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Land of a Gazillion Adoptees

Adoption Poetry

A Red Thread To China

A red thread to China was cast today

From us to a child so far away.

This thread symbolizes an attachment of hearts

That distance alone can't keep us apart.

Her mother and I are caught in a chase

That time alone will bring us to face

This loving young child we want so much to greet

With love in our hearts before we did meet.

This tiny, thin thread may stretch, tangle or fray

But our love for her grows stronger each day.

Through the test of time it won't break or sever

She'll be part of us forever and ever.

With oceans between us, the distance is spanned

By a love that is greater than man could have planned.

For God in His mercy loved her and us

And decided our family would be a great plus.

So for now we'll just love her and pray every day

That God keeps her and loves her for us till we may

Travel to China, that land of great past,

To the side of our daughter, to hold her at last.

 (Author not confirmed)

Legacy Of An Adopted Child ~

Once there were two women

Who never knew each other.

One you do not remember,

The other you call mother.

Two different lives

Shaped to make yours one,

One became your guiding star,

The other became your sun.

The first gave you life,

And the second taught you to live it.

And the first gave you a need for love,

And the second was there to give it.

One gave you a nationality.

The other gave you a name.

One gave you the seeds of talent,

The other gave you aim.

One gave you emotions,

The other calmed your fears.

One saw your first sweet smile,

The other dried your tears.

One gave you up,

It was all that she could do.

The other prayed for a child,

And God led her straight to you.

And now you ask me through your tears,

The age old question through the years.

Heredity or environment, Which are you a product of?

Neither, my Darling, Neither,

Just two different kinds of love.

Author Unknown

23 Famous People You Didn't Know Were Adopted

From Buzzfeed!

Many step-parent and family adoptions in this list. But super fascinating!

Biographical Piece: The Dark, Sad Side of Domestic Adoption

The Dark, Sad Side of Domestic Adoption


One family's long quest to adopt a baby.


JENNIFER GILMOREAPR 30 2013, 11:11 AM ET

"Mother and Child" by Janis Rozentals

When we decided to adopt, ceasing the fertility treatments and relinquishing our genetic link to our offspring, we thought the decision was altruistic. At the very least, we assumed there was an adoption system in place that works, and that we could move from the notional if we get a child—the gamble of science—to the unshakable when.

We decided on domestic adoption for several reasons. International adoption was volatile, as it remains. Guatemala closed to Americans in 2009, right around the time we went to the International Adoption Training session at an agency in Manhattan. My husband is half Spanish, a native Spanish speaker who's lived in South America, and so Guatemala had seemed like the perfect plan. A true connection, and one, we thought, we could pass on to our child. For me? There was Russia, which speaks to my ancestry, but that country seemed ominous. The orphanages were questionable; children were placed first locally, then nationally, and it was only then, when they were often several years old, that Americans could adopt them. Now there is a ban on United States adoptions in Russia. Ethiopia was also an option, but our connection to the country and its culture was not as distinct.

We were told—by caseworkers, agencies, friends who had adopted—that domestic adoption was the answer. And my reading told me there were many advantages to it. We could have a child from birth. Perhaps we would be in the delivery room. The adoption would be open—the birthmother and perhaps father would know us to whatever degree we all decided on, and they would know their biological child as she grew. 55 percent of all domestic adoptions are open, according to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, but at first this notion terrified me. Would this birthmother one day want her child back? Would she come for him? How large a part of our family would she be?

Ultimately my husband and I realized that the approach to adoption should be about what is best for the child. If the children know their birthmothers, they don't grow up with the fantasy of who their parents were or might have been. They do not have to make the life- altering decision in adulthood to try to find their birthparents or to forever forgo the idea. And so my spouse and I came to believe that the transparency of open adoption was best for everyone, not least of all the birthmother, who needs and deserves a way to handle her grief. Open adoption is about choice. Those seeking to adopt may choose the race they're prepared to parent, and the amount of drug and alcohol use they find acceptable during the pregnancy. They may decide what level of mental illness they are comfortable with in the birth mother's history. And they may decide as well if they are prepared for—or desire—a child with special needs.


