to give is true?
11 MS. DEVINE: I do.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay.
13 MS. DEVINE: I wrote e-, as you see on
14 my written statement, I wrote good morning.
15 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Yes.
16 MS. DEVINE: I was wishful thinking.
17 But --
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Good afternoon.
19 MS. DEVINE: But , you know, you've
20 still got more people to hear from so I'm glad to
21 be here.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Well, it's
23 morning somewhere.
24 MS. DEVINE: Yes.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: You also come
3 from the state of that surrogate judge.
4 MS. DEVINE: Yes, my name is Mary Anne
5 Devine. The name I was given by my loving
6 parents, Geraldine and Donald Devine, at eight
7 months of age. Prior to that I was Mary Burn, a
8 name given to me by my mother, Mary, who made the
9 best choice she could for me under the
10 circumstances in 1962. I thank all of them for
11 the life that I have lived.
12 I was born in the Bronx, I've lived on
13 Long Island for most of my life except for a few
14 years that I lived in Buffalo. I went to Sunne
15 under-grad and graduate school. I am a proud New
16 Yorker and I am proud to be here today and I
17 thank you for granting me the opportunity to
18 speak, as I'm, as the hormones and the time of
19 day.
20 I wish to speak to you today to advocate
21 for legislation to adult, to allow adult adoptees
22 access to their original birth certificate. I
23 have many reasons for this but due to time
24 constraints I will share my two most important
Geneva Worldwide, Inc. 256 West 38 th Street, 10 th Floor, New York, NY 10018 Page 244 1 Standing Committee on Health, January 31, 2014
2 reasons with you.
3 The first reason is personal, in 1991, I
4 requested from the agency that I was adopted
5 through, the New York Foundling Hospital here in
6 New York City, for my non-identifying and medical
7 information. After filling out forms and paying
8 a process fee, I was sent information regarding
9 biological family history that was in their
10 records and social workers, office workers,
11 administrative assistants, supervisors, were all
12 allowed free access to view my personal
13 information but I was not.
14 In 1996, in order to claim my dual
15 status, dual status citizenship as an Irish
16 citizen, you're allowed that if you have a parent
17 or grandparent that was born there. It was
18 necessary for me to request that the Foundling
19 send proof to the Irish consulate that I was
20 eligible to receive this. At that time period,
21 you needed to prove blood lineage even though my
22 paternal adoptive family was of Irish-born
23 citizens and I should've been eligible through
24 them, as a caveat that I put in there. The Irish
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2 consulate has since changed that rule because
3 they realized it was discriminatory. My request
4 was granted by the Foundling and the record
5 information office at the Foundling forwarded the
6 necessary information to the Irish consulate,
7 again social workers, supervisors, and office
8 workers at the adoption agency as well as office
9 workers at the Irish consulate in New York and
10 Dublin were allowed to access my information and
11 my original birth certificate but I was not.
12 Which, and I know you've, other people have
13 echoed this today but it's very hard to describe
14 how unsettling and degrading it is to be deemed
15 unfit and unjustified in being allowed to have
16 and see information about myself that others are
17 allowed but I am not.
18 The second reason that I want to speak
19 to you today is cultural, again, some of the
20 points that other people have touched on that I
21 wrote about as well, part of the beauty of
22 America is that in its continuous evolution and
23 recognition that, that times have changed -- I
24 misread that, sorry -- anyway, I'm sorry, it just
Geneva Worldwide, Inc. 256 West 38 th Street, 10 th Floor, New York, NY 10018 Page 246 1 Standing Committee on Health, January 31, 2014
2 doesn't make sense to me otherwise -- part of the
3 beauty of America is its continuous evolution and
4 recognition that times change.
5 People's attitudes and understanding
6 change and this is reflected in our laws. There
7 was a time in our history when women were not
8 permitted to vote but society changed and so did
9 the laws. There was a time in our history when
10 African-Americans were not permitted to vote, but
11 society changed and so did the laws. There was a
12 time in our history when people of different
13 races were not permitted to share the same
14 drinking fountains, to use the same toilets, or
15 even the same seats on a bus or in a movie
16 theater, but society changed and so did the laws.
17 We as Americans, and specifically as New Yorkers,
18 because that's the state we're in that we're
19 addressing this for, have grown and changed. The
20 shame and secrecy that once was a part of the
21 adoption experience has changed. We have come
22 out of the shadow and so must these laws. The
23 time has come, the time is now. Thank you.
24 Yeah, I also want to speak to, there was
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2 talk today about there are biological/birth
3 mom's, whichever terminology anybody wants to
4 use, natural moms, moms, that do not want to be
5 contacted or and have relationships. I am
6 actually in that category, I, both my brother, my
7 adopted brother and I did search where we both
8 found in the last decade, for different reasons,
9 mine was more philosophical in interest.
10 My biological mother does not want to
11 have a relationship with me, I have respected
12 that because life is funny, it, one of my friends
13 turned out to be a second cousin so I was allowed
14 access, information about my family without
15 disturbing my bio-mom's privacy so she is aware
16 of this, you know, I've conta-, I've wrote her a
17 few times but I have kept her confidentiality and
18 I ha-, I did ask and was granted the request, I
19 wrote to her sister who was the only other person
20 who knew about me up until about ten years ago,
21 and so I have not pursued any of that so it is
22 true that, it, there are adoptees who will
23 maintain confidentiality for their, their
24 biological relatives if requested and I'm sure
Geneva Worldwide, Inc. 256 West 38 th Street, 10 th Floor, New York, NY 10018 Page 248 1 Standing Committee on Health, January 31, 2014
2 there's people who don't do that but I am an
3 example of somebody who has.
4 In contrast, my brother for medical
5 reasons because he has a severely impaired health
6 child did a search and he found, my brother had
7 moved to Colorado and then he had his child, he
8 and his wife, and it ended up his biological
9 mother and two half-siblings lived in Colorado
10 not far from him. They all met because my
11 brother, you know, paid an agency and they met
12 and they get along famously and his mom babysits
13 for them, and with full appreciation and approval
14 from my mom who raised us both.
15 So I bring this up to show that there's
16 just so many contrasting stories of what could
17 happen that to sort of hold that, you know, when
18 they were talking about before with the what ifs,
19 it's just too big a range so we should stay
20 focused on the records and opening the records,
21 it's kind of the difference between, to me, it's
22 between oranges and orange juice. Like, we've
23 got the oranges so people might want to make
24 orange juice out of them, some people might not
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2 but we should at least be able to have our
3 oranges.
4 I don't know if that makes sense but,
5 anyway, but that's, that's my story and I thank
6 you so much for allowing us all to be here
7 because this is an, you know, we're not changing,
8 lots of things to do with, you know, the wars
9 that are going on and things like that but it
10 does, it is making a big impact on people's lives
11 if a law like this can be passed. Thank you.
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER WEPRIN: Thank you for
13 coming.
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
15 Our next witness is Cindy Garet Sippin. Excuse
16 me? I'm sorry, I, I --
17 FEMALE: Number 23, Lois?
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: I think she
19 is not here. Yes, okay. Do you swear or affirm
20 that the testimony you are about to give is true?
21 MS. CINDY GARET SIPPIN: Yes, I do.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, and
23 state your name for the record.
24 MS. SIPPIN: Cindy Garet Sippin. Before
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2 I go into my statement, I want to preface this by
3 indicating that there are actually cases where
4 people like me cannot even get their non-
5 identifying information.
6 I was adopted in South Carolina, my
7 adoption was private and because it was a private
8 adoption there was no record of me in their
9 system so when I requested non-identifying
10 information I was basically told, sorry, we don't
11 have anything, you're out of luck. I pretty much
12 in 1994 gave up my search that I started when I
13 was 16. I hit every brick wall, registered with
14 every registry out there, and I felt that if my
15 birth mother was looking for me she would've
16 found me because my birthday is New Years Day and
17 I figured she really wouldn't have forgotten that
18 day, if she wanted to find me, I'm in the
19 registry, been there since I was 18, okay, '94,
20 let's move on.
21 A couple of months ago, a cousin of mine
22 through marriage told me that she just learned
23 that she was adopted after her parents died. And
24 she told me that she was searching for her birth
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2 parents by having her DNA tested.
3 Now, I have been plagued my entire life
4 by health conditions and having doctors basically
5 look at me and go, oh, well, it could be anything
6 with you. When my daughter was three years old
7 she was diagnosed with a genetic condition and my
8 husband and I went for testing and, of course, I
9 came back being the carrier of this genetic
10 condition. And so when I heard about this DNA
11 testing, I said, you know what, I'm going to do
12 this, what have I got to lose.
13 So, let me get into my testimony,
14 because honestly, I'm pretty surprised that I'm
15 here. This has been a wild ride for me since
16 November and I'm still kind of on it.
17 I really have no vested interest in this
18 because my, I was born in South Carolina, I'm
19 really here advocating for every person whose
20 birth certificate in New York they cannot obtain.
21 Old New Yorkers, except for adoptees, can get
22 their birth certificate. It's a civil right of
23 every American to have a copy of their birth
24 certificate except for adoptees. It's just
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2 wrong, period. We're not living in the same era
3 of the time when I was born or even maybe when
4 Mr. Borelli was born, it's a different time. We
5 need, this state needs to change, as so many
6 other states have changed, and by denying this
7 civil right, we are denying people like me health
8 information which can really impact, as we've
9 heard, people's lives, our, my life, my
10 children's lives.
11 Now, as I said, one of the current
12 trends that's being utilized now by adoptees is
13 DNA genealogy services. Now, typically this
14 takes years and aside from it taking years, it
15 also takes a certain degree of intellect to
16 really understand how you're going to dissect
17 your chromosomes and match your third and fourth
18 cousins and figure out who your 16 great-great
19 grandparents were in the 1800s and work your way
20 down to present day. This is not an easy feat
21 but it can be done, people, I will tell you, I
22 meet people online every week who do this.
23 I began to do this in November, building
24 family trees, I have 47 what I called twigs of
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2 branches based on my third cousins. I had
3 identified two of my 16 great-great grandparents
4 based on third cousins and how I could figure out
5 which ones intersected, I didn't know if they
6 were maternal or paternal but I had figured that
7 out. I took one undergraduate course in genetics
8 a very, very long time ago only because it seemed
9 like an interesting course and it fit in my
10 program so, I don't know, I'm, it kind of came
11 back to me but you learn, talk in terms of snips
12 and centimorgans and, that's great for someone
13 like me, but if you don't have a college
14 education, you cannot do this, you cannot dissect
15 your DNA without a college education and you
16 certainly can't do it if you can't afford to
17 test. So the average person, the average
18 adoptee, can't use this service to find their
19 birth family.
20 Now, three weeks ago my search ended
21 very abruptly when I was sitting my living room
22 and I just kept going, oh my God, oh my God, and
23 my husband's going, like, what's the matter,
24 what's the matter. I'm going, I found her, I
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2 found her. He's like, what, are you sure, I'm
3 going, yes, I'm sure, it says, parent right there
4 at the top of the list. I really gave up on
5 looking, I just wanted my health information, I
6 really did not expect to find a birth mother from
7 this whole process, I really needed to know
8 what's going to happen to me as I'm getting older
9 because, unfortunately, I'm finding I'm getting
10 sicker. And for a day I stewed over, well, she's
11 not e-mailing me, after that 24 hours, I sent an
12 e-mail out and I received a phone call in an hour
13 that said, hello, Cindy. And I said, yes, I've
14 been looking for you for 54 years.
15 Now, what I had discovered was, my birth
16 mother is actually very well-known. My daughter,
17 well, actually backtrack a day, when she realized
18 who this was was upstairs Googling and she goes,
19 mom, she's an author, she's written books, look
20 at this, and my husband's going, look, look at
21 the pictures, and of course, I was just fixated
22 on my iPad going still, oh my God, oh my God.
23 Because she is well-known, she didn't put her
24 name out on registries because she was not
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2 prepared to go public if I was not looking for
3 her so here's another story. She wanted to find
4 me but did not want go and say, hello, world,
5 when I was 17 I got pregnant when, and you know,
6 1959 and I gave up this girl, my first child for
7 adoption.
8 I want to read to you what she wrote to
9 me yesterday: "I will be the invisible woman
10 standing tall in your corner, I have carried the
11 guilt, wondered if you had good caring parents,
12 what you looked like, later hoping you hadn't
13 inherited the diseases that have plagued me, the
14 ongoing sadness I was left with after the
15 adoption and the realization of the finality of
16 that decision. I believe every adoptee should be
17 able to obtain a true copy of their birth record
18 at the age of majority and that any birth parent
19 who wishes to contact their child should be able
20 to do so after that child comes of age. After 56
21 years of being invisible, I am proud to be coming
22 out from under the stigmas associated of being an
23 unwed mother, a weight is taken from me in my old
24 age that I can get to know you now."
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2 What I came to learn is that after she
3 gave me up, she went on to have eight children,
4 all boys, always trying to have the girl that she
5 gave up. Three of them died, and one of the
6 things she said to me in our first conversation
7 was, I always wondered, did you die, too. Was
8 like, I know I'm being punished for this,
9 especially when my father died on your birthday.
10 No one could ever understand why I wasn't, I
11 could never celebrate New Years, it was always a
12 really bad day for me.
13 Now, in the literally three weeks that
14 we've been in daily communication, I've learned
15 that I'm a daughter of the American Revolution,
16 that my ancestors touched down Jamestown. Now,
17 honestly, I'm not a hist-, I'm not a history buff
18 but my husband, he's the director of social
19 studies for a district on Long Island, his face
20 has lit up. You know, he, his, and my children
21 also historians, although I will say, my daughter
22 was a little disturbed when she found out that we
23 are also daughters of the American Confederacy,
24 that was very big problem because at 15 and it
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2 was like, wait, that's pro-slavery, oh, mom, this
3 is, I'm not comfortable with this, your ancestors
4 were fighting for the South. Where there for
5 about 48 hours there was a rough spot there, but
6 that, they're --
7 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: But at, but
8 at least they were Viking marauders.
9 MS. SIPPIN: That's, that true so, yes,
10 and ironically, when my birth mother, it was like
11 she had an intuition, she actually sent ou-, she
12 sent me an e-mail about the day that she had come
13 and realized that her ancestors had, you know,
14 had been fighting and she, you know, for, and for
15 this Confederacy and how she had been crying at
16 their graves and I said to my daughter, Caroline,
17 come and read this e-mail, you need to see this,
18 so I said, look, it was just absolutely amazing.
19 Now, what I also found interesting was,
20 it was a horrific experience for her, she was
21 sent from a very rural area to live in the city
22 alone and told never to go out in daytime and
23 only to walk in the back of the building and in
24 the dark, you know, no one should see her so she,
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2 no one should know she's pregnant, and only
3 towards the end of her pregnancy did her mother
4 come and stay with her.
5 And I heard this, you know, it really
6 was not a wonderful tale about how she got
7 pregnant and so forth but, that's not the story,
8 but how she kept track of where my birth father
9 was, which honestly, I really wouldn't have done
10 considering the whole story, because she said, if
11 I ever found you I'd want, you'd, I knew you'd
12 want to know what happened to him. And I
13 thought, really, I have, you're like an amazing
14 woman because if I were you, I, the last person
15 I'd want to be dealing with would be him. So she
16 said, I have his obituary for you, I have
17 whatever family information I have been able to
18 keep track of for you for, you know, and I will
19 help you find his children.
20 I mean, I thought, I kept, everyday was
21 like I hit the lottery each day, it was like, you
22 really don't have to do this, I can -- no, no,
23 it's my job. So she actually did track down his
24 four children for me and, a week after I spoke to
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2 her I made the, one of the most awkward phone
3 calls you could possibly make, you know, hello,
4 I'm this half-sibling that you never knew you
5 had, very nice, I really am not looking to
6 disturb your family but I really would like to
7 know health information and I have pertinent
8 health information for your family and I think
9 this is mu-, will be mutually beneficial. I was
10 overwhelmed, honestly, because within an hour of
11 these brothers and sisters speaking, I offered to
12 pay for a DNA test to prove my assertions, I was
13 welcomed into their family. I'm telling you,
14 this has been like the wild toad ride in Disney,
15 I've, I'm, I'm still not getting off.
16 And shortly thereafter, received an e-
17 mail, subject line, pictures of your father. I
18 never expected any of this, I wanted my health
19 information, I gave up on family, I now have, I'm
20 the big sister in one family, and the little new
21 sister in another family and am looking forward
22 to meeting all of these new relatives that I
23 really never expected to have. And have shared
24 some very important genetic information that they
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2 never knew, we don't know which side of the
3 family this has come from but I've told them,
4 they need to get tested and their children need
5 to be tested, this is important.
6 So, for me, it was actually, I shared
7 with them something that they did not know. Now,
8 my birth mother is beyond ecstatic, she's very
9 ill, I don't know how much time she has left but
10 the fact that this burden that she's been
11 carrying on her shoulders has been lifted, I
12 think has been the greatest gift that I could
13 have given her. And to think that she said, you
14 know, I, I heard about this in December and I
15 figured maybe if you were looking for me this
16 would be the way that we would connect. I, I
17 cannot believe that we, within weeks, had the
18 same thought and we've connected this way after
19 all of these years.
20 Most adoptees are not going to have this
21 type of happy ending, and I urge you to support
22 this bill so that there will be more happy
23 endings like I'm having now. There is no other
24 way, it's not going to happen unless this bill
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2 passes. Thank you.
3 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
4 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you very
5 much.
6 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, thank
7 you. I'm going to step out for a minute but Mr.
8 Borelli will call the next witness. I'll be
9 back.
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you,
11 next we have Mr. Joe Brandt.
12 MR. JOE BRANDT: Good afternoon.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Do you affirm
14 that everything you say is true?
15 MR. BRANDT: I do.
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you,
17 very much.
18 MR. BRANDT: I'm Joe Brandt. I was
19 adopted here in New York in 1949 and for most of
20 my adult life I have struggled with a, what you
21 might call an identity crisis of sorts. During
22 the past 15 years, I've spent a great deal of
23 time and effort in an attempt to research my
24 biological background, an effort that could've
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2 largely been avoided had my adoption records been
3 kept, not been kept sealed.
4 I say with absolute certainty that
5 unless you are an adoptee you cannot truly
6 understand what it means to have no idea about
7 your ancestral or biological roots. The history
8 of my adoptive family has always been of interest
9 to me but it hasn't been my history, and seeing
10 others trace their family trees has always made
11 me somewhat uncomfortable.
12 I am fortunate that I was adopted and
13 raised by a caring, loving family and ever since
14 I can remember, I have been conscious of the fact
15 that I was adopted. As a child, this meant very
16 little to me but as I matured, I developed a
17 habit of keeping this a secret. Of course,
18 eventually questions arose compounded by the
19 maturity of my now adult children who have only a
20 lopsided biological family history.
21 My children, I should point out, are the
22 only blood relatives that I have ever known.
23 It's like being a piece of a jigsaw puzzle with
24 all the other pieces missing and trying to fit
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2 yourself into a different puzzle, one in which
3 you don't really match. Since my inept efforts
4 at detective work had only lead me down several
5 blind alleys during my search, and in recognition
6 of the fact that the odds of finding a living a
7 biological parent at this point in my life were
8 slim to none, as a sict-, 65th birthday present
9 to myself, last month I made the decision to hire
10 a research specialist who had come very highly
11 recommended.
