Adoptions and the right to an original birth cert

As has been stated repeatedly, the system of adoption in Ireland was critically flawed and was based upon the shame of children being conceived out of wedlock, shame that was informed by the Catholic church and who were given too much freedom to inform the morality of a fledgling nation.

You are putting the right to privacy of the birth parents on a pedestal and the rights of the adopted people do not exist when you do this. As another poster said adopted people were treated like a commodity to be passed from one set of people to another, never having the same basic rights as the rest of society because of the shame of their very existence, they were the product of sin and should be grateful for the fact they even exist at all.

The state failed adopted people and their birth parents by handing control of adoption to the Catholic church who were given free reign to run adoption as they saw fit. Many children and parents have sought to meet each other only to receive no help from the orders who facilitated the adoption process.

Is this legislation flawless? No, it's an imperfect solution to an imperfect problem, it's almost a token offering of the most basic of information to a cohort of people who have been failed by both the state and the church and who now are being accused by those like you who feel they may well abuse the information they receive from the birth certificate.

Health related issues are the most important thing that a person can seek if they were adopted and this legislation does nothing to ensure that is available to them beyond taking it upon themselves to find out.

The right to privacy of their birth parents is secondary to the right to understand the most basic things about yourself, no other system other than the new legislation will likely ever be created to assist adopted people in Ireland and while a small number of birth parents may have their noses put out of joint by this, ultimately it is a token gesture of goodwill towards an unwanted and ostracized section of Irish society that will within a few generations no longer exist. And you have a problem with it.

The problem is that most adopted children in Ireland are now coming from other countries.

Adoption in Ireland historically was based on shame, I'd be surprised if there is any significant numbers of Irish children being put up for adoption today, without checking the numbers I think it has been virtually non existent for a generation at least.

The adopted people from the age of shame adoptions have had no rights to know anything until now. Dirty little secrets that everyone would rather forget. Some never knew they were adopted and their parents reached out to them as adults and destroyed their lives as a result, the birth parents had that right they were in full knowledge of the fact they had a child they put up for adoption, a child who potentially had no idea that was the case and whose worlds were shattered when their parents reached out them because they WANTED to, not because they considered the feelings of their child.

The rights of birth parents have been respected more than the rights of their adopted children, who in reality have had no rights at all.

It is actually infuriating to see the type of uninformed nonsense that is being posted here, some of you really don't have a clue what you are talking about.

There are a lot of factual inaccuracies and incorrect assumptions in the OP (and in quite a lot of the replies, for that matter).

Also, posters should be aware there's a sub-forum (now called a 'category' on adoption/adoption information and tracing, available here. It's moderated by @The_Conductor, who is a fountain of common sense.

Thanks to the new forums, I can't multi-quote, so the easiest way is to italicise the points I'm responding to. Sorry about that.

As you may or may not know, there is some landmark legislation due next year that will give adoptees the right to a copy of their original birth cert.

Yes. We've been campaigning for this for well over 25 years now. When this comes in, it will bring us into line with most of Europe. England and Wales have had this since, IIRC, 1970. Scotland since 1930.

At the moment, this can only be given out with the consent of the birth mother, of which four objected to last year.

That may be correct, but my understanding is that even then, the Adoption Authority can dispense with the natural mother's consent if they can't see any reason to withhold the birth cert.

The new system will allow access to the cert even when the mother objects and where the mother objects they will be just essentially be asked nicely to not make contact. The media and public discourse generally seems to be lauding this proposal, but I have to admit I have some concerns about the precedent this sets and how we can expect the State to hold private information.

It's not private information. Birth records are public records. They always have been. Anyone can request anyone else's birth, marriage or death cert, and always has been able to.

When these adoptions occured, rightly or wrongly, the State promised these women to keep the birth cert confidential.

NO. the State absolutely DID NOT promise "these women" to keep the birth cert confidential. They couldn't, for many reasons, including:

1) They had no legal right or basis for doing so.

2) They may not have been in any way involved in the adoption, until it came time to rubber-stamp the placement some months after it had been made by an adoption agency or other intermediary.

Granted, some adoption agency staff/Mother and Baby Home staff may have told some natural mothers that the adoption was entirely confidential, including all the paperwork, including the birth cert.

1) We know as fact that the vast majority of natural mothers never sought such confidentiality.

2) The adoption agency/M&B Home staff had no right to make any such promise or guarantee.

This promise, old as it is, appears to count for nothing

Correct. A promise - if made, and it usually wasn't - or a contract can only be valid if it is compliant with the law. And such a promise wouldn't have been.

and the State is planning to give adoptees rights over the privacy of others.

