Perspective Adoptees seek access law to provide a ‘sense of self’ BY GLORIA STRAVELLI Staff Writer Thomas McGee of Oceanport is a proponent of legislation that would give adopted children access to their original birth certificates. For decades, information as basic as their mothers’ and fathers’ names, their true nationality and cultural heritage has been denied to adoptees in New Jersey. "I’ve done nothing wrong, I’ve committed no crime, so there’s no reason for me or my mother to be kept apart by the law," said Thomas McGee recently. "Everybody has the right to at least know who their mother and father are." Adopted when he was 4 months old, McGee is denied the civil right most others take for granted — access to his original birth certificate. "The law treats me as though I’m somehow unworthy of having this basic information," the Oceanport resident said. Dennis Akstulewicz (left photo), 24, of Freehold Township was reunited with his birth mother, Susan Berntheisel of Hammonton, with the blessing of his family. At right, Dennis and his family, dad Walter, mom Hedy and sister Stacy, vacation at Key West. Dennis’ dad encouraged him to find his birth mother after his adoptive mom, Hedy, died four years ago. Under existing New Jersey law, meant to protect the privacy of birth mothers, adoptees are blocked from seeing that document and are given instead an amended, post-adoption version that expunges the names of biological parents and substitutes those of the adoptive parents. McGee, 55, testified June 4 before the state Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee, urging lawmakers to pass a bill that would give adoptees access to their original birth certificate and the information it provides about their origins, including the identity of their birth mothers and fathers. "The flip side of creating a family is that another family ceases to exist," explained McGee, the father of two. "I’d like to know who I am. It’s not the government’s role to be the final arbiter between adults. It makes me feel that somehow I’m not trusted with this information — who I am and where I’ve come from. It’s impossible to convey to the people who don’t walk in our shoes what that feels like." The legislation, S-1093, would amend existing statutes that have blocked adoptees’ access to birth information for the past six decades. Advocates for adoption reform estimate the records of some 150,000 adoptees in New Jersey are sealed. The proposed bill, which gives access to birth records to adults over 18 and gives the birth mother the option of being contacted or not, is the subject of intense lobbying by opposing factions. Proponents of adoption reform include the American Adoption Congress (AAC) and its affiliate, the New Jersey Coalition for Adoption Reform and Education (NJCARE). The grassroots groups advocate for honesty in adoption on behalf of adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents. They argue that the existing law passed in 1941 reflects the social attitudes of the time and denies New Jersey-born adoptees equal rights under the law. According to Jane Nast, an adoptive parent and past AAC president, the groups have been trying to roll back the existing law for two decades. Nast, of Chatham, said the Senate bill moved out of committee last week and reform advocates are lobbying for support prior to a full Senate vote. In addition to NJCARE, social workers and representatives of two major adoption agencies testified in favor of the bill, she said. The process will be repeated in the Assembly, where reform legislation has twice passed, then failed to gain Senate approval. Opposition to reform, Nast said, continues to come from the Right to Life movement of the Catholic Church and the National Council for Adoption, based in Washington, D.C. "Right to Life says if the bill passes, birth mothers will have abortions because they don’t want children to find them years later," she said. "There’s no evidence of this. "The NCFA says adoptive families will be destroyed. That’s crazy," countered Nash, whose two adopted children found, or were found by, their birth mothers. "Our family was not destroyed. It’s the best thing that ever happened." Chances are good the legislation will make it through both houses this time, Nast said. "Each bill has a two-year life span, and we’re only six months into the bill. We have a year and a half to get it done." Every state except Alaska and Kansas sealed records, but recently six states have restored access, Nast explained. In Oregon voters passed a public referendum to unseal records and 3,000-8,000 adoptees have accessed their original birth certificates. "Our bill is based on the Oregon legislation that stipulates the birth parent can file a contact form," Nast said. "Statistics show that when the bill went into effect there in 2000, 460 birth parents filed contact preference forms and only 81 did not want to be contacted. Since that time, birth parents know that if their children want to find them, they can. Nobody is scared of it anymore." In fact, according to Joe Collins, a private investigator who has conducted more than a thousand searches for adoptees, the great majority of birth mothers he locates are happy to be reunited. "Most birth mothers, 98 out of 100, want to be found," said Collins, of Morristown, who has testified on behalf of the reform legislation. "Out of 1,400 families I have reunited, I haven’t had more than 35 women say no. "They don’t feel they have the right to come look for the child because they were told at the time of adoption not to interfere with the child’s life and to go on with their own life," he explained. "But when they’re sought out, they’re quite happy to see how the child turned out and that they did the right thing. "There’s probably no greater response I can remember than making a phone call to a birth mother and telling her the daughter she had in the 1960s was interested in meeting her and how did she feel about that," Collins said. "She said, ‘I’ve been praying for this phone call for 35 years.’ " In fact, Walter Akstulewicz of Freehold Township has found an ally in his son’s birth mother. Akstulewicz and his wife, Hedy, adopted Dennis, now 24, when he was 2 months old. "We told him right from the beginning that he was adopted," Akstulewicz explained. "Every now and then he’d bring it up. It was obvious to us that it was gnawing at him. He would ask, ‘Why did my mother throw me away?’ " After his wife died four years ago, a friend advised Akstulewicz that the problems his son was experiencing were connected to his adoption issues and referred him to a support group in Morris County. It was at the Morristown Post-Adoption Support Group that the lives of all four advocates for adoptees’ rights intersected. The support group, an affiliate of AAC and NJCARE, meets the first Saturday of the month at the Presbyterian Parish House on South Street. Nast is a facilitator of the support group, which can be reached at nj-care.org. It took Collins only a week to locate Dennis’ birth mother, who responded immediately to a letter from the son she had relinquished while she was still in high school. "There was a blizzard the day they were supposed to meet," Akstulewicz recounted. "Susan said, ‘I’m coming anyway. I’ve been waiting 24 years.’ " Now, Dennis’ birth mother and adoptive father stay in touch and work as a team to help keep their son on track. "She’s treating him like a parent," he said. "He was thrilled that he found her, and she was thrilled she found him. She felt when she gave him up for adoption she gave up the right to find him." McGee, Mid-Atlantic regional director of the AAC, found the Morristown group shortly after reaching a dead-end in his search for his birth mother. His parents hadn’t told him he was adopted when a playmate broke the news to McGee, then 5 years old. "I asked my mother and she said, yes, I had been adopted, and she told me I was special and chosen. At that point it seemed to satisfy me, and it didn’t really start bothering me until adolescence," he said. "The curiosity had always been there. It was not a matter of replacing my mother and father; I needed to know who I was and where I came from." By the time he saw an announcement for an adoption support group meeting in Hazlet in 1997, both of McGee’s adoptive parents had died. At the support group, McGee offered the few details he had — he was born in New York City in 1946 and adopted when he was 4 months old through the Spence Chapin adoption agency. The facilitator told him he was entitled to non-identifying information about his birth family and could call the agency and request it. He did, and the information revealed details about his birth mother and her family. Without supplying names, it told him his mother was a young woman not quite 19 years old from a Minnesota farm family, that she was a striking young woman with blond hair and blue eyes, that his maternal grandfather was a Norwegian immigrant He also learned that in New York State the original birth certificate and the amended post-adoption certificate have the same five-digit number that could be traced through birth indices stored in the genealogy room at the New York Public Library. McGee went and searched the records for 1946. Births were listed by last name, but that was a piece of information he didn’t have. He pored over columns of names, looking for his birth certificate number and the date March 22. Finally, he found the entry "Christopherson, Male" on the line with his birth certificate number and thought, "OK, now I know for real that I was born to somebody," he said. "The feeling I had was hard to express." Three years into the search for his birth mother, McGee had gotten as far as he could on his own and turned to Collins through the Morristown support group. The week before Christmas 2000, Collins contacted him and said he had located McGee’s birth mother, Dorothy Mae Christopherson Holte, and gave him biographical and contact information for his mother, her parents, and her siblings. "All of a sudden I had a history, and it was unfolding," said McGee, who has since been reunited with an extended family of some 80-90 siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins, and has acquired a family history that dates back to the 1500s. "They have opened their arms to me and welcomed me as family," he said of the new-found family that includes three half-brothers. Once he had the contact information, McGee wrestled with the best way to contact his birth mother and decided to begin by contacting the older sister who had accompanied her to New York more than 50 years earlier. After a few more phone calls, he felt confident enough to reach out and called his mother Jan. 2, 2001. When he reached her, McGee told her he was adopted and that his search for his birth mother led to her. "I said, ‘I just want you to know I was placed with a good family, got an education, that you have two beautiful granddaughters,’ " he said. "I know this is difficult for you. I’ll call back in a few days.’ "She said, ‘Please, do. I prayed for you every day. I’m glad you’re OK.’ " With their new relationship unfolding slowly, McGee arranged to meet his mother in March 2001. Now 31/2 years into the reunion, he says he is certain he made the right decision by reaching out to his mother. "This has been a good thing for my mother and for me, and has helped the rest of family to heal and talk about something they’ve never been able to talk about openly," he said. "This has given me the opportunity to finally have a sense of who I am. I’m OK with having a family heritage. That’s great. That’s my real self. To know where I came from and have all these wonderful people to connect with. "The whole idea was just to find out who I was, where did I come from," McGee explained, "and in the process, I found me."