[Image-1]
Adoption. The word itself summons emotions, opinions, sensitivities—insensitivities. Many of us know someone who’s been affected by it. Someone who gave up a child, or someone who was raised by parents who weren’t the ones that birthed them. But most of us know very little about such a heavy issue—and even less about how our province handles it.
Mike Slayter is 60 years old. He was adopted by two loving parents seven months after he was born, and raised in Halifax along with his twin sister, Wendy. In 1993, Mike was reunited with his entire birth family, and for the past 25 years he’s been fighting to have Nova Scotia’s adoption records opened up so that hundreds of others can have the same opportunity.
â¨Twenty-one years ago this month, he thought he was on the brink of a major change. Slayter and his supporters had presented a report to then-community services minister Roland Thornhill looking to open up the province’s adoption records. Their efforts, unfortunately, were fruitless. “None of those recommendations were really implemented,” says Slayter. “And here we are 21 years later wondering why.”
According to the current community services minister, Joanne Bernard, Nova Scotia’s adoption records remain closed, primarily, for privacy reasons. “It’s really about balancing the rights of individuals who feel they have a right to know who their parents are or who their children have gone to,” she says, “and those who’ve decided they don’t want that privacy relinquished by the government.”
But privacy has nothing to do with it, says one mother who was forced to give up her child.
“It’s a cover-up,” says Karen Lynn. “We didn’t ask for privacy. We didn’t ask for confidentiality. All we needed was shelter and support. We would like to perhaps be kept from the prying eyes of the public, but not our own children.”
Lynn gave up her son for adoption in 1963. At the time, the conditions expectant mothers faced were much different. She was a university student, facing not just a financial burden but familial outrage.
“I had no support. The child’s father got scared and left, so my mother took me to the family doctor and he arranged for an adoption. Nobody asked me,” says Lynn. “They just organized it all and then I was sent to a maternity home and the child was born in a Toronto hospital. They tried to keep me from the child. They wouldn’t bring the child to me, and when I objected vigourously they injected me with stilboestrol and they wouldn’t let me feed the child.”
Diethylstilbestrol, or DES, is a synthetic drug that was widely prescribed to women from the 1940s to 1970s to reduce the risk of pregnancy complications and suppress lactation. It was later found to be carcinogenic, causing increased risks of breast cancer in mothers and tumors in those exposed in utero.
Aside from the health risks she was exposed to, Lynn—who’s also president of the Canadian Council of Natural Mothers—says there was no confidentiality agreement signed at the time of her child’s birth. Rather, there were forced relinquishment papers to “surrender” her son. That’s one reason Slayter thinks provinces like Nova Scotia lag behind on opening up their adoption records.
“We have to think how moms were treated back then,” he says. “These moms were sometimes drugged, emotionally and physically abused into signing relinquishment papers, and I think there’s this sense of government fearing lawsuits.”
Despite the trauma, legal actions isn’t what he and other adoptees want, Slater says. It’s more about knowing where you came from. “No one’s looking to screw the government,” he says. “What we want is basic human rights.”
Compared to countries like New Zealand, Australia and England, Nova Scotia is decades behind in adoption rights. Even in our own country, we remain within the handful of provinces that refuse to change with the tide.
“British Columbia opened up their records first,” says Slayter. “They did it because we presented a report to our own Liberal government in 1994 with these recommendations, and BC said ‘This is great stuff,’ and they used that model and opened up their records in 1997.”
British Columbia was followed by Alberta, Ontario and the Yukon. Manitoba will open their adoption records on June 1.
Once opened, the records allow for adopted adults to find out their birth parents’ names, and the parents to locate the child they gave up for adoption. Knowing that information can help with genealogical bewilderment—or “like being a tree and not feeling your roots,” as Lynn’s now-51-year-old son puts it. But there’s also the importance of knowing one’s medical history.
In fact, Lynn ended up meeting her son for the first time only because of a possible health scare. Despite Ontario’s records still being unopened at the time, Lynn’s condition was serious enough that doctors wanted to reach out to her son.
“My father had died at age 48 of a heart attack, and they felt it was probably congenital, so they had to warn my son,” she says. “So they called my son and asked if he wanted to meet me, and he said ‘Of course.’”
For Lynn, it’s something that strikes very powerful—and very painful—chords with the mothers and adoptees she works with on a daily basis.
“We have no idea how many suicides have happened because this devastates so many young women,” she says. “Adopted people don’t know the rivers and streams of their ancestry—they can’t answer the basic question: ‘Who am I?’”
Trying to keep pressure on the province, Mike Slayter has authored an online petition to have Nova Scotia’s records opened up. Right now, it’s backed up by 805 signatures (you can sign it at thepetitionsite.com).
But despite Slayter’s efforts, Joanne Bernard says opening up Nova Scotia’s adoption records isn’t on her agenda.
“I’ve had people that have contacted me on both sides of the issue, and Mike Slayter has been doing wonderful advocacy work for a long time, but no government is willing to take this forward,” she says. “To take away the rights of people who’ve clearly indicated to government whether 25 years ago or last week, ‘I don’t want to be contacted by this person,’ we have no right to do that, absolutely none.”
Slayter remains undeterred. Not everyone may think he’s fighting the good fight, but it’s a battle he says he’ll continue till the day he dies.
“I think there’s just been this sort of resurgence of the passion and the need for Nova Scotia to realize,” he says, “that they are so behind the times.”
Related Stories
Family secrets after the Sixties Scoop
This article appears in May 14-20, 2015.
