Advances in artificial procreation have outpaced Canada’s fertility laws. The result? A field of medicine that has been compared to the “Wild West,” where there are virtually no rules governing what’s legally or morally acceptable.

There have been a number of articles in the aftermath of the decision and I strongly urge readers to continue to research these developments beyond what little I’m going to focus on in this post.

For the purposes of this post, though, I’m going to draw on two articles, both published over the weekend.

First up is Fertile ground: The business of baby-making from the Ottawa Citizen.

Both of these pieces are crucial reads, I’m merely going to pull a few sections. Starting with this overview of the existing reproductive climate. (Emphasis added.)

As more Canadians are turning to science to help start a family, the country’s fertility laws have fallen behind the times, with few rules governing what’s legal or morally acceptable when it comes to artificially making babies — and what’s not.

Some fertility doctors are still routinely implanting three or more embryos into women, increasing the risk of twins, triplets or quadruplets, as well as the risk of fatal outcomes or lifelong complications among the babies that survive.

The RCMP is investigating at least two cases of alleged buying and selling of human reproductive material — sperm or eggs cells, or surrogate wombs. And women in India are bearing babies for infertile Canadian couples who are travelling abroad to circumvent the criminal ban against the hiring of surrogates in this ­country.

An Ottawa doctor and Order of Canada recipient, Dr. Norman Barwin, is also facing two civil lawsuits alleging he inseminated two women with the wrong sperm, allegations he denies; the families are seeking a court order requiring the doctor be tested “to conclusively rule out the possibility that he is the donor whose sperm was used.”

Fertility doctors are offering women the chance to bank their frozen eggs for “reproductive safekeeping,” even though many members of their own profession say egg freezing for fertility preservation is experimental and unproven.

The list of controversies continues to grow.

A sperm-injecting technique that allows once-infertile men to father a child is increasingly being used despite concerns over its safety. The adult children who were born decades ago to anonymous sperm donors are going to court to find out who their fathers are. And alarms are being raised about the growing and aggres­sive use of drugs that stimulate a woman’s ovaries to churn out more eggs than she could ever produce on her own.

The article also goes into the lack of national standards or regulation over much of the growing field. (Again emphasis added.)

As pressure mounts on the provinces to follow Quebec’s lead to fund assisted reproduction technologies, as demand for IVF grows and as couples wait longer before trying to have a family, assisted reproduction is poised to move from a niche to a mass market in Canada.

But, three days before Christmas, the country’s highest court ruled key sections of the nation’s fertility law unconstitutional — throwing efforts to regulate Canada’s fertility industry back nearly two decades. The Supreme Court of Canada ruling places much of the industry under provincial jurisdiction and control, effectively killing a scheme to regulate assisted reproduction on a national level. Critics say the absence of federal standards for clinics will lead to a patchwork approach across Canada.

Seventeen years ago, the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies pressed for legislation to govern the business of artificial conception. Seventeen years later, there are still virtually no national standards or policies to oversee a field of medicine that critics say, despite its altruistic veneer, is ultimately about the commercialization of the creation of life.

Assisted procreation “is aimed at a take-home baby. That’s what everyone is in this for,” says Margaret Somerville, founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. “But ultimately, this is a new human being. And what we have not done in any of this is put that new human being at the centre of our decision-making.”

I have written here a number of times about IVF and the growing movement of donor conceived (dc) individuals and their efforts to gain their fundamental human right of biologically based identity, such as Canadian Olivia Pratten’s lawsuit. (see Olivia Pratten’s suit to end second class citizenship for Canadian donor conceived individuals.)

(As always, I strongly urge those interested in the first hand perspectives of donor conceived people and their human rights work to begin with the Confessions of a Cryokid blog and links as an important jumping off point.)

The driving engine, of course, remains, whatever money can buy.

Despite the money changing hands, many in the field deny that they’re engaged in commercial transactions.

“In the reproductive business — which is a business — you have this very strange denial of the commercial aspect of what people are doing,” says Debora Spar, author of The Baby Business: How Money, Science and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception.