12 I daresay that the expense of such a
13 thing would be beyond what most people could
14 afford but the investment proved to be well-worth
15 the price, within weeks my natural parents had
16 been identified. Both of them had passed long
17 ago but the researcher found many of my first
18 cousins, who were not only alive and well, but
19 very excited at the prospect of speaking with a
20 new cousin and welcoming me into the family.
21 When the researcher called to tell me the news, I
22 was very pleased but kind of cool to this and
23 rather matter-of-fact. However, all that changed
24 the instant I made first contact. The event was
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2 unlike anything I had ever experienced in my
3 entire life, and when I spoke with the researcher
4 I remembered saying that words failed me and that
5 I could not describe the feeling. She said there
6 was, in fact, a word for what I had experienced,
7 reunion.
8 One of the many great people I have
9 spoken with in my newfound family is a wonderful
10 woman who is of no actual relation to me,
11 although we share a permanent bond, she is the
12 adopted daughter of my biological father who had
13 married someone other than my biological mother
14 several years I had been born. She is seven
15 years younger than I am and ever since the shock
16 of finding out, when she was 20, that she was
17 adopted, she has been trying to trace her own
18 biological roots but, having been born in New
19 York, the records are, of course, sealed. For
20 the better part of the past four decades, she has
21 been under emotional stress as the result of her
22 inability to complete a picture of her own
23 biological history.
24 At the end of the first day of the
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2 revelations regarding my biological family and
3 after several long and wonderful conversations
4 with cousins, my wife who had supported me in
5 this search from the very beginning asked how I
6 felt. After considering the question for a
7 moment my one word response was, whole. The laws
8 denying adoptees access to their own biological
9 records need to be changed. Thank you.
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you very
11 much, Mr. Brandt. Next we have, oh, my friend,
12 Joe Pessalono.
13 MR. JOE PESSALONO: Thank you. Good
14 afternoon.
15 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Good
16 afternoon.
17 MR. PESSALONO: I would first like to
18 thank the members of the assembly for giving me
19 an opportunity to speak on A909, the Adoptees
20 Right Bill, which would allow adult adopted
21 persons born in New York State access to their
22 original birth certificate. And in that, giving
23 them access to their truth. My name is Joe
24 Pessalono and I reside in Staten Island. I'm a
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2 retired paramedic and the father of two children,
3 Christopher 18, and Samantha 15. I was born
4 Christopher Anthony on August 17th, 1961, at
5 Misericordia Hospital, Bronx New York.
6 MS. BERTOCCI: Mm-hmm.
7 MR. PESSALONO: At six days old, I was
8 placed in foster care by the Catholic Home
9 Bureau. I was in either Nassau or Suffolk County
10 for about seven months, at which time I was
11 transferred to the Catholic Home Bureau in New
12 York City and given to a couple, taken to Staten
13 Island on March 29th, 1962. Though I was
14 Christopher, which my son, Christopher, is named
15 after me, my name was changed to Joseph Edward
16 and on June 28th, 1963, my adoption was official.
17 By the stroke of a judge's pen, Joseph was
18 official and Christopher Anthony was no more. Or
19 was he?
20 On my 21st birthday, my parents gave me
21 my adoption decree. On that decree was my
22 original name, including my original last name so
23 so much for the confidentiality that the judge's
24 were speaking about earlier. Excuse me. Seven
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2 years later I decided to take that information
3 and begin to look for my birth mother, or as I
4 say, my first mother.
5 MS. BERTOCCI: Thank you.
6 MR. PESSALONO: My employment, excuse
7 me, my employment as a paramedic at St. Vincent's
8 Hospital, Greenwich Village, New York, began in
9 1985. By January of 1990, I began my search for
10 my mother. It took all of four months to find
11 her and on the same day I found my father. In
12 one day, both lived in Greenwich Village. I met
13 my father within four days and he still lived in
14 the Village at that time. As a matter of fact,
15 in the five years when I was at St. Vincent's,
16 our paths had crossed many times. He used to
17 work at a delicatessen where I used to get my
18 coffee in the morning, he served me my coffee. I
19 also passed a cousin on the street, and had no
20 idea that we were related.
21 Excuse me, my, due to health issues my
22 father is unable to be here today. However, my
23 aunt has submitted a letter and I will read that
24 on his behalf. As for my mother, she and I have
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2 met and we do have a relationship. The irony
3 here is that if I was never officially adopted
4 and if I was left in foster care, raised by
5 foster parents, I would be Christopher today. My
6 name would never have changed and, therefore, I
7 would have my original birth certificate. I now
8 have my truth and my history, and my children
9 have that as well. I was extremely lucky and I
10 was blessed that I had certain information that
11 was not in any way locked away.
12 Were you aware, and I'm sure, after
13 today's testimony you are, that 95 to 98 percent
14 of birth moms want to know what happened to the
15 children that they relinquished. And remember,
16 you cannot have adoption without relinquishment.
17 And in addition, there was never a promise of
18 anonymity. Please, I ask you, please, stop these
19 archaic and medieval laws that are preventing
20 adopted persons of learning their truth, their
21 genealogy and their medical history. Please stop
22 adoptees from having to spend $1,000s of dollars
23 to find out information on themselves.
24 I thank you for your time and now I'll
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2 read one letter from Jacqueline DeCarlo, my aunt.
3 "Before my last, my long lost nephew, Christopher
4 DeCarlo, aka Joseph Pessalono, came back into our
5 family life, I always had an unexplained
6 emptiness in my being. I knew my brother had a
7 son that was given up for adoption by the baby's
8 mother. Because of circumstances beyond my
9 bother's control and our family, we were deprived
10 of keeping this child. When I learned that my
11 nephew Joseph had found his father, I was somerut
12 (sic), I was somewhat comparable to the feeling
13 of giving birth to my daughter. My brother,
14 Theodore, who now is, has dementia, said to me
15 countless number of times that he thought of his
16 son in so many, so many times throughout the
17 years and he had hoped" -- excuse me -- "that one
18 day he would meet his son, his only son, because
19 his wife could not conceive. Through no fault of
20 my nephew, Joseph, for the longest time he was
21 deprived of knowing his roots and family genes.
22 I am certain he could feel, he could not feel
23 whole, being deprived of knowledge of his
24 biological father and mother. By withholding my
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2 the-, my nephew's birth certificate, I feel he
3 was and is stripped of his birthright and his
4 identity. Why should a child be deprived of his
5 birthright by withholding his birth certificate?
6 It must be such an empty feeling not knowing who
7 your biological mother and father are." Thank
8 you.
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you very
10 much, Joe. Next is Mr. Dennis Sumland. Dennis
11 are you here?
12 MS. DEVINE: He's gone.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Okay. Next is
14 Carla Marie Rupp.
15 MS. CARLA MARIE RUPP: Here.
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Carla's here?
17 MS. RUPP: Yes.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you very
19 much. Thank you for coming. Do you swear that
20 everything you say is true?
21 MS. RUPP: Yes, I swear.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Thank you so
23 much.
24 MS. RUPP: In 1968 I was unwed and
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2 became pregnant in Kansas, a state where birth
3 certificates were never sealed for adoption, for
4 adoptees. Although adoptees had rights, many
5 women like myself were still subjected to
6 religious codes of morality and social morays
7 that made sex before marriage a sin.
8 I gave birth to a daughter in
9 Leavenworth, Kansas, and met with an attorney who
10 told me I would never see my daughter again. He
11 took her out of my arms and later handed her over
12 to a family in Johnson County, Kansas. I was not
13 given a copy of the surrender paper I signed
14 later with a social worker and was never able to
15 obtain, obtain one from anyone. He never
16 mentioned that I would have confidentiality nor
17 anything else. I terminated my parental rights
18 by signing this surrender paper and was not given
19 any kind of promise of confidentiality nor
20 perpetual secrecy. I had no rights, but
21 eventually became empowered to contact her, my
22 daughter, in 1986, when she turned 18. My mother
23 had known about her for years and was able to
24 help or locate the family for me.
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2 I've spent years wishing I would've been
3 informed about the truth that adoption is a loss
4 and the extremely painful consequences. My pain
5 is ongoing and may never be resolved. I'm aware
6 that Oregon recently passed a law allowing for
7 natural mothers to access identifying information
8 through the courts, something all states should
9 do. I have been a New York City resident since
10 1974 and would like to see the old law changed to
11 one giving all adoptee, adult adoptees rights.
12 Secrecy and lies harm too many.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
14 very much. I appreciate your testimony.
15 Questions? Okay, thank you.
16 MR. RUPP: Okay, thank you.
17 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Yup, okay,
18 our next witness is James Lane. And do you swear
19 or affirm that the testimony you are about to
20 give is true?
21 MR. JAMES LANE: I do.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you,
23 state your name and go ahead.
24 MR. LANE: Okay, it's a pretty emotional
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2 day. My name is James Lane, some people in the
3 room know me, I ran as the green party candidate
4 for public advocate in New York City this past
5 election cycle and I thank everyone that
6 supported me in one way or another for that. One
7 of the reasons I ran was because I found my
8 adoptive, my birth mother last year after 25
9 years of long painful search processes to find
10 out information about my, about my lineage, about
11 my health, about where I came from. It, it's
12 really important, this bill, you know, those,
13 those two surrogate judges that were here before,
14 there was flames in my eyes when they were
15 speaking because my story, adoption story really
16 starts for me when I was 23.
17 I came home from work and found my
18 mother dead, then four months later my father
19 died of cancer in the hospital and then a month
20 after that or so, I had to take care of all the
21 financial information and low and behold, there
22 were adoption records in a, in a safe deposit box
23 and I was asking the clerk at a surrogate court
24 office, you know, what, you know, on all the
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2 adoption pages it says, these adoption papers are
3 for a Male Gamble. And I said, what's a Male
4 Gamble, and the clerk at the court was like, did
5 your parents have any other boys? No. Then it's
6 you. So this is who told me I was adopted, a
7 cou-, a clerk at the surrogate court office.
