Among the events to be grateful for this year is the decision by the NH legislature to give adult adoptees the opportunity to see their original birth certificates, starting January 1, 2005.
This makes NH only the seventh state to open records, a legal right granted to citizens of the UK some 30 years ago.
Interesting factoid: closed records became the norm fairly in th 60’s. Prior to that, even the US government recommended that adult adoptees be given access to their original birth certificates.
This, from the site Origins Canada:
Legal adoption in America only came into being starting in the second half of the 19th century, and at first all adoption records were open to the public. When they began to be closed, it was only to the general public, and the intent was to protect adoptees from public scrutiny of the circumstances of their birth. Later, as states began to close records to the parties themselves, they did so not to provide lifelong anonymity for birth mothers, butthe other way around — to protect adoptive families from possible interference or harassment by birth parents.
One of the most prominent actors in the development of adoption law in the mid-20th century was the Children’s Bureau, an arm first of the U.S. Department of Labor and later of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. In the 1940s and ’50s, the bureau advised that birth and adoptive parents who did not know one another should not have access to information about each other. But it also said that original birth certificates should be available to adult adoptees. As one of the bureau’s consultants put it in 1946, “every person has a right to know who he is and who his people were.”
Amen.