“I get it, I understand it. I think because reproductive technologies are so new people still have this knee-jerk reaction against them — they get very scared when the words ‘baby’ or ‘reproduction’ occur in the same sentence as money,” says Spar, a former professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and current president of Barnard College in New York City.

“The truth of the matter is that there is commerce going on — and it’s pretty expensive and high-priced commerce going on.”

In the U.S., “you can buy sperm, you can buy eggs — that’s really the market that has exploded — you can rent wombs and you can increasingly put together these complicated package deals, where you buy the sperm from one source, the egg from another and the surrogate mother.”

Canada’s Supreme Court left in place prohibitions against paying for sperm or egg donors or surrogacy services — outlawed activities that carry fines of up to $500,000 or 10 years in prison. But many Canadians are simply buying and importing donor sperm and eggs from the U.S. — often with the help of Canadian fertility clinics — or traveling abroad for surrogates.

As the article points out, whatever Canadians can’t get domestically, they can buy in the United States or abroad.

Protecting the identity rights of those produced by these processes likewise, remains just another regulatory hole. (Emphasis added.)

Spar and others say more needs to be done to track any long-term health risks to babies born after assisted conception, and to the women who receive large amounts of hormones as part of their treatments. They say permanent donor records need to be kept to allow children born from sperm or egg donation to trace their genetic parents, should they wish to do so.

“We do that now for adoption after making mistakes for decades. We’re making the same mistakes with assisted reproduction in presuming that children have no interest in their genetic heritage,” Spar says.

The quote, despite bringing up the interests of donor conceived individuals still shows how little their circumstances are understood.

Beyond mere curiosity or interest in one’s genetic heritage, the ability to trace authentic identity and one’s own origins, as well as ethnicity, nationality, family, etc. is firmly in the realms of human rights. When donor conceived individuals are intentionally deprived of such, they are denied their most basic human rights.

Laskin says the “outliers” are small and the vast majority of doctors working in the country’s private fertility facilities are practising at a high standard.

But those watching say the need for oversight and regulation has never been greater.

“Otherwise you are saying to any person with a private interest in making humans, go out there and set up a business,” says Françoise Baylis, Canada research chair in bioethics and philosophy at Halifax’s Dalhousie University.

Which is globally, precisely what has already happened.

Which leads us to the second article, this one about a key technological leap in terms of human egg freezing and defrosting, as well as the pressures driving women to freeze eggs, ideally in their 20’s.

See Human-egg banking raises sticky social questions from the Vancouver Sun.

The article points out how these technologies were originally developed in the medical realm, to help women facing threats to their reproductive capacity retain the ability to bear children at a later date, yet they are now shifting towards the consumer marketplace in a broader climate of little to no regulation.

Egg freezing was born from a goal of rescuing the fertility of women undergoing treatment for cancer or other diseases that can destroy immature eggs in the ovaries and plunge women into premature menopause.

As there is little to no long term health monitoring both of the effects of the practices on the resultant offspring and on the women themselves, much of this reproductive marketplace and its long term effects exists firmly in the realm of “we don’t know.”

Tan agrees with critics that centres introducing egg freezing should initially only do it in the context of a clinical trial, and under research ethics supervision, until they can obtain “consistently good results,” and preferably publish those results in a peer-reviewed journal.

But critics also charge that the long-term effects on the eggs and resulting embryos are unknown. “The consensus of opinion is that if an egg fertilizes and it develops to an early embryo and we implant it into a uterus and it grows, everything is pretty much OK,” says Dr. Roger Pierson, a past president of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Saskatchewan. “But we don’t know how that is going to affect their long-term development. There are things that we just can’t test in animal models.” There’s also no guarantee of a baby in the end, he says.

Women need to be told what the realistic outcomes would be, Pierson says. “The reality is, we just don’t know what that is.”

“I would hate to see it used as a marketing tool, saying, ‘100 per cent of the time when we freeze your eggs you’re going to get a baby at the end of the day.’ ”

All of this, once again, raises the ongoing questions pertaining to stored genetic material and those vying for ‘ownership’/ability to utilize such years later.