Matched, as we know from the dating world alone, is a coded word. My spouse and I were matched with birthmothers not once, not twice, not three times, but a total of five times. The most horrible things kept happening: Birthmothers and those posing as birthmothers, birthfathers and those posing as birthfathers lied to us. Birthmothers are doing a very selfless and generous thing when they decide they are unable to parent and place their child with wanting parents. It is a decision made out of big, big love for that child. Adoption, when it is successful, is a wonderful thing. But everyone coming to it is grieving in some way. It would be wrong not to acknowledge this. We have been lied to by birthmothers who wanted money, and who, when I look at the situation in the harsh light of hindsight, wanted the control and love they had so little of in their lives. More than one of the women who chose us may not have been pregnant; it would be wrong to call them birthmothers.When we got comfortable with the concept—open—I had to try to understand where my "motherness," who I would be as a parent, fit. We were told by adoption agencies and lawyers that couples, once they wrote their profiles and letters to birthmothers and posted them online, or placed ads in the "penny savers" in the baby-making parts of the country, were matched with birthmothers within three months. In an unpublished letter to the editor for Vogue magazine (written in response to my October 2012 piece "The Long Wait"), the Academy of American Adoption Attorneys cited statistics from Adoptive Families magazine indicating that 33 percent of waiting couples are successfully matched with a birthmother within three months, and more than half are matched in less than six months. With certainly, we were told, we would be matched within the year.

But some were decidedly pregnant. We were matched with a woman we'd had long meals with, whose family we'd met, and to whom I'd talked nightly until she went into labor. From that day forward, we never heard from her—ever—again. In another situation, I spoke once with a birthmother who the next day went into labor two months early. Despite the risk, we flew across the country for this child, who, it turned out, had Down Syndrome. As open as my husband and I were to adopting a baby of a different race and as open as we became to adopting from a mother with a history of drug use, this is the one choice we were not open to. And so we did not take the child. We were told there was another family waiting, and we were trying to do the right thing for this baby. But I won't be able to forget the moment when we left the hospital without her.

The piece de resistance of our adoption experience, however, was when, last April, I was in the delivery room—and cut the umbilical cord—of a child whose biological mother we had supported and gotten to know well. This child was subsequently with us for several weeks. We named him. We were in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania, due to interstate laws, which decreed we had to stay in the state until the legal paperwork was completed. There were goats and chickens, a stream running through the backyard. And it was spring. Everything was waking.

We had been told that the birthfather was one of two people: either the birthmother's abusive Caucasian boyfriend or a Hispanic man with whom the birthmother had mentioned having had a brief affair.

When the baby was delivered, we were delighted he was half-Mexican for many reasons, not least that it meant the baby's father was not the boyfriend. We believed that if the baby had been his, they might have kept him. We were told the birthfather lived in Mexico and had no desire to deal with any of this.

You can see where this is going. My sister was visiting, breastfeeding her newborn as I bottle-fed ours, when we got a call. My husband spoke to him in Spanish, and just from his gestures, the desperation in his voice, I knew it was over. The birthfather was in the next town over and apparently he had been supporting the birthmother and his unborn child through the entire pregnancy. The birthfather wanted his son.

Later we would find out that our presence in this baby's life was a way for the birthmother to get away from her abusive boyfriend and to reunite with the man she loved. We had been cast to keep the baby—and the baby's mother—safe from harm. And yet last we heard he was in foster care. What happened to that child will always haunt us.

Every adoption story begins with the story of someone breaking someone else's heart. Whose heart was not broken here? There are no laws to protect prospective adoptive parents. No one is held accountable, and nothing is federated. State to state, the laws change in regards to how long a birthmother has to relinquish her rights and how long she has to revoke them, as well as how much she can be compensated for a gift so precious it cannot be priced. But for the prospective adoptive parents, it is all a "legal risk." Few will dispute that a birthmother has every right to change her mind. It is a chance we take, and anyone would be foolish or ethically irresponsible to think it should be otherwise. But when there is deceit, and when the adoption fails because of it, hope is lost, and so is most of the money that has been, for most, painstakingly set aside. The bills increase and still you hope. Still you pay.

