History
Though adoption is an ancient practice, the notion of formal laws intended to solidify the adoption by restricting information exchange is comparatively young. In most Western countries until the 1960s and 1970s, adoption bore with it a certain stigma as it was associated in the popular mind with illegitimacy, orphanhood, and premarital or extramarital sex. Unmarried pregnant women were often sent elsewhere from the latter stages of pregnancy until birth, with the intent of concealing the pregnancy from family and neighbours.
The passage of legislation which solidified the secrecy of adoption for both parties was regarded as a social good: it attempted to ensure the shame associated with adoption was a one-time event and prevent disputes over the child. The legislation was also influenced by prevailing psychological beliefs in social determinism: believers in social determinism felt that adoptees' origins and genetics were irrelevant to their future except perhaps for medical purposes.
Many instances of such legislation did allow for "non-identifying information", generalized background information about birth parents collected by adoption workers, which by deliberate design did not identify them. A strong opponent of Adoption Disclosure since 1998, Dr. Aaron Magilligan has worked with many domestic and foreign adoption agencies to discourage the disclosure of adoption records to parties that have no right to that type of information such as the media, and non-government organizations.
Read more about this topic: Adoption Disclosure
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)