Waiting in Ontario; opening records in Manitoba

The wait goes on. You may notice I've updated the sidebar; instead of a countdown to June 1, it is now a count of days since June 1. We're out of triage... and into the waiting room!

The Ministry of Community and Social Services has said we should expect feedback in 6-8 weeks, i.e. between July 13 and July 27 if you sent in your Post-Adoption Birth Information form right away.

Earlier I had thought to myself that presumably some of that estimate is allowing for the time the original application spends in transit, so people in my situation with Post-Adoption Birth Information applicants left over from the two days the old law was functioning could probably expect a slightly earlier response.

However, I was disappointed by the realization that since the government said that people have until June 1 to file disclosure vetos, that June 1 must be a postmark date. So they couldn't really begin processing applications until all vetos postmarked June 1 or earlier had gotten in and been processed. (Of course, they could start, and just discard their work if it turns out there was a veto, but I'm not naïve enough to think that's how the civil service works!)

Starting mid-July, I will be checking the mail after work very faithfully!

Amidst all this waiting comes the news that Manitoba is considering opening its adoption records. As my Manitoban-born aunt might say, good on 'em. I feel a close kinship with the "friendly province": my (adoptive) father is from there and I have many happy memories of our summer pilgrimages to the family homestead.

More to the point, I think there is nothing more effective at reshaping public opinion on open adoption records than, well, taking steps on opening adoption records. Incrementalism can be an effective tool for social change. People who think the sky will fall are pleasantly surprised to discover that it didn't: hysterics are replaced with shrugs.

Rather curiously, in its press release of June 1, the Ontario government seems to believe that Manitoba's records are already open. The link the press release provides is to a Post-Adoption Registry operated by the Manitoba government, which on the face of it looks very similar to Ontario's Adoption Disclosure Register. In particular, the description clearly states "The Registry will not facilitate contact without the consent of all concerned."

Admittedly, there is apparently a lot more transparency for post-1999 adoptions in Manitoba than there is in Ontario, but retroactivity is the whole point here. I think that Ontario was probably just looking for support for its position and didn't closely examine Manitoba's situation, though it's funny that the two governments are citing each other as examples of progressiveness on adoption disclosure!

Okay, Ontario, BC, Alberta, and Newfoundland and Labrador down; Manitoba coming. Next: open records for Saskatchewan, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, and the territories. Saskatchewan would be an obvious next target: after Manitoba opens, it will be have both a neighbouring Conservative-led province and a neighbouring NDP-led province with opened records. It would be hard to argue against those precedents.

The future of adoption reform

The press coverage of the opening of adoption records has now died down, and we're in the next waiting stage.  Through this process, my position has shifted from initial uncertainty to the solid conviction that adoptees like me ought to have unconditional access to original birth information.

Along this line, the Toronto Star has some interesting letters about future reforms of adoption disclosure, particularly the one by Alex Greenwood.   Even if we make this distinction Greenwood argues, between adoption and relinquishment, I'm not sure it makes the case that much stronger.  I suspect in most cases the birth parents were notified when the baby was actually adopted, and critics could just argue that the expectation of privacy started then as opposed to the moment of relinquishment.

Now that we have conditional open records here, I suspect open records advocates will wait a couple years until everyone realizes the sky didn't fall in the interim, then push for more openness.  What strategy should we adopt?

I eagerly read all the reader comments on the June 1 stories, since this is one of those few times when we can actually read what the public thinks of us!  Two trends became clear: the public is incredibly ill-informed about adoption, and there is more public support for the rights of adoptees to original birth information than there is for the rights of birth parents to find relinquished children.

Well, I guess I probably should've expected the latter, but I didn't.  It's only natural when you think of the way society characterizes adoptees and birth parents interested in searching:

Social Attitudes Towards Adoptees and Birth Parents Interested in Contact

Characterization	Adoptee	Birth parent
Good	Naturally curious about origins; feels kinship with birth family	Feels kinship and parental sentiments towards reliquished child; unfairly compelled by society to relinquish
Bad	Ungrateful to adoptive parents, overly curious, has no compunction about disrupting birth parents' lives, cannot "move on" or "live in the present"	Promiscuous, irresponsible, ungrateful towards adoptive parents, overly curious, refuses to live with past choices, has no compunction about disrupting adoptees' lives, cannot "move on" or "live in the present"

Every negative sentiment about adoptees—that they are overly curious, might damage the other party with their probing, etc.—has a parallel in sentiments about birth parents, but birth parents have the additional burden of being often labelled as irresponsible or promiscuous.  So naturally they are given shorter shrift than adoptees.

So, a natural question that arises is: should adoptees who are interested in complete and unencumbered access to records just throw birth parents under the bus (metaphorically) and push for open records for themselves only?

I believe the answer is no.  This tactic might have short-term benefits, but breaking the solidarity that exists between the two groups pushing for open records comes with an undeniable price.  And, there is simple fairness: while no infant adoptee ever chose adoption, there are a lot of birth parents who cannot justly be described as having freely chosen it either.