While frozen unfertilized eggs are obviously different from frozen fertilized eggs, a careful study of how those pushing embryo transference (what is sold as “embryo adoption” here in the States,)  particularly those in the christian evangelical subcultures, and how they have come to view genetic material in long term storage as more a national resource than under individual ownership may over time become increasingly pertinent.

Here in the States, in Louisiana for example, they have worked to ensure that frozen embryos can legally only be thawed for purposes of implantation and potential pregnancy. They have a definite preferred outcome for the embryos and it precludes other means of disposal or donation for medical research purposes. See my previous posts In-Vitro Fertilization, “Snowflakes,” and the growing Christian Eugenic movement and Stem-Cell Veto, Snowflake kids, and Christian Eugenics.

Whether or not they would extend their religiously based objections and demand the stored material be essentially hijacked/commandeered from those who were originally the sources of the genetic material beyond fertilized eggs on into any stored material that could be utilized to produce pregnancies is an unanswered question.

The article also points out the fundamental lack of basic physiological and biological education.

Clearly, far beyond sex ed, people need a crash course in the reproductive realities of their own bodies. This lack of basic understanding of the reproductive limitations women face over the course of their reproductive lifetimes is common across many cultures and nations.

Women are born with a finite number of eggs. At birth a woman’s ovaries contain approximately one to two million oocytes — immature eggs; by puberty, the count drops to 400,000. During each menstrual cycle, about 1,000 oocytes begin to develop but only one becomes a mature egg. The others left behind die. Not only does the supply shrink but egg quality decreases over time as well, since the best eggs are used up when young, so that each egg now offers less chance of pregnancy and a higher risk of miscarriage.

By the time a woman reaches age 39, “there aren’t many (follicles) left that have got enough strength to raise their hand,” says Dr. Al Yuzpe, co-founder and co-director of the Genesis Fertility Centre of Vancouver.

“My usual response is, ‘You may not look 40, you may not feel 40 but your ovaries don’t know it,’ ” Yuzpe says. He frequently encounters women who had no idea of the limits of their fertility. “They’re not only shocked, they’re tearful, they’re angry. ‘Nobody told me that I wasn’t going to be able to get pregnant at 48.’

But when women don’t understand something as basic as pregnancy at 48 isn’t “normalcy” is it then any wonder that somewhere between adoption and reproductive technologies the unending quest for a child plays out against the backdrop of a consumer marketplace catering to precisely those consumer demands?

As for the kids produced or purchased, they’re lucky at this point, to even get a couple sentences worth of mentions even in thoughtful articles such as these.

That’s part of the problem.

Now as earlier generations of donor conceived individuals (and adoptees) reach adulthood and find their voices politically, those in any position to regulate this “wild west” would do well to listen.

It’s (the industry declared) “National Adoption Awareness Month” again.

We Bastards and (original) families have little choice but to be “aware” of adoption and our adopted status every day of the year,  but it’s long overdue we bring some of our kind of “awareness” to the industry’s adoption marketing attempts.

Thus for the month of November, those of us writing about some of the cold hard realities of adoption will be pulling together pieces of OUR broader narrative over the course of the month.

Consider it a sane alternative to the cotton candy, rainbows, and unicorns the industry will be shoveling down every media pipe they can get their talking heads into all month long.

Plenty of us will be pointing at one another’s important work and writings throughout the month, some featuring guest bloggers, others using their blogs to link across to solid pieces by other adoption reality supportive writers.

On twitter, a number of us will be gathering our posts together under a single hashtag, by adding #NAdoptAM to some of our posts.

(Hint- keep an eye on the #NAdoptAM search results over the course of the month to read some of the body of work produced.)

Along those lines, I’ve added and will be adding a #NAdoptAM tag to all my posts this month to gather them together in a single place.

Leaving it to the adoption industry or even adopters to dictate the terms adoption is discussed in is unconscionable.

We are adoption.

We live adoption every day of our lives.

Those willing to look beyond the industry’s teddy bears, balloons, and gotcha day videos will find some of the more unpleasant adoption realities in places such as #NAdoptAM.

