I'll be blogging on the current situation in New Jersey in a couple days, as well as posting a Bastard Nation Action alert regarding S799/A1399. In the meantime, here is the letter BN sent to Gov. Chris Christie asking him to veto the bill if it's hits his desk. Governor Chris Christie
Office of the Governor
PO Box 001
Trenton, NJ 08625
PLEASE VETO S799/A1399: the Adoptees' Birthright Bill
Dear Governor Christie:
Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization, the largest adoptee civil rights organization in North America, opposes S799/A1399: The Adoptees' Birthright bill. We ask you to veto it if it comes to your desk. The bill is currently awaiting a vote on the House Floor on January 6 or 20, 2011.
If passed, this bill will permit some of New Jersey's adopted adults to receive their true and accurate original birth certificates. Others, through the compromise language of this bill, will receive only a false and mutilated certificate with the name and address of the parent(s) bureaucratically excised by the Department of Health and Senior Services by order of the birthparent(s).
Bastard Nation rejects this newly created special right of birthparents to remove their names from the birth certificates--the public record-- of their own adult offspring. No other parent has that right. Why should birthparents have different rules?
Since 1999 four states have restored to adoptees the unrestricted right to records and identity access: Oregon through ballot initiative, and Alabama. New Hampshire, and Maine through legislation. Kansas and Alaska never sealed records. New Jersey should not buck the tide. New Jersey should not pass a bill that continues to treat adoptee access to their own birth certificates as a favor, not a right--a right that the not-adopted enjoy without a second thought.
S799/A1399 is not an Adoptees' Birthright bill. It does not restore the right of unrestricted birth certificate access to New Jersey's adoptees. Instead it encodes "special rights" for some into state law where it did not exist before. Please veto this discriminatory legislation.
For the record, Bastard Nation also opposes an alternate bill (no number assigned as of this writing) introduced in the House and supported by the New Jersey ACLU, New Jersey Right to Life and other organizations opposed to the restoration of adoptee rights, which offers a favor-based system of birth certificate access.
Yours truly,
Marley Greiner
Executive Chair
Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization
