Need informed choice in adoption law

Editor: In your August issue, the article entitled "Session ends with issues that weren't settled," Jennifer Halperin was right on to include the "Baby Richard" legislation (see Illinois Issues, August 1994, page 27). The enacting of PA 88-0550, rushed and one-sided as it is, will do little if anything to prevent further sad adoption cases. What is needed to prevent such cases is the enacting of such bills as SB 1673. It says that voluntary relinquishments need to be an informed choice with proper unbiased counseling and legal representation for both of the natural parents before any final choice of adoption is made. This would truly be in the child's best interest.

What PA 88-0550 does is put up more obstacles for natural parents to hurdle if they wish to parent their own children, thus making more newborn infants available for adoption. Our legislators, who voted yes on this adoption bill, have forgotten that the purpose of an adoption is to provide a home for a child, not a child for a home.

The Baby Richard case is a typical case of newborn adoption gone wrong as a result of natural parents' rights being violated by strangers wanting their infant. Baby Richard was not born to unfit parents. There are thousands of newborn infants being needlessly separated from their natural parents and having to live the lifelong experience of adoption while thousands of other children who truly need homes remain waiting.

It is always in the best interest of all children to remain with their natural families whenever possible. It is a travesty of justice to our newborns and ironic that in this state, when children are removed from unfit parents they are given every chance to be reunited while no help is offered newborn infants to remain with their loving, fit natural parents who are in a temporary crisis, usually financial. Is this because they are more marketable?

We have a system for the enacting of legislation, set up in this state to ensure that only necessary and just legislation gets enacted into law. It allows committee hearings where our citizens, those in support and opposition, can give testimony.

Birth parents and adult adoptees, those most profoundly affected by adoption, were excluded in the last minute overnight creation of this 78-page bill, and it is obvious whose best interest this served. I agree with Richard Lifschity (the attorney for Richard's adoptive parents) when he stated on the Bertice Berry Show in Chicago in 1993 that "you should not be able to give up your child unless you disclose who the birth father is." PA 88-0550 not only allows this but encourages it by offering a mother an affidavit upon which she can refuse to identify the father of her child and

then conversely punishes her for not doing so. This entire bill is demeaning of natural relationships as evidenced by its use of demoting terms such as putative father and biological parents. What happened to natural parents? These children were not produced in a test tube. 

Sally Gantz

DeLand

How to write to us

Your comments on articles and columns are welcome. Please keep letters brief (250 words): we reserve the right to excerpt them so that as many as space allows can be pub- lished. Send your letters to:

Letters to the Editor

Illinois Issues

Sangamon State University

Springfield, Illinois 62704-9243

e-mail address on Internet:

plong @ eagle. sangamon.edu

e-mail address on Access Illinois:

peggy.long @ accessil.com

or: dial (217) 787-6255 for free access via modem