8 And so at this point, now I'm faced with
9 another dilemma as far as closing out everything
10 for my adoptive parents since they're gone is I
11 have to prove to the court, the surrogate court,
12 that I am the child of these people because now
13 I'm adopted, so now I'm like this weird rogue
14 person that's been living with them for 23 years.
15 And the irony, so I had to go and jump through
16 all these hoops, the first thing I did was I
17 called my sister, I have a sister who is 10 years
18 older than me and she's the reason my parents got
19 married, there's a wedding picture and she's in
20 the belly and everything, classic. And so I
21 called her and asked her, was I adopted. And she
22 was like, oh, no, of course not, you know, and
23 this is the whole story of the secrets and lies,
24 and I was like, well, I found adoption papers for
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2 a Male Gamble. She says, oh, you know, I always
3 knew your name was Victor so after 23 years, all
4 these things come up.
5 So, you know, I hung up the phone, I was
6 like, wow, this is really weird, I don't know
7 what's going on, my life is crumbling, you know,
8 from, you know, mother dead, father dead, now I'm
9 not even like part of these people. My
10 grandmother called me up like a few minutes later
11 because my sister, was just like, oh my God, he
12 found out that he's adopted, you know, do damage
13 control or whatever, so my, my grandmother went
14 through the process of telling me the story about
15 their adoptive parents and their sagas as far, as
16 far as, they tried, after my sister was born,
17 they tried to have another child, went through, I
18 think it was nine miscarriages or something like
19 that, and so they, they went through their own
20 version of loss.
21 Growing up with them, I think that they
22 really didn't take care of what they needed to do
23 before they adopted me, my father was an
24 alcoholic, my mother was trying to play the role
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2 of mother and father but got kind of abusive,
3 punishment not really, you know, being a little
4 bit too excessive for, for the crime, you know,
5 certain things, you know, I just remember getting
6 beat like, you know, rulers breaking off and all
7 that but, you know, this isn't about that right
8 now. But it, but it was a lot of what made me
9 what I am today, somebody that sees a lot of
10 evils, a lot of injustices.
11 The fact that a person, especially for
12 me, a person of color, in this country, a victim
13 of slavery, being once again told that can't find
14 where my people are, it's, it's something that's
15 just unbearable. You know, it's, it's like,
16 every time I think about this bill, this A909, I
17 think about it and I say, you know what, if, if
18 this bill doesn't pass, they should give adoptees
19 reparations because that is what is needed, I
20 mean, because of the emotional problems that we
21 have to suffer not knowing what our medical
22 records are, it's painful.
23 I went through some really bad times,
24 really, like, during these 25 years of trying to
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2 find some information about my mother and every
3 time it went around there's just a brick wall
4 after brick wall. My, my adoptive parents died
5 when they were 53 and 55, you know, they had
6 really bad health conditions, my mother had
7 diabetes so she lost three-quarters of her leg,
8 then she had like kidney problems and she had to
9 do home dialysis, my dad had throat cancer, and
10 I'm watching these people deteriorate for like 5
11 years, from when I was like 18 to 23, and you
12 know, it was like, what, what is my future, you
13 know. And this was, this was before I found out
14 I was adopted so I started making changes in
15 myself and become a vegetarian and do whatever,
16 and then when I found out I was adopted I was
17 like, okay, I'm not adopted to them but I still
18 don't know anything about my history.
19 I, I served in the military, you know,
20 and I'm thinking, every time I went to a doctor
21 up to that point, I lied, I said, oh, yeah, you
22 know, my mother's got high blood pressure and
23 diabetes, and wears a medic-alert thing, and my
24 dad, you know, he seems all right, but that's not
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2 my history, that was their history. So I didn't
3 know if I was be alive past 50 or whatever so I
4 started searching and during the searching, you
5 know, and it's really interesting because sitting
6 here and hearing the testimonies of people that
7 are clinical social workers and such, and you
8 like, my God, I'm a test, textbook example of, of
9 this pain, of this thing that happens, you know,
10 this, this bill is about health, it's not just
11 physical health, it's mental health, I, I was, I
12 found myself like walking on, you know, but too
13 close to the edge of subway platforms and looking
14 out of windows from tall buildings and just like
15 inching a little bit forward and say, you know,
16 wh-, what's my purpose here?
17 I, I don't, I don't understand, like,
18 I'm here but I don't know where I came from,
19 what's the point. And I've never been like that
20 my entire life, everyone always remembers me, oh,
21 yeah, you're the goofy kid in high school, always
22 smiling and laughing but then these things, these
23 thoughts, these feelings would just come up.
24 So I went, it went for about say ten
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2 years or so, this kind of dark period I went
3 through and then finally I met my future wife and
4 things sort of normalized a bit, you know, its,
5 you meet somebody, you get married, you start
6 talking about doing a family, and then when we
7 started trying to have a child, it took six years
8 to have, have our son and during those six years
9 all these things come back again like, is there
10 something wrong with me, is there something
11 wrong, you know, my, my, my past history or
12 something like that, you know, we've gone to the
13 geneticists at the Cornell and all these places
14 and, and they would look and say, well, what's
15 your family history, and as everyone else said, I
16 don't know, I can't tell you, I'm adopted. And
17 there's one geneticist looked at me and said, you
18 know, you look like you have some Latin American,
19 American in you, and I'm like, really, you think
20 so, okay, I'll go for that, I like spicy foods,
21 that's good.
22 But, sorry, there's a lot of pain and
23 laughter in adoptees, but so you kick yourself
24 because you're, you're wondering what, what
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2 future am I creating for this, this child if we
3 do have one. You know, what can I give him as
4 far as family history, you know, there's going to
5 be a time when he goes to school and everyone's
6 going to be going around the classroom making a
7 little family tree project, and say, here's my
8 daddy, here's my mommy, here's my cousins, and
9 I'm going to be like, you've got a stump, that's
10 all I have for you, I don't know where everybody
11 is, you know. So luckily we did have our son,
12 everything worked out but now he's in this world
13 and so those feelings come back, I, I can't, I
14 can't deal with this anymore, we have to find out
15 something.
16 So luckily my wife is a social worker
17 and she knew the agency that I was adopted out of
18 and so I think only because of her helping to
19 advocate for me as somebody in the field, she was
20 able to get my non-identifying information which
21 is amazing because I started off telling I found
22 my mother. After, before I found her, I was
23 trying to get some additional information for
24 some search angels and, and whatever and they
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2 looked at the, the non-identifying information I
3 had and they said, this is atrocious, we can't
4 find anybody with this, you have to go back to
5 the agency and get more information. You know,
6 and at least the search angels gave me additional
7 information about what I should ask and so I went
8 back and asked, you know, filled out their forms
9 and everything, and still to this day. I mean I
10 submitted this, I think it might be going on two
11 years, I haven't gotten that information from my
12 agency and I didn't know how long they expect for
13 me to wait but regardless, I had to go the route
14 of going through a, a paid searcher, you know,
15 one of the best in the industry.
16 And, you know, that said, guaranteed 30
17 days, and I was sweating bullets because I don't
18 have money to pay for a search, you know, a paid
19 searcher, so, you know, as David Weprin said, I'm
20 a person of not these financial means. So 30
21 days would go by and I would go, shew, that's
22 good, you know, another 30 days. I'm, I'm really
23 depressed that they're not finding anything but
24 at the same time I'm trying to save up money and
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2 everything.
3 So it took about, maybe almost six
4 months and then I get a phone call, your case is
5 almost solved and then, I was like so what's the
6 next steps, and they're like, well, you have to
7 pay us. So at this point, I'm like okay, so I'm
8 calling up friends, lend me some money so I can
9 pay for this and get this information because
10 still at this point, I don't know if I'm going to
11 find a living person or a grave and so I sent
12 them the money and then they sent me back this
13 information and they gave me like 12 pages of
14 information about my family, you know, my mother,
15 two half-sisters, aunts, cousins, grandfathers,
16 and there's just like so much data, that, you
17 know, I'm a data guy by, by profession and so I
18 just, I ran to like, not to promote it, I ran to
19 ancestry.com, started plugging all these things
20 and I'm like, oh my God. And my son's there with
21 me and he's like, what's that, I'm like, that's
22 our, my family, and he's like, yeah, and we're
23 both getting excited plugging in things, look at
24 this name, Almira Stroud, who's that, you know,
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2 like all these crazy names and it's, it's like an
3 amazing feeling.
4 But that, that was only possible because
5 I had to spend a lot of money for a paid
6 searcher. Money that nobody else, well, some
7 people, but a lot of people can't spend.
8 I actually do want to go back a bit and
9 I want to share with you an example of non-
10 identifying information that I got. So it starts
11 off, Victor Gamble, date of birth, April 21st,
12 1965, it says birthplace, Booth Memorial
13 Hospital, mom age 15, first child on birth
14 certificate is male, mother is very interested in
15 completing her education, she feels that since
16 she cannot rear the child herself, it will be
17 better off with adoptive parents.
18 The father is someone mother met once at
19 school, he followed her home and raped her, she
20 has not seen him since. Efforts would have been
21 made by the Board of Ele-, Board of Education to
22 apprehend him but mother's meager description of
23 him made it impossible. She becomes hysterical
24 whenever the father is discussed. She was in
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2 junior high school.
3 Mother has a good relationship with her
4 relatives and they are sympathetic to the problem
5 mother is having, however, very upset by the
6 pregnancy. Mom was raised by grandparents who
7 died and then raised by an aunt. She knew her
8 mother and father but never lived with them. She
9 is in the position of having many people around
10 her and interested but there is no one whom she
11 wholly belongs, she feels no one cares for her.
