Connor Howe

The adopted person, the natural parents, the adopters, no one has access to the records.

The whole point was to make them complete legal strangers from each other and make it impossible for the parents and the children to reunite.

That was essentially really

the purpose of closed adoption.

So when they opened it, they didn't really open the records.

There's still most U.S.

states, if you're an adopted person, you can't actually access your own legal vital records, your original birth certificate.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know exactly how it works in every single state.

Everything's different.

And there are like...

You can have adoptive parents who are like, well, we want the birth certificate.

I had a copy of mine, but it wasn't a legal copy.

And I had to still go to the court and petition a judge, even though I had the document in my house, to get a certified copy of my original birth certificate to get my citizenship in Ireland when I was doing that.

Oh, weird.

They didn't trust you?

That's confusing.

You still have to get a judge to sign off on it in California because it's not an open record state.

There's only, I think, 15...

It's somewhere between 15 and 20 states where adopted people have access to their birth certificates.