Adoptee Rights in the 20^th Century and into the 21^st

Ideologies and their Impact on Activist Strategy and Success

By Damsel Plum

September, 2000

Since the beginning of the adoptee rights movement in the 1950's, there have been several ideological influences which have impacted adoptee rights activist strategies and outcomes.  While adherents to each ideology claim that they are working in the best interests of adopted people, the focus of their efforts and the end-products of their activism diverge significantly.

The following are the four main ideologies impacting adoptee rights activism, including organizations representing the ideologies, the groups which seek to benefit from each ideology, and examples of the activism outcomes of pursuing each ideology. Please keep in mind that most proponents of each ideology genuinely believe that they are doing the best thing for those affected by adoption. The most effective way to find out what sort of ideology, and thus activism, you should be supporting is to look at the end-product of each ideology's activism and decide if that is what you (and your group) are aiming for. Generally speaking, the "search rights" and "psychology of adoption" strategies tend to have more in common with each other, while the "civil" and "identity rights" have more in common with each other, but there is certainly overlap among them.

Relative Rights

Jean Paton was the first to articulate the adoptee's plight of secrecy and shame in her writings on the adoptee experience. Originally a staunch supporter of open records as a civil right, Paton has recently switched her focus from civil rights to the psychology of adoption, opining in personal correspondence that the main issue of consequence is the psychology of the adopted child. While Paton herself remained an inspiring voice for adoptee rights up until the late 1980's, the group that Paton founded, Orphan Voyage, has not been involved in any serious movement for open records but is rather a sparsely diffused network of search professionals.

A now largely-defunct adoptee rights group, Yesterday's Children, filed a class action law suit in 1975 which claimed that sealed records violated their constitutionally protected rights as articulated in the First, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. They lost on jurisdictional grounds, with the court appearing to hold that the issue of sealed records was not one of constitutionality, and belonged to the states. Yesterday's Children appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case in 1978.

ALMA, the Adoptees' Liberty Movement Association, filed a class action lawsuit in New York in 1977, arguing that sealed records violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  They further compared sealed records to slavery, and therefore concluded that the system violated the Thirteenth Amendment. ALMA also lost their case.

Bastard Nation began advocating for equal access to personal, government-held adoption documents when it was founded in 1996.  Thanks to the Internet, adoptees can now network with hundreds of thousands of other people touched by adoption worldwide, resulting in an explosion of adoption reform activists.  Thanks to this ability and improved activist education, Bastard Nation members have successfully spearheaded the restoration of adoptee access in Oregon and Alabama.

Some Psychology of Adoption advocates claim that restriction-to-access "protections" are needed for the good of all those involved in adoption. Unfortunately, many well-meaning support-group leaders and professional searchers have taken a very self-defeatist approach to legislative activism and make claims that conditional access is the only way they can get anything passed in their state or province. Luckily, with the recent successes in Oregon and Alabama, many states are now trying to introduce unconditional records access bills. The new problem is in strategic naiveté as many support group leaders introduce bills with all the final acceptable compromises built in. This does not give them negotiating room during the legislative session and may very well lead to unacceptable compromises along the way, especially in states where conditional access legislation has been brought up, unsuccessfully, for years in a row.

Some Identity Rights advocates argue that the civil rights argument does not go far enough for those whose documents are falsified, incomplete or otherwise made inaccessible. Some have taken the civil rights advocates to task for not going far enough in demanding the complete adoption file in all cases. After the success of Alabama, this may very well be the way of the future.

Regardless of how you came into the adoptee rights movement, it pays to take heed of the implications of focusing on one or another ideology when pursuing activist strategies. I hope this presentation will make this easier and lead to more adoptee rights activists securing sound and effective strategies for success.