Imagine only knowing your life as starting at Chapter 2—the moment you met your adoptive family—with no access to critical family medical health information and maybe even your nationality, time and place of your birth or the names of your birth parents.
Since 1964, this has been the experience of adoptees in Ohio, when state law changed to require adoption records be sealed.
Betsie Norris, executive director of Adoption Network Cleveland and an adoptee herself, spent 24 years working to overturn Ohio’s closed records law to provide adult adoptees access to their birth certificates. Similar laws permitting access to birth records are being passed nationwide as many states modify their policies concerning adoption records.
Norris’ work led to the passage of Ohio Bill SB 23, and, on March 20, adoptees can begin requesting their birth documents.
Leading to this landmark change, “A Night of Film and Discussion with Adoption Network Cleveland” will take place Thursday, Feb. 5, at 6:30 p.m. in Case Western Reserve University’s Wolstein Research Building Auditorium.
Two short films will be screened at the event: An Adoptee ROARed in Ohio—The Betsie Norris Story, about Norris’ journey, and A Simple Piece of Paper, which explores the impact on adoptees in Illinois when they first receive their birth records. Both films were featured last year at the 38th Cleveland International Film Festival.
“The opening of birth records to the person they belong to has been a driving public policy initiative of the organization I founded—Adoption Network Cleveland—and to me personally since the day I held my original birth certificate for the first time in the 1980s,” Norris said.
A panel discussion following the films will be moderated by Gabriella Celeste, Schubert Center’s director of child policy. Zoe Breen Wood, assistant professor at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences and an adoptive parent, and Denise Barone, a birthmother, will join Norris for the discussion.
The event is co-sponsored by Adoption Network Cleveland and the Mandel School. The Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services is a community partner for this event.
For information, contact Celeste at gabriella.celeste@case.edu or 216.368.5314, or Wood at zoe.wood@case.edu or 216.368.2689, or visit schubert.case.edu.