12 Mom was in maternity shelter before she gave
13 birth, she asked intelligent questions, and
14 that's weird because they put that in quotes,
15 when the process was explained to her, she was
16 diagnosed as mentally ill, so I guess that's why
17 those are in quotes.
18 Your mom and her aunt visited once in
19 May and she signed the surrender in August. You
20 were described as a chunky youngster with two
21 dimples, very alert, responsive. He seems to be
22 alert and physically quite unusual at three
23 months, he was able to stand up with help.
24 October '65, placed with a family who could
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2 possibly adopt.
3 First foster mother became quite
4 hysterical when they came to move you. Because
5 of Victor's physical attractiveness, the foster
6 parents were extremely proud of him and he soon
7 became well-known in the community. The whole
8 family was stunned when it became necessary to
9 remove him from adoptive home placement. You
10 were walking by May of 1966, you were also saying
11 words like, hi, mommy, daddy, and waving good-
12 bye. You frequently sang with the foster family
13 and made motions of conversation when they were
14 conversing. Placed with the Lanes June 17th,
15 1966, adopted April 5th, 1967.
16 So with that information, that non-
17 identifying information, I have a window back
18 into my childhood before I was with my adoptive
19 family. Something that I never knew about and a
20 lot of things in there are really kind of painful
21 because when I was growing up I always considered
22 myself an ugly child, you know, why do I feel so
23 strange in this family, I just don't, don't feel
24 I belong, what's wrong with me. So then when I
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2 found out I was adopted, I'm like, ahh, and now
3 it makes sense, you know.
4 Now I remember when in high school when
5 we were doing that blood test thing and my dad
6 was an A and my mom was an AB but I was B
7 positive, you know, it was like some weird thing,
8 and I'm like, oh, I probably wasn't paying
9 attention. So these, these lies and, and fears
10 that people had about letting me know about my
11 adoption was actually kind of life-threatening
12 because I didn't know what my history was, my
13 medical history, I mean.
14 And just going back to what we're saying
15 before and what I used to say on my fliers, I
16 will give you guys a copy because I didn't
17 include it with my thing, you know, I'm running
18 for a citywide office and so my first issue is
19 adoptee rights reform now because it is a human
20 right and people said, well, that's kind of
21 interesting, I mean, what does that have to do
22 with city government? And I said, well, let me
23 tell you, there's about a million people around
24 America that are not able to know anything about
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2 where they come from, who they are, you know.
3 Their medical history and stuff like that, you
4 know, and people seem to be all up and enraged
5 when they hear stories about sex trafficking and
6 human trafficking, you know, adoption is another
7 form of human trafficking and, and, in a weird
8 way, you know, and I hate to bring it to that
9 level but it is. As I said before, slavery was
10 human trafficking, and not being able to know
11 where you came from and who you are, that is just
12 really devastating information.
13 But I'm, I'm in somewhat happier times
14 now because I was able to reconnect with my
15 mother, and actually because of all the extensive
16 research I was doing to try to find out about
17 where I came from, you know. I went through
18 three different DNA companies, you know, and, you
19 know, sort of cross-sectioning the data, because
20 like I said, I'm a data geek, and I look at this
21 stuff, I'm like saying, okay, this is
22 interesting, for some reason I'm 60 percent West
23 African but then the other 30 percent or so is
24 Romanian, Tuscan, and Spanish. I don't know what
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2 that's all about but then when I look at the
3 other tests, I'm like, they all have that weird
4 kind of mix so when I found my, my mother she
5 tells me, oh, yeah, you know, because my father
6 was a Venezuelan merchant marine, I'm like, oh,
7 well, let me tell you something, it's like, look
8 at this mix we've got going on.
9 So it's, it's been pretty interesting as
10 I share with her my stories of the scientific
11 data and she gives me the stories of what's
12 actually real because as was mentioned here
13 before, when the state says we can give you
14 health related information about you, it's just
15 based on whatever somebody fills out at that
16 time. If you have somebody that's, like they
17 said in here, somebody that's quite hysterical
18 when they talk about her pregnancy because it was
19 based on a rape, she's really not going to know
20 much about the father's history and she's barely
21 functioning enough to write her own information
22 correctly.
23 One of the most powerful things for me
24 was to see that I saw, you know, like I said
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2 before, my adoptive sister said, oh, I always
3 knew your name was Victor, and then I got this
4 stuff and I said, oh, it says Victor, I'm like,
5 okay, it's interesting, you know, but I didn't
6 really hold it to anything because I don't know
7 who gave me that name. I know that my mother
8 gave me up for adoption so I don't know when this
9 thing happened and when I, the first, well,
10 actually the second person I met was my half-
11 sister and she gave me a big hug, oh my God,
12 Victor, it's you, and we had this really great
13 conversation and talk and I'm like, you knew my
14 name was Victor. It's like, I always knew your
15 name was Victor, mommy never stopped talking
16 about you, she's been talking about you for like,
17 ever since I was born. And she's telling the
18 whole family, you know, mostly, my two half-
19 sisters said, you know, you have a brother out
20 there, he's, you know, he's an older brother,
21 he's 48 now, you know, one day he's going to come
22 and find us and all this kind of stuff. For 48
23 years my mother was holding this, holding this
24 thought of I would come back and show them so
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2 with my meeting with my sister, I said, well, you
3 know, sis, unfortunately, the state wouldn't let
4 that happen and I showed her, I showed her my
5 falsified birth certificate that I used to get
6 into the army with a very extenuous (sic)
7 background check because my, my training was
8 going to be like a year down in Fort Gordon,
9 Georgia. And they had to do all this special,
10 you know, checking on me and seeing my police
11 records and all this kind of stuff but, you know,
12 even they couldn't find that out that I was
13 adopted. So when I showed my sister how I was
14 just being blocked by, by the state and a lot of
15 my, my frustrations and, and anger.
16 Like when I, I keep thinking about those
17 surrogate judges speaking before, just erase
18 whatever you hear about people saying, oh, when
19 mothers give their children up for adoption they
20 don't really want to see them anymore, they don't
21 want to be contacted, they don't want some
22 stranger person showing up, you know, when, you
23 know, a child finds out they want to be adopted,
24 that's up to the child, you know. Because it
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2 depends on the story they're being told when
3 they're growing up, you know, if they're happy,
4 if they're not, or whatever, if they're
5 inquisitive or not.
6 But at the end of the day, people do
7 want to connect, people that, if a mother is
8 holding her baby in her body for nine months,
9 there's a connection there and when she gives
10 that child up that connection doesn't just
11 disappear because somebody says, okay, quick
12 let's get the whiteout and change who this person
13 is. That connection is still there and to this
14 day and one of my reasons for running for public
15 office was to bring that level of discussion out
16 into the public, you know. The media wouldn't
17 cover me but I didn't care, I was out there with
18 my fliers hitting the streets, hitting, doing
19 whatever. And I would meet, if I, if I met ten
20 people, I met at least three that were either
21 adopted or knew somebody that was adopted and
22 they took my information and gave it to them and
23 I was getting their e-mail addresses and pointing
24 some places to go to, registries, support groups,
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2 whatever. A couple of them still e-mailing me
3 today, it's like, I haven't done looking, I was
4 just thinking about you, I just wanted to let you
5 know I'm, I'm still thinking about coming to your
6 group, I'm like, okay, man, whenever you're
7 ready, we're there for you know.
8 And going back to the judge, oh, you
9 know, the, the the state could do a better job of
10 letting people know about these registries, I
11 mean that's just nonsense, you know, people, just
12 this, this law shouldn't even exist, that's,
13 that's the bottom line, this shouldn't exist. I
14 should just be able to just go just like anybody
15 else, we've said it over and over again, anyone
16 else can just go to the, you know, Department of
17 Auto Records, fill out a form, give them whatever
18 money, get your thing, and you're done.
19 But for whatever reason, I'm seen as a
20 threat and, believe me, I'm not, the only threat
21 I am is to myself a lot of times because even
22 though I'm in happy times right now.
23 Just because of this and not being able
24 or allowed to have this information is something
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2 that is, really just unbearable for me a lot of
3 times and, you know. I keep trying to focus on
4 the good times and focus on my son, he embraces
5 adoption because, you know, we watch X-Men
6 together and we do see characters that are
7 adopted and he's like, oh, that guys adopted from
8 here, that's so cool, you know, oh, and it's
9 like, say, yeah, and the important thing is even
10 they know who they're real parents are, you know.
11 So that's really all I have for you guys. I
12 mean, I just, I just really want this bill to
13 pass, I just, I just feel like, if, if it doesn't
14 pass I don't know what I'm going to do this year.
15 I, when I, when I think of my mother
16 telling me, I, I prayed every day that I would
17 see you before the day I died, I think about all
18 these other mothers out there that probably have
19 that same thought. I think about Joe Soll's
20 mother that he just told us about today, that is,
21 that is just not right, too many people are going
22 to their graves, thousands of people are going to
23 their graves because of laws like this and that
24 has to change. Thank you.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
3 very much. Thank you.
4 MR. LANE: Okay.
5 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, our
6 next witness, while he is the last on the typed
7 list, we have two other add-ons, but our next
8 witness is Rod Shinners. I thought, they had
9 left, too.
10 FEMALE ASSISTANT: No. There was
11 somebody who was an add-on and then they
12 cancelled, sorry.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Oh.
14 FEMALE ASSISTANT: Sorry, as far as I
15 know, they are here.
16 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Oh, okay.
17 FEMALE ASSISTANT: Sorry.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, before
19 you testify, I just, apparently the folks who are
20 number 32 are here, we'll get to them. No, you
21 can, we'll get to them right after you. Do you
22 swear or affirm that the testimony you are about
23 to give is true?
