My thoughts on Privacy

It seems to me that one of the biggest arguments against making original birth certificates available to adult adoptees, is that it could "violate the privacy of the birthparents" (cause there are two people involved there). Anyhow, someone mentioned to me recently, or I read somewhere about what kind of privacy we are dealing with here. Who would the birthparents be wanting to keep this information from? It's not necessarily the adoptee that they want to keep in the dark, it's everyone else! Their families, their neighbors, their coworkers, their in-laws, members of the communities they live in. Those are the people that the information about an adoption is being kept from. And rightfully so, because it's not their business. However, the adoptee shouldn't be shouldered with the blame for 'violating secrecy', and shouldn't be kept from their records so that these other people don't find out.
This is how I see that the current laws hurt the situation and HB770/SB364 could improve privacy for birthparents from these other parties. Currently, if an adoptee wants to find his/her birthparents, he/she can register with the state adoption registry and any number of organizational registries (which have a relatively low match rate). He/she can also use the more common method of amateur detective work (or hiring an agency) and searching for any records around their birth, looking for hospital records, dates and times, types and times of babies born, talk to local people, narrow down the possible candidates, and start calling people to see if they are their birthparents. This method is currently being used by a lot of adoptees who are searching for connections, reconnections, medical histories, and long lost siblings.
Now, using this roundabout way of finding birthparents, it is much more likely that a member of the above mentioned group will find out that a birthparent has given a child up for adoption in the past. One article I read talked about a women calling a number she was sure was her birthfather, only to end up talking to his wife who made it very clear that her husband had NEVER had an affair and how dare she call them. (This man turned out not to be her birth father).
If HB770/SB364 were to pass, the adoptee could have access to their birthparents names without having to do a lot of detective work and asking other people. They could contact the birth parent through a discrete intermediary and the birthparent could then keep this information secret from anyone else they wished to. Also, if the birthparent chose to fill out a contact preference form and desired no contact, then the adoptee would have his/her current medical history provided and would know, from the birthparent, that they did not wish to be contacted, saving the adoptee lots of time of fruitless searching. All in all, it seems like HB770/SB364 could actually improve birthparents and adoptees privacy from the people who really don't need to know. That would be up to the adoptee AND the birthparents.

Karyn