The History and Consequences of Sealing Adoption Records

The History and Consequences of Sealing Adoption Records
by Janine Baer (growinginthedark@comcast.net)

(This article first appeared in the Winter 1998 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

In 1995 I completed the above-titled master's thesis, having taken to heart historian E. Wayne Carp's admonition that the adoption rights movement was ahistorical. I agreed that knowing the past can help us understand how to proceed in the future. My goal was to find out exactly how and why records were sealed and to become more familiar with the various adoption studies, some of which were used in arguments against open records. I wanted to be able to write clearly about the consequences of sealed records, not only for the individuals involved, but for adoption agencies and society as a whole.

One reason I have been so interested in adoption is that the topic was taboo in my family so I am spending my life making up for the silence. Though I was told I was adopted at a young age, adoption was rarely discussed. Of course, nearly everything was a secret in the 1950s, especially if it had to do with sex. As a teenager in the early 1960s, I brought up the unmentionable topic once again to ask if my mother knew my birthmother's identity. As I found out later, she did, but she pleaded ignorance for several years.

When I was nineteen, Mother relented and told me my birth mother's name and city of origin. Records had been officially sealed for 15 years in California by the time I was born, but the obstetrician who arranged my adoption knew both of my mothers as his patients. I also learned later that the attorney who handled the paperwork had told my adoptive father that he would be glad to tell us my birth mother's name when I turned eighteen. When I was born, everyone involved basically ignored the sealed records laws.

When I was 24, I actually found my birthmother, having sent a veiled letter to a name in the phone book which a relative forwarded to her. I dated the letter with my birthday. The search for my birth parents depended on luck and good will -- luck that mine was an independent adoption in which names were shared, luck that it was an unusual name. Faith on the part of my adoptive mother, who gave the name to me despite her fear of what it might mean for me to find my birth family.

Having found my birth mother, and later my birthfather, I was supposed to "move on" beyond adoption. Instead, I moved in. With records still officially sealed, there was a cause to be fought. I had experienced the injustice of having to beg and argue for this information, but it was worse for other adoptees since most adoptive parents did not have their children's birth parents' names. In 1990, a bill to open records retroactively was proposed in California's legislature but died in committee. Discouraged, I took the stance that people needed to be educated about our perspective. (I'm learning in Bastard Nation that education is only part of the struggle.) I started a newsletter that connected the adoptee rights movement with the feminist community, where adoption and technoconception were gaining popularity.

Then I decided to go back to school to study adoption. I was accepted into the interdisciplinary social science master's program at San Francisco State, a program for students who wanted to tackle topics that are best understood through the study of two or more academic disciplines. Adoption certainly fits that criterion. For two-and-a-half years, I took classes and wrote papers pertaining to adoption. With laws implemented at different times in 48 states, it was most convenient to study my own state. San Francisco State University's library has copies of California statute books dating from the mid-nineteenth century, when California became a state.

Details of my findings can be found in my thesis. Briefly, here is what I learned. California's original adoption law was written in 1870. It stated that the adopting "person or persons" would enter an obligation, in writing, to the state of California "to raise such child as his or their own ... [S]uch child shall become the child of the person or persons signing the [obligation], and shall bear the name of such person, and shall be considered in law as the heir of such person or persons, and shall inherit the estate of such person or persons in like manner as if born of the body of such person" (Statutes of California, 1869-70). Adoption was serious stuff from the beginning in the gold rush state: you had to leave your wealth to your adopted heir.

Continuing through the statute books chronologically, I struck gold again (or was it quicksand?) when I got to 1935. With the stroke of a pen, California forbade the people involved in an adoption from having access to their own records. Before 1935 the law read, "All records and information specified in this section, other than the [amended] birth certificate to be issued hereunder, shall be available to no person other than the child, foster parent, natural parent, or upon the order of a court of record." The 1935 version was shortened to read that all records ". . . shall be available upon the order of a court of record."

Adoption existed for 65 years in California without sealed records statutes. This did not mean that adoptees always could learn their birth parents' names. Sometimes names were not known because no birth certificates existed, sometimes adopted adults were not told they were adopted. Nor, as in my case, did it mean adoptions after 1935 were always sealed in concrete. Nevertheless, in 1998, the era of open records is two years longer than the era of sealed records in California, which now has lasted 63 years, from 1935 to 1998.

Exactly why were records sealed? My hypothesis had been that it was to protect children of unmarried parents from knowing they were bastards but that this purpose is obsolete today. Reading the Child Welfare League's articles, after many hours of poring over scratchy microfiche of articles written from 1921 through World War II, to my surprise, I could find NO ONE who spoke out in favor of sealing records from adult adoptees. Could adoption have been so new, I wondered, that these professionals were not aware that adult adoptees might want to know their birthparents' identities? Nope, they knew. And they were sympathetic to the questions of adult adoptees. Two instances in the 1920s and one in 1943 (a cover article) were about adoptees' right to know. Each time the writer admonished adoption workers to obtain more information about adoptees so their questions could be answered in later years.

The support for adoptee search by CWLA was a wonderful discovery. These early policymakers were truly concerned not just with finding homes for children, but with obtaining information for them as adults. But this made the sealing of records all the more mysterious. Either CWLA was saying one thing publicly and doing another behind the scenes, or someone else was behind sealed records laws in the 1930s and early 1940s.

I finally found a book by someone who was against adoption agencies giving information about birth parents to adoptees or adoptive parents. She was a volunteer adoption worker named Eleanor Gallagher, whose 1936 The Adopted Child was a guide for prospective adoptive parents. Her canned speech, which was recommended for inquiring adoptees, stated that secrecy was actually their birthmothers' wish. (Where have we heard this argument recently?)

Gallagher wrote, "We, in whose charge you were temporarily placed, have made that secrecy inviolable; your loving adopting parents have accepted the situation, whether they originally wanted to or not, and now you, too, can be a fact-facer by realizing that further details about your origin simply are not on record anywhere."

My conclusion is that it was probably adoption agencies who were behind the sealing of records and that they did it to facilitate adoptions during the Great Depression and, in some instances, to hide their own corrupt practices. Some agencies had a lot to hide, as did Georgia Tann, the notorious adoption expert in Tennessee, who removed children from poor homes in that state, fabricated birth certificates, pocketed money from baby sales, and placed some of these children with movie actors in California before World War II. Along with the value of opening adoption records, it is also fascinating and valuable to unseal the secrets of adoption history.

If you want to read more about adoption in the 1930s and the ongoing consequences of sealed records, copies of Janine's thesis are available for purchase. Send $25 plus $3.75 postage to Janine Baer, P.O. Box 8081, Berkeley, CA 94707. Or e-mail your address to JBaer@pacbell.net to obtain a flyer or more information.

(This article first appeared in the Winter 1998 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)