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198 11 SealedAdoption Records If the word“rights” were not in the dictionary we might be better off. We would then be fighting for the things that matter most, roots and relatives and pride. —Jean Paton, 1982 Jean Paton’s participation in what was billed as “The Great Debate” by the Toronto television station that produced it came about after a visit in August 1976 with Joan Vanstone, a Vancouver activist and founder of Canada’s adoption search group, Parent Finders. Unable to attend, Vanstone suggested Paton as her replacement. Paton looked forward to the debate, believing that it would have important consequences.1 She also appreciated the respect accorded her: not only did the debate sponsors pay her a $350 honorarium plus all expenses, but Canadian adoption search groups took Paton out for meals while she was in Toronto, and one member drove her back from her hotel to the airport.2 In the aftermath of the debate, Paton felt she performed well and spoke with feeling. One highlight that stuck in her mind was that“a young man in the audience said ‘amen’” when she finished speaking.3 Nevertheless when the moderator, Pierre Berton, polled the audience at the end of “The Great Debate,” few had changed their original position in favor of Paton: the concluding vote was 51 in the affirmative and 24 in the negative. On the whole, Paton’s argument that adult adoptees had an absolute right to knowing who their birth parents were was not particularly effective. She was too discursive, spent too much time on historical issues, and failed to provide persuasive answers as to why adoption records should be opened.4 Although Jean Paton left voluminous records attesting to her activism regarding adoption reform, we know surprisingly little about her position on the Sealed Adoption Records 199 issue of sealed adoption records.Later in life she was hailed by adoption activists as pioneering“our national movement to open sealed adoption records.”5 But in fact her views on this subject evolved and changed over time. In the first decades of her activism between 1949 and 1970, Paton’s beliefs reflected the era of her own upbringing. Because adoption records were open before the 1950s, her correspondents were unconcerned with gaining access to them. Consequently, Paton concentrated on the psychological healing of adult adoptees through the mechanism of a national mutual consent adoption registry, the Reunion File. In the 1970s, her thinking evolved in accord with the fresh leadership and concerns of the newly energized adoption reform movement. Though still skeptical of the immediate beneficial results of open records, Paton promoted others’efforts to open adoption records and eventually added her own voice to theirs. By the early 1980s, she had wholeheartedly embraced the notion of opening adoption records unconditionally. This chapter explores Jean Paton’s evolving position on this issue, an aspect of her adoption activism that is still largely unknown. Between 1949 and 1970, Paton seldom expressed opposition to sealed adoption records. However, on occasion, as in 1963, on a field trip to St. Paul, Minnesota , when she spoke to a convention of 100“alumni” at the third annual convention of the New York Foundling Hospital, she did. A newspaper account of the event quoted her as saying,“The sealed record almost completely prohibits a person from finding out his real background. He is turned away and feels resentful. As soon as the record is sealed, society has entered into the situation. And the adopted person feels he can’t fight society by himself—he becomes an outsider.” Her solution to the problem of sealed adoption records was not to advocate political action, but to help people locate relatives “lost to them by adoption, divorce, or to other social separations” through use of her matching Reunion File, the first national voluntary mutual consent adoption registry.6 Nor did Paton write many letters advocating that adoption records be open. Of the thousands of letters she wrote between 1949 and 1970 advocating adoption reform, in only four did she express opposition to sealed adoption records, and she mentioned the topic only rarely in The LOG.7 One typical Paton letter, to the editor of the Denver Post in 1969, blandly recommended Orphan Voyage ’s Reunion File as an alternative to the sealed record.8 Conspicuously missing from Paton’s thinking during these early years was an appeal to the mass media to persuade adoption agencies to open their records or, failing that, to...

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