Access approved — adoptees finally get what’s right

For more than 30 years, adoptees in New Jersey have been fighting unsuccessfully for what was entirely reasonable and just — access to their original birth records.

Bills have been offered, altered, introduced again, and occasionally approved by some portion of the Legislature — but no plan ever made it all the way to the governor’s desk and was signed into law. Advocates came closest in 2011, when Gov. Christie broke their hearts by vetoing a proposal and recommending unacceptable changes that reflected the suggestions of Catholic and anti-abortion groups that opposed opening the records. It amounted to a poison pill scuttling the entire effort — for the moment.

But the battle has continued, relentlessly, and at last all of those frustrations are finally about to change with the announcement this week of an agreement among legislators and Christie on a plan that will open those birth records to adoptees beginning in 2017. The latest access bill enjoyed bipartisan sponsorship from Sen. Joseph Vitale, D-Middlesex, and Sen. Diane Allen, R-Burlington, and Christie was ultimately won over by allowing birth parents well more than two years to decide whether they want their names redacted from the records, or to determine how they might want to be contacted by their adult children.

Adoptees who have longed for this moment don’t seem particularly troubled about waiting until 2017. Most have been simply expressing relief at news of the agreement. If another couple of years is what’s necessary to assure that access will soon be provided, then so be it.

This victory is long, long overdue. New Jersey sealed the records in 1940 to protect birth parents’ privacy, and that motivation has been the linchpin of the debate ever since; the desire for adoptees to obtain the records has long been viewed as secondary to the privacy issue. It has been a twisted philosophy denying adoptees a civil right and treating them as second-class citizens.

Religious groups and pro-life organizations have constituted the main opposition for years, over fears that easing privacy protections would jeopardize adoptions and increase abortions — a claim that adoptee advocates have long disputed. Adoptees maintain that the large majority of birth parents actually want a reunion of some kind and would welcome contact.

But that, frankly, shouldn’t even matter. An increased sensitivity to the value of family histories and medical records may have slowly turned the legislative tide, raising awareness that adoptees’ health was being compromised by unnecessarily denying them any knowledge about their birth parents.

Regardless of the reasons behind the political actions, however, an injustice is finally being corrected. That’s what is important today, and that’s what adoptees will truly be able to celebrate come 2017.