The Declassified Adoptee

Amanda's Guide to Adoptee Rights Legislation It's Your Birth.  It's Your Record.  It's Your Right. To view a PDF of this document, click here . What is “Adoptee Rights?” “Adoptee Rights” refers to the movement that seeks to restore retroactive access of adult adoptees to their own original birth certificates (OBCs) through “Access Legislation.”  Over 6 million U.S. born adult adoptees have difficulty accessing the birth certificate they were born with.  This is because laws in 44 States do not allow adult adoptees to access the birth certificates they were born with the same way all other citizens do. How is “Access Legislation” different than “Open Adoption?” “Open adoption” is a term that refers to contact arrangements made between the original parents and adoptive parents of an adoptee who is under the age of 18.  “Access Legislation” refers to bills and laws that allow adult adopt...

The following is from ESSENCE, the Grio, and NBC's Mara Schiavocampo, look at a growing number of prison nursery programs and explore whether female inmates should be allowed to raise their children while doing time... (As featured in the May issue.). At a time when most women would be decorating a nursery, a six-months pregnant Takaya Patterson, now 29, was moving into a prison cell. Patterson had just received a one-year sentence for theft after admitting she stole more than $5,000 from the bank where she once worked. Patterson was scared to have her baby in prison. She left behind her 2-year-old daughter with her mom but knew that in most cases her newborn would be whisked off to foster care within hours. "I was stressed. I had lost everything and didn't know what was going to happen with my child," she says. Fate was on her side. Patterson was sentenced to the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, Ohio. Its Achieving Baby Care Success (ABC's) Prog...

The following article is from Change.org The debate between pro-choice and pro-life groups is one of the most divisive in politics. But one thing that everyone should be able to agree on is that information provided to pregnant women in reproductive health clinics should be medically accurate. However, a new investigative video reveals a disturbing trend of fake family planning clinics around the country, called Crisis Pregnancy Centers, which advertise themselves as providing "abortion services" only to give false medical information to women in order to pressure them not to have an abortion. This deception was initially documented in a Congressional report which found that 87 percent of the 3,500 Crisis Pregnancy Centers nationwide misinform women about birth control and reproductive rights. This includes telling women that abortion will dramatically increase their risk of breast cancer, could impact their future fertility, and may cause them severe mental health ...