Now that the annual legislative session has wrapped up, it’s time to rake through the results and see what’s there.
The legislative website makes this relatively simple.
From the capitol website, click on “Reports and Lists“, and then scroll down the resulting long list of available reports. Down towards the bottom, you can select “Bills that Passed Legislature (Report complete after all bills are sent to the Governor.”
It’s always interesting to see what’s there in the final listing.
On the first pass, I noticed HB2082, HD1, SD1, “A BILL FOR AN ACT RELATING TO ADOPTION RECORDS.”
[An aside, isn’t it time that the legislature’s official website stopped “screaming” with its use of ALL CAPS for bill titles? Earlier this month, NOAA announced that the all caps style would be dropped from its weather forecasts (“April 11, 2016 LISTEN UP! BEGINNING ON MAY 11, NOAA’S NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE FORECASTS WILL STOP YELLING AT YOU.“)
Anyway, back to the bill on adoption records.
If it becomes law, Hawaii will join a number of other states in allowing “adopted individuals who have attained eighteen years of age, adoptive parents, and natural parents unfettered access to the adopted individual’s adoption records.”
There was quite a bit of supporting testimony throughout the process, pointing out that the practice of sealing adoption records is a throwback to an earlier cultural era.
According to the Senate committee report on the measure:
Your Committee finds that states began sealing adoption records in the middle of the twentieth century to protect adopted children from the stigma of illegitimacy. However, current research has illustrated that the secrecy surrounding an adoption has significant negative psychological consequences on an adoptee. Furthermore, cultural changes have largely diminished the stigma surrounding adoption, and recent genetics research has highlighted the importance of genetic history to an individual’s medical care. Hawaii’s adoption records law continues to condition access to records on birthparent approval, which is a major hurdle for adoptees to overcome. This measure eases the restrictions on access to sealed court adoption records in the interest of transparency and access to family medical history and ethnic background.
And here’s an example of the testimony presented on the bill when it came before the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Labor.
Times change. And it’s taken a long time for this particular law to catch up with the changed times.
It’s a change that seems to deserve additional public attention.
Anyway, dig through the bills that were approved and flag those of particular interest to you.
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One person testified that he had to hire someone to search for his “original” birth certificate. My understanding was that upon adoption, the birth certificate is changed, and that’s it. Are original birth certificates required to be kept even after adoption in all cases?
I am aware of several ways that birth certificates can be rewritten for personal or political convenience, in addition to the issue raised by Natalie, who seems to think there would be something wrong with preserving an original birth certificate after an adoption. Apparently historical fact simply doesn’t matter anymore. Our society has gone down Alice’s rabbit-hole. Natalie
For example, the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation had a TV show a couple years ago explaining the rules it had secured whereby an adult child whose mother had refused to identify the father could go to court and get the father’s name and the word “Hawaiian” added to the birth certificate in order to qualify for racial entitlement programs, including proof of 50% native quantum for Hawaiian Homes eligibility. It wasn’t clear on the TV show what standard of proof is required to establish who was the father (beyond a reasonable doubt vs. clear and convincing vs. preponderance of evidence vs. reasonable suspicion).
Another example: there was legislation in 2015, which I seem to recall passed, allowing a transgender to get the birth certificate changed to reflect the currently preferred gender regardless whether any surgery has been done; so that the transgender will not be embarrassed by a contradiction when applying for a job or life insurance etc.
Birth certificates can now be classified with Salvador Dali’s drawings of semi-liquid clocks, and M.C. Escher’s drawings of impossible architecture of stairways in buildings. The Hawaiian acceptance of po’olua in genealogies from a couple of centuries ago now becomes merely a minor source of doubt when compared with the chaos engendered by today’s fluidity of both gender and race as recorded in official government records, not to mention somewhat-less-than-official published news reports and institutional records identifying wannabes Ward Churchill and Elizabeth Warren as Indians and Rachel Dolezal as Black. Ain’t life wonderful! Pity the poor census-taker in the upcoming decennial of 2020, and pity the poor great-grandchild, or Professor Henry Louis Gates V, using those records a century later to do genealogical research.
Just to clarify, I am for preserving history and believe that the original birth certificate should not be altered.
Bless you Natalie. I agree. So what’s happening now, when the government changes a birth certificate to change someone’s “official” gender, is that the government is knowingly lying to anyone who will be relying on that birth certificate. For example, a life insurance company might charge different premiums for men than for women of the same age and health status, because of the significant difference in life expectancy — a difference which is based on biology. By providing the insurance company with an official birth certificate containing a false birth gender, the government (and therefore all of us) is an accessory to theft by deception, even though theft from the insurance company was not the motivation for changing the certificate. I imagine there are lots of other scenarios where a person or company is relying on the gender proclaimed on a birth certificate — indeed, that’s precisely why the person has asked for a new certificate reflecting the newly adopted gender in order to deceive all future requesters. I don’t like seeing my government knowingly enabling a liar.
Let’s consider the calculus a pregnant teenage girl goes through as she considers whether to kill her unborn baby (abortion) or whether to give birth and give the baby up for adoption. For such a girl, and the people advising her, perhaps the most important element of the decision is the girl’s wish to move past her mistake of getting pregnant, and to know for sure that if she gives the baby for adoption she will then be able to have a “normal life” and get married to a man who might have rejected her if he had known about her “sordid” past; and have children with her husband; without anyone ever knowing that she had an “illegitimate” child. She needs to know that she can rely on secrecy, and that there will never be someone knocking on her door 20 years later totally destroying her nicely-established life. But now, with this new legislation, she knows that there is zero reliability to any promise that the adoption will always remain secret. So her choice is clear. Kill the baby — it’s the only way this pregnant girl can put the pregnancy permanently behind her.
