Friday, 400,000 native Ohioans will get the key to open a previously locked door to their past.
Because on March 20, a state law goes into effect that allows persons adopted in Ohio between 1964 and 1996 to request a copy of their original birth certificate from the Ohio Department of Health.
For the past 51 years that access was granted only by court order. Birth certificates for adoptions prior to 1964 and after 1996 have been available on request.
Ohio now joins 17 other states with varying degrees of access to original birth certificates. Proposed laws providing that access are pending in nine states.
The new law comes as a relief to adoptees searching for, or wondering about their origins. The same applies to birth parents seeking answers as to what happened to the children they relinquished for adoption.
To Patricia Knowles, 51, of Parma, questions regarding her son, Michael, have “haunted me for 32 years.”
“Birth mothers don’t forget, and some of us have lived a personal hell due to the fact that we had to give up part of us, our hearts, our souls, the day we signed the relinquishment papers,” she said.
Weeks prior to the effective date of the new law she had a packet ready for her son. The packet contained a family medical history, details about his birth and her contact information — materials that would be provided with the original birth certificate if he applies for it.
Ideally, that application would lead to a reunion, Knowles said. “That would be awesome. That would be my dream,” she added. “There’s a hole in my heart that he needs to fill. I try to keep that hole open in case that missing piece finds its way home.”
Mindy McCombs, 42, of Oberlin, who was adopted in Clark County, plans to request her original birth certificate. She said it’s a way of filling in the blanks — family medical history, her genealogy and “where did my ancestors come from, and when?”
If that discovery leads to a meeting with members of her birth family, that would be great, McCombs said. If not, she’d be disappointed, but “I’m not expecting some tear-jerking reunion.”
“It doesn’t matter, really, what I find out,” she added. “It’d just be nice to know something.”
Under the new law, an adoptee 18 and older — including those born in Ohio but adopted in other states — can request the original birth certificate and adoption decree. There is a $20 fee. An application can be obtained online at the Ohio Department of Health, odh.ohio.gov, or by calling the Office of Vital Statistics at 614-466-2531.
Adoptees also can receive a family medical history and contact preference form provided by their birth parents.
The form indicates whether a birth parent wants to be contacted, provides personal contact information or approves contact through a third party, or might say the birth parent does not want to be contacted.
In the past year, birth parents had the option to have their names removed from the version of the birth certificate that is released to the adoptee, as long as they provided the adoptee with an updated family medical history.
That redaction provision expires today, but can be changed at any time in the future. (As of two weeks before the law took effect, only 74 birth parents had asked that their names be redacted.)
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