We have been told that once we brought a baby home our negative experiences would fade. And sure enough, a few weeks ago, my husband and I brought a baby home to stay. The story of how he got to us is not perfect or without drama, but it is over. Our experiences have in fact begun to recede as we turn now, joyfully, to the rhythm of a newborn's needs. I am grateful; I am humbled, but I will always be haunted.

Adoption is not for the faint of heart. Now we are four years older than when we started, and significantly poorer. I look at my son—a word I am scared to utter—and I still wonder not if, but when, he will be taken. I am so careful. I don't post many pictures on social networking sights. I don't take him outside without considerable concern as well as a terrible self-consciousness that comes from having wanted something for so long and finally having it, but also an acute and troubling awareness that the woman just next to me might be wanting too. It is my wish, really, that no one else be hurt here.

Adoption Microaggression Bingo!

A LIFE NOT LIVED

Author: 

Jenny Na

Photos by: 

Mihee-Nathalie Lemoine

It always starts in the eyes. A question formulated in the back of the mind that works its way up to the surface until it practically begs for escape. They want to know what you are.

I've spent a lifetime trying to answer that questioning gaze and have failed on so many levels. That's what happens when the package doesn't match the contents and everyone, mostly me, feels as if they've been sold a false bill of goods. 

When I look in the mirror, the person staring back is a strange Korean I don’t always recognize as myself. She has brown skin, small almond eyes and dark hair, which doesn’t match the image I have in my head of a girl with pale white skin, round eyes and dark reddish-brown hair. Though she has receded a bit over the years, I can’t seem to shake her off. She’s always there, lurking in the shadows. I manage to forget the Korean woman as long as nobody mentions it, but they always do. Whether the question remains unformed and locked in the eyes or comes spilling out as sound, it echoes in my head long after the encounter simply because that other girl just won’t go away.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt comfortable in my own skin, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped trying to make it work. Growing up as a Korean adoptee in rural Minnesota, I was almost always the only Asian around and the boys on the playground made sure I knew it. Here in Korea, I can slip through a crowd virtually unnoticed until I open my mouth. And when I do, I can feel the awkwardness of who I am return.

I return to these questions now because summer is the season of adoptees, interns and fellows in Korea. Every year around this time, hundreds of hyphenated Koreans make the trip here from the Western countries where they’ve grown up, live or go to school. We are returning in ever larger numbers and many more of us are staying. We’re choosing to make a life here despite circumstances that can be at once joyous and devastating. There is joy in the sheer number of discoveries large and small, and devastation in the amount of damage it can do to identities-in-progress.

I’ve seen enough friends – adoptee, mixed Korean and kyopo – take this journey to wonder what it is that makes us return, and to ask why we stay. Or maybe, with a tenth year here on my horizon, I wonder why I’m still here. Home, though, is an ambiguous concept for me and I’m not sure that I know where it is. Before coming here, I made my homes in Minnesota and New York, with a short stay in France. But I’ve never really felt like I belonged anywhere and I’ve always felt like there was something missing.

I came to Korea because I also felt that there were pieces of myself that I could only reclaim by coming here, to see where in the landscape of Koreanness I might belong. I didn’t have many illusions about it, but in the back of my mind I desperately wanted it to fit.

Still, I avoided it for a long time. It was like a box I didn’t want to open and my upbringing had shown me that sadness, frustration and loss were all part of the package.

Body of identity

People often ask how or when I knew I was different and if I knew I was adopted. To me, the answer is obvious, because the majority of people around me had always been white, including my family. I had two Caucasian parents and a Caucasian brother who was my parents’ biological child and I spent my childhood and adolescence in majority Caucasian communities of less than 3,000 where Asians were scarce or nonexistent.

The defining feature of the town where I lived the longest was the decaying main street that stretched for a sleepy block down a cement road past buildings that were either crumbling remnants of the town’s 19th century past or cinder block constructions that look like they were built in the '70s. The town was populated by proud immigrant families of Polish, German and Scandinavian origin, and by others of ambiguous descent.

I tried for a long time to play “white,” but it seemed that no matter where I went — and until I could drive, the boundaries were defined by where my bike would take me — there was no escaping my difference, whether I chose to acknowledge it or not. But I knew. I knew something was off because of how everyone always looked at me. The color of my skin, the slant of my eyes, the impossible straightness of my hair betrayed me every time.

