Growing in the Dark: Adoption Secrecy and Its Consequences

By Janine M. Baer

Generations of adults who were adopted as children have been kept in the dark about their original identities. The law sealing birth records, passed in 1935 in California during the Great Depression, swept adoptions emotional complexities under the rug and made it possible to keep adoption itself a secret.

Reflecting extensive archival research and written for general audiences as well as professionals, Growing in the Dark: Adoption Secrecy and Its Consequences takes you through Californias early adoption laws, the sealing of records in the era of baby seller Georgia Tann, and the various consequences of this policy as they unfolded throughout the 20th century.

WHAT REVIEWERS HAVE SAID:

"...articulate, easy to read, and filled with real facts concerning sealed records."
- Jean Brown, adoptee

"If you work or live with adoption, you cannot afford to skip this book. Everyone seeking to reverse outdated sealed records laws should also provide a copy of the slim paperback to their legislatures."
- Mirah Riben, author

"...full of fascinating information...you wont be able to put it down."
- Anita Field, Bastard Nation

"Janine Baer, who was adopted in California, focuses on the California law enacted in 1935 sealing original birth certificates. Contrary to the popular perception, the intent of this law was not to protect the privacy of birthmothers.


Rather, these records were sealed to protect children from the stigma of illegitimacy, to protect adoptive parents from intrusions by birthparents, to allow adoptive parents to keep the childs adoptive status a secret, to create the illusion that the birthparents did not exist, and to prevent adoptees from finding their birthfamilies.


...This is an excellent book for birthparents, adoptees, and adoptive parents who want to know how we got to where we are."
- Jane Edwards, Portland, Oregon

"Growing in the Dark, by virtue of its modest length and accessibility, can be used to educate people both within and outside of the adoption reform movement about the effects of sealed records and the faulty premises used to support them."

- Barbara Busharis, American Adoption Congress "Decree"

"Extensive notes and bibliographic information make it an excellent resource for those arguing for open records."
- Sandra Falconer Pace, Canadian Council of Natural Mothers

Note on price: Nonprofit organizations and resellers get 40% off. Call Xlibris for these orders: 1-888-795-4274.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 28, 2004
• ISBN: 9781462843602

Janine M. Baer

Janine Baer is an adoptee who studied adoption at San Francisco State University in the 1990s; she then published her master's thesis as "Growing in the Dark: Adoption Secrecy and Its Consequences." A lifelong Californian, she published the "Chain of Life" newsletter from 1989 to 1997 in which contributors articulated a feminist vision of adoption. Janine currently lives just outside Berkeley, California. As of 2017, adoptee birth certificates are still sealed in California. She met her birth family in the 1970s and '80s, thanks to her adoptive mother inquiring about her original mother's name when Janine was born.

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Copyright © 2004 by Janine M. Baer.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Uncovering What is Hidden: An Overview

Chapter 2

California’s Adoption Laws Before Sealed Records

Chapter 3

California’s Adoption Laws and the Sealing of Records

Chapter 4

Information is Power: Agency Secrets

Chapter 5

The Consequences of Sealed Records

Postscript

Bibliography

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

This book is an updated version of the master’s thesis I completed at San Francisco State University in 1995, titled The History and Consequences of Sealing Adoption Records. I want to thank SFSU faculty members in the interdisciplinary social science and history departments for teaching me historical research methods and allowing me to further my ongoing interest in adoption. Outside of academia, I appreciated letters of support and interest from the late adoptee advocate Jean Paton (1908-2002) as I searched for evidence of who sealed adoption records.

As an adoptee, I was always curious about my birth family. Even after I had located and met my birthmother, I still had not talked to other adoptees until I first attended meetings of PACER, the Post Adoption Center for Education and Research in Oakland in 1983. I appreciate the efforts of members of the group, who validated my experiences as an adoptee and introduced me to the American Adoption Congress.

In 1996, Bastard Nation, the adoptee rights organization, emerged on the scene with humor and resolve. Special thanks to its founders and fellow members for their lightning illumination of the injustices of sealed records and their work for adoptees.

