At 18, let adoptees learn who they are

State Rep. Richard Stark of Weston is on a mission. For the second year in a row, he has introduced a bill in the Florida Legislature that would let adopted people over age 18 examine their original birth certificates to learn the identity of their natural parents.

Florida is in the company of 26 other states that grant access only under court order. Sixteen states give partial access to adoptees, usually after jumping through a cumbersome and expensive series of hoops. Just nine states grant the easy access outlined in Stark’s bill.

At issue is an adoptee’s right to answer a fundamental human question: “Who am I and where did I come from?” Without the original birth certificate, that question is not easily answered.

The popularity of services such as ancestry.Com testify to the thirst for discovering our roots. And the growth of genetic medicine makes knowing the identity of our parents all the more important.

Infant adoptees are issued two birth certificates, the original at birth and a revised one at the conclusion of the adoption. The original bears the names of the mother and father. The revised one, the names of the new parents.

In all but those nine states, the original is sealed. Stark and thousands of other adoptees believe that deprives them of vital information without a court order.

Practically speaking, sealing the records makes it hard to learn the identity of the birth parents, which is precisely why advocates of the current policy favor it. Birth parents, they say, should be protected from unwanted scrutiny.

Arguing that point is State Rep. Jason Brodeur, R-Sanford. Like Stark, an adoptee, Brodeur is acutely aware of the sensitivity to privacy among all parties in an adoption — the adoptee, the birth parents and the adopting parents.

He believes, along with many others, that the prospect of disclosure could prompt a would-be mother to abort a pregnancy rather than go through the adoption process.

Opponents also believe disclosure violates the promise of confidentiality that prompts many to agree to adoption.

Stark and his fellow advocates suggest a financial interest for opponents of disclosure. Getting a court order to unseal birth records requires expensive legal help, something the adoption bar favors.

Restricted access was not always the case in Florida. Until 1977 an adoptee was able to gain access to his or her original birth certificate. But the law was vague on the question of who could adopt, an omission nettlesome to many.

So the Legislature closed what they saw as a loophole. They barred gays and lesbians from adopting. Having done that, they also added the confidentiality provision in the rewrite.

The ban on gays adopting held until 2010, when an appeals court pronounced the prohibition unconstitutional. But the birth record seal remained in place.

Stark sees the issue as common-sense fairness, fundamental to answering someone’s basic questions about who they are. This is a zero-sum game. If the natural parents enjoy the cloak of anonymity, the adoptee is denied the right to learn his genetic identity. If the adoptee wins the debate, the natural parents are exposed.

Keeping the record sealed until the adoptees’s 18th birthday isn’t a perfect solution, but it does balance competing interests. Two decades of anonymity for the natural parents seems like a fair swap for a lifetime of doubt, uncertainty and mystery for the adoptee.

As in virtually all conflicts between rights, the task before us is to strike a balance. We cherish the freedoms enumerated in the First Amendment, for example, yet we continue to struggle with where to draw the line between the right to speak and the wish to muzzle hate speech.

We believe the merits in this argument lie on the side of the adoptee, who, under current law, is totally cut out of the equation, but has the biggest stake in the outcome.

The Legislature owes this year’s bill a hearing, something it failed to get last session.

The law has needed changing for 40 years. A modification is overdue. Surely it is within the ability of the Legislature to address this question in a way that is fair for all.

Keeping the record sealed until the adoptees’s 18th birthday isn’t a perfect solution, but it does balance competing interests.