24 MR. ROD SHINNERS: I do.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, state
3 your name and --
4 MR. SHINNERS: My name is Rodney
5 Shinners, I live in Short Hills, New Jersey in
6 Essex County, and I'm married and have four adult
7 sons. I am not what you would commonly see here
8 because I'm a birth father or biological father,
9 some pla-, some people call them baby daddies.
10 I went to college and lived in New York
11 from '58 to '69 and I went to Kingspoint,
12 graduated from there in 50, in'62. When I was 6-
13 , in, in, November 1965, my steady girlfriend
14 gave birth to my first child and this child was
15 given up for adoption against my will due to
16 parental pressure and the social stigma of the
17 time. I'm not proud of this, it has cast a
18 shadow over the rest of my life. At that time I
19 thought I had no rights whatsoever and was very
20 ashamed, sent upon request, it turns out to be,
21 of the gray market lawyer, a sum that today by
22 inflation would be $35,000.
23 But I thought I had, I thought I was a
24 scoundrel, I had no rights, I had nothing to do
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2 but just slink away into the night. Later I got
3 married, raised a family, I have four adult sons.
4 As the years went by these memories, I tried to
5 put this out of my mind, it never really went,
6 and as the years went by it got stronger and
7 stronger until I realized that, you're an old man
8 now, you don't have that much time left, so if
9 you're going to do anything, you'd better do it
10 now, which I did and that was six years ago. I
11 felt that I had to find out what happened to this
12 child and I have done whatever I can, I do par-,
13 I have signed up with the Department of Health
14 Adoption Registry which confirmed that the child
15 was, I knew it was born in New York, it was
16 adopted in New York and that is about what I
17 know.
18 The mother of this child is one of the
19 four or five percent who wants nothing to do with
20 it. I did contact her a couple of years ago, she
21 was very surprised, first she was friendly until
22 I mentioned the baby and then she wasn't so
23 friendly and she couldn't understand why I wanted
24 to find this child. I offer that as a
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2 demonstration that, that one, that I know those
3 people exist and there are people that get
4 rejected by their birth parents, I'm sort of out
5 of the norm because there's a lot of, a lot of
6 birth fathers who take a powder, deny it, don't
7 do it, that wasn't what I wanted to do, I didn't
8 want to lose the mother and I didn't want to lose
9 the baby and it still bothers me.
10 I have told my family about this, it was
11 a long time later but I told them about it and
12 the reaction was surprising, my wife is quite
13 supportive, my four sons are anxious to meet this
14 unknown sibling, I have identical twins and I
15 told them on different days and they both said,
16 wow, dad, that's cool and didn't know the other
17 guy had said that so it wa-, that's, I, a rather
18 interesting little, little snippet of, of the
19 procedure here.
20 Now, I also should say that I wouldn't
21 be here if I hadn't satisfied myself through my
22 own research and my own reading that unsealing
23 the records would not cause, I'm satisfied that
24 unsealing the records will not cause an increased
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2 abortions, that to me, that argument is just out
3 of the question and it seems to be an abandoned,
4 fortunately.
5 The other thing that I would like to
6 emphasis here is despite the fact what was said
7 here, the children were adopted into a loving
8 family, well, that may be at that time but
9 children are adopted into the full range of
10 families that exist here in this or any country,
11 we've heard about children adopted and the father
12 was an alcoholic, some are abusive, that's no
13 guarantee, for those who say that, there's no
14 guarantee that a baby is going to be adopted into
15 this, quote, loving family. It's the full range
16 of families, there are plenty of people, some of
17 them here have left whose children were adopted
18 into families that were far less than loving. So
19 that says, that, that sounds good when you say it
20 but it doesn't, it doesn't happen all the time.
21 I have, I have cut out a lot of, a lot
22 of stuff here that's been, as you've said, will
23 have been addressed by the time we get down to me
24 four hours later, a lot of this has been covered
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2 so there's not much point of my try-, saying it
3 all again, it's all been well, it's all been well
4 said. But I do wish to say this about private,
5 privacy and confidentiality, and I strongly
6 believe this, and some people do and some people
7 don't but I do, when a life is created, whether
8 intentionally or not, there is a responsibility
9 for that life that cannot be negated by the
10 passage of time or the wishes of the man and the
11 woman who created that life, they may vary from
12 that. I do accept that responsibility and even
13 though I said nothing for about 40 years it
14 wouldn't have bothered me a bit and I would have,
15 would have satisfied a, a great, I guess you
16 would call it, long in me if I had been found by
17 this adult child who is now 48 years old.
18 I have trouble understanding why this is
19 denied by some people, denied by some women, the
20 mother of my child has four other children, has
21 four grandchildren, is very happy in her own life
22 and thinks her life will be ruined if, if she's
23 found out. In my experience, and I know a lot of
24 adoptees now, I'm pretty active in this thing, I
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2 know a lot of adoptees, I know a lot of birth
3 mothers, I know mothers who waited 38, 40, 45
4 years before they let their husband and their
5 family know and there's no case, and I've talked
6 to other people, very knowledgeable people,
7 there, you can eventually find one case but the
8 idea that the family is going to be ruined and
9 that the mo-, the woman will be thrown out by her
10 husband of X number of years is pretty much a
11 convenient myth to those who, to those who say
12 that.
13 It still is, unfortunately, I have one
14 of the less than 5 percent that doesn't want to
15 be contacted, that's up to her, that's her
16 privilege, I do want contact, I make no bones
17 about it, I am searching. I do not, when I, when
18 I started the search and, and looked into this
19 stuff I was appalled by the laws in New York and
20 the laws in many other states, this is, this is a
21 real slap in the face to American principals and
22 I, I am totally opposed to these restrictive
23 laws.
24 I also, if the judges were here to still
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2 hear, I would say them to that, I guess that
3 England and the states that have opened up their
4 records or unseal their records are all wrong,
5 England isn't sinking into the ocean and God
6 isn't striking them with pestilence and frogs
7 because they opened their records, they're still
8 afloat. The other countries and the other states
9 that have, are still afloat. This is, to me this
10 is not a very go-, a very good argument it's, it
11 doesn't hold water. The states that have never
12 closed them, well, they're, they're not in New
13 York State, they're not nearly as big as New York
14 but they're not awash in immorality or murders or
15 abortions or anything like that, this is, I guess
16 it's convenient for those people to say that and
17 I, and I suppose that they believe it but it just
18 isn't the case. So I've added what little bit I
19 can to this and I really appreciate your, it's
20 too bad the full committee isn't here.
21 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Yes.
22 MR. SHINNER: And a few dissenters, I
23 would like to be, I would like the dissenters to
24 be hearing this but I certainly appreciate it,
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2 I'm glad you went to the effort to hold this and,
3 and engaged all these people in this and I
4 certainly appreciate it and I hope to see you
5 again.
6 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you
7 very much. Okay, we will go back on the list to
8 There-, Theresa Stanton and Ron Stanton, and let
9 me say, if there is anyone else who was on the
10 list who I have skipped over, it's because I was
11 under the impression that either you hadn't
12 arrived or you had left so if you're sitting out
13 there and wondering why you didn't get called
14 just alert the folks at the table in the back.
15 So, do you swear or affirm that the testimony you
16 are about to give is true?
17 MS. THERESA STANTON: Yes, I do.
18 MR. RON STANTON: Yes.
19 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, and
20 just state your names and begin.
21 MS. STANTON: My name is Theresa Stanton
22 and I was born in New York City.
23 MR. STANTON: Ron Stanton.
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, if you
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2 can just pull the microphone a little closer,
3 yeah.
4 MS. STANTON: I want to ask the people
5 in the audience and share with them, what does it
6 mean to grow up adopted. It means that all your
7 cousins look a little different than you, it
8 means that your parents are shorter and have
9 darker complexions than you, it means that you
10 spend your entire life thinking you're Italian
11 when in reality, you're mostly Irish and German.
12 It means you like to draw and paint, sing and act
13 but no one else does. It means that you want to
14 be a teacher but your family can't imagine why.
15 It means that you love to read books but your
16 mother thinks you should cook and sew. It means
17 that you have blue eyes but you don't know where
18 they come from. It means that you do not know
19 what your own biological mother looks like. It
20 means that you have never heard the sound of her
21 voice. It means that you never looked into her
22 eyes or into the eyes of your biological aunts or
23 uncles. It means that your brothers grew up
24 without you. It means that your grandmother died
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2 of breast cancer but you didn't know that. It
3 means that one of your aunts died of breast
4 cancer but you didn't know that, either. It
5 means that one of your aunts today also struggled
6 with breast cancer and perhaps it's important to
7 know that. It means that one of your brothers
8 died of cancer before you ever got to meet him
9 and if only you could have known that. It means
10 that even though you did not consent to your
11 history being erased and your family ties being
12 severed forever, New York State has mandated that
13 you have no connection whatsoever to your own
14 biological family. It means that you will have
15 to search for your own mother if you ever hope to
16 see her face. It means that it may take you over
17 30 years of searching to find her, your brother,
18 and other family members and finally, it means
19 that you may be almost 50 years old before you
20 can tell your mother that you love her. So
21 please, pass this legislation, allow others to be
22 reunited with their families.
23 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
24 MR. STANTON: So I'm, I'm the spouse of
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2 an adoptee from a closed adoption and from the
3 moment she first shared this information with me
4 I understood that it was very painful for her.
5 She was adopted as a baby so she had no
6 recollection of the separation, that wasn't the
7 issue, her adoptive parents were wonderful and
8 loving people and that was never the issue.
9 The issue is that even as an adult under
10 the current law, neither she nor our children nor
11 their children, presumably, can know the answers
12 to the most basic questions about themselves and
13 so I ask you to answer three questions silently
14 to yourself; do you know your birth mother, do
15 you know if you have any siblings, does your
16 family have any history of cancer. For most non-
17 adoptees it's impossible to imagine not knowing
18 the answers to basic questions, however, for many
19 adoptees these are primal wounds reopened every
20 time someone asks.
