Desperate Birth Mothers Challenge Law That Would Reveal Identities

Jane’s biggest fear is that the son she gave up for adoption 40 years ago will show up on her doorstep, bursting in with a camcorder and questions she doesn’t want to answer.

Who is my father?

What was he like?

Why did you give me away?

“I’d be very angry,” she said. “The idea of the adoption was to permanently sever the relationship with the child.”

Jane, who asked that her real name not be used, is among the birth mothers opposed to Oregon’s voter-passed Measure 58, which would allow adult adoptees to see birth certificates that have been sealed for years. The mothers fear that if a court challenge next month fails and the law goes into effect, the information will be used to find them.

“The birth mother is quarry to be hunted down,” Jane said. “There’s nothing there to protect them.”

Opponents of the law say there are already registries for birth parents who want to be contacted, so the decision Oregon voters made last fall threatens only those mothers, like Jane, who want to keep their pasts private.

She was a senior in college. She hadn’t been dating the man long when she got pregnant.

“Having a shotgun marriage was the last thing on my mind,” Jane said.

It was the early ‘60s. Abortion was illegal, but Jane went to two doctors who were known to perform them. Both refused. Because Jane had a tipped uterus, they said the procedure would be too risky.

Jane had read several news stories about “kitchen table” abortions that went wrong. She didn’t want to be one of those dead women.

It is not Jane’s intention now to tell her child he was born because she couldn’t find a safe abortion.

Although the stigma of having a baby out of wedlock has subsided considerably, she doesn’t want the child disrupting her life, demanding explanations and casting her in a motherly role she never chose.

“I really feel resentful that someone can come in and stake a claim on my life,” she said. “They want to sit down at the table and be a member of the family.”

Six anonymous birth mothers are plaintiffs in the lawsuit that challenges open access to birth certificates. They contend that they were promised confidentiality when they relinquished their children.

Backers of the new law argue that no one had the authority to make such promises.

Adoptees who support the law see it as a civil rights issue, that they should be given the same opportunity as everyone else to know who their parents are. They say that finding their birth parents could help detect potential health problems and, more important, give them a sense of identity.

The case is to be heard July 14 in Salem by Marion Circuit Judge Albin Norblad.

Another birth mother, Marie, backs the plaintiffs in the challenge.

At age 70, she has kept the story of her son’s birth a secret for four decades. She doesn’t want that changed now.

When she got pregnant in the late 1950s, her boyfriend turned on her and threatened to ruin her reputation. She tried to get an illegal abortion but was told she was too far along in the pregnancy.

“As the years have gone on, it’s kind of been like it was something that happened to someone else,” she said.

Marie’s opposition to Measure 58 starts with not wanting to disrupt her life. Her late husband already had children when they married. She does not want those stepchildren to know she had a baby of her own.

She’s worried the biological son might try to claim an inheritance. And she is concerned about safety. She said she’s too old now to let a stranger into her life, even if he is her son.

“Who knows what kind of person he is? Who knows what he’d do?”

Marie recognizes that she is part of a political fight. She also sees that insisting on anonymity has hurt her side’s ability to shape the debate.

“Most of the news stories are slanted against the birth parents and for the adoptees,” Marie said. “It makes me sad that so many people have painted the birth mothers that don’t want to be found as selfish.

“I wish there was some way of letting people know it’s not out of being coldhearted,” she said. “I pray for him, but I don’t want to meet him.”

Jane frames the privacy of birth mothers who don’t want to be found as a feminist issue.

Although the legalization of abortion and the pill gave women more control over reproduction, those changes came too late for Jane’s generation. Adoption was the only real choice in a culture that scorned unwed mothers.

Maintaining privacy, Jane said, is the only way women like her can define their own identities. She questions the motives of the adoptees who pushed the ballot measure.

“It would be easy to interpret the initiative as an effort to expose, humiliate and punish the women that gave them away,” she said. “The attitude and treatment is really the same in the 1990s as it was in 1960.”

The Boys and Girls Aid Society of Oregon, one of the state’s leading adoption agencies, has come out in support of birth mothers who wish to remain anonymous.

The aid society said in a position paper on the issue that “promises that have been made to them in the past must be addressed with respect and honor.”

But Madelyn Freundlich, the executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York, said that in most adoptions of earlier generations, it is not clear that anonymity was promised to the birth parents.

Birth records were sealed, she said, to protect the privacy of the adopting family. Although that would keep the birth mother’s name a secret, an explicit promise of anonymity was not the norm, she said.

Plaintiffs in court cases challenging the opening of records in other states have not produced written promises of anonymity, she said. “To the extent that any representation was made, it was verbal.”

Only two other states--Alaska and Kansas--have laws similar to Measure 58. Oregon was the first to adopt such a measure through the ballot box.

Freundlich said Oregon’s unconditional access to birth records is an important test case. “The eyes of many states are on Oregon,” she said.

“Cindy,” who lives in Oregon, would not be subject to the law because she gave her daughter up for adoption in another state. But the passage of Measure 58 turned her into an anonymous crusader for privacy.

“I’m just as innocent as the adoptee,” she said. “For most of us, this is the most painful thing we have ever been through.”

Cindy said her daughter was conceived in a “terrifying, brutal stranger rape.” She said adoptees who want to use information on their birth certificates to contact parents who don’t want to see them are committing “emotional rape.”

“They are brutally invading our lives.”