Quotes to Consider

"The law must be consonant with life. It cannot and should not ignore broad historical currents of history. Mankind is possessed of no greater urge than to try to understand the age-old question: "Who am I?" "Why am I?"

Even now the sands and ashes of continents are being sifted to find where we made our first step as man. Religions of mankind often include ancestor worship in one way or another. For many the future is blind without a sight of the past. Those emotions and anxieties that generate our thirst to know the past are not superficial and whimsical. They are real and they are "good cause" under the law of man and God."

Judge Wade S. Weatherford, Jr.

Seventh Judicial Circuit Court, South Carolina

Ruling on an adoptee's petition to gain access to adoption records.

The above quotation has been seen floating about for years in e-mail signatures and on adoption webpages. It has even appeared on non-adoption related sites devoted to genealogy, and to biofeedback! Where did it come from?

The answer is that it comes from the case Bradey v. Children's Bureau of South Carolina, (Spartanburg County, S.C., Ct. C.P., Apr. 9, 1979)

Judge Wade S. Weatherford, Jr., now retired, was honored by the Sunflower Birthmom Support Group (http://www.bmom.net/) last year. See Lynne Powell, 20 years later, woman finds daughter she gave up for adoption,

GAFFNEY LEDGER (S.C.), Jan. 29, 2001.

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"An adoptee is the product of the adoption industry which bestows special rights on adoptive and birth parents. In becoming a product, certain rights are abrogated for the adoptee: the right to one's birth name and the record of one's birth"

- Joanne W. Small

Discrimination Against the Adoptee, 37

PUB. WELFARE 39, 43 (Summer 1979).

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(These features appeared in the Spring 2001 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)