Georgia Alliance for Adoptee Rights
Dedicated to Equality for All Adoptees
The 2023-2024 legislative session has ended and although SB 64 did not pass out of the House Rules Committee to be heard on the floor, it gained tremendous momentum and garnered more support than any past efforts in Georgia.
The Georgia Assembly is in session and Senate Bill (SB) 64 is active!
SB64 will restore a right that has been restricted since 1961: the right for all Georgia-born adult adoptees to obtain their own original birth certificate upon request. Georgia Alliance for Adoptee Rights has worked with bill author, Jim Outman, and the bill sponsor, Senator Randy Robertson (R-Cataula) to assure a “clean” and unrestricted bill.
If you are a Georgia-born adoptee or birth parent, be sure that you sign up for our e-mail list to receive action notices and the latest news regarding the bill.
The Georgia Alliance for Adoptee Rights is a coalition of state and national organizations with a singular focus: restoring the unrestricted right of all Georgia adult adoptees to obtain their own original birth certificates (OBC) upon request.
For decades, adoptees have been denied the right to their own birth records, and as a result, denied the opportunity to learn about their origins. Many false claims about birth parent privacy or anonymity have been made as reasons to continue to deny equal rights to adult adopted persons. However, in the last decade, the availability and affordability of consumer DNA testing through sites such as Ancestry and 23 and Me, has opened up new avenues for adoptees from states with sealed records to find out where they came from. But, using DNA testing in an attempt to discover one’s origins is not without issues, one of which being the lack of privacy.
If you have never taken a consumer DNA, let me explain how it works. First, you purchase a kit from one of the consumer DNA testing sites and upon receipt, spit into the tube, and mail it off to be tested. Then you wait. It usually takes the lab a few weeks to perform it’s analysis. Once complete, your results are uploaded to the site and you will be notified that your results are available! At that point, you may be filled with excitement or anxiety as you click to link to find out what your DNA has to say, especially if you are an adoptee with so many unknowns.
Many people are aware that once they log in they will find out what percentage Colombian, or Irish, or Japanese they may be, but not everyone is aware that in addition to identifying your ethnicity mix, you are also matched with DNA relatives who have also taken a DNA test through that same company. (There are also platforms that allow DNA results from various companies to be compared, such as GEDMatch, if that is desired.) For most people, when they view their list of DNA matches, they will see some combination of 2nd-4th cousins listed. It is less common to log on and find that you’ve immediately been matched to a 1st cousin, sibling, or better yet… a parent! (Although this would be like hitting the jackpot for most adoptees.) Without being directly linked to a parent and having little to no knowledge of your origins, how do you use these DNA matches to find out where you belong in the family tree?
Well, you have to start shaking the branches and ringing the phone lines. You will need to contact some of your matches and hope you can get some of them to respond with helpful information. Even though some of them want to help they do not have the information you need, so they aren’t really sure where you belong. They may then begin to call their sister or aunt, or another cousin, or grandma asking about any information that they might have on a baby from the family that was placed for adoption. If that person doesn’t know either or has vague memories of something like this happening, they may call another cousin or uncle or brother. Before you know it, the whole family may be in on trying to discover where in the world you came from and who gave up a baby! This is obviously not a very private or personal way to attempt to learn your biological origins, but this is what is forced upon adoptees when states refuse to allow adoptees their own records.
If the concern for adoptees and biological parents is privacy, then allowing an adopted person the right to directly obtain their own birth record is the key. With this scenario, the only contact required is between the adopted person and the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH).
Giving equal rights to adult adopted persons means more privacy, not less. It is that simple. Or as my kids would say, “Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy!”
Not many, including adoptees, know that when an adoption is finalized, their original birth certificate is permanently altered by the State of Georgia.
When Courtney Humbaugh, an adult adoptee, petitioned the Georgia court system in 2020 and received her original birth certificate later that year, she was shocked to discover the changes. Immediately after receiving her original birth certificate, she compared it to the one she had been using her whole life.
“The city in which I was born (Augusta) was totally changed to Atlanta where I was adopted,” Humbaugh said. “Along with that, the hospital and attending physician were deleted in the altered version. The information about it being my birth mother’s first pregnancy was deleted, and my birth parents’ names listed as birth parents were changed to my adoptive parents’ names.”
“When I realized all of the changes had been made to my original document, I had this intense feeling that altering one’s original birth certificate, the only “official” document that tells us about our start in this world, was so unethical and really just plain wrong,” Humbaugh told us. That’s when she became involved with Georgia Alliance for Adoptee Rights.
Georgia is one of only a few states that alters the birth location on a child’s birth certificate once the adoption is finalized. Adoptive parents, who are forthcoming with information, may tell the child they were born in X city, but their birth certificate says Y city. Also, all adoption records finalized in the state of Georgia are altered and sealed, regardless of any agreements for contact and communication made between birth parents and adoptive parents.
“There are so many adoptees who want their original birth certificate and records and it makes total sense. It’s so hard to separate fact from fiction when it involves our beginnings. We’re told one thing, but documents tell another story,” Humbaugh said. “Until we petition the courts for our records, we don’t really have the facts. And we shouldn’t have to go through that lengthy and expensive process.”
Humbaugh utilized the legal services of Lila Bradley with Clairborne, Fox, Bradley and Goldman in Atlanta to petition the Georgia courts. For more information, listen to Humbaugh share more details about obtaining her original birth certificate here.
The Georgia Alliance for Adoptee Rights is a coalition of state and national organizations with a singular focus: restoring the unrestricted right of all Georgia adult adoptees to obtain their own original birth certificates (OBC) upon request.