21 So week after week, month after month,
22 year after year, we searched phone books,
23 databases, reunion websites and adoptee
24 registries, I personally made countless calls,
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2 spoke with counselors, strangers, left countless
3 generic messages and sent countless e-mails all
4 in an attempt to heal the wound and ease her
5 pain. She has also posted countless messages on
6 Facebook and ancestry.com. Well, I'm happy to
7 report that no thanks to your predecessors who
8 failed to right this wrong, somehow my wife's
9 birth mother received one of those cou-, one of
10 those generic messages -- just give me a second -
11 -
12 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Take your
13 time.
14 MR. STANTON: If you've never witnessed
15 a mother and child coming nose to nose for the
16 first time in 49 years as I've witnessed, it
17 trumps a wedding day. I'm sorry, it's pain, it's
18 painful for me as well.
19 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: It's okay.
20 MR. STANTON: It trumps childbirth, I
21 know that's hard to believe, if you've never
22 witnessed a tall handsome brother sneaking up to
23 hug his long lost sister for the first time as I
24 have then you don't understand the opportunity
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2 you have before you.
3 You guys have the opportunity to give
4 many adoptees and their birth families a chance
5 to find their loved ones before it's too late to
6 find anything but a headstone. My wife even
7 spent this past week meeting two more aunts for
8 the first time and although they hadn't seen or
9 held her in 50 years, they picked up right where
10 they left off with unconditional love.
11 Don't kick the can down the road,
12 because your predecessors failed to change this
13 unfair law my wife missed a chance to meet her
14 other brother and aunt who both died of cancer
15 several years ago. And her mother missed her
16 chance to have her daughter there to comfort her
17 while her second child was d-, was dying. So
18 don't let that happen to any other adoptees and
19 families who are out there and searching for each
20 other.
21 Now, I've heard people argue, people who
22 have made a lot of money, I guess, with making
23 secret adoptions and I think they should
24 effracute (sic) themselves but I've heard people
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2 argue that some birth mothers might not want
3 their identity to be known that there was a child
4 given up for adoption and to those mothers I
5 would say, if you want to withhold your
6 friendship, that's your right. But what right
7 does anyone have to withhold a person's identity
8 and family history.
9 And I would also say that in my wife's
10 case her birth mother was very young at the time
11 of adoption and was told she must never search
12 for her child or interfere in any way, as so many
13 women who were told in those days, and I know
14 you've heard all this testimony. So I know you
15 guys realize that birth mothers grow old, aching
16 to know the fate of their lost children, and many
17 die with that pain. When they were reunited, her
18 mother said the weight of 50 years had been
19 lifted from her shoulders. They're so incredibly
20 happy together, no thanks to your predecessors,
21 my wife and her birth mother are like two peas in
22 a pod with more in common than I have time to
23 share today but what I want you to understand at
24 the end of this is that they are, at last, healed
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2 so please find it in your heart to give that gift
3 to others who are still searching.
4 Now, I know you guys, I'm preaching to
5 the choir over here, but for anyone else I don't
6 know if they're going to find wisdom in the law
7 books or from their bench, maybe what they should
8 do is just call their mother and find out what
9 they should do, that would be my recommendation,
10 ask their mother. Thank you.
11 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
12 Thank you very much.
13 MR. STANTON: And I'm sorry to make it
14 so heavy, to make that such a heavy thing but I
15 promised my wife I would show you guys a picture
16 of what happened last week and I can't show it to
17 everybody.
18 MS. STANTON: My mother's 70th birthday,
19 I was, I went to California to be with her and my
20 aunt who I had never met before, it took me 52
21 years to meet my aunts and 50 years to meet my
22 mother so.
23 MR. STANTON: That's who they are.
24 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: We could make
3 that happen.
4 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: By the way,
5 if you want to, if you'd like to e-mail us the
6 picture, feel free to do that. Okay, our next
7 witness is Michael Schoer. And do you swear or
8 affirm that the testimony you are about to give
9 is true?
10 MR. MICHAEL SCHOER, BROOKLYN & STATEN
11 ISLAND COORDINATOR, NEW YORK STATEWIDE ADOPTION
12 REFORM'S UNSEALED INITIATIVE: Yes, sir.
13 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you,
14 state your name and go ahead.
15 MR. SCHOER: My name is Michael Schoer,
16 I thank you for allowing me to speak before you
17 today. I am 45 years old, I'm a combat military
18 veteran, I'm a happily married father of two, two
19 young kids, I'm a retired New York City police
20 office, I'm a lifelong New Yorker, and I'm also
21 an adoptee. I'm here today to support A909, the
22 Bill of Adoptee Rights.
23 I've always known that I was adopted and
24 I'm fine with it. I love my family dearly and I
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2 wouldn't trade them for anything in the world,
3 the craziness and all. They gave me and my two
4 sisters everything we needed and a fair amount of
5 what we wanted, which is probably a lot more than
6 a lot of other people have in their life so I was
7 blessed.
8 Both my parents, especially my mom, were
9 open to the questions I had concerning my
10 adoption and they answered the questions
11 truthfully and honestly, so I was blessed, again.
12 I'm not looking to replace my family or intrude
13 into someone else's life, I just want to know
14 where I came from just like everyone else. Ever
15 since I was about 13, give or take, I wanted to
16 know where I came from. I've wanted to know why
17 I was so tall and where did I get my green eyes
18 from because I was 1 of 8 grandkids and I was
19 always Michael, in the back of a bunch of other
20 kids, including the older ones. Then as I a-, I
21 got older, my questions expanded to wanting to
22 know about my biological par-, what my biological
23 parents looked like, their religion, where they
24 lived and grew up, and I also wanted to know
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2 about their medical history which is my medical
3 history, and nobody can say it's not. These are
4 the regular common things that most non-adopted
5 people can simply turn to their mom, dad, uncle,
6 aunt, or grandparent and simply ask the question
7 and get an answer, but adult adoptees do not have
8 that privilege.
9 Our original birth records are sealed
10 forever when our adoptions are finalized, sealing
11 our original birth records and original
12 identities, or sealing of that information is
13 outdated and needs to be changed. The law that
14 seals our original birth records is, was enacted
15 in the 1930s, 80 years ago give or take. Times
16 and change-, times have changed and so must this
17 law. Adult adoptees are being discriminidate
18 (sic), discriminated against solely because of
19 the way in which our births were handled and,
20 therefore, we are being treated differently than
21 everyone else and again, that is discrimination.
22 This past October 17th, 2013, I found my
23 natural mother, my biological mom, who was still
24 alive and living in Long Island. It took me
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2 about 30 years of on and off searching to do
3 this. I now know my heritage and m-, and medical
4 information, I spent a lot of money and time to
5 accomplish this and money, you know, I shouldn't
6 have to spend nor, you know, I'm not rolling
7 money so it's, it's, every dollar counts, I've
8 done DNA tests, I've paid an investigator, I
9 befriended search angels to help me find her, I
10 posted search information, my personal
11 information on sodi-, social media Websites which
12 today with identity theft is a, is a threat all
13 in o-, all unto itself. I've spent countless
14 hours, days, and weeks in libraries looking
15 through phone books, high school yearbooks and
16 anything else I can get my hands on that would
17 give me information about the first chapter of my
18 life. I deserve, adult adoptees deserve to know
19 who we are and where we came from.
20 I now know that my biological family is
21 mostly German, I know that my natural mother is
22 almost six foot tall, she has multiple sclerosis
23 as did her mother, my natural grandmother, and
24 grandmother died in her 40s, and she's also
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2 fought breast cancer which is very important
3 since I have a daughter myself.
4 I do know now that my natural mother
5 spent her entire life with my biological father,
6 later marrying him. I learned that he spent 36
7 years, 35, 36 years as a New York City
8 firefighter, ergo the helmet that was given to me
9 the first day that I met my natural mother.
10 Secrecy, she met me and then she gives me one of
11 the most prized possessions that she possibly
12 could have had, the helmet that a fa-, that her
13 husband wore.
14 When she knew that I first found her she
15 was in shock and then she cried. Soon after, she
16 called me. I was so excited that I took sh-,
17 took a picture of the caller id on my, on my
18 telephone that showed her name because I couldn't
19 believe that this was finally happening. Our
20 first phone call was about 50 minutes long and we
21 spoke about this, that, everything and nothing.
22 We made plans to meet a couple of weeks later
23 which went extremely well.
24 When she first saw me, she turned her
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2 head away and got emotional so I, I went over
3 next to her, I put my hand on her shoulder, my
4 cheek to hers, I sat down next to her, and we
5 looked at each other in amazement. She then held
6 my hand for the first 30 minutes until her
7 arthritis started to bother her. We met for
8 three hours and she was happy and relieved to
9 know that her son was doing well. Since then I
10 have visited her several times and we've, we talk
11 about once a week on the phone.
12 Her friend of many years told me that
13 she never forgot about me because on Mother's Day
14 she would tell the staff at the assisted living
15 home that she's in that she's a mother because
16 they would give out flowers to all the moms on
17 Mother's Day. So I know that she didn't forget.
18 During my entire life, we've only been
19 just a 30 minute car ride away from each other
20 because she lived in Queens and then moved out to
21 Long Island and I've been in Brooklyn, which I
22 still am. And in closing, only an adopted person
23 can understand how it feels not to know how your
24 life began.
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2 I'm fine with being adopted, I'm, I was
3 never the adopted child, I was just Michael
4 amongst the other kids and, you know, my parents
5 are my parents and, you know, again, I wouldn't
6 trade them for anything in the world but sealing
7 my original identity and birth records is
8 hurtful, shameful, disrespectful, and most of
9 all, again, it's discriminatory.
10 A909, the proposed law, strikes a
11 balance between the adopted person's right to
12 know and the very few natural parents who may
13 have a privacy concern. I feel more complete as
14 a person knowing how my life began.
