The ethics of retroactive disclosure

Countdown: 32 days to go before the Access to Adoption Records Act takes effect in Ontario!

So after June 1, I'll be able to find out my original name and my birth mother's name; she'll be abke to see my adoptive name.  Lifting these restrictions after all these years has some serious implications for personal privacy and these are what doomed the 2005 Adoption Information Disclosure Act.

Debate on this issue is quite polarized; most people who have an opinion on the question of retroactive disclosure have a strong one.  Here are some of my thoughts on some aspects of the subject:

1. Birth mothers and confidentiality.  I've seen a lot of claims, many anecdotal, on this subject, asserting that birth mothers who surrendered children for adoption were promised complete confidentiality or never promised confidentiality at all.
   
   I think it's clear that quite a number of birth mothers walked away from the adoption with an expectation of confidentiality, whether legally founded or not.  All you need is some cases for disclosure to be an ethical issue, so this makes it clear to me that we need to be concerned about this.
   
   
2. Adoptees and confidentiality.  An adoptee never entered into a contract, so I think the case is less clear, but because the system concealed our identities from birth parents for so long, it is reasonable to say that most of us grew up believing that disclosure or contact would be voluntary.
   
   
3. Violation of preference.  No matter how effective the government's publicity campaign, there will be adoptees and birth parents who would have wished to file disclosure vetos but missed the notice.  These people would reasonably expect the secrecy provisions to continue, so we are guilty of violating their preferences.  I can't feel too sorry for them, because I've seen a lot of publicity about the new law, but fair is fair.
   
   On the other hand, if we can talk about "hypothetical preference" and use ignorance as an  excuse, I think the status quo is just as much guilty of violation of preference.   A lot of us who are interested in contact, when we were getting started, thought that navigating the system would be a lot easier or at least possible!  I think there are a lot of folks out there who wouldn't object to contact but tried investigating it.
   
   
4. Disruptive effect.  In the debate about the 2005 Adoption Information Disclosure Act, Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian reported getting anonymous calls from sobbing birth mothers in dread of being "outed" by the law, though she never gave any evidence or any precise numbers of such callers.
   
   Now, the disclosure veto pretty much eliminates this as a practical concern. Neverthelessm while I acknowledge that the idea of contact is pretty shocking, I really have to wonder just how much of the kind of fear Cavoukian described is completely rational.
   
   Long-kept secrets and the judgments they're hiding from have a way of getting frozen in the psyche: almost no one today judges "unwed mothers" in the way that people did in the 50s and 60s, but a birth mother who never shares a secret may not fully accept that.

A lot of what I said above might look like arguments against the new law, and they can be.  But I think all of them are trumped by one basic point, which is the right of an individual to information about their origins.

I was born to two living, breathing parents, and I had a name.  While it was their choice to relinquish me and have my identity replaced, it is the complicitity of my government in this operation that offends me.  It's one thing for one's only links to the rest of humanity to be unknown (as in the case of abandoned or orphaned children); it's quite another for them to be hidden by the government.

Why have I been denied information about myself, on the feeble and hypothetical grounds that it is to protect my reputation and that of my birth parents?

Introduction

Hi there, my name's James.

Well, okay, that isn't actually my name, or at least isn't what I go by. But it isn't a pseudonym either: it was the first name I ever had, picked out for me at birth and probably taken from some relative I've never met; it was the name under which I existed (legally at least) for the first nine months of life until my adoption was finalized.

So I'm an adoptee. I plan to go more into my story in later posts; briefly though, I was born in the province of Ontario, Canada in the late '70s and adopted shortly after birth. I've always known I'm adopted and I've always been interested in learning about my origins.

In writing here under this pseudo-pseudonym I have two goals. The first is to just to talk about being an adoptee and adoption generally. This isn't something I've usually dwelt deeply on, but I've been thinking about this a lot lately for a reason I'm about to get into.

I also want to discuss an adoptee's situation in the province of Ontario. Starting this June (2009) because of a new law, most Ontario adoptees — myself hopefully included — will finally be able to learn their full birth names and and the names of their birth mothers. For many this will be a goal long sought after and the first step towards contact.

I say "hopefully" because success isn't guaranteed. Many adoptees and birth parents never expected their identities could be revealed in such a way and the predecessor of this law was quashed following a court challenge on privacy grounds. Under the new replacement law an adoptee or birth parent whose name may be revealed can file a request to prevent the disclosure of their identity. So there is a chance I could be disappointed in June.

There are now 36 days left till June 1, when the government will begin processing applications. As you can see, I'm already counting the days. I'm hoping that this blog will give me a bit of an outlet in the weeks to come (and maybe save some fingernails) and will make some interesting reading whether you happen to have a personal connection to adoption or not.