TRIADOPTION ® Library, Inc. - CA ~ Pg 369-480

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Five mill'ion people in the United
States today were born with a dual
identity. They are not schizophrenics,
amnesiacs, escapists or mentally unfit.
They are individuals born with two sets
of parents, genetic and adoptive.
An individual carries twenty to twentyfive
thousand genes transmitted to him by
his biological parents and their combined
total ancestry. When a person is separated
from the people who gave him these inheri
ted traits and is placed with a set of
parents of a different ancestral heritage,
he is immediately given by this set of
circumstances, a dual identity.
The heredity factors an infant or child
brings with him into his new environment
dictate his internal reaction to external
influences. Heredity and environment join
to form the individual he wi 11 become.
How the individual copes with life is as
much determined from the moment of his
conception as it is by the surroundings
in which he is placed. As he matures, the
adoptee 1 ives within a nucleus of height- '
ened stress because of acute awareness of
his dual identity.
Can the adoptee's dual identity be
prevented? Our law makers could take the
first step to answer this question by
voting to unseal the birth records of
adoptees. Working with the laws of today,
legislators at the state level are responsible
for a change in the law.
A second step toward the prevention of
dual identity in the adopted infant or
child is "open adoption". "Open adoption"
a1 1 ows adoptive parents and bi rth parents
the option of choosing to know each other
in the adoption of an infant. "Open adoption"
could allow the birth parent,
adoptive parent and the adoptee the choice
of knowi~g one another if, at the time
of his adoption, the adoptee is older.
According to Dr. T Berry Braze1 ton in
hi s col umn in April , 1979, issue of Redbook
Magazine, it is harder work to
raise an adopted child than it is to
raise your own. Adoption carries longer
periods of adjustment between infant
or child and the new parents. When the
natural rhythm and balance of 1 ife change,
as in the moving or placement of a baby
or child, often suddenly, into the lives
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of adoptive parents, however wi 1'I ing,
there is an emotional adjustment to be
made for every member of the new family.
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he present sealed record laws can only
breed mistrust between adoptive parent and
child, and between adoptee and society as .
a whole. Lack of truth and knowledge in
childhood, and many years of living with
fantasies, can cause numerous frustrations
and personal i ty defects. Certainly, feel ings
of insecurity and ambi valance dominate the
personality of any individual who lives
within a vacuum of who he is and how he got
there.
United States laws are throwing a double
barreled burden on adoptive parents by
enveloping their family relationships with
secrecy. To be eligible to become an adoptive
parent, one must lay bare to strangers
his emotional, financial and sexual stability
If the application to adopt is accepted,
then the adoptive parent or parents are
asked by the agencies to rear their child
without the knowledge to share who, what,
where, when, why and how he came to be.
Primary prevention is the medical and
clinical profession's basis for all research.
Adopti ve parents, the nuhturing
parents, are rearing their chi ldren without
knowledge of his genetic and medical
background. Therefore, they are arbi trari 1y
forced to be unable to prevent the preventab1
e, medi cal ly and emotional ly , as thei r
child is growing up.
Depending on their own individual
maturity, all children face an identity
crisis. Parents often talk about the teen
years as the years when their children
are searching for self-identity. As the
parents of three children, my husband and
I agree we could not have survived without
Dr. Spock and Erman Bombeck!
Dr. Rollo May, a practicing psychoanalyst,
author and lecturer, suggests that
the AGE of TWO is a natural time for the
infant child to enter a stage of rebellion
and try to become free to establish inner
strength! Most psycho1 ogists today agree
that by age six a person's self-image is
basi cal ly formed. Furthermore, the professional's
agree that an individual's method
of operating in life is based on this early
image, whether it be poor, excellent, or
somewhere inbetween, unti 1 he chooses,
through learning and growth, to change.
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