Adoptees are the last unaddressed group in the United States being denied their civil rights and there is no greater example of that than a little piece of paper called: the Original Birth Certificate, or OBC.

Your OBC is the single most important document you own as a human being. It is required for your Social Security card, your school enrollment, your driver's license, Medicaid, and other social services like a marriage license, passport, and more. In addition, it serves as proof of relationship to your parents, which is required for child support services, inheritance, and eligibility for benefits. Without it, you would be hard pressed to obtain any sort of accepted legal identification.

Did you know that every single adoptee has a falsified birth certificate? We do. Our identities are stripped from us at birth. In the place of our true, legal identity, we are given what is called an "Amended birth certificate" that falsely lists our adopters as the biological parent. In the process of legal adoption, our OBC is sealed away and the false one is substituted in its place.

Why is this? Well, remember good old Georgia Tann, baby trafficker? You can thank her. As I stated in my post about her, a lot of what is done today in adoption was started by her and perfected over the years. This is the biggest one.

Why does this matter to adoptees? Simply put, this is a violation of our Constitutional rights. It violates our First, Fourth, Fifth, and Nineteenth Amendment rights.

Under the First Amendment, denying access to our OBC violates our right of freedom to participate in and contribute to social and governmental decision making processes. In order to develop into integrated, healthy individuals capable of intelligent participation in society, we deserve access to information that will enhance our sense of identity.

The argument for equal protection is this: non-adoptees can readily access their OBC with no barriers. Our status as adoptees turns us into a "quasi-suspect class" and legislation that discriminates against us should be subject to heightened scrutiny. Sealed OBC's fail the heightened scrutiny test, they do not advance any compelling or important state interest.

SCOTUS has never addressed this and its highly unlikely they ever will. Therefore, adoptees only hope to access their own identity lies in legislative reform at the state level. Currently there are only TEN states that allow adult adoptees to have access: Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island (age 25 or older), Oregon and New York. If you are an adoptee born in one of those states, congratulations on being allowed to view your own OBC. But for the majority of us, no such law exists.

The biggest argument to sealing OBC's and denying adults to access them is privacy. Sealing the OBC allows the birth mother to "move on" and forget that she had a child she relinquished. I will argue that no mother forgets giving birth to a child. They don't "move on". They learn to live with their loss, often keeping it buried deep inside where it festers and slowly kills them.

The privacy argument no longer applies. Why? Because of the development and popularity of commercial DNA testing. For the low low price of $59, any adoptee can spit in a test tube and find out exactly who their birth family is. This is how many of us adult adoptees are finding our families. While I am extremely grateful for the gift it gave me, I believe DNA testing places undue stress on the birth families. If I had access to my OBC, I could have immediately made contact with my family privately, giving them the safe space to process their lost family finding them. What happened instead, and this is true of every DNA searching adoptee I know, we are forced to ask uncomfortable probing questions to our 2nd cousins, 3rd cousins...anyone who will respond to our emails. This places undue stress on all parties and I believe plays a factor in the failure of reunions.

I was born in California. One of the worst states in regards to OBC access for people born before 1984. The only way that I can see my own legal identity is to petition a judge and hope for a compassionate and progressive one that will unseal them which has only happened a handful of times in the entire history of CA adoption.

I have an identity. It was taken from me.

I have a name. It was taken from me, replaced with a name that I have never once felt was MY NAME and a last name that I never knew.

My real name is the one given to me by the woman who bore me and a last name from the father who helped make me, and with or without that piece of paper, it is my right to carry it.

Should I have to pay hundreds of dollars to reclaim what is mine, my legal birth name? No, but that's exactly what I did.