Marci and Me

A shift has taken place in the past few decades, though, one in which adoptees and parents have begun reframing the way we think about adoption. It's their own version of the civil rights battle, they say. Groups like Bastard Nation, an advocacy group for adoptee rights, have even tried to take back the slur against those born out of wedlock. ?Millions of North Americans are prohibited by law from accessing personal records that pertain to their historical, genetic and legal identities,? their mission statement reads. ?Such records are held by their governments in secret and without accountability, due solely to the fact that they were adopted.? Even worse, many adoptees' birth certificates, the legal document declaring their official existence, are effectively fraudulent, listing their adoptive parents as their birth parents. Until the 1970s and ?80s, adoption records were top secret, as a rule. Today 11 states have laws on the books giving every citizen access to his or her own birth documents. More states may follow. The suppression of birth-parent identity has become a lot harder with the flow of information online. No one has quantified the phenomenon, says Adam Pertman, author of Adoption Nation and executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, but ?the Internet is revolutionizing adoption in every way.? Social networking has made reunions exponentially more feasible. ?People who have wanted to find each other for a long time now have a process where what they wanted is far easier to achieve than ever,? he says, ?but we'll never have numbers because there is no reporting system.?

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