The Rise of "Bastard Nation"

...If that confidential information is released, I will have absolutely no control over its use and publication to other persons, including my husband and children...

...That's not just Pierce's view...

...Infant adoption is a relic in England and Wales...

...By 1998 she had a husband and four kids, none of whom knew about her other child...

...It's unbelievable, but they do...

...Constitution...

...This notion of blood and biology as central to identity runs deep in adoptee-rights rhetoric...

...Bastard Nation members also talk a lot about their pride and dignity...

...It's a remarkable figure that almost 98 percent of women who give birth to children out of wedlock keep them now," he says...

...While those who are politicized talk about their rights, the unpoliticized talk about their wounds...

...The data are clear and unequivocal," Pierce says...

...To be deprived of knowledge of one's origins and ancestry is to be maimed as surely as to be deprived of limbs or sight...

...Bastard Nation's rhetoric and tactics resemble those of gay activist groups such as Queer Nation and ACT UPP Take the protest the group held last year in front of the D.C...

...An Oregon adoptee named Helen Hill, working with an activist group called Bastard Nation, launched a campaign to throw out the state's laws shielding the names of mothers who place children for adoption...

...I personally think that Bill Pierce has made civil discourse on adoption almost impossible in this country today," she says...

...In a string of rulings, which the U.S...

...It's a no-brainer," he says...

...To be sure, the release of information often isn't as easy or complete as it could be...

...In arguing they should be, adoptee-rights activists make a number of dubious claims...

...1 decided to place her baby for adoption in 1961, she was promised her decision would be kept confidential...

...While Bastard Nation's main interest lies in opening adoption records, the group is also moving into other areas...

...It opposes laws already on the books in most states that promote contact between birth mother and child when both want it, but that give birth mothers the option to withhold release of their names and other identifying information...

...But the obvious solution is to improve the system of release...

...It's hard to say...

...Supreme Court recently let stand, judges Ira Carnahan is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C...

...No, it's a simple matter of civil rights...

...there's no need to compromise birth mothers' confidentiality...

...headquarters of the National Council for Adoption, whose founding president, William Pierce, is the leading defender of the confidentiality of records: "Clad in black T-shirts emblazoned with a bright gold logo called a 'spermburst,' the Bastard Nation protesters chant, 'Willie P, Willie P, why are you afraid of me?'" the Washington Citty Paper reported...

...This claim appeals to the public...

...Another claim, often repeated by journalists, is that nearly all birth mothers want to be contacted, so not opening birth records is denying the wishes of the many to satisfy the desires of a reclusive few...

...Shortly after, Jane and several other anonymous birth mothers filed suit...

...On Bastard Nation political buttons, his exaggeratedly scraggly face is depicted with a diagonal rubout line across it...

...Even if the further weakening of adoption isn't Bastard Nation's goal—and they say it isn't—this might be an unintended effect...

...Such laws are sweeping through state legislatures, and Bastard Nation is appalled...

...Such laws aren't fair to adoptees, they argued...

...It's not about balancing birth mothers' and adoptees' interests, or assessing the effect of opening records on the number of adoptions...

...That soon threatened to change...

...Yet it's hardly farfetched that ending confidentiality could lead fewer women to place babies for adoption...

...While the group raises several objections, the one that most obviously explains its interest in the issue is its claim that safe haven laws "obliterate the identity rights of the abandoned child...

...While Bastard Nation likely won't have much success with this argument, the prospects for open adoption records look brighter...

...Oregon voters responded, approving it in November 1998 with 57 percent of the vote...

...You can't cut a human being off from knowledge of their roots," Hill said...

...In Alabama, the governor recently signed an open-records bill modeled on Oregon's, and in Tennessee, an open-records law recently went into effect...

...As evidence that ending confidentiality won't lead to more abortions, the group cites below-average rates of abortion in Kansas and Alaska, which have long had open birth records...

...we see nothing shameful in having been born out of wedlock or in being adopted...

...He was hung in effigy at a previous rally...

...No one today, after all, suggests that adoptees should feel any shame...

...One's biological history is as much a part of the essential self as limbs or senses," argues an article on the Bastard Nation site...

...The most controversial claim of adoptee-rights activists is that abolishing confidentiality won't lead more women to seek abortions...

...Encouraged by its success in Oregon, Bastard Nation is looking to change the law in other states...

...In Delaware, a law opening birth certificates with some limits took effect last year...

...I would say if we look out at the adoption picture now it could hardly get fewer," he says...

...Greiner, the executive chair of Bastard Nation, refers to mothers as "breeders," spells America with a "k," and signs her postings to Internet chat rooms "by all means necessary...

...The numbers have been shrinking without open records as it is...

...What you're dealing with are very, very clever propagandists," he says...

...Pierce, of the National Council for Adoption, points abroad as a warning of what could happen here...

...The Era of the Bastard has arrived...

...It is one of the oddities of the adoption records debate that the typically left-leaning advocates of open records stress the importance of genes and blood, while advocates of sealed records, who are often on the right, have little use for such talk...

...It's a really inhumane thing to do...

...Within the next few years, we are likely to find out...

...Yet she blames the ugliness of the adoption records debate squarely on the other side...

...held that the promises made to mothers giving up babies weren't legally binding and that the mothers have no right to privacy...

...And so the Oregon Health Division is now mailing out thousands of formerly sealed birth certificates...

