Cassidy Sandberg was raised in Lincoln as an only child, but her family tree had hidden branches. Adopted at ten weeks old, Sandberg always fantasized about meeting her birth family. She fruitlessly scoured reunion websites and spent three years pursuing her birth information from the private agency that handled the adoption, only to receive a document redacted beyond use.
But in 2011, Sandberg was among a coalition of advocates that persuaded the state Legislature to allow adult adoptees to receive copies of their original birth certificates, and Sandberg got her answers. She was one of five siblings from a struggling Woonsocket family. Her biological aunt suffered from the same autoimmune disease that had produced constant bouts of hives since her late teens. She attended grade school with her first cousin.
Now at thirty-five years old, Sandberg sees how adoption shaped her life.
“I ended up with the best parents. I was so loved, I had the greatest life growing up and [was] given so much opportunity, and having found my birth family, I know that I wouldn’t have had any of it,” she says. “But it’s complicated. With all adoptees, there’s attachment issues, because from birth you are rejected. I struggled with depression and self-worth issues. It’s just so deep-seated. At the end of the day, no matter how wonderful your adoptive home can be, there’s trauma that comes with it and there’s no regulation on how to deal with that.”
There are, nonetheless, many regulations governing the creation of families, and these policies reflect the culture’s answers to some of life’s most fundamental questions: What is a family? Identity? Who is suitable to be a parent? What are the best interests of the child? What are the rights of birth and adoptive parents, and adoptees? Whose rights are prioritized?
Adoption is a rarely taken route to familyhood. Only about 2 percent of the United States population is adopted. In 2020, 95,306 children were adopted nationwide; in Rhode Island there were a to tal of 332 adoptions, according to the National Council for Adoption. For the first ten months of 2023, that dropped to 104.
In the last several years, Rhode Island has amended its laws to act less as an arbiter and more a facilitator of an expan sive view of families created through adoption. For example, last June, the state made it easier for nonbiological parents in same-sex relationships who used reproductive technology to conceive their children to get an adoption decree that ensures that their families are legally constituted.
The provision affects a narrow slice of prospective parents, but it would have made a big difference to Sara Watson. The Narragansett physician and her partner conceived their two sons with Watson’s eggs and an anonymous sperm donor. Watson’s partner carried their eldest son to term. But when he was born six years ago, the law did not recognize Watson as his parent. The couple had to undergo a home study, place an ad advising the sperm donor that his parental rights would be terminated, and attend a Family Court hearing — all for Watson to adopt her biological child.
“We were not married, so we were considered a single-parent household, and I became a legal nonentity to my son,” she recalls. “If anything had happened to my partner during her nine months of pregnancy, I wouldn’t have had any rights to make medical decisions for my son or put him on my health insurance. I was so an gry at the idea that my gender was the one thing standing between me and my having a legal link to my kid. I spent my maternity leave making sure the law got changed.”
Under the new law, same-sex couples no longer have to undergo a home study or publish parental rights relinquishment notices unless court-ordered; the adoption is confirmed by filing a Family Court petition. The law follows the 2020 Rhode Island Uniform Parentage Act, a lengthy measure that overhauled the decades-old state parentage laws and gave same-sex couples a way to establish legal parentage at birth by signing a voluntary affidavit of parentage.
“The new confirmatory adoption law is really about streamlining the process so that families can make sure they’re protected in jurisdictions that are hostile to ward same-sex couples,” says Senate sponsor Dawn Euer (D-Newport). “There are so many ways to make a family that are recognized and should be respected. We’re fortunate in Rhode Island to be ahead of the curve.”
The last dozen years have seen other significant shifts in the adoption triad — the types of birth parents and adoptees, the connections between the two, and adult adoptees’ access to their own information. The average age of birth mothers has risen, and the vast majority of children who are available for adoption are older children who come from foster care; kinship adoptions are emphasized. In private adoption, birth parents are choosing the adoptive parents; and intercountry adoption, hugely popular fifteen years ago, has all but ended. In 2004, 22,987 overseas children were adopted by Americans. In 2022, the number dropped to 1,517, according to U.S. Department of State figures.
“It’s not because there aren’t children in need of families,” says Ryan Hanlon of the National Council for Adoption. “Adoption is a reflection of our values. Now there is a mindset that children are better off in the culture they were born into, and intercountry adoption is attacked as a Western colonialist activity instead of identifying it as a means of providing a family for a child who is otherwise going to grow up without one.”
