Our Bastard Calendar

365 Reasons You Cannot Have Your Records

www.bastards.org/fun/hosrec.htm

More reasons!

***Real

A Kansas social worker told an adult adoptee (with his birthfather standing beside him) that he didn't really need his OBC because after finalization of the adoption, his adoptive parents became his biological parents.

A woman I met several years ago was told by a clerk in Virginia that she had lost the right to her OBC when she agreed to be adopted. And then there's the Franklin County, Ohio ex- Probate judge who told the Ohio House that the only birth parents who wanted to be reunited were those who were in jail and wanted somebody to send them cookies.

The judge denied my petition to have a copy of my OBC, saying, "What if you die? What if it's found among your belongings and gets published in a magazine?"

Said to me by a Cook County Vital Stats clerk: "This is Chicago. We don't have freedom of information here."

*** Unreal?

Oh, yes, we have a notation here that there *was* a record of your birth, but it seems someone accidentally registered you twice, so we had to throw it out.

Yes, we had your birth record, but it was full of dimpled and pregnant chads, so we dumped it.

Yes, your birth record was quite unusual. Most don't list birth fathers, but yours lists both Al Gore and Pat Buchanan. Of course, we had to discard it.

After much legal wrangling, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that your birth father is George W. Bush. Are you sure you want this?

(This feature appeared in the Summer 2002 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

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