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.