Thanks to Adam Pertman for inspiring this book’s title; to Steve Boehm of the Child Welfare League of America for permission to use that organization’s copyrighted material; and to David Klaassen, archivist with the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota, for sending materials early in my research process.

I also want to thank my parents, who made it up as they went along, raising me as an adoptee in the 1950s and ‘60s without the benefit of adoption books.

This book is dedicated to women and men who were adopted as children. May we nurture our nature and grow in the light.

Chapter 1

Uncovering What is Hidden: An Overview

Beautiful things don’t grow in the dark, they grow in the light so we should all be very grateful that adoption is finally emerging from the shadows.

—Adam Pertman, author of Adoption Nation and Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute

Adoptees who were raised in the era of secrecy grew in the dark, without knowledge of their birth relatives or why they were available to be adopted. It is a challenge to become oneself with important pieces missing; it requires more creativity and more emotional effort. Some adoptees feel they were special and chosen, but for others the shame of secrecy is an obstacle to overcome. Complicating life further, not all adoptees in the early-to mid-20th century even knew they were adopted—some may still not know—and many who knew were told not to talk about it. [W]hen you can’t talk about the most important thing, you can’t talk about anything, not really, said adoptee activist Helen Hill.1

The desire to learn more about their birthparents and sometimes to meet them, though often mixed with ambivalence or fear of rejection, is common among adopted people of all ages. A 1994 study of 881 adolescent adoptees in the Midwestern U.S. found that two-thirds of them were interested in finding their birthparents.2 Though some recent adoptions have been arranged with openness and cooperation between birth and adoptive families, the 1935 California law that keeps records sealed continues to prevent many adopted adults today from learning their birthparents’ names. They cannot know a basic part of their identity and how they are connected to the chain of life. Under sealed records policies, both adoptees and their descendants cannot learn their genetic heritage, family medical history, or the circumstances related to the adoptee’s birth and relinquishment.

Post-World War II baby boomer adoptees were not the first generation to seek their birthparents, they were just a larger, more vocal group than their predecessors. Stories of young adult adoptees who sought their origins were reported as early as 1925 in the Child Welfare League of America’s Bulletin, the monthly publication of the New York-based national organization of child advocates that began in 1921. These sympathetic stories portray adoptees whose searches for birth families were doomed to fail, stories written to illustrate why it was important for adoption workers to obtain accurate information about birthparents of adopted children at the time of relinquishment. These early child advocates supported the natural interest an adopted person would have to obtain more information or meet his or her birth relatives.

In one such example, published in February 1929, the Executive Director of the Children’s Bureau of Philadelphia, J. Prentice Murphy, told the story of a man, now in one of the professions, who had been adopted as a child by a good family of which he was a devoted member. He was not dissatisfied with his family, but wanted to learn about his origins and be treated equally. He also lacked a passport because he did not have a birth certificate. Murphy explained the adoptee’s dilemma:

When he reached manhood he caused various searches to be made from time to time in an effort to discover something of his own social background. These searches were unsuccessful largely because of the fact that the child-caring institution which placed him for adoption had apparently made no inquiry at the time of their acceptance of him and made no effort to record in any detail even the little information which was evidently given to them by those who brought the little baby boy to the agency for care.3

The U.S. Department of State had refused to give this man a passport to travel to Europe because, without a birth certificate, there was no evidence that he had been born in the United States. Murphy concluded that poor social work practices led to such lifelong problems.

Where inexpert and prejudiced people are permitted on the basis of superficial knowledge or the presence of fear to sever blood ties, there are created problems before which in later years the most experienced, imaginative and resourceful social workers stand in utter helplessness.4

This professional man was hindered in several ways by the lack of a birth certificate. While a policy to provide each child with a birth certificate would allow this adopted man to obtain a passport, only the existence of an original, unrevised birth certificate, and his ability to gain access to it, could solve his other problem of wanting to know his birth family. Sealing adoptee birth records came later; the first step was keeping records.

