Family Matter by E. Wayne Carp

Bastard Book Rerview:
Family Matters:
Secrecy and Disclosure
in the History of Adoption

by E. Wayne Carp
Harvard University Press,1998

Reviewed by CK Bertrand Holub

(This feature appeared in the Spring/Summer 1998 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

Carp, an Associate Professor of History at Pacific Lutheran
University, has produced a fascinating, maddening history of adoption in the
United States. He was given unprecedented access to the confidential files
of the Children's Home Society of Washington, the first professional
researcher permitted to examine thousands of closed adoption case records.
One of his major findings is that disclosure rather than secrecy was
the norm in adoption until after World War II.

Carp begins his work with a discussion of adoption throughout western and
American history, but I will confine my remarks to his discussion of
adoption in 20th century America.

Adoption was relatively rare during the first third of this century for a
number of reasons, among them child welfare workers' emphasis
on the preservation of the biological family and the stigmatization of
adoption as socially unacceptable and inferior to biological kinship. In
addition, the eugenics movement coupled the taint of illegitimacy to
adoption as it was thought that illegitimate children were the products
of feebleminded, unmarried mothers.

State legislatures followed the advice of two national child welfare organiza-
tions, the U.S. Children's Bureau and the private Child Welfare League of
America, in regulating placements. The CWLA published its first set of
adoption standards in 1938, which provided safeguards for the child, the
adoptive parents, and the state. Among these safeguards were an emphasis on
maintaining ties with the family of origin if possible, and the shielding
of adoptive parents' identities from the natural parents if an adoption
took place.

The immediate pre-war years saw the beginning of a number of trends
that would transform adoption during the next three decades, such as the
increasing demand of childless couples for adopted children and the rise in the
number of children available for adoption.

The discrediting of the eugenics movement's claims about the heredi-
tary nature of feeblemindedness removed that taint from many poten-
tially adoptable children, and the development of psychometric tests
assured prospective adoptive parents that children were safe to adopt.
The post-war demographic boom in children born out of wedlock
coincided with that era's ideology of domesticity and the glorification
of the nuclear family. From 1935 to 1965, the number of adoptions grew
ninefold.

Carp discusses three sources for information on adoptees: court
records, vital statistics registries, and agency records. Those states
that provided for conf'identiality of court records prior to WWII did so
to prevent the public from inspecting them. Their intent was not to prevent
the parties to an adoption from accessing the records.

The wording of the statutes made this clear, and in some cases explicitly gave
the justification as preventing outsiders from gaining knowledge regarding
illegitimacy and other private matters. Social workers also campaigned for
confidentiality in order to ensure for their profession the same legal
privilege accorded to doctors and lawyers.

Although most of the states that passed confidentiality provisions allowed all
concerned parties access to adoption records, some began to prohibit birth
parents from inspecting them in order to protect the adoptive family from
their interference.

Before WWII, however, 23 states did not provide any confidentiality for
adoption records. Those which did, did not mention agency case files,
and did not restrict access to them. Nowhere in the laws, legislative pro-
ceedings or writings of professional social workers was it ever advocated
that adult adoptees should not be permitted to access the legal information
pertaining to themselves.

The Bureau of the Census issued the first national standard birth certificate
in 1915. Prior to that, birth registration was unreliable and haphazard. Because
they recorded births as legitimate or illegitimate, reformers advocated
making those records confidential, but also would permit the individuals
to whom they belonged access them when they came of age.

By the early 1930s, some states had passed a variety of laws to remove
mention of illegitimacy. Other modifications to the original certificate were
proposed, but child welfare workers insisted on preserving the historical
record for the child to be able to learn about their original families when they
reached adulthood.