By way of a few very basic suggestions of what you can do this month to serve as a counterpoint to the sealed records status quo:

1. Start by getting well grounded in terms of your own thinking.

Bastard Nation’s booklet, The Basic Bastard, while a bit dated in some places, still contains the core arguments of the Bastard civil and human rights politic. Also see the BN FAQ, particularly in relation to the important distinctions between search and reunion and unconditional records access restoration.

If you’re not confident or well grounded in some of these nuances, and prepared to refute some of the typical nonsense flung at us when we do speak out, maybe November for you is more about setting aside some time to delve into an education process or making personal connections with others who have been in these battles before, who demand nothing less than full equality.

2. For others who are ready, November is a time to speak and act.

A few possible suggestions, in no particular order:

• Write letters to the editor
• comment on articles
• blog
• read and educate yourself
• tweet
• tag and hashtag it
• get your voice and perspective into the broader conversation across the net and in person, particularly with those in your social circles
• consciousness raise
• work with others locally, and globally but be sure such efforts are grounded in a position or document similar to CALOPEN’s No Veto Resolution from the get go
• educate
• do radio and television interviews
• help bring foster kids’ voices and experiences to the fore
• meet with your representatives, work with them to introduce and pass pure unrestricted restoration of access to our records bills

November is no time to stay silent and let the industry control all discourse on the subject..

Let your words and actions speak loud and clear this November.

If people want to talk adoption, they need to start at the demand for nothing less than the restoration of full human/civil/identity rights of all adopted people.

Let your voice be heard.

Use it or lose it.

Now that Illinois’ disastrous HB 5428 has been signed into law, (it’s now known as PA 96-0895) simply by looking at the new law it becomes clear, some untold number of adoptees will have their requests for their original birth certificates, or attempts to register with the registry rejected by the state. Yet the state appears to have no interest in hearing from or about those so intentionally left behind.

No provision has been made to track those rejections nor build statistics how many requests are being turned down. (Let alone offer those rejected any form of redress.)

Until now.

Mary Lynn Fuller (of Illinois Open) is beginning to compile some of the stories of those the state of Illinois is rejecting access to their Original Birth Certificates (OBCs) to or refusing to register in the IARMIE (Illinois Adoption Registry and Medical Information Exchange.) She’s attempting to build some basic statistics on just how many are being turned away and what their circumstances are.

She can be contacted via email- mlfuller65@comcast.net.

If you can help spread the word about Mary Lynn’s effort to do this basic data collection, please share her effort far and wide within your social networks.

This is terribly important work, as many legislators believe they just ‘restored’ adoptees civil rights and believe the new law has ‘fixed’ the situation. Tragically, nothing could be farther from the truth. But without the data to show what those turned away are experiencing, those rejected will be left to suffer this injustice as if it were nothing more than a ‘personal problem’.

These rejections are not ‘personal problems.’  They are the result of a systemic flaw, inherently built into the new law, and precisely what many of us who have been blogging about the legislative wrangling in Illinois for years now warned was about to happen before the law passed.

Bastardette has added her take on Mary Lynn’s effort here:

Attention Illinois Original Birth Certificate Rejects! Act Now!

As Bastardette put it:

You can read Mary’s latest blog about Illinois here. Note that although Mary is a grandmother, and her first mother is dead, she is not yet old enough and thus responsible enough to qualify for her own birth certificate–despite what Feigenholtz says to to the contrary on her own webpage.

Representative Sara Feigenholtz, who sponsored and pushed the bill can say  “Today, we’re opening a new chapter in adoption history in Illinois where we can finally say that all families are created equal” ’til she’s blue in the face.

Even the most straightforward reading of the law makes it clear enough, today Illinois families and adoptees remain locked behind multiple doors of state constructed unequal treatment.

What’s important at this point, is to bring together and compile the stories of those who AS A CLASS OF PEOPLE are left to endure that inequality, and bring their plight to light.

Rather than remaining voiceless, each trapped by the legislation’s fatal flaw, adoptee rights advocates both in Illinois and across the country are trying to ensure that PA 96-0895 is not the end of the road in Illinois as this new law merely creates a whole new set of problems, problems we warned were inherent to it before it passed. None of us are giving up.

