About

We are adoptees from the Baby Scoop Era.  We each have our own story and views on adoption.  Sometimes those views are the same, sometimes they differ but that is life.  Stop in and get to know us – you may just find you like us.

As you will notice as you read our posts both of us were impacted in different ways by the lack of current updated family health history because of being adopted.  While having the family health history may not have changed the course of our diseases – the knowledge in my case may have prevented two life threatening events, and for shadowadoptee the knowledge that she would go blind sure would have been nice to know…

Petitions to unseal our adoption records were submitted and approved…

Just a little rant…

Adoption advocates should be advocating to ensure a process of continued access to family health history for the adoptee, that any raised child in their family would know.  Family health history is fluid and ongoing.  Both families should be educated about the need and a process set up at the time of the adoption.  That should be a common sense tenant in the phrase “In the child’s best interest”.  Currently it is not, nor have I ever heard any adoption advocacy group or agency look at real solutions or even discussing solutions to an ongoing problem.  We are in the era of personalized medicine that is being denied to adoptees solely because we are adoptees, an entire class of individuals excluded, like we are excluded from accessing our original birth certificates.  Adoption advocates are not looking after our best interests once we are adopted.

When you face a medical emergency it is too late to go to the court where the adoption was finalized.  And once you get to the court (which can include travel) you must then submit a petition which then moves slowly through the process before it gets to the judge.  If the judge determines the petition indeed is “good cause” and grants the petition, then you simply have access during business hours to the adoption file.  Once that is done you must then search for the family taking into account the very real possibility that the mother may have married and changed her name as well as moved out-of-state.  All of this takes time, effort and money you do not have when you have a medical emergency.  When you finally find the family (if you are lucky) you must then approach and make contact – all before you can ask for the family health history and sometimes is not given. 

That process does not work in the case of true medical emergency which is the only time the judge will deem it “good cause” to unseal the adoption records.  Something has to be done to ensure ”best interests” are looked after at the time of adoption.