The device of the amended birth certificate, which would name the
adoptive parents as the natural parents of a legitimate child, was proposed by
two vital statistics registrars in 1930 and enacted by 35 states by 1941.
Their expressed concern was to protect children from being exposed
as illegitimate, and they specifically recommended that the sealed original
certificate "shall be opened upon demand of said child, or his natural
or adopting parents, or by the order of a court of record." (p. 54) Main-
taining family histories-or case records-was central to the develop-
ment of social work as a profession during the first quarter of this century
and, among other things, distinguished licensed agencies from the private,
unlicensed ones that asked no questions and kept no records.

Until the end of WWII, professional social workers felt it was their duty
to compile detailed family histories to hold in trust for the adoptee until
he/she came of age. Because of their allegiance to the biological model of
the family, social workers hoped to eventually facilitate the reunions of
adoptees with their birth families, either personally or through the
information they had gathered on the adoptees' behalf.

Carp's privileged access to the records of the CHSW from 1895 to 1988
enabled him to see which members of the triad returned to that agency
post-adoption, and to also determine what types of information they were
given. He discovered that non- identifying and identifying information
was freely shared with adult adoptees, as well as, to a lesser degree, with
both birth and adoptive parents.

The median age of children placed by the agency before WWII was
four-and-a-half years old. So often strong bonds had formed in the birth
family; many requests to the agency were for help in reuniting siblings
who had been separated. The agency operated as a sort of passive registry
for birth parents, often acted as intermediary for them, and satisfied a
variety of requests for help in dealing with their children's problems on
behalf of adoptive parents.

It was never the agency's policy to disclose all the information it
possessed; negative information was routinely held from all paities of the
triad, for "their own good."

The most important point to be made, however, is that before the mid-1960s
they divulged identifying information to most adult adoptees who requested
it. After WWII, the policy of disclosure gave way to one of secrecy.

Carp cites several reasons for this, among them a desire to defend the
adoption process from interference from the birth farnily, a desire by
social workers to increase their own influence and power and to bolster
social work's professionalism, and, most controversially, to protect birth
mothers' privacy.

The changing demographic composition of birth mothers-from the pre-
war, primarily married or divorced women who worked outside their
homes and relinquished their usually older children for economic reasons,
to the post-war younger, more broadly middle-class unmairied women who
relinquished their children in infancy contributed to the imposition of
secrecy as opposed to confidentiality, according to Carp. It is his contention
that these birth mothers demanded secrecy at a time when there was
tremendous stigmatization of unwed pregnancy, and that they were aban-
doning licensed agencies to patronize private agencies in search
of this secrecy.

Carp fails to support this point with references. His discussion of it seems
only to illustrate that birth mothers were demanding to the degree that
they were in a position to demand anything, not eternal anonymity from
their offspring, but protection from community exposure of the type
which established social work fact-gathering entailed.

A caseworker from a CWLA member agency stated her belief that "more
mothers of middle-class families and those of higher educational and
cultural advantages would tutn to the accredited children's agencies
for placement of their children if they could feel certain that their confidences
would be respected and no publicity of any sort attached to the proceed-
ings." (p.112)

It was thus partly a business decision to lure prospective clients back to
licensed agencies that determined the policy of secrecy. Social workers
touted their new policy of secrecy as a lure to adoptive parents as well,
claiming that accredited agencies had a greater ability to conceal the identity
of natural and adoptive parents from each other than unlicensed facilities.

Although he does not discuss the process in detail, Catp asserts only
that the law soon followed this new social work principle, and adoption
records were sealed to all parries in most states soon after WWII to be
opened only upon judicial showing of good causc. Carp overgeneralizes,
however, from the case of Washington, the state he studied in greatest detail.
California, for example, closed its records to all parties in 1935.

This hypothesized demand for secrecy coincided with a new psychoanalytic
paradigm in which unwed mothers were no longer the congenitally
feebleminded girls and women of the eugenics era, but the neurotic
and therefore curable daughters of the middle class. It was deemed
unhealthy for both mother and child for them to be kept together, and as
early a separation as possible was advocated.