We don’t view this latest version of the mess in Illinois as any kind of “end point” nor do we consider the matter “settled.” If anything, we foresee that for a class of adoptees and their families, this is merely another chapter, and the problems therein are only just beginning.

Proving that, though, becomes a matter of individuals being willing to speak out. Of data collection. And of not giving up.

We recognize there’s a long haul ahead of us, all the more so in that once legislators pass a bill, they use their work on it as an excuse to refuse to revisit the “issue” for years to come.

As they refuse to track the consequences of the law, it falls to the directly affected to do so.

With the evidence of PA 96-0895’s failures in hand, we will continue to push for nothing less than genuine equality for adopted people and their families in Illinois.

Because when it comes to genuinely restoring human, civil, and identity rights, no one should be left behind or forgotten.

Illinois Adoptees with One Foot in the Grave. Hark! Your Original Birth Certificate is on its Way.

LD 1084, An Act To Provide Adult Adoptees Access to Their Original Birth Certificates

In 1953 Maine took away adopted adults’ access to their own state held records, locking them away and forcing Adoptees to gain a court order before being granted access to their own information.

Now after 56 long years, the most basic human right, that to one’s own authentic identity, has at long last been restored.

Those 56 years represent an ugly chapter in the state’s history, a time when adopted people had their original identities confiscated by the state and withheld from them.

Some of those adopted as children lived and died in the space of those decades never knowing the truth about themselves. They were never granted the State’s permission to access the most fundamental aspects of their own lives, their authentic origins, the paperwork listing their original birthdate, in some cases, perhaps even the original names they were given.

Today, Maine has taken an important step forward, restoring access to these state impounded documents. Upon age 18, adopted people will once again have access to their own most personal information, putting an end to an era of secrets and lies and what had amounted to state held secret dossiers on those who had been adopted.

Original Birth Certificates for Maine, or OBC for ME has further information, including the link to the official state application form and the details of what will also be required when submitting a records request.

They have a lot to be proud of today. Tomorrow January 2, a set of opening day activities are planned.

Maine now joins the proud ranks of the five other states that have either never taken away or have since restored access to their adult adoptees since 2000 (Oregon having been the first to restore access.)

Bastard Nation’s map of full access states; Alaska and Kansas never sealed their records, Oregon, Alabama, New Hampshire and now Maine have restored after an intervening period of having our most basic identity rights stripped away from us:

These are the few states that treat adult adoptees who were born there as equal citizens.

That said, even in some states that have reopened, the State is still clearly uncomfortable with with the notion of adult adoptees as being able to conduct their own affairs free of the government cast as a third party to our interpersonal relationships.

Apparently we are not to be trusted to act as other citizens, assumed to simply be able to associate freely and control our own intimate associations free from the state maintaining files pertaining to our relationships.

Sadly, Maine, like Oregon, Alabama, and New Hampshire has added a (fortunately toothless) “contract preference form,” by which the state is to collect parents “contact preferences” and then hold such paperwork to pass along to adult adoptees upon their submitted records request.

We as adopted citizens must be free to conduct our most intimate interpersonal affairs, deciding whether or not to contact our own blood relations free from government’s insistence upon information collection “on our behalf” or “for the protection of those involved” and essentially the government insisting upon being a party to our interpersonal relationships process.

It’s simply none of the State’s business.

Today at least, such “preference” forms have no enforcement power behind them, but they set a terrible precedent, AND maintain the role of the state in how we conduct our intimate associations, insisting our private lives and associations or lack thereof ARE quite literally, the business of the State.

No other class of citizen has to endure such indignities.

If you are not an adoptee, the state does not keep track of whether or not your parents or other blood relations want to see you or not. Only adoptees are subjected to such State intrusiveness.

It’s insulting, and maintains the State’s ability to portray adopted individuals as a form of ‘forever children,’ constantly in need of the watchful eye of the State, allegedly forever unable to achieve full self determination.

All of which has it’s basis in the (adoption industry propagated) mythologies that many if not all adopted people could become stalkers or harrassers at the drop of a hat, that parents must be protected from them, and that most parents would not welcome the presence of their long lost children in their lives.

