Adoptees need to know parents

Adoptees have the right to know who their birth parents are and learn about family history just like the rest of society.

Under current North Carolina law records of adopted children are sealed and birth certificates are reprinted to list parents of the adopted. This makes it nearly impossible for adopted children, even after becoming adults, to learn who their natural parents are or learn about family medical history and genealogical records.

It's time to change the law and allow records to be seen by adoptees so they can understand their past and find needed information vital to good health care. Current law sealing adoption records make it difficult to know biological and medical information readily available to other persons and do not stop adopted children from turning away from adoptive parents and the law does not serve the best interests of the adoptees.

News and Observer
April 22, 2004
J. Andrew Curliss, Staff Writer

Adoptees seek open records

David Vaughan has a medical condition -- "I get the shakes," he says -- and the doctors would like to make a better diagnosis: They want to know his family's medical history.

Vaughan, 36, can't provide it.

Adopted as an infant in the early 1970s and reared in Raleigh, he knows nothing of his birth parents or his biological background.

Under North Carolina law, the state keeps secret the original birth certificates of adoptees, including Vaughan's, sealing off the names of birth parents and the locations of the births. New certificates are printed to show only adoptive parents and where they lived at the time of adoption. Read more...

Search Angels seeking for identity

Searching for identity in past records requires good research skills, compassion, a strong interest in helping others and being able to talk and work with others. "It is a tedious, all-hours enterprise made more difficult by a state law under which all adoptees' original birth certificates are forever sealed." Some private individuals do this for fun and the sheer pleasure of finding out about the past. Commercial businesses charge up to $3,000 for birth-family searches but "search angels" do it for nothing more than the satisfaction of helping adoptees answer the universal human query of where they came from.

Read the article from the February, 2007, News and Observer...

News and Observer
February 4, 2007
Martha Quillan, Staff Writer

On a quest to unlock identity

APEX - On May 6, 1958, a young Buncombe County woman, maybe afraid and probably alone, gave birth to a baby girl she called Pamela. Unable or unprepared to care for a child, the woman signed some papers, handed the baby over to an adoption agency and resumed her life.

If that woman is still alive, somewhere, sometime -- it may be weeks, it could be years -- her phone is going to ring. And Martha Mills, the daughter she may have thought she never would see again, will be on the line.

Mills believes this because she has an angel on the case: Joanna Freitag, one of dozens of "search angels" in North Carolina. Their mission is to help adult adoptees track down their birth families. Read more...