Privacy vs Identity
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Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian Takes on Adoptees
By Michelle Edmunds
Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian, has declared war on the province’s adoptees.
Cavoukian’s war is in the name of privacy; and as she ferociously gallops across the country, recruiting allies and spreading bogus adoption propaganda, she is creating a new defence force – the adoptees and birth mothers who will not buy into nor surrender to her dictator-style, fear-mongering tactics.
Bill-183, a proposed act of legislation is hoping for a smooth passage this fall when the Ontario legislature resumes. The bill, aimed at opening up the province’s 78-year-old sealed adoption records – will permit adoptees to see their original birth name, and the names of the people who gave them life.
Cavoukian purports that some women should have the right to privacy and not be disturbed by that ominous ghost of pregnancy past. She claims the privacy rights of the natural mother should annul the adopted person’s right to obtain personal and identifying information. One assumes that she has taken into consideration that on no adoption contract in Canada is there a proviso that denies an adopted person’s right to know their natural parents.
The bill already has a condition for privacy; it’s a “no-contact veto.†If an adopted person violates this veto, which is placed in an adoption file by the natural mother, the adoptee can face a hefty fine of $50,000 and potential criminal charge. Alas, this is not dehumanizing enough for the privacy commissioner. She wants a disclosure veto implemented into the bill – this will provide natural mothers permanent anonymity from their child.
She has diminutive patience for adoptees she says are determined to trace their family heritage, despite frantic pleas from natural moms. (Who of course are at home crouched inside the closet, gnawing on the last fragments of their fingernails waiting for that dreaded knock at the door.)
She has blasted the media in recent months with warnings from anonymous birth mothers, who are threatening to lock themselves in the SUV and gas themselves to death should their adopted-away child one day learn their original identity.
Apparently, some women forgot to mention to their post-adoption partners that they once had a baby and gave it up for adoption. Guess it’s not a self-describing attribute one puts on Yahoo Personals.
That is one weighty secret the adoptee is expected to keep tucked under their hat for their entire life. Not only is the adopted person perpetually silenced and hidden in shame — they now have to live with the notion that their very existence will cause someone to suicide.
Adoptees search so they can move to the natural rhythm of life. Maybe just once they would like to compare themselves to another human being in appearance and personality traits. Perhaps they are curious about their inherent ethnicity and ancestry, could they be of Native, Chinese, Irish, or Persian decent? It might be helpful, too, if they could get hold of a genetic medical history – that just might save the life of an adoptee with a predisposed life-threatening disease.
Cavoukian’s plight for privacy goes far beyond that of the role of a privacy commissioner making simple recommendations on a legislative bill. She has solicited the opinions of all privacy commissioners across Canada (which falls out of her mandate as a provincial privacy commissioner) and has posted an adoption Fact Sheet on her web site (http://www.ipc.on.ca – which is ninety per cent inaccurate). It is bizarre, really, how she has gone so far as to accuse adoptees of being potential home-wreckers and murderers, just to protect a few agitated people who wish not to confront an unpleasant memory.
She is ignoring the fact that in the last half-century the majority of birth mothers were either forced to or coerced by adoption workers and families into relinquishing their children for adoption – and that most natural mothers live for the day when they can once again set eyes on their gone but not forgotten kin.
The Adoption Disclosure Register (ADR) holds the names of more than 70,000 Ontarian adoptees and natural mothers requesting a reunion. The ADR reunites on average 600 people per year.
Since January 2005, The Adoption Council of Canada has received over a thousand enquiries, mostly from adoptees asking how bill-183 will help them obtain a birth certificate.
The privacy commissioner ought to realize that the adoptee is not nor will they be the perpetrator of any crime. The adoptee was simply born – and with that, came a unique identity and genetic history. If there is a crime being committed in adoption, it is not the fundamental need to discover and connect with one’s roots – it is the intentional withholding of personal and genetically identifying information.
@ July 31, 2005