It's a myth: Adoption records weren't sealed to protect birth mothers' anonymity, birth mother says

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.

Adult adoptees are the only people forbidden to have their original birth certificates issued to them, forbidden to have access to their ethnicity, genetic heritage and identity.

As a birthmother/first mother/natural mother, whatever you want to call me, I oppose this idea of keeping their past from them. It has been said that the records in CT were sealed in 1975 to "protect" women who surrendered their children to adoption, that we were promised anonymity.

Horse feathers!

I was promised a lot of things-- that I would forget about this child, that life would go on as if nothing had happened -- but never anonymity. Having surrendered in 1966, that would have been impossible to promise anyone; records were open. They were closed to protect the privacy of the adoptive parents and child.
Karen Waggoner, Bethel