Birth certificate dallas texas

There were almost more moms than children to meet Santa Dec. 4 at Holy Family of Nazareth Church in Irvington, Texas. Though the children -- all adoptees -- called only their adopted mother "mom," their birth mothers were also present to share the moment.

"This is not 'co-parenting'," said Bill Betzen, whose agency, Catholic Counseling Services of the Dallas diocese, threw the party and has been facilitating open adoptions for more than a decade.

"The child knows who 'mom' and 'dad' are. There is only one set of 'real parents.' They are the adoptive parents," Betzen told NCR. "The birth parents are other relatives, very important relatives, but not 'mom' or 'dad,'" he said.

Catholic agencies around the nation are leading the movement toward more fully open adoptions, said Betzen, who has written widely on the issue.

Fully open adoptions are those in which birth parents choose from a list of applicants the family that will raise their child. Both sets of parents meet and often the birth mother hands over her baby to the adopting couple, frequently in a church service. At the service, the new parents promise to love and care for the infant.

This growing practice is a far cry from adoptions that occurred 20 to 50 years ago, most of which were shrouded in secrecy. Birth parents -- often only the mother -- were promised anonymity when they signed papers relinquishing their child to people they had never met and would presumably never meet.

However, there are some "sad exceptions" to the practice of open adoptions, Betzen said, pointing to New Jersey where the state's Catholic conference has fought two bills that would open the state's adoption records, sealed since 1940. On Dec. 5 legislators passed Assembly Bill A-1273. It restores the right of New Jersey-born adoptees over age 18 to get a copy of their original birth certificate from the state registrar, including the name of their birth parents.

Birth parents would have a year from the time the new law takes effect to remove their names from the birth documents. The state bar association joined the bishops in opposing the bill, noting that a year's notice is "inadequate," given that birth parents may have left the state or even the country.

The bill requires passage by the more conservative Senate and approval by the governor to become law. A similar Assembly bill passed in 1991, but wasn't considered in the Senate.

Unsealing the past

The New Jersey Catholic Conference, representing the state's five dioceses, sided with the birth parents in testimony before both Senate and Assembly committees. It argued that Catholic adoption agencies had pledged lifetime confidentiality to birth mothers at the time they surrendered their child for adoption.

Unsealing these records would be "shattering" for many birth mothers who have hidden their pasts from their husbands or families, said Regina Purcell, associate director for social concerns at the NJCC. What the conference supports in place of open records is a "mutual consent adoption registry" whereby adoptees and birth parents can make it known that they wish to contact each other.

Although proponents of open adoption argue that only a small percentage of birth parents would resist opening the records, Purcell said there is no data on either side of the debate on this question. She said it would be "inadvisable" to survey birth parents on the question.

Rather, she quoted figures from the American Adoption Congress, national advocates for open adoption, which estimates that only 250,000 of a total of 9 to 15 million adoptees and birth parents -- 1 to 3 percent -- have expressed interest in contacting one another. This figure does not reflect adoptees who are currently minors.

In New Jersey, Health Department officials claim some 110,000 sealed adoption records, some of which involve adoptees who are still children. Catholic Charities agencies in the state's five dioceses facilitated thousands of these adoptions.

Faye Cheeseman of Edgewater, Fla., who directed the Pregnancy and Adoption Services of the Trenton, N.J., diocese from 1972 to 1993, told state senators that social workers like herself used to "play God" with clients, assuring adoptive parents that if they provided an adoptee with a nurturing environment, the child would never question his or her heredity.

But Cheeseman said she had altered her thinking over the years as she witnessed adoptees yearning to learn who they were and why their parents had given them up. She told NCR that "confidentiality isn't credible anymore." Today, unwed mothers give birth because they love their child and they want to stay connected to the child after delivery even if they can't raise it, she said.

A chilling effect

Throughout New Jersey and in other parts of the nation, the battle to unseal the records is one pitting the civil rights of the adoptee against the right of the birth parents to anonymity. "The church was allegedly doing adoptions 20 to 40 years ago in the best interest of the child," Betzen said, "even though this involved giving false names at maternity homes and many other abuses.

"Now we have to look at what these children are asking for; we can't ignore them," he said. Betzen said that birth mothers had no choice where their child went and "no choice but to sign those papers," often no chance even to read them.

Catholic social worker Jane Hotchkiss believes that the solution is not to be invasive or obtrusive but to respect all three parties in the triad: adoptee, birth parents and adopting couple. She felt that passage of New Jersey's reforms could lead other states on a path that would have "a chilling effect" on whether birth mothers place a child for adoption.

Hotchkiss, who supervises Pregnancy and Adoption Services for Central Virginia and is program director of Catholic Charities in the Richmond diocese, characterized those who are demanding unsealing the records as "people who need therapy. ... Finding (the birth mother) is not going to solve their problems," she said.

Already adoptees have been given more rights than birth mothers, Hotchkiss said. Adoption, she noted, is not even possible without the birth mother. "Let's get one thing straight," she said she advises adoptees. "Your mother didn't abort you. She didn't place you and then jump off a bridge. She has a right to have her privacy respected."

Fr. Thomas Brosnan adamantly disagrees. So adamantly that he told New Jersey state senators that a person's right to his or her name and identity weighs "far more than the right of a woman to privacy from her own child." Brosnan, an adoptee who did not learn who his real mother was until age 31, testified that it was standard practice for dioceses to alter data on the baptismal certificates of adoptees.

Such alteration includes certificates that attest that the adoptee was born to his adoptive parents. Often two certificates with two different dates are issued, Brosnan testified. Dual certificates lead people to believe they were baptized twice, he said, a practice the church forbids.

By far the most serious falsification of such documents occurs when church authorities alter the child's baptismal name when that same child is adopted. Brosnan charged that such changes undermine "the very essence of the meaning of baptism, which is the naming of the human person before God."

Lies that multiply

The priest, who coordinates the Korean apostolate for the Brooklyn diocese and administers a Korean parish in Brooklyn, warned of the lie that can be initiated by the closing of birth records. "The lie told to avoid the shame of unwanted pregnancy becomes the lie of many adoptive parents so desperate to forget the pain of infertility, becomes the lie preserved in the falsified documents ostensibly manufactured to protect the child from the stigma of illegitimacy," he said.

Referring to his own illegitimacy, which required that he get a dispensation before being ordained, the priest said, "To deny me my inalienable right to know my name is to deny me my unique identity. I would rather be the bastard who knows his name, than the slave who does not."

Bill Watson, associate executive director of Catholic Community Services in the Newark archdiocese, admitted that unwed mothers had been placed in Catholic maternity homes under assumed names and that dual birth and baptism documents had been issued. In the 1960s and '70s Newark was placing 300 babies per year, compared with six in 1994.