The end

The letter came yesterday. So many questions answered and so many more to ask.

All my guesses were wrong, but given what I know now I don't see how I could've known how and where to look. Maybe a private investigator would have known, and that's something that will bother me.

Nothing, nothing for 31 years and now this, all at once. Three decades of joy and heartbreak in one family, all read vicariously, all at once. Every 10 minutes, another Google query and another thundering revelation. It's an overwhelming, mind-blowing trip, but wherever it takes me, this is one trip I've always wanted to go on.

If only I could have left sooner. My consolation is that it wasn't my choice.

More later.

Stats on Post-Adoption Birth Information forms

Fifteen weeks and still waiting. I was recently forwarded some new stats on Post-Adoption Birth Information requests from the Ontario Ministry of Government Services. From conversations with Service Ontario I understand that they are still, as of this moment, processing the 2007 forms so it's obviously of interest to anyone who's not gotten their information yet just how many such forms there are.

Any numbers below should be taken as corrections to anything I published earlier.

Post-Adoption Birth Information forms received by the Ontario government, Sept 2007 to present

	September 2007	Jun 1–19, 2009	Jun 20-Jul 31	Total
All	372	3071	2693	6136
Filed by birth parent	95	1166		1261
Filed by adoptee	277	4603		4875

(The ? symbols indicate a lack of information on my part.)

Thirteen weeks later

I'll admit I had been prepared for some delays and thought the 6-8 week timeline unduly optimistic but I really believed that now, thirteen weeks after June 1, I would have got something in the mail.

Anecdotal accounts tell of some 2007 applicants having gotten their info, but these are few and hard to come by. Secondhand information suggests that the Ontario government has processed the first batch of the 2007 Post-Adoption Birth Information requests, with a large pile of 2007 requests and all 2009 requests still pending.

The government's handling of this wait period is absolutely inexcusable. All the applications yet processed are from 2007; all the relevant vetoes and other forms arrived, at latest, just after June 1. By mid-July, it must have been evident how long it would take to process these documents.

Instead of presenting us with a realistic time estimate, they tossed out 12 weeks as a bone to the baying masses. I spoke to a very polite ServiceOntario rep on the phone, so I'm quite sure of what they promised: 12 weeks from receipt of the request (or from June 1 for requests from 2007). It's now obvious that, just as they couldn't deliver in 6-8 weeks from June 1, they can't deliver now.

While I appreciate that adoption disclosure is not the Ontario government's highest priority, they have a duty not to offer us misleading time estimates. It's clear that on this file, they're bad schedulers, slow workers, or awful communicators. They have to step up their game: this is a one-time event, can't it justify a little more attention?

The final stretch

Word came on one of the mailing lists I'm on that some people have received their Post-Adoption Birth Information. The government's revised target of 12 weeks will expire this Friday, so it's no surprise that my obsession about this has heightened to near-epic levels.

I have the sort of job where I could, if I really had to, just toss off an email to my boss and say "I'm working from home today." It's not without consequences, but I could get away with it if I had to. And so every morning this week, I've thought to myself "should I stay home today to wait for the mail?"

I haven't done so yet, and what purpose would it serve really? But it's hard to fight the temptation. I concoct elaborate plans for just how and when I'll open the envelope (take a day off work, go for a long contemplative walk, and open the letter over a Scotch?) and what it will reveal. I agonize over the thought of getting a veto, or even of having only information about my birth mother and not my birth father.

Four more weeks

Sigh. The word on the mailing lists, from some people who've called up ServiceOntario to ask for a new ETA, is that because of all the requests they've received (Post-Adoption Birth Information, vetoes, and contact preference forms) that the expected 6-8 weeks has expanded to 12 weeks. What does this mean? Four more weeks.

Sure, this sucks, but at least it's better to know. I won't be rushing to the mailbox every day after work for whole bloody month!

I also heard that the workers have clarified that pending Post-Adoption Birth Information (PABI) requests from 2007 will be processed before anything else that came after June 1, which I'm happy about. I'd been wondering just what would happen if a disclosure veto arrived after June 1, but before the response to the PABI request was mailed out. The answer is "nothing", i.e. the PABI request has priority.

How far we've come

Well, it's been six weeks since Disclosure Day. If the 6-8 week time estimate from ServiceOntario is to be believed, those of us who had left-over post-adoption birth information requests from 2007 should be getting responses any day now. I'm still waiting, of course.

