Despite the fact that genealogy is one of the most popular national hobbies, its a difficult sport to participate in if you happen to be adopted. People love discussing families, origins, immigration stories, and making family trees. These activities are considered trivial concerns for adoptees, who aren't supposed to care about the details of DNA, blood, medical history, genealogy, family roots or origins.
Irish adoptees were back in the news this morning, with the Daily Mirror reporting that nearly 60,000 Irish adoptees have no legal rights to information about their own identities or histories. The article reports that because Irish adoptees are forbidden from obtaining their original birth certificates, they face considerable obstacles in finding their "real" parents. [Side note: the article headline really did say, "real parents." Cue the predictable backlash.] Some adoptees, the Mirror reports, have had their birth certificates forged, making searching for their biological families that much harder.
I don't know if in Ireland adopted people are subject to the same type of legal falsification (read: forgery) as adoptees in the United States, but it wouldn't surprise me. Despite public pretenses of adoption as a wholly positive event, it is still shrouded in secrecy and the birth certificates of adopted children are routinely mutilated in order to make the child appear legally as if born to the adopted parents. Even today with "open" adoptions being the norm, childrens' birth certificates are regularly changed to hide other people's identities and histories and proclaim new ownership as if a birth certificate was somehow as malleable and temporary as a car title.
Secrecy and the legal fictions necessary to create a new family start the snowball of lies that continue to torment adoptees. The very foundations of our lives have been fictionalized--is it any wonder that so many of us struggle with questions of identity? I read recently on an adoptive parent blog that adoptive parents should make sure to write down and document their "adoption journey" so that they could share this history with the child someday. I hope that someday adoptive parents understand that their child's story is different than their own. My personal story didn't start with my legal parents--it started it very different circumstances that I was never supposed to care about or want to know.
The shaky foundations of secrecy and lies that built the modern practice of adoption are part of the reason that its so hard now to reverse sealed record laws and restore adoptees' legal access to their own information. A healthy sense of self can't be built on lies and neither can a legal institution that's supposed to be devoted to the welfare of children. We deserve nothing less than honesty, openness, and transparency in order to combat the shame and secrecy of earlier eras that resulted in unjust and unfair laws.
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