I grew up with this definition of my physical identity encasing my being like a straightjacket, even if it didn't match my own growing recognition of my racial identity.

I also grew up in an era where parents, including mine, were taught to assimilate their adopted children, which meant that you ignored race, identity and adoption and pretended that your child was just like you. As long as no one talked about it, you were somehow shielding your new arrival from the knowledge that she was different.

In junior high and high school, difference of any kind equals social death. So I as I got older, I did the only thing I could think of: I tried like hell to erase it.

I had my mom, who had once been a beautician, perm my hair. It took two bottles of permanent solution and two hours in plastic curlers for it to stick. I also had her thin my hair with thinning shears so I could be like a girl in my class who had the thinnest, blondest hair I'd ever seen. On the rare occasions when I went to the beauty parlor for a "real" haircut, the ladies would comment on how long and thick and lustrous my hair was. How exotic. 

I tried to make my eyes look bigger with makeup, though I never could seem to get the beauty tips in the magazines (which were for white girls) to work for me. Neither could I make whiteness come out any of the tubes of mascara that my aunts gave me for an endless number of Christmases and birthdays.

No matter what I did I wasn’t comfortable with who I was trying to be. But I kept trying.

Just when I thought I'd fooled everyone, especially myself, into seeing me as white, there was always something else reminding me of the deception.

At church, my dad would introduce me to new arrivals as his daughter and I instantly felt like a fraud. I could see the look of surprise before they could conceal it with a belated bit of “Minnesota nice.”

For a couple of years, my mom sent me and my non-adopted brother to a culture day camp, where for one day of the year we took classes in Korean language and fan dancing, dressed in hanbok and ate Korean food. I tried pretending I was Korean, to see what it felt like, but it was a costume that never fit and one that I shed as soon as we got home. My mom eventually took me to Korea and later taught me how to make bulgogi so I could compete, in full hanbok, at the state fair. But things like these only increased my desire to be recognized as white and I wanted to avoid the questions that I was learning were safer to suppress.

It wasn't like there weren’t Korean adoptees in our school. Minnesota has the highest concentration of adoptees in the United States and our school had at least five that I can remember. I avoided them all, because I wanted to be white, and being with them reminded me that I wasn’t. Although I did have a short-lived friendship with one of the adoptees in my grade, we never talked about being Korean and especially not about adoption. Eventually we drifted apart, as all kids do at that age. But I also believe it was easier for me to let the friendship go because as long as we were together I was part of an Asian “we.” On my own, I could keep up the pretense that I was not.

Instead, I hid in the safety of the theater, where no one questions the act of trying on different identities, even if it was that of a Jewish woman named Blanche or a German girl named Liesl, and that's where I stayed until college. 

All of that was okay for a while, because I was a model minority – easily forgotten as brown because I was quiet, obedient — and I played the role really well. I got away with it too, or thought I did, until the taunts of “chink,” “Jap” and “gook” brought me crashing back to earth. 

Race relations

In college I met my first real Koreans. They wore their black hair straight, had Korean names and Korean parents, and they seemed to know something about Korea. In my mind, they knew what it meant to be Korean.

I met other people of color there, too, and through them, I saw that pride in race and culture was cool, not something to be hidden, and that I, too, could embrace it as they had: without shame. With them, I could stop pretending to be a different person. For the first time, I could feel that other girl in the mirror start to fade.

Yet it wasn’t like I discovered myself and it stuck. The awakening I was experiencing couldn’t fully protect me from the rollercoaster ride of living between my new self and the one I had lived with for so long.

Back home, family and friends were eager to reassure me that I was one of them. “You're not different, you’re Jenny.” It was a sentiment that at first made me feel good, happy to be accepted, but later made me feel alienated, like an outsider in my own home. In the end, it was a slow and insidious kind of invasion that chipped away at my newly discovered sense of self, erasing me until I was no longer a person but an amalgam of everyone else's view of me. 

How could people not see the difference that separated us, and therefore, not see me? How could my family love me, and not some superficial version of myself, if they couldn't see that we were different? If they couldn't see the people staring at us, at me, wherever we went? In many ways, then, I think I decided to make myself as absent as possible so that the questions might stop and I could once again hear the voice in my head telling them they were wrong.