Time and again adopted people have been deprived of birth information by social custom, parental fears, insufficient record keeping, intentional misrepresentation, and sealed records policies. Each adopted person, as a child and as an adult, finds a way to cope with the experience of learning he or she had other parents. Too many face not being able to find their birth families or even their names. A woman adopted some time before 1933, quoted in

Jean Paton’s 1954 study of adoption, recalled learning of her own adoption at age nine:

It was exciting to me, the shock and curiosity came later and mother always cried if I tried to talk about it. I was told at the same time I was told about the birds and flowers. There was no particular shock at the time. The difficulty came later when I was preparing to have children of my own. Then I was worried about inheritance.5

Finding allies in the archives

A California-born adoptee myself, I researched the sealed records policy’s history in my state to find out how it originated and why it has been so impervious to change. Finding that birth records were originally sealed from adoptees in California in 1935, I looked into the social climate of the 1930s. I wondered if California legislators had anticipated the lifelong problems they were creating for adult adoptees when they sealed birth records, or if they chose to override their concerns in the belief that adoptive families would be more secure with birthparents eternally hidden. And I wondered whether the claim by today’s opponents of opening records, that birthparents were promised confidentiality, was in fact the reason records were originally sealed.

I was surprised to discover that the numerous articles about adoption and illegitimacy in the Child Welfare League’s Bulletin from 1925 to 1945 never suggested that birth records should be kept hidden from adoptees. When the Bulletin mentioned adoptees at all, it was sympathetic to their desires to know their birthparents. The only confidentiality the organization recommended in the 1930s was to protect adoptive families from being contacted by birth families, as the CWLA’s board of directors stated in its 1938 Minimum Safeguards in Adoption. However, the California legislators who voted to seal records in 1935 apparently were not motivated by the Child Welfare League of America’s views.

Rather than recommend that original birth records be kept secret from adopted people, writers in the Bulletin had the opposite concern: that adopted adults might not have enough information about their genetic forebears because adequate records often were not kept. Child welfare advocates through the early 1940s pondered the dilemma of young adult adoptees who, learning of their adopted status, would be shocked and would wonder about their other identity. These child advocates believed adoptive parents should tell their child he or she was adopted rather than keep it secret. But they also recognized that in the real world in the 1930s, adoptions took place outside their control, transacted by people with different perspectives and motivations. Many parents did not tell their children they were adopted; others who wanted to provide information could not tell their children first-hand about their birthparents because adoption agencies, lawyers or social custom prevented both sides from meeting.

Granted, adoption workers probably had additional motivations in wanting to make sure that birthparents’ identities were known and recorded. They probably wanted to be certain that they were providing normal children for adopting parents rather than children with mental disabilities, who were not considered adoptable in the 1930s. Information about both of the birthparents would help them determine a child’s future abilities. It had not been long since a belief that children of unmarried mothers were inherently feeble-minded had prevailed, stigmatizing such children and precluding their adoption. The eugenics—good genes—movement in California earlier in the century had adherents who believed that people with bad genes would pass along unacceptable traits to their children. The philosophical and scientific debate about the relative important of genes and upbringing, nature and nurture, found its embodiment in adoption.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, adoption agencies felt the need to assure adopting couples, most of whom were white, that the babies available for adoption were not racially mixed or members of non-white groups, a concern that could have accounted for some of the inquiries by social workers into a baby’s birth heritage. Racial segregation in the 1930s, combined with economic requirements for prospective adoptive couples, meant that formal adoption was mostly a phenomenon of the white majority. Given the homogeneous racial and ethnic population in California—a 95 percent white population was recorded in the 1930 census—it is fair to say that adoption took place mostly in white families in California at the time records were sealed. Of the state’s 5.6 million people in 1930, 3 percent were Asian and 1.4 percent were Black. There were also 368,013 people in California in 1930 counted in a subcategory of the white majority called white population of Mexican origin, representing 6 percent of the state’s population.6 There was somewhat more racial diversity in other parts of the United States in 1930, with nearly 90 percent of the country white, nearly 10 percent