Not Worth The Paper It's Printed On

This is an archive of the original Bastard Quarterly newsletter, edited by Damsel Plum and Charles Filius. It was published in print and on the web between 1997 and 2002.

Not Worth The Paper It's Printed On

by David Winge

This article first appeared in the Spring 1997 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.

About a year or so after my adoption search & reunion, my birthmother sent me a certified copy of my original birth certificate. It was overwhelming and surreal to hold my original birth certificate and my amended birth certificate next to one another and to inspect the differences. They have a nearly identical format, with the most glaring difference being that one of them says "Certificate of Birth" and the other says "Certificate of Live Birth". No markings of any kind distinguish one from the other. There is no scarlet letter or stamp on the original, as is the practice in many states. Simply the word "live".

Coming face to face with my alter ego was perhaps the most glaring example of how my life had been manipulated, my beginnings covered up and the lies fully supported and co-conspired by the county of Ogemaw and the state of Michigan. At first it seemed as if I were holding someone else's birth certificate, but I am luckier than many adoptees in that the date, place of birth and sex on both are the same. I can only assume that the latter facts mattered little since my birth mother had traveled so far away from her home to deliver. It was probably assumed that those details would offer me no clue as to the whereabouts or identity of my birthmother.

Rewriting the birth certificate to name the adoptive parents as the only parents of the adoptee, and sealing the original, was a practice started in the States some fifty years ago. This was done in an attempt to erase the illegitimate status of the adoptee, the unexpected result being that the altered birth certificate just reinforced the adoptee's feeling of detachment from the truth. Fabricating a birth certificate starts the chain reaction of lies and secrecy which become part of the adoptee's makeup. Only when we dig through that tangled web of deceit do we realize that changing and hiding this original and very personal document perpetuated the problem from the start.

When I opened that letter and got my first look at the "other" birth certificate I was at first bemused. Here I had an official government record, a certified document stating I was once someone else, or that I was someone I am no longer. Someone I never knew existed, someone to whom I had no apparent connection had my birthday, my birthplace, my birth parents, my birth certificate. Perhaps a sibling or a ghost, maybe an evil twin? Was anything really outside the realm of possibility?

After contemplating this issue long and hard, I can only reach the conclusion that falsifying my birth certificate was done for the sake of someone's pride, not unlike the California ruling that changed the words "mother" & "father" to "parent" so that gay couples could list their partners on their own children's birth certificates. How could this alteration be anything but self-serving when the same task of recognizing parental right could as easily be accomplished with an adoption decree, an adoption certificate, or any of at least a dozen other much more accurate legal remedies? Vanity has its price and unfortunately it's a price paid by every adoptee when they are refused access to their original certificate of birth.

"Legal fiction" is a contradiction in terms, much as "amended birth certificate" is. We all know that birth is the act of being born; of coming into the world and beginning a life on our own. The original birth certificate is the declaration of this fact. Something happens to the adoptee when this declaration is sealed. At that instant, the adoptee has their history rewritten. Are adoptees no longer descended from their progenitors, that long list of ancestors from whom they inherited the essence of their being? Do they really become someone new, someone created from a legal manipulation, manufactured for the sake of appearance, as their birth certificate indicates? No. While some will argue that these modifications are made for the adoptee's own good, the ramifications of sealing and falsifying birth records are actually the degradation and violation of one group in society based solely on their adoptive status. Not even as autonomous adults are adoptees privy to the "original declaration of the fact of their birth". While as a child, this "legal fiction" may have been seen by a few as a means to facilitate a blending into the adoptive family, today the right of adult adoptees to obtain this basic information is being thwarted by the statutes of 48 states.

Ironically, in the same country built on the principal that all people are created equal, adoptees are not. The system is seriously flawed. Not only is my birth certificate not worth the paper it's printed on, but I now have two names, two identities, and the current laws make it certain that I will forever remain a bastard.

David Winge is 40 years old and Bastard Nation's Great Lakes Regional Director.

This article first appeared in the Spring 1997 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.