With no equal right to secure our own identities—and with our own pre-adoption birth records restricted, redacted, and denied to us—DNA tests are the only effective way we can determine our full identities and origins.
And that simply makes everything worse for everyone, as even our opponents admit.
This is best illustrated below. In the first illustration, an adult adopted person requests his or her own original birth record—as proposed in two Michigan bills—and he or she receives it in a few weeks, like all other Michiganders. That’s it.
The adopted person may do nothing with that single piece of paper, other than to confirm information already known. Or the adopted person may seek more information about parents listed on the record—though increasingly, adoptees discover that their birthparents are now deceased. But they are not forced to contact multiple family members across generations to identify a birthparent, as they are compelled to do under current law.
This is what the second illustration shows, and it is the result of states like Michigan that deny equal rights to adopted people and instead incentivize the most effective and inexpensive tool available to them: direct-to-consumer DNA testing.
With massive current databases that continue to grow, submitting an inexpensive DNA test to AncestryDNA or 23andMe frequently leads to first or second cousin matches—or even biological siblings, half-siblings, aunts, or uncles. These matches then connect through messaging apps, social media, and email, seeking to understand this mysterious biological connection to the adoptee. From there, multiple biological family members begin to get involved, as it becomes a genealogical conundrum to solve, a mystery played out millions of times every day within a multi-billion dollar genealogical industry. Ultimately, all of these cousins, aunts, uncles, and half-siblings are talking to each other and seeking to answer one thing: “who in the family who surrendered a child for adoption in 1973?” It’s hardly “private.”
DNA does not lie. But it is still only an inexpensive and effective tool. It is not a replacement for equal birth record rights for all adult adopted people in every state. Legislators and the people who oppose such equal rights know this, yet they prefer to keep their heads in the sand.