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Who
Are We?
F.R.E.E is an
organization made up of many people, all of whom are interested
in the same thing. That is securing access by adult adoptees to
their own original birth certificates in the State of Florida.
But who are these many people? Are they all adoptees? Are
they an unhappy minority of those affected by adoption? Many
discussions of adoption address the issue as it concerns minors
who are adoptees, but the membership of F.R.E.E. consists of
adults including adult adoptees.
First we should
list some broad categories of people involved. Our first
category is that of people who are commonly called “Triad
Members” and who are most directly affected by the adoption
process. The Adoption Triad is made up of three subgroups of
people. The first group is adoptees, who are people that were
relinquished as children by their birth parents and placed up
for adoption. The second subgroup is made up of adoptive
families, and are
the adoptive parents, adoptive siblings and extended adoptive
families. The third side of this adoption triangle is made up of
the birth families which relinquished a child and includes birth
parents, birth siblings, biological grandparents and even the
extended birth family of the adoptee. The adoption Triad is made
of people who are either adopted or related to an adoptee
through either birth or adoption.
Also active in
this issue of adoptee rights are people who are less directly
affected by adoption, but who deal with adoptees and adoptee
issues. This includes physicians, counselors, social workers,
ministers, adoption agency employees, attorneys, judges and
lawmakers. All of these people deal with adoptees and issues of
adoptee rights, health and well being regularly as a part of
their professions.
Another group
of people active in dealing with these issues are those who are
neither directly affected by adoption nor deal with adoption
issues in their professions. At times they are friends or
acquaintances of Triad members. Some people are just involved
simply because they have a personal interest in equal rights and
ethical treatment for all. This category includes human rights
activists and many others who join with adoptees in seeking
equitable treatment under law.
Though the
movement for adult access to original birth certificates is
occasionally characterized as representing a small minority of
Triad members the actual published studies and surveys would
disagree with this. In order to better understand just how many
people actually desire adult adoptee access to original birth
certificates we should look at some of the studies that have
been done and published concerning this issue. All of these
studies may be found on a United States Government information
web site by the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse, a
branch of the United States Department of Health and Human
Services at http://www.acf.hhs.gov/index.html
*A survey
conducted in the late 1980s estimated that 500,000 adult
adoptees were either seeking or had found their birth families. (Groza
and Rosenberg, 1998)
* In a study of
American adolescents the Search Institute found that 72 percent
of adolescent adoptees wanted to know why they were placed for
adoption, 65 percent wanted to meet their birth parents and 94
percent wanted to know which birth parent they looked like. (American
Adoption Congress, 1996) The adolescents surveyed in the mid
1990s are now voting adults.
*Sachdev’s
1991 study found that 85.5 percent of birth mothers and 81.1
percent of adoptees supported access by adult adoptees to
identifying information about their own birth parents. (CWLA,1998)
*Avery’s 1996
research on the attitudes of adoptive parents found that 84
percent of adoptive mothers and 73 percent of adoptive fathers
either agreed or strongly agreed that an adult adoptee should be
allowed to access identifying information about his or her birth
parents. (CWLA, 1998 )
What these
studies show is that a consistent and overwhelming majority of
adoption triad members approve of adult adoptee access to their
own original birth certificates. The studies also show that not
only is this a majority of Triad members in total, but a
majority of each of the three categories of Triad members, adult
adoptees, adoptive parents and birth parents. It is this
majority of Adoption Triad members that wish to see adult
adoptee access to original birth certificates that is
represented by the activities of F.R.E.E and similar
organizations active across our Nation.
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