No, they're not. They're planning to give adopted people the same right of access to their birth cert as every other citizen in the country. A right to access my birth information is just that. It is not a right to anything except the information on the birth cert - my name, my parents' names (in 99.9% of adopted people's cases, that means just the natural mother's name), occupations, date and place of birth. That's it.

It does not confer a right to contact.

Little meaningful effort is going into balancing the mother's right to privacy with the adoptees right to know.

Actually, there is. Natural mothers (and fathers, and adopted people) can use the Contact Preference Register to register a wish to not be contacted.

With this precedent set, it appears that the State could choose to make any confidential information available even where it has said in the past that it wouldn't.

It didn't have the right to make any such promise in the past, and to my knowledge, it never did. Whatever lies or promises the adoption agencies and their staff told is a different story.

This is obviously a controversial and sensitive topic (some posters I'm sure will be affected), but I would be interested in what others think of this. Media debate has been very one sided (the birth mother's obviously don't have the NGO's advocating for then) but there is another legitimate point of view.

You've not come across the Natural Parent's Network of Ireland, the MABS (Mother & Baby Home Survivors) group, or any of the other natural parent's groups, then? A pity. There are plenty of such groups. The adoptees' groups also number quite a few natural parents among their numbers, btw.

There's nothing controversial about this, as far as the vast majority of adopted people and natural parents are concerned. Again, it brings us into line with the rest of Europe, including the UK, where the right to your original birth cert has existed since the 30s/1970. When Scotland and England/Wales introduced those changes, the sky didn't fall in. And in any case, GDPR means the government has no choice but to legislate for access - my birth cert is my information - all of it - and GDPR means I can access it. The AG and the government are well aware of this.

Those who don't want to be contacted can express that wish using the Contact Preference Register.

Oh, btw? Adopted people and natural parents have known how to trace each other, entirely legally, using existing access to public records, for quite a while now. There are even guides published on how to do so. They're even re-published here on boards!

Ultimately, any adopted person could always get their birth cert, unless the nuns/adoption agency/mother and baby home had falsified it. It just took a couple of days work in the GRO's Public Office, rather than just rocking up and asking for the cert. Like any other citizen.

So the anguish of a birth mother is more important than the anguish of an adopted person whose life could also be turned upside down by a birth parent attempting to initiate contact with them?

There are two sets of potential victims in this situation and you are prioritizing the rights of one of those groups over the other.

Birth parents have always had the right to initiate contact on their terms ( I know of people who had no idea they were adopted and had their lives turned upside down by their birth parents making contact, that affected not only them but their entire families as well).

You've offered your opinion and it is every bit as invalid as that of the OP, you have essentially dismissed the rights of adopted people and offered a peace sign as some sort of means of validation of your ridiculous opinion.

Wait until they pass away!! You’ve hit the nail on the head there. That’s exactly what’s happening. Dead people can’t tell their stories.

Right, so "conciliation" fails, the Adoption Authority puts my right to an identity and information (as enumerated in the UN Declaration on Human Rights and the Irish Constitution) over the (non-existent) "right" of a natural parent to deny me my birth cert. I am made aware of their request for no contact.

So... what's the worst that can happen?

There are already civil and criminal statutes in place to prevent harassment. I have literally nothing to gain from hassling someone who doesn't want contact.

Adopted people (and natural parents, and siblings separated by adoption for that matter) have had the knowledge on how to trace each other for a couple of decades now.

Where are the horror stories, the prosecutions, the stories of harassment, stalking, etc?

What? There are - after several decades - a tiny, tiny handful? (Or, quote possibly, none?!)

Bad cases make bad law.

The reality is that quietly and without much fuss, thousands of adopted people, natural parents, and extended family of both have been tracing each other for a few decades now. You just haven't been aware of it.

And the people who have traced each other? Who have been able to establish anything from polite exchanges of letters ("Oh, yes, you're right, there was no medical information on the file. That's because everyone in my family was healthy when you were born. But you really need to know that there's [x condition] on my side...") and photos and little more contact, to full ongoing friendships and family relationships. We've just been getting on with things. Just now with more of our own family and medical history. Useful, when we have kids ourselves!

You're not engaging honestly because you're saying the suffering of one group of people trumps the suffering of another.

It's a completely ridiculous stance,but by all means take the moral high ground.

You have consistently put the suffering of one group above the suffering of the other. I'm not putting words in your mouth, you wrote them yourself.