Child welfare adoptions here have long taken the opposite tack, where the Department of Children, Youth and Families has worked with private and public adoption agencies to keep the pool of adoptive parents as inclusive as possible in the search for permanent homes, says Emily Lyon, chief operating officer of Adoption Rhode Island, which has been facilitating public adoptions for forty years.
“There’s also been a real shift from a place of secrecy and closed adoption approaches to open adoptions, where there is some degree of contact and connection for a child,” she says. “From a child development perspective, everyone goes through identity-building, and when you know who you are and where you came from, that’s much easier than having to figure out the story of your journey.”
Historically, adoption laws have favored adoptive parents, who could return a disabled child, or in some states, a child of the “wrong race.” But that has begun to change, says attorney Gregory Luce, founder of the Adoptee Rights Law Center. One emerging trend are measures that allow adult adoptees to legally vacate their adoptions. More common are laws that restore adult adoptees’ rights to their original birth certificates. Rhode Island is one of only fifteen states that gives unrestrict ed access to those records. The rest limit this information to varying degrees — requiring a court order, permission from the birth parent, a high school diploma or participation in a mutual consent adoption registry.
In some respects, technology is rendering these laws obsolete as parents and children find one another via genetic testing and social media. Luce believes that the legal barriers are falling away — in part — as older legislators retire.
“It’s always been a bipartisan issue. The one common thing that determines opposition is older legislators who maybe remember that period of time when there was extreme secrecy and shame associated with out-of-wedlock birth,” Luce says. “It’s legislators who are younger and understand what identity means to people — those are the ones who get the issue.”
Rhode Island’s access law evolved over four decades of pushing. In 1993, the state established a passive adoption registry at the Family Court, which allowed adopted adults and birth parents to register in pursuit of a reunion.
“It had a whole lot of hoops you had to jump through and it didn’t really work — none of the registries have worked,” says Nancy Horgan, a birth mother and access advocate. “But at least it identified a problem that needed to be addressed.”
It took another eighteen years to reach the next milestone: a 2011 law that allowed adoptees twenty-five years and old er to get their original birth certificates, and gave birth parents the option of indicating at the time of adoption their willing ness to be contacted in the future. A decade later, advocates finally reached their goal. In 2021, a new law dropped the age to eighteen. A year later, it was amended again to extend access to the children of deceased adoptees.
Kara Foley, an adult adoptee who lob bied for access, said the original proposal would have set the age at forty.
“We compromised at twenty-five years old. I thought something was better than nothing, and we could make incremental changes over time,” she says. “Although it took many years, I think bringing the age down to eighteen was a step in the right direction. Keeping safety in mind, openness, truth and transparency are at the forefront of everything that adoption professionals do.”
Since 2012, the state has released 1,792 original birth certificates; thirty-six birth parents submitted a contact preference form, with twenty-six opting to be contacted directly.
One aspect of adoption that has resisted progress is the level of services and support for adoptive families once the decree is final, says Adam Pertman, president of the National Center on Adoption and Permanency, a nonprofit promoting policies that emphasize family success.
“It has not kept up at all — especially because the vast majority of adoptions are from foster care,” he says. “Traditionally, it’s all about child placement, but when most of the kids have special needs, that doesn’t do the trick. And those families are having a hard time. How do we help the family succeed? That means making resources available so that they can get what they need to thrive, or just make it through.”
And attitudes can change more slowly than legislation. When her adoptive mother died after a short battle with cancer, Sandberg was sure that the two had no secrets.
And then she discovered another sibling.
At sixteen, her adoptive mom had a daughter — her sole biological child. Like a lot of babies born to teenage mothers in 1968, she was delivered and promptly dispatched to an adoptive family in absolute secrecy. Sandberg’s mom held that story close for forty-seven years.
“She suffered silently — I don’t know if she felt shame or it’s been too long if I bring it up now or watching me in my teen years having issues with adoption. It must have been so painful for her because, probably, she was like ‘Did my child go through that?’”
With the help of 23andMe and Facebook, the first daughter reached out to the second daughter. Now, Sandberg’s family life is wide and deep, and rich with siblings who celebrate holidays together.
“My mom was never able to meet her or have a relationship with her — and she testified for the original birth certificate bill because she didn’t want me to live with that emptiness. I can’t imagine what was going through her head — ‘I wonder if my daughter is going to find me?’ She did that knowing there was a chance — oh, that makes me so sad for her.”
Ellen Liberman is an award-winning journalist who has commented on politics and reported on government affairs for more than two decades.
