The Truth Belongs to the Child: Why America Must End Sealed Adoptions

For too long, the United States has treated the origins of adopted people as state secrets. Files are locked, records are falsified, and children grow into adults who are told that their pasts are not theirs to know. The justification has always been “protection.” In reality, it is control. It is an act of erasure that severs a human being from the truth of their own beginning.

I have lived beside that pain. I am the husband of someone who grew up under the shadow of sealed adoption. He was given love, but not answers. His story began with a bureaucratic lie — a substitute birth certificate, a legal fiction designed to hide what really happened. The state decided that secrecy was compassion. It wasn’t. It was theft. For decades, every question about who he was or where he came from met the same wall: “Those records are sealed.”

When he finally obtained a copy of his original birth record, his hands trembled as he read it. The page confirmed what he had always suspected — that his life had been rewritten by policy, not by truth. That moment changed everything. It wasn’t about curiosity. It was about identity. Every person deserves to know their own story.

Sealed adoptions began in the early 20th century as a way to hide “illegitimacy.” Lawmakers claimed that closing records would protect children and help adoptive families bond. What it really did was bury history under the weight of stigma. The practice may have been born in a different time, but its consequences echo today. Millions of Americans are still denied the most basic human right — to know their own parentage.

The damage runs deep. When you grow up without access to your origin, you inherit someone else’s silence. You lose medical history, cultural roots, and a sense of connection that the rest of us take for granted. Doctors ask about family conditions you can’t name. Bureaucrats demand documents you’re not allowed to see. Even love can’t fill the void of a missing identity.

Supporters of sealed adoption say that secrecy protects birth parents. But the world has changed. DNA testing and genealogy databases have already made permanent anonymity impossible. What secrecy protects now is outdated bureaucracy. No one benefits from lies, and love doesn’t need falsified paperwork to survive. True compassion is built on truth.

The moral argument is simple: a birth certificate belongs to the person it records. It should reflect reality — not the state’s idea of what reality ought to be. To deliberately falsify or conceal it is to deny a person’s existence as it actually occurred. It is government-sanctioned amnesia.

As a husband, I have watched what secrecy does to a soul. I have seen the toll of unanswered questions, the grief that hides beneath even the happiest moments, the weight of wondering who you come from and why it was hidden. When the truth finally surfaces, it brings both relief and heartbreak — relief at finally knowing, and heartbreak for the decades lost in the dark.

That experience convinced me that reform isn’t optional. It’s a moral imperative. Adoption itself can be a force for love and stability, but it must be transparent. Honesty strengthens families; deception corrodes them. It is time for America to admit that the era of sealed adoption was a mistake.

We need a single national standard that guarantees every adopted person — past, present, and future — the unrestricted right to their original birth record. No more petitions to courts. No more begging for permission. No more gatekeepers deciding when a person has earned the right to know who they are.

And we must fix another injustice: every birth certificate should include both biological parents’ names whenever they are known. To erase a parent’s identity from a record is to erase part of a child’s humanity. Truth is not a threat to adoptive families. It is the foundation on which love can stand without fear.

This call is not about tearing down adoption. It’s about rebuilding it on truth. Secrecy may have been justified by shame in another century, but in ours it only causes harm. The people affected by these policies are not children anymore. They are adults — veterans, doctors, teachers, parents — still being told by their government that they have no right to their own history.

It doesn’t have to stay this way. Congress could pass an Adoptee Rights and Identity Act, guaranteeing permanent access to original records and forbidding the sealing of any future adoptions. States could restore every name they’ve hidden. Agencies could finally admit that protecting adults from embarrassment is not more important than giving a person the truth of their own life.

Every day, adoptees reach out online trying to fill in the blanks — searching databases, tracing DNA matches, piecing together clues. They are historians of themselves, working to rebuild what was deliberately dismantled. The state should not force them to live as detectives in their own lives.

I believe the future will belong to transparency. The truth always finds a way through. What we decide now is whether the law will catch up to morality. Whether we will stop pretending that secrecy is kindness. Whether we will finally admit that identity is not a privilege — it’s a birthright.

The truth belongs to the child. It belongs to the man who waited fifty years to know his parents’ names. It belongs to the woman who wonders every birthday if her child still remembers her. It belongs to every person who has ever been told, “You don’t have the right to know.”

That right exists. It always has. The law just needs to recognize it.

Until it does, those of us who know the cost of silence will keep fighting. We will write, speak, and stand for those still locked out of their own past. Because love, when it is honest, can survive anything. But lies — even well-intended ones — should never be the foundation of a human life.