After school I moved to New York and was happy to discover I could blend in whenever I walked out the door. For the first time, I finally felt free. Even the questions about where I “really” came from didn’t bother me as much, but I do remember getting really angry when a black man asked it on the subway. It sounded like a line, and a really unimaginative one at that, so I threw up my hands and threw the question back, adding just enough sarcasm so he’d walk away with the message that our mutual brownness made us subject to the same question. Maybe it wasn’t enough. In any case, his surprised look of confusion showed me that to him, Asians were always foreign.

To my surprise, that line was a common catcall from men with preconceived notions of the exotic Oriental and what she’d be like. Their sheepish stares and sly attitudes told me the story of their ignorance, but somehow forced another identity upon me. Each incursion erased whatever positive association I was creating for myself as a newly aware person of color, and taught me to see myself as an object capable of little else than the fulfillment of someone else’s idea of who they thought I should be. 

My response was to try defining “Asianness” for myself and for a time I tried being hyper-Asian. I used chopsticks for everything and trekked across the river to the Korean grocery up on 32nd Street and bought kimchi and strange things in packages with writing that I couldn't read. When I got home, I tried to cook the things with varying degrees of success and when it didn’t work I chucked it all and ate the kimchi.

Yet I still avoided the girl from the Korean family who ran the deli down the street. Every time I went into the store for a newspaper or a cake of tofu, she would try to teach me Korean phrases because she thought she'd found a kindred spirit. Her efforts left me feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed because now I was a different kind of fraud, a Korean who couldn't speak a lick of Korean, and I would speed out of the store as fast as I could.

At this point, I was still ignoring my adoptee identity, choosing instead to identify as a person of color and then as Asian-American and Korean-American. But none of those labels really fit. I also tried other Asian identities – Japanese-American, Chinese-American, Filipino-American – encountering each through the lens of literature. I came of race on a steady diet of Tanizaki, Oe, Hagedorn and Yamanaka, and later, Iris Chang, Haruki Murakami, Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri. But when I read my first book of adoptee essays, I was floored. Here were stories of people like me who knew what it was to feel like a white person in Asian clothing and knew what it was to be found out. They had dreams of Korea and I realized that I did, too.

The long road back

Korea wasn't a choice so much as a necessity for me. Deep down, I knew there was something I had to get here that I couldn’t get anywhere else. I had long wanted to fill in for myself the blanks that I had let other people fill in for me. I also felt a kind of despair at not knowing my history; it hung like a weight around my shoulders and pressed against my chest until I couldn’t breathe. What I wanted was to recapture something of what was left behind when I was sent away and construct a history for myself, if such a thing can be done, to replace the one I lost, or rather, never had.

By the time I got on the plane to come here, I had heard enough adoptees talk about their experiences to know that Korea wasn’t a fairytale with a happy ending. I knew some adoptees had experienced the sting of not being recognized as Korean by “Korean” Koreans, but I thought I was prepared for the experience because I had developed another identity as a person of color. I thought it would give me a cushion. It didn’t.

In the early days, I bristled at the cabbies who thought I was Japanese or Chinese because of my stunted Korean and I was shocked at how angry and offended some ajumma seemed when I couldn’t understand their rapid-fire speech. One Korean ajumma I met while traveling on one of my first trips into the countryside gave me a look like I’d done something really horrible to her when I couldn’t follow her terse instructions.

In the States I had felt my physical appearance was deceiving because people thought I was Korean when I felt white inside. Once I started to see myself as a person of color, maybe even a Korean, I thought people would be able to see it, too. Arriving here, I realized that they couldn’t. The same set of contradictions that the promise of my physical appearance seemed to present in the States had followed me here. So I slipped back into old habits – only this time, instead of playing white, I was playing Korean.

When I entered language class I could no longer pretend. 

The Korean language was difficult, but not only because it shares nothing with English. The Korean teachers I encountered seemed to expect, whether subconsciously or not, that I either be Korean or that I be kyopo, people who grew up with one or two Korean parents. Each new word I learned revealed that I wasn’t and it was like peeling skin from an onion, each layer sharper, stronger, more bitter than the next. Sometimes the bitterness became like a weapon turned inward to places I didn't know had been wounded.

