Op-ed re: adoption by

(Rev.) Thomas F. Brosnan
Sacred Heart R.C. Church
Bayside, New York

Access to your original birth certificate shouldn’t require a papal dispensation.  But if you’re an adoptee -- it might as well.  In forty-three states, an adoptee’s original birth certificate remains sealed to all who were party to the adoption (adoptive parents, birth parents, adopted person).  Some of those who most vigorously support secrecy in adoption practice are Catholic bishops; desirous, they say, to protect the privacy of the women who relinquished their children to adoption.  (Odd, isn’t it, that Catholic bishops would expend so much effort and capital defending the link between privacy and reproductive rights for women – even when they don’t want it).
For more information on adoption legislative reform: www.americanadoptioncongress.org

States retroactively sealed birth records, keeping the adoptee’s natal identity a secret from himself.  Initially, however, the laws were enacted to protect those party to adoption from public scrutiny, not to keep them unknown to each other.  A woman’s right to privacy from her own child was never promised -- because it was never intended.  That’s why when my parents adopted me in 1953, the New York court officially issued adoption papers to my adoptive parents using my birth name.  Since I was born illegitimate I was identified by my birth mother’s surname.  If privacy was indeed being promised my birth mother, then how could the court officially release her surname to my adoptive parents?     

The truth of one’s origins, your natal identity, is a fundamental human right.  American Catholic bishops, by and large, fight to deny that right to adopted adults by their support for sealed records in adoption practice and by their national policy of issuing amended (i.e. false) baptismal certificates to persons baptized before they were adopted.  This, in sharp contrast to their church’s official teaching: “(I)t is through the …recognized relationship to his own parents that the child can discover his own identity and achieve his own proper human development.”
[Instrument on Respect for Human Life, 1987. Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI)]

What motivates American bishops to act in opposition to their church’s teaching?  Sympathy, they say, for anonymous birth mothers (one wonders how the bishops found them); but what they’re really doing is paying obeisance to the anti-abortion lobby who maintain the mistaken conviction that openness in adoption somehow equates with increased abortion rates.  Truth is: in those states which have access to adoption records abortion rates are, in fact, lower than in states which have sealed records.  

“…(T)he journey toward truth …leads us to heed the admonition carved on the temple portal at Delphi – the admonition to know thyself – and to answer the fundamental questions which pervade human life: Who am I and Where have I come from?” [Fides et Ratio, John Paul II].  Amended birth and baptismal certificates deliberately keep from the adopted person knowledge of his natal identity, burdening this essential human journey with unnecessary ambiguity and hardship.  Maybe we do need a papal dispensation -- one that would free us from misguided bishops who claim that secrecy trumps truth (sound familiar?).  Bishops, as shepherds, should be helping to remove those obstacles to truth, not placing more in the way. 

(Rev.) Thomas F. Brosnan
Sacred Heart Church
215-35 38th Avenue
Bayside, NY 11361
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