Current state law is outdated, denies adult adoptees their identities

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.

To Members of the Planning and Development Committee:
I think we can all agree that the most personal of all rights is the right to know who you are and where you came from. Therefore, there should be no circumstance in which the government can change the identity of an individual and keep that person's original identity from them and from their family. This denies that person the most fundamental right of all: The right to your own identity. Your identity belongs to you and you alone. It does not belong to the State and cannot and should not be taken from you under any circumstances for any reason no matter how well intentioned.

This is exactly what happens to those of us who were adopted in "closed" adoptions. We are denied our identity and we are denied equal protection under the law. I believe this to be a denial of the most basic human rights and further infringes on the rights of all children of adoptees who are in turn denied basic health, genetic and cultural information.

Infringement of adoptee rights, especially for closed adoptions, where rights were stripped with out informed consent, must be stopped and rights fully restored. I support Senate Bill 977 because, as amended, it takes another important step in modernizing our laws to restore those rights taken from adoptees by outdated and misguided efforts of the past.

Bill Finch