None of which are true.

The facts remain, not only are most adopted people NOT stalkers or harassers, but many parents actively wish to be found. Indeed, many were promised by agencies that when their children turned 18 they would have their paperwork released to them and that their children would come find them.

In those exceptional, rare circumstances in which individuals are unable to respect a “no” or “not interested,” the violators should be treated as any other adult would be. Restraining orders and such can be issued based upon a demonstrated pattern of misbehavior.

Any attempt to instead place any form of pre-emptive restraint upon adoptees as a class, interferes with our constitutional right to free association.

Fortunately Maine does not include an actual form of pre-emptive restraint, for now at least, but it sets up the systems by which such could become possible at a later date.

The Maine law does however, continue in the fine tradition of infantalizing adopted adults, even as the concrete effect of such is to finally restore adult adoptee rights.

Sadly, it is even less kind to our parents.

Along with the contact preference form, the state has coupled the act of affirming that they wish to restore contact (or even that they do not prefer contact, at least that was their feeling at the time the form was filled out) with their adopted children with the parents’ own medical histories, something that adopted adults have no legal right to.

While adopted people may contact our blood relations and REQUEST their familial medical history, there is no legal requirement that our parents divulge their own personal medical information. They may do so at their own choosing, but they cannot be required to do so.

The contact preference clause is spelled out thusly in the law:

3. Contact preference form. The state registrar shall develop a contact preference form on which a birth parent may state a preference regarding contact by an adoptee. The form must contain the following statements from which the birth parent may choose only one.

A. “I would like to be contacted. I have completed this contact preference form and a medical history form and am filing them with the State Registrar of Vital Statistics.”

B. “I would prefer to be contacted only through an intermediary. I have completed this contact preference form and a medical history form and am filing them with the State Registrar of Vital Statistics.”

C. “Do not contact me. I may change this preference by filling out another contact preference form. I have completed this contact preference form and a medical history form and am filing them with the State Registrar of Vital Statistics.”

While contact preference forms and medical histories are not required as a precondition to records release to the adult adoptee, for a parent to affirm that they wish contact, the state has essentially coupled a medical history form to the contact preference form unnecessarily.

Created in the name of protecting alleged “privacy”/confidentiality, this new set of state held files actually is quite the opposite, and becomes yet another layer of the State injecting itself into our interpersonal affairs.

Personal medical information is best shared between the individuals directly affected, not between our parents and the state, who will then file and hold such, releasing it to adult adoptees if they submit a records request.

The State needs to stop treating adopted adults differently.

What we want is equitable treatment, to be treated just like anyone else, no preference forms held by the State, none of this unnecessary nonsense. We want the ability to conduct our own interpersonal affairs without the State injecting itself as a third party into our relationships, collecting and holding information pertaining to our families.

The entire section of the law quoted above creates another NEW layer of state held files pertaining to our lives, our relations, and our interpersonal relationships. More bureaucracy and meddling that “normal” (i.e. non-adopted) citizens do not have to endure.

Just because such “preferences” are not enforced today does not necessarily mean they will not be at some future date.

States need to simply restore what they took from us, records access. Period. Not utilize such legislation as an excuse to go build NEW sets of files pertaining to adopted people and their families.

Legally speaking the personal “preferences” of our parents do not factor in. Records access restoration is a matter between adoptees and the state, and also between parents and the state.

By putting parents preferences in files for adult adoptees, the state is falsely pitting the desires of parents AGAINST their own children. This is built on the false notion of adoption as a “triad,” (parents, adoptees, and adopters.)

The reality is our records are not sealed upon relinquishment.

And despite all claims of “privacy, often raised by industry or those with what certainly appear to be dirty hands, such as the Illinois Catholic Conference (who have admitted in Illinois, that opening records would likely produce lawsuits against them, and that information contained in original birth certificates could be false) never once has a single document actually promising “privacy” to parents ever surfaced. Even if such ever should, there was no force of law behind such supposed promises. Further, parents were often promised the precise opposite as part of the process of getting them to sign away their kids, they were assured that such wasn’t forever, the kid would come find them when they turned 18.

