Who's Rights?
A Note on Adoptee Identity
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Who’s Rights?
A Note on Adoptee Identity
Adopted people must rely on morsels of truth from their adoptive parents, or often seek help from search angels, and family tree experts for their share of crumbs from the genealogical table. I began to search at forty and reunited with my biological mother and half-sister three years later, a year before our mother died at sixty-four. I realize that I was lucky in those snail-mail and landline days. I much later went on to find my paternal half-siblings, thanks to DNA research.
I had only a falsified baptismal/birth certificate to get me started. I learned later I should have had an Amended Birth Certificate from S.C., which is the alternate falsified I.D. for adopted persons. But until I was in the thick of my search and needed a current passport, around the same time I was searching for my kin, I didn’t know one existed.
Likely, my adoptive parents weren’t aware they could have sent for my original birth certificate in the mid-1960s before it was sealed by South Carolina. My father would have steered clear of that, as an Air Force officer. All I needed as a military dependent was an I.D. card and the passport they obtained using my baptismal certificate. Dad was hyper-conscious of his family’s appearance. Let’s say, he was not happy to learn I had pursued my search for my true identity, but our contact with Dad was minimal after they moved cross-country in my twenties. My guess is he’d have been mortified if information about the woman who gave me life (whoever she was) had gotten out when he was in the service.
My birth state unsealed adoptee records — with conditions — two years ago when I was seventy-one. I now have a non-certified copy of my birth certificate and my full adoption records file. My name at birth, Ruth Ann Lee, was effaced in adoption and changed to Mary Ellen Caffrey.
The secrecy and distortion around adoption pacts must end. Every adult adoptee’s original birth records should be unsealed. The laws that prevent adoptees, domestic and international, from what is ours by human rights, must change in our favor.
The Switch
As she was born, she might still be,
but for intervention in identity.
Her genes know, but the psyche must shift
to make sense of the switch.
In surrender, what is gone is not restored —
The imprint of relinquishment can’t be fixed.
© Mary Ellen Gambutti
Thank you for reading,
I always thought it was strange that the state could reinvent a person's identity and claim it as the truth. My mother kept my original birth certificate in a safe deposit box. I didn't see it until I was in my 50s when my parents asked me to close out the safe deposit and retrieve what was in it. I'm guessing she hid from me because of her shame of being unwed.
I’m not able to get any records from California. It’s very frustrating. Thank you for sharing this and loved the poem. 💞