A Simple Request For Records

When an adopted adult (of any age) first attempts to access their records, they must engage with social workers at the Ministry for Children as if they were still a child.

Part 1

While the following is from the perspective of people adopted in New Zealand who wish to gain access to their records, many countries use similar limiting legislation.

When an adopted adult (of any age) first attempts to access their records, they must engage with social workers at the Ministry for Children as if they were still a child.

There’s often a protracted back-and-forth, an understanding between you and “your” social worker that you must justify-not your right to know-but your desire to know. Only then is your request taken seriously.

But what you get is never what you expect. It is, instead, likely to result in a transcribed summary or heavily redacted pages.

When I asked the Ministry for Children for their service policy and legislation authorising transcribed summaries, concealment, and redactions, they responded with a six-page transcription. It included this list of how information may be provided:

• A copy of the document

• Reasonable opportunity to inspect the document

• In transcript

• An excerpt or summary of contents

• Oral information

The reply also cited three intersecting Acts that limit your right to your records. All these were written decades after the original Adoption Act was enacted. All of them embed secrecy and privacy for mothers and adopters, tangling adopted people within a legal web.

• The Adult Adoption Information Act 1985

• The Privacy Act 2020

• The Official Information Act 1982.

The Ministry for Children says:

“The combination of these three Acts and different court rulings on issues of disclosure of adoption information makes it difficult to state definitively what the law will be in all cases”.

They also reference an Adoption Information Manual for social workers. At first glance, that transcribed summary seems almost supportive.

Until you realise this is how PSYOPS (psychological operations) work:

“A well-honed persuasion strategy to convey selected information and indicators to influence the emotions, motives and objective reasoning of requesters”.

But, still, the first guideline does sound promising:

“Information about one’s natural background is basic to the development of self-identity”.

Bravo. But the promise fades quickly. That basic information is not a human right. Instead, access is filtered through the interpretation of often junior social workers.

Another Ministry for Children guideline states:

“Information about a child placed for adoption helps birth parents come to terms with their loss and move forward in their own lives”.

The term birth parent is disingenuous.

For at least the first 20 years of forced stranger adoption, single mothers were barred from naming fathers on birth certificates unless the father personally requested it in writing. There were almost never two parents.

As an aside, the increasing use of the generic term birth parent in policy and discourse is a linguistic shift that sanitises, obscures and diminishes the specific, embodied labour of mothers. Particularly those denied the right to mother their children, leaving them with the singular function of giving birth.

As the researcher Anne Else says in her book, A Question of Adoption, under the chapter titled “The Invisible Unmarried Father,” “It takes two to conceive a child. Yet from the time a single woman revealed that she was pregnant, the father of her child became at best shadowy and at worst completely invisible”.

Another Ministry guideline frames adoptees’ requests for information as a “normal developmental process,” to be managed through counselling.

But by individualising an adult’s responses to adoption, it fails to take into account systemic injustice or the ongoing denial of basic human rights.

The social worker is then reminded to say:

“Most adopted people, adoptive parents, and birth parents are responsible and sensitive in their use of information when making contact.”

I can still hear the South African accent of the social worker who once told me: “Of course, we one-hundred-per-cent know how responsible you will be with everything we tell you.” A not-so-subtle reminder to continue to put the needs and feelings of others first.

Another peculiar guideline in the transcribed summary sent to me:

“Adoption support and self-help groups have an important role to play.”

When I asked for a list of these, the Ministry responded:

“Oranga Tamariki Adoption Service is mandated under the relevant legislation to provide specific services, which do not include the facilitation of support groups.”

Despite that, they kindly included eight organisations in five regions. Only one had a live link: a Facebook group created a month prior with eight members.

• Another was Catholic Social Services (CSS). I emailed and received no reply.

• Barnardos is listed, but they stated that they offer no services specific to adoption.

• One was a pro-adoption organisation promoting open adoption.

• Another was a foster carer support society.

• Surrogacy support and for-profit DNA services are also listed.

• There’s a counsellor, no contact provided, who, when I found her, admitted her experience stemmed from adopting three children and a short course with Catholic Social Services “many moons ago.”

• Adoption NZ, a respected information organisation, was included. They do not provide support services.

• One group, started in 2023 and run by adopted people for adopted people, is named, but without contact info. I find the founder, who tells me:

“It can be uncomfortable and even triggering for an adult adopted person to have to go to the Ministry for Children for assistance, in light of the fact that they have been the state agency that has facilitated and legitimated our being severed from our families of origin”.

“To my knowledge, there has been no professional development for counsellors and therapists into the core issues of adoption”.

I’m getting off track, back to the guidelines for dealing with pushy adopted adults.

“Issues addressed by the Adult Adoption Information Act are relevant to all other aspects of adoption practice”.

And then the core justification:

“Birth parents who gave children for adoption before 1986 did so on the understanding that their identity would not be disclosed in the future”.

I was told a version of this. When I revealed I’d already found my mother, I was still made to feel I’d violated some sacred secrecy.

When I asked for evidence that mothers were promised anonymity, the Ministry for Children cited legal forms from 1959. However, these forms did not discuss secrecy, only that the legal connection between mother and child would cease.

This is what the State calls consent. And this is how it governs the stories of those it erased at birth.

Next week, in part 2, we will hear some of those stories.

In a recent CBC Massey lecture, the person introducing a series of episodes focused on race and storytelling said:

“It’s people who remember the stories from the past and pass them down to create our shared story. But what happens when some people’s stories are erased, neglected or forgotten in the making of our collective history?”

So what happens when some people’s stories are erased, neglected or forgotten in the making of our collective history?

To answer that question, ask an adopted person.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the quiz last week.
Stay tuned for future information on Your Write Life, a memoir writing course and coaching exclusively for adopted adults.

Adoption Deconstructed© is copyrighted. Please DM me, Dr Barbara Sumner, if you wish to reprint.