Adoptees have the right to know their birth parents
National Post – editorials/letters
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Re: A Victory For Privacy Rights, editorial, Sept. 24.
The adoption information debate is yet one more situation that can involve a conflict of adults’ and children’s rights. When biological parents and their children given up for adoption disagree on disclosure, whose claim should prevail? Your editorial supports respect for privacy as the overriding principle in all cases. I suggest we need to distinguish between adults and children.
I agree the privacy of children who don’t want contact with their birth parents should trump adults’ claims to contact them. But children’s claims to know the identity of their birth parents should trump adults’ claims to privacy. It’s true that adults were promised confidentiality, but, as we now recognize, that was an ethical mistake.
In general, breaching adults’ confidentiality is a lesser ethical wrong than intentionally depriving children who want to know their biological origins from finding them. To refuse to disclose means that, as a society, we are complicit in deliberately depriving adopted people of knowledge we have and they — the people most affected — do not, knowledge that they believe is central to their sense of self and well-being.
Ethics principles such as favouring the most vulnerable person; the person who did not consent to the situation in which they find themselves; and, in many cases, the person to whom the most harm will be done, when harm to one or the other person is unavoidable, all favour children’s rights of access to knowledge of their biological parents. Cases where the harms of disclosure outweigh those of non-disclosure should be dealt with as individual exceptions.
Mr. Justice Edward Belobaba, in giving reasons to support his ruling against access to adoption records, wrote that “adoption information is among the most personal areas in individuals’ lives, and opening up files against their wishes could be devastating. Lives could be shattered.” Because knowing who one’s biological parents are is such important personal information to most people, not opening up files at the request of adopted children can also mean lives are shattered. It’s a hard call, but one that should favour children.
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Margaret Somerville, McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, Montreal.
© National Post 2007
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