Birth mother: It's time to get with the times and give adoptees access to their birth records

Editor's note: This is one in an ongoing series of posts spotlighting support for our continued effort to provide adult adoptees born in Connecticut access to their original birth certificates. The testimony featured in this series was submitted to the state Legislature earlier this year in support of proposed legislation that would have restored the right of adult adoptees adopted before Oct. 1, 1983, to access their original birth certificate. (Post-1983 adoptees had this right restored in 2014.) The letters are published with the authors' permission. Sign up for our newsletter at www.accessconnecticut.org if you want to help us end discrimination against adoptees.

Dear Friends,
I’m a birth mother, class of 1966, writing in enthusiastic support of Senate Bill 977.

After surrendering my son to closed adoption in San Francisco in March, 1966 there was never a day when I didn’t wonder where or how he was. At age 28, he and his wife (both in medical school) searched earnestly after long days in classes and labs. They found me in February, 1966, followed by a joyous reunion in Michigan. I watched him graduate from the U. of Michigan medical school that June, named by fellow students as the most compassionate, caring physician in the class. Now, his older son will graduate from the U. of M. and go to medical school there, or possibly at Yale, (my former employer) where he’s wait-listed. Rick and his sons know they are Mayflower descendants from William Bradford, and Revolutionary War descendants of Phillip Reed, who was born in CT and served with the VT Green Mountain Boys.

It is priceless for my son to know his heritage. He spent years searching with little to go on (he found me through my father’s Ph.D. dissertation). Neither of us can get his California OBC. Countless CT adult adoptees would be spared this unremitting effort because of the passage of Senate Bill 977.

As birthmothers in that dark time, we terminated our parental rights, NOT our love for our children. When Rick found me, I was the DAR Good Citizens chair. "Coming out" as a birth mother to my fellow DAR sisters was tough, but it needn’t have been. The DAR members were, without exception, kind and understanding; many of the older members knew girls who had gotten "in trouble" in the World War II era.

Denying access to birth origin information is an artifact of past attitudes. Times have changed. CT adoptees would be well-served if they could all share in having access in access to have their original birth certificates. Please support this Senate Bill 977.

Your constituent and CT citizen and voter,

Diane Kathleen Reed Jowdy