To come back to this - yes, this happened a lot. To give an example, I'm aware of one case where Saint Patrick's Guild conducted an illegal adoption - placing the child with a couple who then registered the birth as if the child was born to them - against the wished of the natural mother. The natural mother was back in touch with the agency for literally years, trying to be put in contact with her (now adult) son. The agency lied - denied she had ever been with them, then that they had no records, then that they had been in touch and he didn't want contact - before admitting the adoption had been illegal but they wouldn't do anything as the adoptive parents had never told their son he'd been adopted. And the adoptive parents were refusing to tell their (adult!) son. This, despite one of the reasons the natural mother wanted contact was to pass on important medical information!

Again, this is far from unusual. Most (but not all) adoptive parents obviously did tell their children. But it was still common enough that parents didn't tell their children that they were adopted that, at one stage, the General Registrar's Office had trained staff in how to sensitively break it to someone that they were adopted (because adopted person turns up to get a birth cert for employment, or college, or to get a passport, asks for the long-form birth cert, and instead gets "An Extract from the Adopted Children's Register."

The uneasiness about this new legislation will be like previous social issues that were changed in recent times ie divorce, abortion & same-sex marriage. Those changes were not wanted in any shape or form by large numbers of our citizens but the world didnt fall in when we brought in new rules.

I'd say there were many people who got married years ago with the expectation that it was for life but the law changed, so saying that something was expected because of a choice made years in the past is a poor reason imo to deny our fellow citizens their basic human rights.

Those of us not affected cant understand how it feels, the same way that those in a happy marriage or with wanted pregnancies cant feel the same way as people in unhappy marriages who want a divorce or with those who have an unwanted pregnancy. Walk a mile in their shoes etc...

Who are we to deny adopted citizens the right to their own information? Its a bizarre situation that should have been sorted decades ago. Birth parents who gave up children had their reasons for making that choice but to suggest that the children should continue to be discriminated against by not allowing them the same rights as others to access their own data which is a public record & making them feel like second class citizens still in 2021 is just cruel imo.

EDit: a lot of people forget that dna testing can shed a light on many issues from the past. No secrecy with dna.

Agree that anyone who falsified records are beneath contempt, everyone should have fundamental information about who they are & who their ancestors are irrespective of who raised them. Its sad that children were seen as a commodity by some in the past with no consideration as to how it could affect them in later years. I have huge sympathy for birth parents who lost a child to adoption by choice or coercion, that must have been horrific. I have children & cant imagine that pain.

Providing information doesnt mean contact is obligatory OP, people are free to refuse. As others said, there's a big difference between privacy & secrecy.

The nuns must have been smuggling petrol or something, given the numbers of records "lost in a fire" that was hushed up and never made the news.

I'd imagine those who've been actively misled, or were illegally recorded on birth cert as the child of the adoptive parents would have a hard time getting hold of the truth, but as a poster says above, DNA doesn't lie and people are finding cousins and half-siblings in unexpected places.

Many of the birth mothers who have up children for adoption didn’t see it that way. Many were under huge pressure from families, nuns etc to cooperate and give up the baby. This caused them huge grief and shame. My grandmother has told me many stories of women she knew in that situation who never got over it. I was born in the 80’s to a single mother, my grandparents didn’t try to force an adoption as they had seen the huge harm it caused when it’s done against the wishes of the mother. My father’s name is not on my birth certificate I know nothing about him except a name. So I have no family medical history on that side I will never know it as my mother will never give me more information.

I have to say I would have sympathy for both parties here both the person adopted and the birth mother. The state failed them both.

Just to mention, you do have the option of doing a DNA test on ancestry.co.uk or 23andme (or both) and possibly finding close relatives that way, if you're interested in medical information.

Good idea! And yes, there are absolutely thousands of people with falsified records, as anyone working in the field will admit if they're honest.

Well then you're relying on the adoption agency to have kept accurate records of its own illegal activity, and for those records to not have been lost in a mysterious "fire"...

Even if the records aren't burned in a fire, it's very difficult to look back at a >50 year old document and be able to tell if it is factual or not. I'd imagine an awful lot of people who could be called as witnesses to the validity of a signature or information contained in a form(s) are dead at this stage.

An adopted person could get a copy of their birth cert but given the shenanigans and flagrant disregard for rules etc. in years gone by, there's no guarantee whatsoever that the information contained in the birth cert is accurate.

Nail on head.

And cowardly successive governments have been afraid to touch this issue because it exposes their decades of bad practice.