N.H. adoptees gain access to records

Just $12 and 20 minutes in a government office gave Sara LaCroix the pieces of her life that had been missing during the nearly four decades since she was given up for adoption.

Ms. LaCroix, of Kennebunk, Maine, drove to New Hampshire's capital last Friday to take advantage of a state law, which was passed in May and took effect Jan. 1, that allows adults adopted as children in New Hampshire to obtain access to their original birth certificates - and so to the names of their birth mothers and, occasionally, fathers.

"I knew I was French," LaCroix said with a laugh as her eyes darted to her birth mother's last name, which she asked not be printed. LaCroix then noted her own listed birthday, Aug. 23, confirming she had been celebrating on the right day all these years.

Lacroix grew more pensive as she studied the document. "She was 24," she said softly.

New Hampshire is not the first state to install open-adoption policies. They are now in place unconditionally in five states, with Alaska and Kansas the 1950s pioneers. But it is the third since 2000, joining Oregon - where a two-year court battle followed a 1998 referendum - and Alabama.

The law passed decisively in the New Hampshire House, and by a vote of 12 to 11 in the Senate. Spearheaded by adoptee rights groups, it adds heat to a debate that pits advocates of birth-parent privacy against the rights of adults to know their full biological histories.

"I have an adopted daughter who, since the time she was 18, has wanted to find out who her biological parents were," says state Sen. Lou D'Allesandro, who sponsored the bill. His daughter has since had health problems, the senator says, that have now shown up in her own daughter.

"Those problems could have been dealt with in a much different fashion had we known," he says. "There are many good reasons for that information to be available now. They negate, I think, many of the concerns."

Critics dismiss that reasoning.

"A blood test, a DNA test, can provide infinitely more information about predispositions than a family history," says Lee Allen, a spokesman for the National Council for Adoption in Alexandria, Va. Nonidentifying information, including medical history, can often be obtained through state offices, though that can be a protracted process.

"These advocates seeking reunification [are just] furthering the notion that somehow adopted individuals are less than whole, they're incomplete if they don't reunite," says Mr. Allen. "It's a very vocal minority."

Further, he says, individuals who feel they need confidentiality must give it up in order to come out and fight open-adoption laws.

"It whittles down a [woman's] privacy option to one: She can maintain her privacy if she chooses abortion," says Allen.

He notes that women "historically" have made adoption decisions based on the assurance of confidentiality, and he calls the retroactive nature of such laws especially ill-advised.

"There are so many scenarios you can think of - a harmful relationship, a rape," he says. "A woman moves on with her life and maybe never reveals [the birth] to her current family. Sixteen to 18 years later, there's a knock at the door."

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