I thought it would be interesting to note just how far we've come over the years on adoption disclosure. The following article is from the Globe and Mail back in 1984, about the apparently successful campaign by Frank Drea, an adoptive parent and the Minister of Community and Social Services, to restrict Children's Aid Societies from distributing non-identifying information to adult adoptees. He argued that "in a small town it could be a neon sign with an arrow pointing to the innocent party."

To their credit, the CASes fought back hard against Drea's law, and it seems to have gotten scrapped in 1985 right after the Davis government was defeated, but it's amazing that back then even non-id was something contentious.

I was a child then, and it's hard to imagine what that era must have been like for adult adoptees, who then needed permission from adoptive parents to sign onto the Adoption Disclosure Register! It's almost incredible that just two years later, the Garber study would recommend that adult Ontario adoptees should have unqualified access to the identities of their birth parents: something which is contentious even now.

Adoption bill may bring suit

Saturday, November 24, 1984

The Metro Toronto Children's Aid Society is considering legal action against the province if legislation prohibiting the disclosure of certain information to adoptees is passed.

"We will certainly explore a constitutional challenge if the legislation in its present form is proclaimed," Doug Barr, the agency's executive director, said yesterday.

His concern, shared by other children's aid directors, is aimed at new child welfare legislation that restricts the societies from releasing non-identifying information, except when medically necessary, to adoptees they have placed.

Since the mid-1960s, children's aid societies have agreed to release to adoptees who request it, information relating to social, religious and academic background of their birth parents.

Child welfare officials say the legislative change is being pushed by Frank Drea, Minister of Community and Social Services, because he is an adoptive parent.

Mr. Drea has argued that information considered non-identifying in an urban centre could risk confidentiality in a small town.

The Child and Family Services Act, which enshrines the new adoption provisions, goes before the Legislature for third and final reading next month.

Lobbying by child welfare officials and Parent Finders Inc., a group concerned with the rights of adoptees, failed to produce amendments to the controversial disclosure clause when it was reviewed by a committee of legislators on Thursday night.

William Wrye, the Liberal Party's social services critic, unsuccessfully put forward an amendment that would have given adoptees over 18 the right to non-identifying information.

Mr. Wrye criticized the disclosure provisions as "disenfranchising thousands of young adults" from information on their backgrounds, "which is important to them and makes them feel more secure." George Caldwell, executive director of the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies, said he is unhappy with the disclosure clause.
"I don't know why he (Mr. Drea) is doing it," Mr. Caldwell said.

Jeffrey Wilson, a Toronto lawyer, said adoptees in the United States have been unsuccessful in their constitutional challenge to get access to their records.

A crazy old letter

During the lead-in to June 1 last month, I was kind of obsessing over open-records coverage in the media, as you might have noticed.

Once I was done with the press I moved onto blogs, and found a bunch of interesting reading (not all recent) including The Daily Bastardette. While there I stumbled across this incredible letter which read into the Ontario legislative record on May 5, 2005 by Tory MP Frank Klees (now running for Ontario Tory leader) during the debates about Bill 183.

There's a lot to comment on about this letter, but I'll save that for afterwards. For now, here it is verbatim:

Dear Mr. Klees,

I am writing as a responsible parent and husband living my life with my family and until recently, very contentedly in your riding. Sir, for the very first time in my life, I am afraid. I am afraid of the government of Ontario's announced intention to abrogate the province's long-standing adoption law, a law that guaranteed the privacy of both the adopted child and adoptive parents from those who, at a time of their choosing, might seek to interject themselves into the private social dynamic of the adopted child and their nuclear ‘life’ family.

For reasons of privacy and discretion, I choose, as I am sure countless others would also choose, to withhold my name. But I know you, sir, and ironically, I also know the Premier and his family and they know ours. But all they know is that we have tried to live our lives honourably and that we attend church, pay our taxes, volunteer and vote. We also take care to mind our own affairs and to never visit our attitudes and cultural norms on others.

We are a tolerant, dutiful and hopefully caring family, but sir, we do have a distinction from other families in our circle. We are all adoptees: both generations. Our children have never been told that they are adopted, and my wife and I, being only children, have never told our friends, business and professional associates or neighbours.