Records access is not a matter between adoptees and their parents. Parents do not hold the power restore records access to their children.

Records are sealed upon our adoptions.

Records restoration is a matter between adoptees and the State. Similarly, parents are also battling the state to gain records access as well. The State confiscated the records, and the only place that we can turn for restoration is the State.

There is no “adoption triad.”

Adoption is built instead, upon an adoption pentagon:

1. parents
2. adoptees
3. agencies/lawyers/intermediaries/lobbyists/industry/etc
4. the State
5. adopters

It should be noted, some parties to adoption have more power and control than others.

While it serves the State’s interests to have adoptees and parents at one another’s throats in some false game of “conflicting interests” the bottom line is, our genuine interests are not at odds.

The “preferences” of those who were not parties to our records being closed cannot be used by the state as something to hide behind in the process of re-opening them (or not.) Our parents were legally out of the picture at the point in time when our records were closed.

It’s past time the State begins to trust adult adoptees to conduct our own lives. No more state held files, no intermediaries (unless directly personally chosen by the individuals involved, preferably non-commercial/non-contracted) etc.

We’re grown ups, it’s time for the State to start treating us as such.

In the end, it’s a damn good day for Maine adoptees.

The real bottom line here is that people who have waited their entire lives for the most personal and basic of information about themselves have finally had their civil and human right to access their own information restored to them.

It’s just a shame that states insist upon insulting adoptees and their families in the process and building yet new bureaucracies upon false notions that we still are unable to conduct our own lives without the State butting in.

Finally be sure to see both Marley’s piece on Bastardette- MAINE: RECORDS OPENED, GRINCH CRINGES! and Robin’s piece on Motherhood Deleted- New Year, Same Old Myths both about Maine.

Last Friday, December 5th, 2008, the SECA web-page finally went live. (http://www.stopdumpingkids.com/)

SECA, short for “Stop Encouraging Child Abandonment,” is a concept that has been a long time coming.

From the first of the legalized child abandonment laws passed in 1999 until now, efforts to repeal and stop the dump laws have suffered from a lack of an alliance dedicated to focusing primarily on the issue.

Before SECA, responses to dump laws had been piecemeal, portions of existing organizations’ broader missions. Over the years numerous organizations have opposed and testified against the legalization of child abandonment, and individuals have contacted legislators and worked against legalized child dumping. But, there had been no one place dedicated to dismantling the evolving child abandonment infrastructure.

Thus, SECA has finally been created.

Stop Encouraging Child Abandonment works toward nothing less than the full and permanent repeal of laws that legalize child abandonment.

We feel it is not the proper role of any government to encourage child abandonment as policy.

We approach this work firmly grounded in a human/civil/identity rights perspective. We support kids, women, and reproductive autonomy.

The need for SECA had become apparent over the past nine years, but the child welfare crisis in Nebraska with its law legalizing the abandonment of older children finally made it clear to the broader public, a formalized response to legalized child dumping is necessary.

Since the beginning, the consequences of such laws have been clear to those of us “in the field.” With bills rushed through state legislatures and policy and legal criticisms by and large dismissed, the general public simply never had reason to even think about the consequences of “safe haven” laws. Most people had never heard the voice of a kid who had been legally dumped. They had never seen the desperation of mothers and families utilizing the legalized abandonment laws.

Nebraska changed everything.

Nebraska’s older kid dumps, and the state’s eventual age down of eligible dumpees from 18-year olds to those 30 days and younger has solved nothing. It has merely attempted to put off dealing with the inevitable consequences “safe haven” laws create until the infants abandoned under the new law grow old enough to speak for themselves.

The child welfare abandonment disaster across the United States, legalized everywhere except Washington DC., is far from over. It is just beginning.

Out of that context, SECA was born, not so much a formal organization, for now more of a collective voice of allies, organizations, bloggers, and individuals among others working together towards the repeal of the dump laws.

If you are interested in working against the legalized child abandonment laws, or already are, SECA can serve as a resource in that work.

We can be contacted through the SECA contact page.