Tracking Down Mom

By John Cloud/Portland

Cindy is shaking with fear. She tugs at her gold necklace, shifts in her seat, slams down cup after cup of black coffee. She gets this way when she has to tell a stranger why she can't sleep at night, why she and her husband have been fighting, why she can't choke down even half her meal when she goes to a nice restaurant. Two decades ago, when Cindy (a pseudonym) was in college, a man beat and raped her. Devastated and uncertain, she had the baby but surrendered the girl for adoption.

Last summer, after soul-searching, Cindy decided to find out what had become of her child. She gave the state where the girl was born permission to contact her if the daughter asked her whereabouts. The daughter already had, and the two began exchanging letters through the adoption agency. But Cindy held back her identity and location.

A wise move, she now says. After Cindy told her daughter about the rape, the young woman wrote, in her swirly cursive, an oddly jovial response, "Hi, how's everything going?" She said she was glad to learn "about my father's situation"--the only reference to the rape--and wanted to know how to find him. Cindy was horrified. Her daughter obviously hadn't grasped her pain, the nightmares--her whole life. The daughter, with the help of her adoptive mother, persisted in trying to find her father, a man Cindy had helped send to prison. Fearing he might find her and harm her again, Cindy terminated contact.

Cindy now lives in Oregon, where voters last fall approved a two-sentence initiative called Measure 58. If it goes into effect, it will radically change traditional adoption law by allowing adoptees the unfettered right to see their birth certificate when they turn 21. Today those papers are sealed. But since the biological mother's name appears on a birth certificate, the law would mean adoptees like Cindy's daughter could easily find Mom's real name--and perhaps track her down. A group of birth mothers has sued Oregon, arguing that state statutes promise them confidentiality and that breaking these promises would be unconstitutional. The measure is on hold while the suit is pending.

More than an hour south of Portland's suburbs, where Cindy has kids in school, lives another woman, Mary Inselman. Mary is angry about adoption law, but for another reason entirely. She turned 77 in December, and has never seen her birth certificate. While everyone else can see such a document without fuss, adoptees must petition a court for their records, and petitions cost money (Inselman is on a fixed income) and, more important, dignity.

Inselman, who says she didn't learn she was adopted until a relative told her just six years ago, feels she should be able to discover her true background, but she has a more urgent reason to seek her records. She needs to find out whether any of her biological relatives has a kidney that would be suitable for her granddaughter, who is need of a donor. Inselman has sent letters to a local judge explaining all this, but the judge has thus far refused to release the information, offering a polite recitation of the law. Other judges across the U.S. routinely overlook the law in such cases. Adoptees cite this capriciousness as a reason for opening all records.

Two women, Cindy and Mary; two lives in turmoil because of adoption laws written in another era. Before the late '60s, states thought they were doing birth mothers a favor by confining their identities to dusty registrars' books. At the time, only "bad" girls got pregnant out of wedlock, and they were cloistered with fake names until they gave birth. Today, of course, that attitude seems quaintly outmoded. What's more, we have become sensitized to the rights of adoptees, who as they grow up want to know what everyone else already knows: who they are. "We are besieged by ghosts," says Helen Hill, a sculptor, sheep farmer and newborn political impresario, who wrote Oregon's Measure 58 in her basement and has spent part of her inheritance getting it approved. "We are haunted by questions."

Several states have tried to devise workable new laws to help answer those questions without treading on the rights of mothers. It's a tricky legislative game. In 1996, for instance, Tennessee legislators gave adoptees--except those who were the product of rape or incest--access to their birth certificate while also allowing biological mothers to tell the state they never want contact with their kids. As in Oregon, birth mothers have sued to overturn that law, saying they were promised nothing short of lifelong confidentiality (and wondering why, if adoptees can be prevented from contacting their mothers, they would have any use for the name alone). Just last month Delaware lawmakers said the state would give adoptees their birth certificate unless the birth mother explicitly asked to remain anonymous. Yet the moms have only 60 days to file such a request, and the state isn't planning to hunt them down to ensure that they know they can.

Predictably, the politics of adoption-law change gets very nasty very quickly. Conservative advocates of confidentiality warn that pregnant women faced with the prospect of having their records eventually opened will be more likely to choose abortion over adoption. While most adoption groups support some kind of compromise plan, the National Council for Adoption, a buttoned-up Washington coalition of agencies that arrange confidential adoptions, would require that extraordinary measures be taken by the state to find, counsel and get consent from birth parents before adoptees could even learn their names--to say nothing of meeting them. At the other extreme is the Internet-based Bastard Nation, which wants no exception whatsoever to open records and arouses activists' ire on its irreverent bastards.org website ("Rush for Our Records!" the site proclaims).

With such delicate positions to navigate, it's not surprising that the initiative process, which encourages simplistic laws like Oregon's Measure 58, has not provided a solution. It will take more careful legislation to let adoptees feel whole, even as the few Cindys of the nation feel safe.