We have enjoyed the anonymity our silence and right to privacy has afforded us and our children. We were never subjected to the systemic prejudices the adopted suffer in humiliating silence almost every day. When we did poorly in school, no teacher ever raised their eyebrow in that knowingly condescending fashion and asked, ‘Oh, would Johnny be adopted?’ When our parents died, we were not singled out by the Toronto Star as ‘the adopted children of.’ We were instead listed as ‘the loving children of.’

We were never actually told we were adopted ourselves until our parents passed away, and by that time we had become the sum collective of their beings and were content to be so. Our children have been raised as our own, as in fact we were, and they are the inheritors of all that our parents once were and loved and all that my wife and I hold to be dear.

My wife and I discovered very little about the circumstances surrounding our birth. Both she and I thank God that our knowledge of such events and people are remote and intangible. For our children, however, the horrifying background and circumstances surrounding their earliest circumstances should never see the light of day. I remember the judges in the adoption courts assuring my wife and I that these haunting shadows would never be visited upon them. Now all of this is in doubt and my family is threatened by its own government.

Mr. Klees, there is much I have left out. Cryptic references aren't exactly the kind of documentation you are probably looking for in your defence of our family's privacy. I do, however, implore you to speak to the other members of the Legislature, to halt this attack on the thousands of defenceless families in Ontario who have adopted and been adopted with the clear understanding that our records were to be permanently sealed and that we were free to lead our lives (like everyone else) within the context of the lives we had actually lived, not the denial-laced pseudo-lives this legislation would lay at our door.

Mr. Klees, we and the thousands of voiceless and defenceless adoptees and adoptive parents need the Legislature to amend this bill and to take out the retroactive aspects of the disclosure provisions.

I ask you and your colleagues to change the nature and content of this proposed bill.

On behalf of my wife and family, thank you for your interest and compassion in this matter. I know you know of what I speak.

Wow. It's hard to know where to begin. Another time, I might feel compelled to challenge the assertion of guaranteed privacy for adoptees, but there's no such more to speak to that I'm just going to sail on past that.

I could also argue that by santimoniously summarizing his churchgoing, community-serving, straight-arrow lifestyle he is broadcasting a message about its worth and thus projecting his "attitudes and cultural norms" upon us all, something he claims to ahbor. But I'll sail past that too.

No, the truly stunning part is the miserable picture he paints of an adoptee's life, a life of almost Dickensian misery, a daily struggle against shame, abuse and haughtly sneers, forever coping with second-class status. Now I'll grant you I grew up after illegitimacy had lost most of its stigma, but the shocking part was not the degree of utter misery in the portrait of an adoptee—it's that as the writer relates this horrific existence with such authority he simultaneously denies ever having had firsthand knowledge of it!

I have no idea what the writer was referring to with the mention of the Toronto Star. He seems to believe that all of us "out of the closet" adoptees live our daily lives as sons and daughters forever weighed down by adjectives, distinguished and diminished. This shows, better than anything else perhaps, how clueless the writer is about the daily lives of adoptees who don't live under totalitarian regimes of secrecy regarding their adoptedness.

I am an "adopted son" when I want to be and a "son" the rest of the time, and have always felt that revealing my adoptedness was my choice to make; never have my parents or any other authority figures obliged to reveal it or hide it.   Granted, maybe my parents were enlightened in that regard, but I don't think they were that unusual.

The most objectionable point, though, is that the writer openly admits to keeping his kids in the dark about their adoptedness; even stronger, he demands further government aid in perpetuating this ignorance.   Once upon a time this was a mainstream opinion, and I can reluctantly excuse adoptive parents from that era who kept and keep their children in the dark.    But to do this now after all the evidence of the past decades is morally repugnant.  It turns a secret into a lie.  I think back to all the times doctors have asked me "is there a family history of X?" and imagine that instead of answering "I don't know" that I had in ignorance given the the response "No", which might be wrong.

Would it ever have made a difference?  Maybe and maybe not.  But nobody, adoptive parent or social worker, could ever know in advance whether it would or not.  If I could criminalize the act of not telling adopted kids they are adopted I would, because it is dangerous, irresponsible, hurtful, and terribly selfish.

I am very glad this letter-writer didn't get his wish and I fervently hope his children will one day learn some truths about themselves, because they deserve to know.  I also hope that when this bubble of deception bursts as it probably will, the family is not too much hurt by it.

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.

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.

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?