Adoptees may want to have access to information about their biological parents due to medical issues. Knowledge of family medical history could be a vital key in dealing with hereditary illnesses and other risks. So you might want reconsider your stance on this issue, Ken. That is, if you are sincere about your pro-life sentiment.
I agree that any adoptee who needs genetic information from a biological parent should be able to get it. Now, perhaps you will agree that the needed information should be requested through a procedure that protects the anonymity of the biological parent, if that parent insists on the protection. In the not-so-old days of closed adoptions, a child could send a request through the adoption agency to the biological parent asking for communication and perhaps meeting, without obtaining any information about the identity or location of that parent unless and until that parent agreed to it. I suppose there might be situations where the adoption agency has gone out of business, records have been lost, etc. In that case, too bad for the adoptee; no information can be obtained. Consider again that the pregnant girl must make a choice — either kill the unborn baby because the new law will no longer guarantee her anonymity, or let the baby live knowing that when it grows up it might come looking for her with the help of the government. Anyone who favors “a woman’s right to choose” needs to be confronted very clearly with the fact that the new law will most definitely increase the number of abortions that otherwise would not have been done if anonymity continued to be protected. But the choicers might not care about that, because they view an abortion as having no more moral consequence than throwing out the trash. So let’s ask a 25-year-old adoptee this question: Would you prefer to go forward with your life never being able to get the medical information you need, OR would you prefer to have been killed in the womb because your mother decided that her right to privacy, her right never to have you contact her, was more important to her than your life. So you might want to reconsider your stance on this issue, Allen. That is, if you are sincere about your pro-choice sentiment.
Since your response to my initial post is considerably longer and nuanced compared to your initial cut-and-dried declaration about the “calculus” that a pregnant teenage girl faces being the only consideration in deciding upon HB 2082, I’ll consider my shpiel to have been a success in getting folks to realize that this issue is rather complicated and can’t be only decided upon based on the interests of one particular group. It is something that needs to be carefully studied with input from family law experts, adoption counselors, the medical/psychiatric community, and advocates for each of the stakeholders (adoptees, biological, and foster parents). I haven’t put forward my own stance on this bill just yet, but your straw man argument does contain a couple of salient points that offers food for thought.
Ken, it sounds like you have gone straight into the rabbit hole. The presumption that a teenage girl will abort instead of putting the child up for adoption because secrecy cannot be kept is the wrong reason to keep records sealed. This too is an outdated thought. I am adopted and most definitely pro life, and for whatever reason my birth mother decided to have me and put me up for adoption. This new law is awesome for so many adoptees. So many questions. They may still go unanswered but the possibility is so much better now to get answers.
The original birth certificate from the hospital with the doctor’s signature is kept in the Department of Health archives, but if you request a birth certificate for yourself or your child, you get a print out from the computer data base of the information that was transcribed from that original. That is a lot cheaper than the old method which was to print a photocopy of the original from microfilm.
The “birthers” were unwilling to accept the testimony from the Director of the Department of Health and the State Registrar that they had looked at the original of President Obama’s birth certificate and it was consistent with the information shown on his birth certificate printed from the DOH database.
Eventually, the Governor gave permission to make a copy of the original available, but even then, the birthers were not convinced.
Everyone used to get the “long form” birth certificate when requesting copies, at least up through the mid-1980s. By the early 1990s, that had been replaced with the computer-generated “short form” which, as Lopaka43 pointed out, is cheaper to produce.
The Governor has now signed his bill into law.
There is a lot of ignorance in some of these comments. This issue has been carefully studied, litigated and researched for decades. Most of the rest of the world opened records to adult asoptees long ago. Kansas and Alaska never sealed their records to adoptees. Oregon opened records almost 20 years ago. No, abortion rates don’t increase, no adoption does not suffer, to the contrary it becomes a much more attractive option to potential birth parents, the vast majority of whom do not want and never asked for anonymity from their own children.
Moreover, DNA, which now cheap, fast and easy, has made even the concept of state enforced birth parent anonymity absurd and irrelevant. Adoptees have been searching and finding for decades without open records, now it’s ridiculously easy for most with DNA. Access to the original records of our births and other adoption records is simply about the dignity that comes from the due process and equal protection of the law. Now thankfully Hawaii has joined the growing number of states to recognize that.
Wonderful to see Hawaii joining the ranks of modern, democracies that grant equal rights to adoptees and treat them under the law with the same rights as non-adoptees. Lets see, those other nations who have been doing this without harm and with great benefit for years and decades are: France, Germany, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Israel, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway. Thank you state of Hawaii and the leaders who made this possible.
Where I live, Oregon has opened its birth records to adult adoptees for nearly two decades without any ill effect. One day we might return to the original legal practice (eroded sinced the 1950s by a coalition of interest groups and state lawmakers) that allowed all U.S. adoptees in all states the legal right to view what is theirs by birthright: access to their name, knowledge of the past, access to their legal birth records.
I would recommend anyone unfamiliar with the original intent of the creators of modern American adoption in the 20th century read E. Wayne Carp’s Family Matters. The original intent of the modern institution of adoption was NEVER to seal adoptees’ birth records from adoptees. This has been the product of political processes that ulimately deny equal rights to millions of Americans–the same Americans who by strange coincidence have historically been treated as social pariahs (people born out of marriage–bastards as we like to call ourselves.) Mahalo, Hawaii!