She says that contact from the child through Oregon's new law might reopen a traumatic chapter in her life. In Tennessee, an anonymous birth mother in her late 50s said she became pregnant at age 17, contracted the German measles, was told her baby probably would not survive, placed the baby for adoption and heard the baby had died. Thirty-two years later, in 1988, the state sent her a letter saying a young man was seeking identifying information to confirm that she was his mother. Shocked and despairing, she eventually declined the request. Tennessee's new adoption law, she heard, would open files to adult adoptees.
Sorrows touch the other side, too.
Tennessee adoptee Charles Raymond Lokey said in a sworn statement to the court that his older brother died last year at age 45 of a massive heart attack. The laws' challengers argue that state registries already enable most adoptees to receive nonidentifying medical information about their birth parents. The laws' supporters counter that it comes down to the principle of an adoptee being able to see a piece of paper that everyone else can see. Although some critics predict traumatic encounters if adoptees find their birth parents, vital-records officials say that has not been the case in Kansas and Alaska, the only two states that have kept their records open to adult adoptees in recent decades. In those two states, parents relinquish children with the knowledge that those records will be open.