With the goal of biological family preservation no longer pre-eminent,
the mission statement of the CHSW, for example, no longer referred to
preserving family history for the adult adoptee, who was increasingly seen
as also neurotic for even requesting it. This new restrictive policy was codi-
fied in the 1960 CHSW Adoption Manual, which bluntly stated that
"for reasons of confidentiality" no identifying information should be
released to adult adoptees.

Carp discusses the rise of the adoption rights movement (the ARM, in his
terminology) in the 1970s, and its divergence from ALMA founder
Florence Fisher's emphasis on the constitutional right of adult adoptees
to access their birth and adoption records. He disparages the work of
Sorosky, Baran, and Pannor-authors of "The Adoption Triangle,"--as
being pseudoscientific social science ideology which pathologizes adoptees
as psychologically damaged individuals who suffer "genealogical bewilder-
ment" and "adoptee syndrome"-concepts he terms bogus.

Tlte climate of the 70s, with its new emphasis on openness in government,
the importance of finding one's family roots, and the diminishing stigmatiza-
tion of single pregnancy, predisposed the mass media and the general public
to be sympathetic to the goals of the ARM, although the adoption establish-
ment, the courts, and state legislatures refused, as he puts it, to abrogate the
pledges of secrecy made to birth mothers.

He cites the various compromise solutions of the 80s and 90s of mutual
registries and intermediary systems as accomplishments of the ARM,
although not what more "ideologically rigid " sections of that movement
would wish.

The backlash efforts of the NCFA also are noted. Bill Pierce supposedly
refused to speak with Carp, but Carp nonetheless pseudonymously retells
the old Carol Sandusky story and uses it to score points against adoption
reformers.

Carp's conclusions will engender much discussion and disagreement
in the adoption reform movement. From those who think that adoptees
are primally wounded and need to search in order to resolve their identity
issues, to those, like Bastard Nationals, who are "ideologically rigid" or
principled enough to insist on the right of unconditional access to birth
and adoption records.

It is interesting to note that Carp repeatedly refers to the promises of
confidentiality made to birth mothers as the reason he thinks records should
not be opened except with birth parents' consent. And although he
makes reference to the Tennessee semi-open records law, he makes no
reference to the findings of the Sixth Circuit Court in Doe v. Sundquist in
regard to that legal decision reached one full year before the publication
of this book.

He asserts that the legal decision in ALMA v. Mellon of 1979, which
refused to overtum sealed records laws on the basis of unconstitutionality,
has never been reversed. But he fails to note that the Court in Doe v.
Sundquist opined that the "right to privacy does not extend as far as the
plaintiffs would wish," i.e., as far as maintaining birth parent anonymity.

Although he claims to wear the mantle of academic neutrality, he
disingenuously takes a political stand and advocates a mutual consent
registry as a way to "balance the rights of all parties."

He decries the pathologizing of adoptees and yet lends his support
to a system that is predicated on the assumption that birthparents and
adoptees need protection from each other.

I highly recommend this book for its wealth of historical information, but
you will find yourself arguing with it repeatedly.

It was fascinating to me, as one who grew up under the sealed records
system, to learn that it was not always so, that this system is not
engraved in stone, and that its original intent was not to deprive
adoptees of their rights.

I also hope it will inspire many of us to undertake research on the
process of how records came to be sealed in our own states, as
Carp's work raises nearly as many questions as it answers.

It should also be mentioned that in his prefatory "Note on Language"
he refers to Bastard Nation as "a group of adoptees on the Internet
[who] have created a Web page that they defiantly call Bastard Nation,
thus reappropriating the original term of opprobrium and turning it into a
term of pride and commitment in their quest to secure access to their
adoption records."

Except for the fact that we're not just a Web site anymore, that, at least,
is something he got right.

Cynthia Kathryn (CK) Bertrand Holub is a reunited adoptee, Mid Atlantic
Regional Director of Bastard Nation and a newly appointed member of its
Executive Committee. She is a librarian and lives with her husband and two
children in Philadelphia, PA.

(This feature appeared in the Spring/Summer 1998 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)