Adoption disclosure press roundup

Yesterday had a very understandable déjà vu quality, since it was basically a re-run of September 17, 2007.  We saw a very similar slew of "open records" articles as last time.  (Heck, we even saw a surging Canadian dollar!)

I'm impressed by the Toronto Star.  There are two lengthy articles by staff reporter Nicole Baute: one discussing open records in general and focusing on an adoptee named Paul O'Donnell (Emotions high as veil around adoption lifts, May 31), and another from the perspective of birth mother Rebecca Fraser (Knowing a name makes all the difference,  May 31).  As well the Star has an op-ed piece (Unveiling adoption, June 1) in support of open records with disclosure vetos, and they are also soliciting for reader feedback (Adoption records in Ontario opened up. What's your take?, May 26).

The Globe & Mail presents the story of Toronto writer Richard Wright, birth father of a 40-year old son (After 40 years, a father can tug on the ties that bind, May 24).  This prompted a response letter by Denbigh Patton, the guy who with Clayton Ruby launched the legal challenge to Bill 183.  The Globe also presents an interesting digest of adoption stories (Adoption: Other sides, stories, June 1) and an article by Erin Andersson about people signing disclosure vetos profiling Joy Cheskes, another name we know from the court challenge to Bill 183 (Signing a veto on knowing the past,  June 1).

This isn't exactly "press", but CBC's The World This Weekend on Sunday, May 31 had a segment by producer Aziza Sindhu interviewing Karen Lynn of the Canadian Council of Natural Mothers and adoptee Steve Forrest (see the podcast archives, and download May 31.)

Finally, the non-Toronto papers.  There is surprisingly not much.  The Lindsay Post has an article profiling a local adoptee and a birth mother, both reunited, but happy about the change in the system (Looking for answers, May 22).  The Barrie Advance has an interview with a local Children's Aid supervisor and an adoptee with their perspectives (Names revealed after adoption law changes, May 26).

Aside from those there's little, except for two articles whose genesis seems to have been Tory MPPs' expressions of dissatisfaction with the new law.  The Windsor Star (a CanWest paper) had a piece quoting MPPs Sylvia Jones and Norm Sterling.  (New adoption disclosure rules start Monday, May 30). Jones is calling for a postponement of any release of records until all vetos are processed, and Sterling is calling for a one-month postponement of opening records because he expected 4 to 12 times as many vetoes as actually came, and clearly this is a sign that everything is broken.  The Caledon Citizen, from Sylvia Jones' home riding, quotes her (to be blunt) fearmongering about birth parents (Jones questions Liberals about adoption disclosures, May 28).

Besides the aforementioned, we have nought but a deafening silence from outside the GTA, which is as effective a demonstration of the gutting of local news staff as any I've heard.  (Stick to your pieces about weather and municipal politics, you local kids: we big boys in Toronto will handle the big-picture stuff.  But I disgress.)

I have to say I'm rather disappointed in the Hamilton Spectator, which had good adoption stories in even the last year (see the story about adoptee Paul Zadvorny, and the follow-up) and had a number of articles prior to and after the September 2007 abortive opening of records.  Yesterday, they had nothing but a tiny, recycled CP article summarizing of the Ontario government's press release.

Disclosure Day

Well, the wait is finally over. And now the wait begins.

It's sure been a long time coming. From the time I first contacted the Adoption Disclosure Register in 1996, to the time I finally got off my ass and signed on in 2003, I became more or less resolved to the fact that I would probably never find anything, and put it mostly out of mind. When you're eighteen years old, a six- or seven-year wait sounds like eternity. I did always nuture the idea of a private search, though I confess it was together with "writing a novel" on my rather dusty "to-do" list.

When I learned of the passage of the Adoption Information Disclosure Act in 2005, I slowly assimilated the idea that I would find something eventually, and with that grew the conclusion that I had been overly meek before in simply accepting the closed-record system. My birth certificate is a falsified document. Whenever I am obliged to put down my (adoptive) surname as "name at birth", I am being obliged by my government to conspire in a fiction. Yes, this is perhaps an overly dramatic characterization, but a true one.

This new viewpoint turned adoption into a project for me, and I started quietly searching in the months leading up to September 17, 2007. When the decision overturning Bill 183 came down I was oddly not that disappointed; I guess I was used to waiting, and I knew that today would eventually come since even the most vocal critics of Bill 183 were only talking about amending the law to have a disclosure veto. But Justice Belobaba's quashing of the law roused in me an even more fervent desire to find the truth, and I pursued my private search even more aggressively.

I think I always knew this obsession would eventually assert itself: I'm very, very good at obsessive information retrieval and have been since childhood. (I suspect now that this and my being adopted are not a coincidence.) I got a list of prospective names with some educated guesses based on my Non-Identifying Information, and in the years since 2007 I have narrowed it down pretty far. Since this past March, I have a good guess as to who my birth mother is. Some important details don't match, so I'm going to wait for confirmation before proceeding.

So now I wait, as do thousands of others. The only question left is one that will only be answered when the envelope arrives: I just hope I'm not one of the 1800 or so adoptees on the other end of a disclosure veto. As long as I'm not, I might just find out what the "M" in my first surname stands for.