Monday, October 30, 2006

PLANNED PARENTHOOD AND NARAL

I want it understood that I believe in choice. Choice to me means parenting, abortion, and adoption. In parenting and abortion, I believe its a woman's right. I don't think anyone has the right to dictate to a woman what she can and can't do to her body. As long as the child is in a mother's stomach, no one can dictate jack diddly to her. Planned Parenthood and NARAL have something of a good thing when it comes to abortion. They are providing a service to women and girls. Many of which is also toward actually planning parenthood. Poor women need their services.

My attack on them isn't about these very services. I am angry with them for being ignorant about adoption. These people consider adoption a medical procedure. The only part of adoption that is even remotely medical is labor and delivery. Once the child is born and relinquished there is no medical procedure about it. Parents sign a piece of paper relinquishing their rights. Then the child is adopted which is also a legal procedure. Even in abortion, a woman has to sign a piece of paper acknowledging that she has received fully informed knowledge of what exactly she is doing. In a court of law when a minor requests help from the court in order to bypass the parents' consent. This minor still has to reveal her identity. Granted those records are sealed, she still has to reveal her identity to the court system. There is no longer any guarantee of privacy. With the courts now forbidding abortion in two states, the law goes after the doctor. The medical records of women who have had an abortion are no longer private. When you have the Christian Right groups taking pictures of young women and their vehicles (license plates numbers) and posting them on the internet, privacy is being thrown out the window. Ignorance is no longer an excuse for these groups. Those adoptees are becoming adults. Others have been adults for many many years. We should be recognized as such.

The right to privacy is not automatic when a woman gives a child up for adoption. More than 99% of birth parents no longer want that privacy from their child. Privacy is no longer a promise that can be kept. There are voter registration lists (that are sold to many databases), death, marriage, birth, and divorce indices, property tax rolls, and many court records that are not sealed.

In Doe vs. Sunquist, several things were stated.

1) Having open adoption records does not impede traditional familial rights such as marrying, having children, and raising children.

2) Because a birth mtoher has no fundemental right under the federal constitution to have her child adopted, she also can have no correlative fundamental right to have her child adopted under circumstances that guarantee that her identity will not be revealed to the child.

3) A birth is simultaneously an intimate occasion and a public event -- the government has long kept records of when, where, and by whom babies are born. Such records have myriad purposs, such as furthering the interest of chldren in knowing the circumstances of their birth.

4) If there is a federal constitutional right of familial privacy, it does not extend as far as the plaintiffs would like. The Constitutio does not encompass a general right to nondisclosure of private information.

Our nation's courts have spoken clearly on this issue. The right to privacy does not extend to withholding birth information from the very person to whom it primarily and justly pertains -- the adoptee. This is according to Bastard Nation. A group that I am very pleased to be a part of now.

We as adoptees, birthparents, and adoptive parents need to stand up and voice our opinions. It is time for the courts, lawyers, state congressional leaders, state senate leaders, agencies, social workers, and governors to take heed. We are 30 million strong. Our voices will be heard.

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