After relinquishing their children, adoption professionals instructed mothers to return home and behave as if their children never existed or had died. Adoption agencies often promised mothers that no one would ever find about their greatest shame. Many mothers never revealed the existence of their surrendered children to anyone, never speaking of them again.
Responding to social mores and cultural concerns about the stigma of illegitimacy, states first began sealing adoption records in 1917, the majority after 1945. All states, with the exception of Kansas and Alaska, eventually followed suit. After adoption, the adopted child was issued an amended birth certificate with a new name, and the names of the adoptive parents listed as the child’s parents as if they had given birth to the child. The child’s original birth certificate was legally sealed from everyone, including the adopted child, even after reaching legal adulthood.
Sealing records facilitated the creation of a new legal family of genetic strangers that resembled a “natural” family. Closed adoption records gave adoptive parents the power to choose whether to even tell adopted children the truth about their origins and entry into the family. Adoption professionals and courts believed that sealed records would “normalize” adoptees, giving them no choice but to embrace the adoptive family as their own.
Adoptees were expected to make a clean break with their supposedly pathological birth mothers and shameful origins. Sealing birth records of adoptees left them with no legal option to recover information about their original families and made the idea of searching for them unthinkable and nearly impossible.
Closed records and secrecy in adoption remained the norm until the 1990s. Today, secrecy in adoption seems outdated. Cultural and social norms have shifted, making single motherhood a more acceptable choice. Many people have families that seem far from the nuclear family ideal of the BSE, including families with same-sex parents, half-siblings, and family members of different races. Ninety percent of adoptions are “open,” meaning that birth and adoptive families know each other.
Nevertheless, the legacy of the era of shame lives on through records that are still legally sealed today. Only seven states allow adopted adults legal access to their adoption records. In over forty states, adopted adults are still legally prohibited from accessing or even seeing their original birth certificates.
Although birth mothers and adoptees have long pressured legislators to change state laws to open adoption records, these efforts have been painstakingly slow. Many lawmakers and adoption professionals reflexively argue that opening adoption records may cause irreparable psychological harm to the mothers who never told anyone about their relinquished children.