It never ceases to amaze me….or would that be ‘totally astonish me’…how a Cabinet Minister in the Stephen McNeil Government can get away with spewing forth such unconscionable tripe as the N.S. Minister of Community Services, Joanne Bernard, does…time and time again. To offer up a statement such as ” …but no government is willing to take this forward..’ speaks volumes of her complete incompetence as person who understands the issues around adoption let alone that of a Cabinet Minister. What an appalling display of arrogance and insensitivity around acknowledging the truth. And so to the Minister Bernard I say this: “keep your bloody meaningless accolades about my advocacy away from me…and the rest of us ! ” Comprendez Joanne ?
Mike, I am afraid she is too stunned to get that when she runs her mouth the hole gets deeper.
Increasingly this ‘privacy’ is impossible to have anyways. With social media, an adoptees search can be an extremely public affair. Best to let each party have access to their records and full identities, a human right that is only abridged in the case of adoptees.
Where was Joanne Bernard when women she claims to be protecting were abandoned by their families and had to surrender their babies in exchange for medical care and a roof over their heads? When they were denied holding – or even seeing – their babies after delivery? When they were tricked into signing relinquishments by being told the forms were for medical care for their babies? When they were threatened with legal action if they dared to search for their children? When many were told their babies were stillborn or died soon after birth? Where, indeed, were all the people who could have stood by these vulnerable mothers, helping them through what was the most difficult time of their lives? Where? Busy condemning them, gossiping about them, judging them, that’s where. And now? Suddenly they’re “protecting” them? No. In essence people like Joanne Bernard are still shaming them. Still making them feel what they did was so terrible, so disgusting, that they don’t deserve the peace that would come from knowing what became of their lost children. And punishing their children by denying them the most basic of human rights – that of connecting with their own blood kin. That’s what they deserve, and that’s what they’ll get, by golly! Sick and sad. And WRONG!
If this Joanne Bernard had half enough brains to work with adoptees and find out how they feel not knowing who they are, where they are coming from, no past , feel the void in their hearts and hear the sadness in their voice , not knowing.. maybe she’d change her mind if she has one… but by what I ‘ve been hearing from her it sure doesnt look like she does.. just another brainless politician I guess, so sad…
No government eh? Then what does she call the BC govt who took the recommendations and ran with them? Or the other provinces who followed suit? No government eh Bernard? Arrogant much? You work for the only government do you? Resign, you are an embarrassment to intelligent life. And yes it’s personal you are messing with not only our lives but our medical history.
As for her statement that the search requests are addressed in a timely fashion… 1992 to 2015. How timely was that for my natural mother and I? As she said last week…look how much time we lost.
I’d like to find my brother, he was given up 1963-5? I think.
My sibling was adopted from birth and has never once even raised the topic of looking for her birth family. She’s fond of the privacy NS affords and has absolutely zero desire to be contacted by her birth family. They shouldn’t open the records but if both parties contact the government in search of each other the info should be released. That’s it.
I consider myself one of the ‘lucky ones’, as an adoptee I was gratefully reunited (through parent finders) in 1987 with my natural mother when I was 28 yrs and found a sister too! My adoptive parents encouraged me to do so as it was something I needed. Loving parents (natural or adopted) always put the needs of their children above their own! It did not change my relationships-my parents (and family) were still my parents and I now had ‘history or roots’ something I craved. My natural mother did not replace my mother and I thankfully had a relationship with her for 27 years until her death one year ago.
It is a basic human right to know who you are and people who are not adopted don’t understand this. My natural mother did not ask for privacy, she asked for a loving home for her child whom she could not raise because of society and church biases against unmarried women in 1959. We can’t change the past but we can right a wrong by opening up the adoption records, as has been done in many countries and provinces in Canada, and allowing adult adoptees to find their ‘roots’. It is very sad that we have a Minister of Community Services in NS who, when it comes to adoption issues, is clearly not educated and speaks without knowing the facts. Another very sad issue is that all the work was completed in 1992, they heard from all the stakeholders (natural parents, adoptees and adoptive parents) and made the necessary recommendations to open the records. What a waste of taxpayers money for the government to then do nothing!Twenty-three years later we still do not have a government with the ‘balls’ to move this forward into the 21st century! No wonder our province is still considered ‘backward’!!!
Your birth certificate is your property, not the government’s. A driver’s license or hunting license is a privilege, not a right. Your birth certificate is YOUR property and accessing it is your RIGHT. Adoption should not equal a loss of a right. Who you are is your business, and yours alone. The actions of other parties have placed their names on it and invaded your privacy in the greatest of all measures: your birth. You absolutely have the right to know the names of those who are responsible for your existence. You also have the right to engage in relationships with those whose DNA will not, in concert with your own, produce offspring who may suffer greatly because their parents are too closely related. It happens all the time! Governments: Stop micro-managing our personal lives! Do what you were elected to do. Serve.
It always amazes me how people like Joanne Bernard fail to do their research. If they did they’d see opening records has been working in other countries for decades.
We do not appreciate government representatives who claim to support our rights to privacy and confidentiality which were never legally offered in the first place. In actual fact, we signed a “Consent to adopt” form that did not offer us anything in return. And THEN we are denied, by the same government, the right to reach out to our adult children. We were never asked, or consulted about our wishes for secrecy. Please, do not speak for us. INSTEAD, give adult adoptees the right to find out their origins, and allow natural parents the ability to offer a connection to their adult children who had been adopted. People deserve to know their own stories. Records in other provinces and territories have been opened for decades now without any adverse effects. Stop manufacturing excuses for government control! Karen Lynn, Canadian Council of Natural Mothers.