Doug Whiteside wrote in a message to Michael Kirst:
DW> Pardon me for jumping in, but are you serious?  It almost seems like
DW> a Mission Impossible episode.  Who would want to stop you?
Well, let me see now.....  A-parents who don't want to worry about the 
b-family stealing their little Johnny's or Susan's love from them, the social 
workers who don't feel that adoptees have any right to search, the multitude 
of other "do-gooders" who also don't feel that adoptees have any right to 
search for their b-families, the lawyers who openly falsify birth dates on 
the ammended birth certificates, etc.  The people at Catholic (Un-)Social 
(Dis-)Services feel that it is their duty to set any judge straight on 
his/her "erronious judgement" should he/she grant a court order to open that 
agency' sealed adoption files!!  And that last part comes from my own 
personal experience!!  I've been there, done that, and did NOT like the 
t-shirt!!!  And the CSS people will go out of their way to mis-interpret 
state laws in their favor every chance they get if they're not held 
accountable in a Court of law!
DW> Except the birth parents perhaps.  And, it would seem that if they didn't
DW> want to be found, they wouldn't need any special information to hide.
DW> They could just say "No, I don't want to see you" (Which is my personal
DW> fear!)
I have been down that road in my own search. :-<  But at least I was able to 
speak with my b-mother for 45 minutes and obtain some information and hear 
her voice.  I looked at that decision as coming from her out of her own free 
will without anyone else pressuring her to make any decision which happened 
when she decided to relinquish me for adoption.  Not all reunions are a nice 
bed of rose blossoms...some of us get the rose stems.  But that just makes us 
try harder to help others.
And b-parents aren't the ones (typically) that desire sealed records. It's 
the a-parents that really want the sealed records to keep the b-parents from 
trying to get their child(ren) back.  Under Wisconsin's state search system 
adoptees could pay to have a search conducted for their b-parents (b-mother 
first then b-father), but the b-parents could
*-not-* pay to have a search done for the child(ren) that they relinquished 
for adoption!  Discrimination - heck YES!!  Did they get away with it - 
unfortunately yes.  Because no one could (or would) mount an adequate 
legal/constitutional challenge to have the state's laws changed.  The last I 
heard, that search system was dismantled infavor of forcing one to go through 
private adoption agencies to have a search conducted.
DW> Maybe you, Michael, could shed some light on the situation.  I'm a wee
DW> bit confused.  Any others who want can jump in too. I did. ;)
I have tried to give you some insights into the problems with posting too 
much information on how/where to get search information.
Michael Kirst
f/k/a Christopher Lee Backus
Sysop of The Noble House BBS
--- timEd/386 1.10+
---------------