Privacy in Adoption

I wish to commend you for your editorial regarding adoption records. Current state law allows access if adoptee, birth parent, and one adoptive parent sign, even if the other adoptive parent strongly objects.

As an adoptive parent, I strongly object to this invasion of my privacy and the breach of the contract into which we entered when we adopted our child.

The current Senate legislation would literally reduce adoptive parents to uncompensated foster parents who are legally responsible for all aspects of a child’s care as well as making the child a legal heir.

The decision to adopt is not one that a couple makes lightly and usually comes after years of trying to conceive a child of their own. Adoption is a way of filling those dreams one has for one’s life; however, under this new law one would only fill those dreams for 18 years, then the “real parent” comes back on the scene. Not a very happy prospect.

Frequent articles about adoptees finding birth parents never mention the devastation this can bring to the adoptive parents who have spent a lifetime treating this child as their own, only to have it turn against them.

TERRY BRICK

Fullerton