Adoption records access by state
NEW (March 2010): Adoptee rights are under attack in Illinois! Join the Adoption Reform Illinois coalition and find out how you can help support the rights of all Illinois citizens to access their original birth certificates.
At present eight states offer open or semi-open records: Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon and Tennessee. For more information, visit the Child Welfare web site.
A handful of states have instituted confidential intermediary programs under the mistaken assumption that women who relinquished children to adoption were promised confidentiality, which they interpret as anonymity. Such promises, had they been made, would have been extralegal because there is no guarantee that any given child will be adopted. Those who are not, continue to carry their name at birth and the only birth certificate they will have is one that names the biological mother and, perhaps, the biological father.
While birth certificates as a class of public documents are not open to random inspection, they are accessible to the persons named on the document -- to the parents until the child reaches adulthood and afterward, only to the individual whose birth is recorded. After death, these documents are available to next of kin with a legal reason to obtain a copy and more generally available after a period of at least 50 years (this varies from state to state). Adopted persons are provided with a fraudulent birth certificate under their adopted name and showing the adoptive parents as the natural parents of the child.