15 Please ask yourself, would you buy a
16 book with the first chapter missing or go to a
17 movie and intentionally miss the first five
18 minutes? You may still enjoy what you read and
19 what you saw but how in the world would you know
20 how it all began and how it's all tied in
21 together?
22 To some it may not matter but it should
23 be the decision of the individual to want to know
24 his or her history or not and not the
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2 government's. It is very important for everyone
3 to be treated equally, I cannot tell you in the
4 right words how fulfilling that this experience
5 has been for me, times have changed and so must
6 the current law that seals an adoptee's original
7 birth records.
8 Everyone is supposed to be treated
9 equally, right? Then why are adoptees being
10 treated like we are second class citizens? Thank
11 you very much for listening, for your support,
12 and I pray that this bill will pass in the very
13 near future. One of the things that I have
14 gotten, not only from my natural mother but her
15 brother, which of course, is my uncle, I've
16 gotten pictures. These are the two people who
17 made me. It, it's astonishing to see something
18 like this, this was the wedding picture of my
19 maternal grandparents, my great grandparents are
20 in here as well, amongst aunts, uncles, and yada
21 yada yada, as Seinfeld would say.
22 It, it's, it's, you know, this has to,
23 this has to occur, we, I know I'm preaching to
24 the choir and, and other people may want to talk
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2 but she was happy as a pig in, to, to be found
3 and, and even her brother said because she's
4 dealing with illnesses and, and whatnot that she
5 has an extra spunk in her voice, some extra spark
6 because she's been kind of like, not so great
7 with the health so privacy, I don't think so.
8 And thank you very much for allowing me to speak.
9 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Thank you.
10 Thank you very much. And while our next witness,
11 Pat O'Brien, if, if he's here, coming up, I just
12 want to mention, I should've mentioned it
13 earlier, Assembly Member Weprin who left, you
14 know, only left because he needs to be home
15 before sundown for the Sabbath, and this time of
16 year that's pretty early so, I wanted to just
17 make that clear on his behalf. Do you swear that
18 the, or affirm, that the testimony you are about
19 to give is true?
20 MR. PAT O'BRIEN, PRESIDENT, NEW YORK
21 STATE CITIZENS COALITION FOR CHILDREN: Yes.
22 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, please
23 state your name and go ahead.
24 MR. O'BRIEN: My name is Pat O'Brien,
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2 I'm the president of a New York State Citizens
3 Coalition for Children. I certainly have, have a
4 prepared text that I'm going to say, you guys can
5 read that because everything that we wrote in the
6 text has been addressed today, so I just want to
7 take, I took some notes about, about things that
8 didn't get covered and that's what I just want to
9 go over now.
10 First of all, thank you very much for
11 even being here. I mean, look, I know you said
12 this was ending at 2 and the fact that it's still
13 20 after 4 and you're here I think is amazing,
14 even thank you for giving us the reason why the
15 gentlemen had to leave, which I totally
16 understand why they, why they had to leave so
17 thank you.
18 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: I don't, I
19 don't know who may have said the hearing was
20 going to be over by 2. We've never had a hearing
21 that ended at 2 so...
22 MR. O'BRIEN: Oh, good, no, it was, it
23 was in the papers, you know, and it said 10 to 2
24 and that, you know, so...
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2 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Oh no, I'm,
3 I'm amazed we're getting out before 8.
4 MR. O'BRIEN: Oh, okay, oh, excellent,
5 excellent, well, well then, thank you very much
6 for your patience. I
7 t, it's such an important issue, I know
8 where you guys are on the issue so I don't have
9 to convince you, and, so a couple of things, a
10 question came up a little earlier today on, what
11 do the adoption agencies feel, feel about this;
12 there, there's a group, New York State Adoption
13 Action Network, a group of adoption agencies that
14 meet on a r-, regular basis and I'm, I'm certain
15 that every adoption agency in that group is in
16 favor of, of this, so I'll, I'll put your staff
17 in touch with the, the current president of that
18 group and, and if you wanted to have a
19 conversation with adoption agencies. And I would
20 be very cautious of any adoption agency that is
21 not in support of, of openness. That was a
22 practice they did years ago, it was ways that
23 they made money, they wanted to keep everything
24 closed but that's not what's going on today so I
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2 would be very suspicious of any adoption
3 organization that actually still practices
4 closed, closedness [sic], so that, that's another
5 very important thing.
6 Something that got addressed a little
7 bit by, by Joseph, the gentleman from Staten
8 Island but I just wanted to really highlight it,
9 you guys are the parents of, of, of thousands of
10 kids whether you know it or not, we have loads of
11 kids in New York State's foster care system. In
12 my other, I'm a volunteer with the Citizens
13 Coalition for Children but I'm also the founder
14 of an adoption agency called You Gotta Believe,
15 the older child adoption and permanency movement
16 and what we do is we find permanent parents and
17 adoptive parents for kids who are aging out of
18 the system in order to prevent them from becoming
19 homeless when they age out.
20 So we're finding homes for 14, 15, 16,
21 17 year olds, and the ironic thing, if we don't
22 solve the problem of, of access to birth records
23 is the ironic thing, right now we, we, the agency
24 practitioners play a game, we're not allowed to
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2 give the foster parents who are going to adopt
3 the 14, 15, 16 year old, we're not allowed to
4 give them the kid's birth certificate.
5 Now, how does that foster parent get
6 the, get the kid's Social Security, I don't know,
7 somehow they figure it out, I don't know how they
8 get them working papers because we're not allowed
9 to give them the information. We want these kids
10 to be legally adopted, however, the day that the
11 16 or 17 year old who lived with their birth
12 parents on and off as young children, the day
13 they get legally adopted, they're not allowed to
14 have their original birth certificate any,
15 anymore, so if somebody followed the letter of
16 the law, they get ado-, and, and, and this great
17 event of adoption happens to a 16 or 17 year old,
18 why would a 16 or 17 year old even want to
19 consent to that if they knew their records would
20 be cut off? We solve these problems when we
21 allow op-, open records.
22 So I just wanted to point out the irony
23 of, of how even it will help kids in our care
24 right now if we get ri-, if, if we, if we give
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2 every adoptee access to their original birth
3 certificate. New York State Citizens Coalition
4 for Children has the major adoption conference in
5 the country, I'm sorry, not the country, in the
6 state, in Albany, on Mother's Day weekend, and so
7 Friday, May 9th, Saturday, May 10th, we, we have
8 lots and lots of great workshops but I just
9 wanted to read you one of the workshops that,
10 that we're doing on that day because of the
11 circumstance of the way things are. It's being
12 labeled, Behind Closed Doors, being delivered by
13 a board member of Coalition called Lisa Maynard,
14 this workshop will discuss barriers that
15 searching adoptees face and the challenges for
16 agency staff who believe adoptee's rights to
17 their original birth certificate but must conform
18 to closed record laws, we're doing workshops on
19 that.
20 And, and, and we shouldn't have to, it,
21 we just should, we just should have open records.
22 And what I'm hoping is, I know we can't do it in
23 time for this year, what I'm hoping for, our
24 Mother's Day con-, conference in 2015 is that we
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2 can entire, we can honor your entire committee at
3 our conference because you made this legislation
4 happen so I hope you do a good job of lobbying
5 your, your Senate people and the rest of your
6 assembly people but, you know, in, in this day
7 and age, it's an antiquated law, I think you guys
8 are on the cusp of making it happen and I just
9 want to thank you again for, for even giving us
10 this full day and your attention on this issue
11 that is so, so important. Before I leave, I just
12 wanted to know if you had any, any, any
13 questions?
14 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: I don't
15 think so. Thank you very much.
16 MR. O'BRIEN: All right.
17 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay. All
18 right, well, I think that concludes the hearing.
19 I just want to say this, I think for all of us,
20 has been a, a very emotionally packed hearing. I
21 think we have gathered a lot of very useful
22 information, both from everyone's individual
23 stories and the, the evidence and legal
24 documentation and, and, that we have received
Geneva Worldwide, Inc. 256 West 38 th Street, 10 th Floor, New York, NY 10018 Page 325 1 Standing Committee on Health, January 31, 2014
2 today so I, I think this has been very useful to
3 us, although, as some have said, you know, you
4 may feel like you're preaching to the choir, but
5 I think, I certainly hope that the information we
6 have garnered today is going to be very helpful
7 in persuading some of our colleagues who have
8 been very much opposed to this legislation.
9 Unless you have anything to add.
10 ASSEMBLY MEMBER BORELLI: Oh, I do, I
11 just want to thank everyone for, for coming,
12 especially as an adoptee myself, it's, it's a
13 therapeutic for me to hear these stories and to,
14 and to hear some of the testimony from,
15 especially some of the birth mothers, as it is
16 for some of you and, and, you know, like you, I
17 have my own sad stories of walking into a, a town
18 hall in Beacon, New York, and asking for my birth
19 certificate and, and seeing the look on these two
20 women who work there, you know, they're, they're
21 kind of, they're startled look, they're sad face,
22 and who's going to tell me, which one of them was
23 going to come and tell me that they, I couldn't
24 have it. So it's, it's certainly an emotional
Geneva Worldwide, Inc. 256 West 38 th Street, 10 th Floor, New York, NY 10018 Page 326 1 Standing Committee on Health, January 31, 2014
2 issue for everyone involved and without support
3 from, really all three parties, and, and we
4 really had a good representation from all three
5 parties in, in the adoption process, I don't
6 think we could move forward. So thank you very
7 much.
8 ASSEMBLY MEMBER GOTTFRIED: Okay, we're
9 adjourned.
10
11
12 (The public hearing concluded at 4:12
13 p.m.)
Geneva Worldwide, Inc. 256 West 38 th Street, 10 th Floor, New York, NY 10018