This is the perfect opportunity for everyone to start writing to their legislators and submitting Op-Eds to their local newspapers!
Here's some topics you can cover:
Rhode Island just passed a law giving adult adoptees unconditional access to their own original birth certificates. They have joined Alaska, Kansas, Oregon, New Hampshire, Alabama, and Maine as the states who treat adoptees equally. PA has an Adoptee Rights bill too, HB 963. Let's be the next state to correct to treat adult adoptees equally!
The Adoptee Rights Demonstration is in one month! Activists from all over the world will be at the National Convention of State Legislators protesting and inside the convention at the Adoptee Rights Coalition booth providing education. Let your local newspaper and your legislators know that Pennsylvania adoptees and mothers and VOTERS will be there marching for the return of Adoptee Rights!
Happy Independence Day! This is a time where we reflect on freedom and justice for all in our country. But what about the rights of adoptees and the injustice of adoptee inequality? Discrimination is not an American value.
Is your legislator on the House Children and Youth Committee? Call/email/write to them and ask them to give HB 963 a hearing! For more info on the bill and info on who to contact, click here.
My letter to the Centre Daily Times:
ReplyDeleteI hope everyone had a wonderful, happy Independence Day! We need to remind ourselves especially at this time of the year that there are still millions of U.S. citizens who are denied equal rights - specifically, adopted people who are precluded by law from knowing the facts of their birth, genealogy, medical histories, and whom they are related to by blood. We renew our vow to speak up in legislatures in "sealed" states to restore the respect and dignity to them that is accorded to every other citizen without question or impediment--the right to their own original birth certificate. Pennsylvania is one of those states, and we now have a chance of correcting this injustice in the form of HB963, Adoptee Civil Rights Bill, introduced in the legislature this session by our own Rep. Kerry Benninghoff.
Please call or write to Rep Benninghoff and the House Committee on Children & Youth to get this long overdue bill to the floor for a vote. Then PA can join the esteemed ranks of enlightened states - KS and AK - which never sealed adoptee OBCs, and other states - OR, AL, ME, NH, IL and just the other day, RI - which unconditionally honor adoptee rights.
Priscilla Sharp
Mother of loss/search angel/adoptee rights advocate
Mothers of Loss (to Adoption) on Facebook