...One man wrote recently in the Oregonian, the state's largest newspaper, "As an adoptee, I have been drifting, lost, most of my life...

...Because it would limit adoptees' rights...

...They are quite skillful...

...Put yourself in the position of a young woman...

...Pierce, an avuncular 64-year-old former executive at the Child Welfare League of America, begs to differ...

...We feel that humans have a fundamental right to their identity, and that the government should not be putting up impediments to keep people from accessing their own vital records," says Ron Morgan, who lives in San Francisco and is one of three members of Bastard Nation's executive committee...

...Jane, 21 and unmarried, gave up her baby and went on with her life...

...But that appears untrue...

...We are loud, powerful and ready to demand justice in the form of open records...

...While the precise percentage isn't clear, Pierce suggests at least one-third of birth mothers don't want personal contact, as revealed by their responses when contacted by state-authorized intermediaries in Oregon, prior to the new law, and in Florida...

...The underlying principle of the adoption movement is the determination to be free of those limitations that have not been imposed on non-adopted citizens," declares an article on Bastard Nation's website...

...It's clear too that the number of adoptions is shaped by many factors, of which the law is just one...

...That's what the law said in Oregon, where her baby was born, and that's what her doctor, a nun, and the attorney handling the adoption assured her, too...

...Why...

...We shall put this beast in chains and shall vanquish him utterly,' roars Marley Greiner, the self-described 'founding foundling' of Bastard Nation...

...Since then the annual number of adoptions of children under age one has plummeted from 4,548 to just 322 in 1995, a 93 percent decline...

...Too bad, the courts declared...

...Because a choice which is not private is no choice at all...

...In 1975, England and Wales moved from confidential records to open records...

...The group's mission statement declares, "We have reclaimed the badge of bastardy placed on us by those who would attempt to shame us...

...And that won't do...

...Nonsense, replies Bastard Nation...

...Jeremiah Gutman, former chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union's privacy committee, has written that a pregnant woman "may be inclined to bring the pregnancy to term rather than secure an abortion, but, if she cannot rely upon the adoption agency or attorney and the law to protect her privacy, and to conceal her identity for all time, her choice to go the abortion route may be compelled by that lack of confidence in confidentiality...

...Having kept this secret from my family and community these many years, disclosure of confidential information would be worse for me now than it would have been at the time that the events occurred," Jane wrote in an affidavit...

...The question is whether adoptees' birth mothers ought to be stripped of their confidentiality even though they were promised they wouldn't be...

...All you have to do is look at countries where they do not allow, in essence, any privacy for adoption and they allow privacy for abortion, like Japan, and you find almost no adoptions and you find abortions are almost universally the option of choice...

...To advance its agenda, the group publishes the Bastard Quarterly, which provides "a forum for Bastard Nationals to express themselves...

...That skill comes through on Bastard Nation's website (www.bas-tards.org) and in the way the group seeks to frame the adoption records debate...

...He was, he said, "driven unconsciously to solve the riddle of my blood...

...And in Washington state, Bastard Nation and other activists are gearing up for an open-records initiative in 2001 like the one in Oregon...

...The truth, though, is that Oregon and other states already provide for the release of medical information when needed, without disclosing the mother's identity if she wishes to remain anonymous...

...But this defiant stance seems a bit odd...

...Could the same thing happen here...

...One is that adoptees need the names of their birth parents so that they can obtain vital medical background information...

...Such statistical points aside, it is striking that Bastard Nation and other adoptee-rights groups, whose ranks are filled with ardent defenders of abortion, have no patience with a privacy argument on behalf of women who place babies for adoption...

...In fact, with the rise of "open adoption," in which birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees keep in contact, the number of birth parents requiring confidentiality is falling...

...An essay by one of the group's founders proclaims: "In Bastard Nation, adoptees have found a voice...

...The most prominent is opposition to so-called safe haven laws, which allow mothers who would otherwise abandon newborns in dumpsters or alleys instead to drop them off, no questions asked, at designated centers, where the children can then be placed for adoption...

...Pierce says that's absurd...

...Founded in 1996, Bastard Nation doesn't believe in compromise...

...Such laws are unacceptable, declares a group publication called the Basic Bastard: "Any legislation that provides for less than access on demand, without compromise, is a violation of the basic right to equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S...

...The group condemns the laws—intended to prevent infant deaths—for "lifting entirely the obligation to collect and record any identity information, in contravention of the widely recognized human right to an identity...

...The issue is whether adoptees are to be allowed to emancipate from chattel-child status into autonomous adults, or are they to continue to be infantilized by the ongoing control of the State and agency, birth parents and adoptive parents...

...E. Wayne Carp, a historian of adoption at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, suggests too that opening records probably won't sharply reduce the number of children placed for adoption since the number of children put up for adoption in the United States is already low...

...But the fact that abortion rates are below the national average in these two states is not a surprise, given their demographics...

...Hill and Bastard Nation campaigned hard for the "open records" initiative...

...If, instead, we compare the abortion rate in Kansas with the rates in nearby states where the demographics are similar, we find that Kansas's rate is well above average...

...The events surrounding the child's birth and my decision to place her for adoption in 1961 were among the most difficult and emotionally painful I have ever experienced," she explained...

...In England and Wales, the number of adoptions was already falling when records were unsealed...

...Not all adoptees who seek open records are so militant...

...We feel that it's a civil right for us to access them...