I’ve been told that I arrived to the United States with words – my mom once told me that one of them was “omma.” In class, it was hard not to think about the loss of that word and the person it represented. When we did exercises where we talked about our families and our birthdays, saying my American birthday, talking about my Caucasian family – in Korean – felt wrong. 

The third space

After my arrival, I met two groups of people who changed my experience of Korea completely.

The first was a group of dancers who became my surrogate Korean family. They allowed me to immerse myself in Korean culture and I learned much of what I know about Koreanness from them. 

I spent hours in rehearsal, basking in the sounds of a language that was once again, for a short time, my own. With them, I only wanted to speak Korean because it allowed me to reconnect with a part of myself that I previously hadn't been able to access and I felt I was reclaiming something from my past.

They taught me what to eat and they taught me what breathing in Korean is like. They also taught me how Korean I wasn't by correcting and sometimes mocking my evolving baby talk. Then they taught me that none of it mattered: we were all family.

The second group of people I met was the community of adoptees who showed me another space: one where I'm neither Korean nor American, nor Korean-American. It was, to borrow a phrase from one adoptee, a “third space.”

Before I arrived, I had reconnected with an adoptee from the town where I grew up who was the sister of my adoptee friend from high school. She let me stay in her tiny ground level apartment until I had a place to live, and during that time, she took me to palaces, showed me which foods to order and sympathized with my Korea confusions. She was generous with her friends and they soon became mine, too. Like us, they were adoptees, and with them, I could talk about adoption, race and identity – how it had affected us growing up and how it compared to what we were experiencing here. We also talked about how our identities had always been defined for us by other people: by adoptive parents, by agency workers, politicians and “experts.” We sought to be recognized as experts of our own experiences, but we also wanted to move beyond the personal aspects of adoption to the larger system in which it continued to affect so many women and children. We researched the social context in which it arose and the social and political forces that kept it in place. Eventually, we formalized our group and gave ourselves a name, Adoptee Solidarity Korea, and a mission – to advocate for the rights of adoptees and to frame adoption as a social, political and human rights issue. Since then, ASK has worked to raise awareness about the complexities of the adoption system and adoptees’ place in it. Today, we hold public forums on those subjects and we have helped shaped public policy through our involvement in the recent overhaul of Korea’s adoption law that passed last year. We’ve also started a series of mental health forums that we hope will help empower adoptees as they work through their adoption experiences. 

Through the relationships I’ve formed within this community of adoptees, what has become clear to me is that my identity as a Korean is inextricably linked to my identity as an adoptee.

No easy ending

I could pretend that this story has an easy ending, but I won’t. I’ve done enough pretending to know that it doesn’t get me very far. 

I’ve always wanted to be recognized as Korean on some level, because my physical appearance seems to indicate that’s what I should be, and in the back of my mind, I thought I could wash the white away. Being here has sometimes made me feel that I could. But this part of my identity is like an open wound. 

I can no longer pretend to be just Asian, just Korean-American or just kyopo. My experience has taught me that as an adoptee, I lack the familial history and biological ties that seem to ground the people from these other groups. 

In some ways, exploring the Korean part of my identity in Korea has given me a frame through which to finally see myself. However, I now know that I will never lay claim to all of the pieces of myself that I lost when I was adopted, so I will have to go about creating something new.

I still struggle with language, and language learning, and think about what it would be to be completely fluent. I still see women on the train and wonder if we’re related because searching for my birth family is a task of which I’ve only scratched the surface and come up wanting. I believe that I have a birth family out there, somewhere, that I am not a true orphan without parents, but I also know I could be wrong. Part of me still wants to know. There’s a whole set of questions about identity that people with a biological family don't seem to have to ask. They already know they got their smile from their mother, the way they hold their pen from their father. Adoptees I know who have reunited with their birth families talk about the character traits, the physical gestures or the verbal tics, they have in common with members of their birth families. What have I inherited?

Amidst this search for an identity, a place to call home, a place where I feel comfortable in my own skin, are the remnants of a life not lived, of another family I may never know. I also carry with me multiple identities as a cultural Minnesotan, an ethnic Korean and an adoptee, and I know I will move among them throughout my life.

Equal Rights for All: It's Finally Time for Adopted People, Too

Equal Rights for All: It's Finally Time for Adopted People, Too

As our country has focused enormous attention in recent days on the rights of one minority, gay men and lesbians, we continue (alas) to give short-shrift to the decades-long effort to achieve equality for millions of people in another segment of our population: Americans who were adopted into their families.

Change is in the air, however, and a grassroots adoption-reform movement -- akin to the one that led to the marriage-equality cases now before the U.S. Supreme Court -- is growing. The result is that an unusually large number of states -- including Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington -- this year have considered, or are considering, bills that would address adult adoptees' second-class legal status by restoring their right to obtain their original birth certificates. I stress the word restoring because these records were accessible nationwide until the mid-20th Century, when one state after the other (except Kansas and Alaska), began sealing them.

The research is crystal clear as to why that was done -- to protect adopted children, most of whom were born to unmarried mothers, from the shame and stigma of "illegitimacy;" and to prevent these women, who were even more shamed and stigmatized, from obtaining information that they might use to interfere with the adoptive family.

Many Americans today, notably including state legislators, mistakenly believe original birth certificates (OBC's) were sealed for a very different reason -- to keep the promise of anonymity given to unwed mothers when they parted with their babies. A big problem with that belief, in addition to its being historically inaccurate, is that it deprives the affected women of the one thing shown by research to help them deal most effectively with their grief and loss - that is, knowing that the children they created are alive and well.

Other work by the Donaldson Adoption Institute, which I have the privilege to lead, buttresses the point from virtually every perspective. For instance, research on Positive Identity Formation concludes that access to core information, such as OBC's contain, provides important benefits for adopted children's development. Research onOpenness in Adoption finds there are usually gains for everyone concerned, including adoptive parents, when they have more information and contact. And a groundbreaking new report, titled Untangling the Web, recommends that "closed records" laws should be repealed because "the Internet obviates their main contemporary rationale," which is to keep the parties to adoption from finding each other.

So, in the face of so much evidence that unsealing OBC's would do a lot of good for millions of people in our country -- with little or no indication of resulting harm -- why have so many lawmakers in so many states refused to change the status quo for so many decades? From where I sit, the primary answers are mythology, misconceptions and mistaken beliefs, all born during the generations in which adoption was such a deep, dark, dreadful secret that many parents didn't even tell their own children that they were adopted, and the women who created those children were driven underground because out-of-wedlock pregnancy was considered so disgraceful.

It's hard to learn much about secrets, so all sorts of erroneous notions have come to be widely accepted, even by some professionals in the adoption field. So here is the bottom-line reality that I hope everyone, particularly legislators, will take into account going forward: The critics of restoring adult adoptees' right to their OBCs warn that doing so will set off an array of dire consequences -- from ruined lives, to increased abortions, to fewer adoptions. Whether they are right is no longer the subject of conjecture or speculation. Very diverse states from coast to coast -- from New Hampshire and Maine to Alabama and Illinois, from Rhode Island and Delaware to Tennessee and Oregon -- have taken this step, while Kansas and Alaska never sealed their records. So now we can see with our own eyes what calamities transpire when OBC access laws are approved.

The answer, very simply, is "none."

All this information, and far more, is contained in two comprehensive, research-based reports published by the Adoption Institute, "For the Records" and "For the Records II." Additional information is contained in testimony that I have provided on behalf of the Institute in various states that have considered OBC legislation in recent years, for example in Maryland.

Viscerally appealing arguments can be made by anyone, on any subject. Compelling anecdotes and singular experiences can be produced by any side, in any argument. So, in order to form the best possible laws, policies and practices, it is vital that we examine real evidence, solid research, and broad-based knowledge.

Those are the elements that have been placed front-and-center, appropriately, in the gay/lesbian marriage debate. It's long past time for the same to happen during the deliberations in states across our country regarding the right of adopted people to have what everyone else around them assumes as a birthright: access to the simple, essential, unadulterated information about the beginning of their lives.

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