Birth Parents

Unless I'm wrong, many of you either are parents or have had parents. So you know the truth without me telling you: There are lots of rotten parents out in the great wide world.Some abuse their children.Many don't seem to have enough time for them.Others simply drive their children crazy. As any Mercedes-driving Freudian analyst could tell you, parents basically fuel the psychiatry industry.And, as we know, virtually anyone can have a kid. You don't need a license. You don't need training.

For Cockeysville businessman Ron Ryba, the long walk from the parking lot to the stadium in Philadelphia was a 29-year trail of memories. He had come to meet the son he and his high school sweetheart had never dared to look at when they gave him up for adoption nearly three decades earlier. Now, the baby was a grown man. What would he say to him? What would he look like? For Phil Bloete, too, the 2004 meeting at a Phillies game, was the culmination of a lifelong dream. He was 28, a high school English teacher in New Jersey.

Twenty-seven-year-old Nik McGowan can't wait to see his father for the first time -- but he'll have to wait at least 18 months to begin looking for him.That's because a new Maryland statute designed to help adopted children find their birth parents -- which was signed into law last week -- does not go into effect until October 1999.While the law will not completely open the birth records of adoptees, it allows "confidential intermediaries" to work with adoptees or birth parents to find the relatives and inquire whether they will agree to a reunion.

The father fell to his knees weeping in a dramatic display of grief and contrition. The mother quietly buried her face in her hands. The 17-year-old boy, returning to China for the first time since he was adopted by a Maryland woman eight years ago, stood upright and motionless - whether out of shock or stoicism - with the only dry eye in the room. The interpreter stood quietly on the sidelines waiting for what seemed an eternity in which nobody spoke an intelligible word in any language.

EASTON - -The boy was near age 6 when he was abandoned in 1998. Police found him under a bridge in Luoyang, a city in eastern China. Unable to learn how he got there or where he came from, officers deposited him at a busy orphanage in town. That was the story Julia Norris heard two years later, in June 2000, when she visited the orphanage. That was still the story in April 2001, when she returned to adopt the boy and bring him to America. And it remained the story this spring as Christian Norris finished 10th grade at Easton High School, where he plays lacrosse and has a crew of buddies.

Deb Schwarz assumed that she was entitled to know her parents' medical histories, even though, under Pennsylvania law, she knew she couldn't get their names.Like many adoptees, she was naive.It took months for the agency that handled her adoption 36 years ago to dig her file out of the archives -- and only seconds for her to see that the information was worthless."Both your parents," the agency divulged, "were in their mid-20s and were considered American."But what really outraged Schwarz, and turned the San Francisco marketing research consultant into a national crusader for open adoption records, was what she discovered after a private investigator located her mother in a Harrisburg nursing home.

Beyond the normal kid stuff, adopted children can hear especially hurtful questions from other children, causing stress for them and their adoptive or birth parents."

Ellen Berman and Mitchell Rosenwald met two years ago for the second time in their lives -- and learned that reunions between a birth mother and the child she once placed for adoption can be complicated."

Spurred by a new law that opens records sealed for a half-century, hundreds of Marylanders are seeking answers about past adoptions -- and moving a step closer to reunions they once only dreamed of.The law, similar to statutes in 13 states, allows court records to be opened for the first time since 1947, when they were sealed to protect the privacy of birth parents and adoptees.It also allows a state-appointed intermediary to search state tax, motor vehicle, welfare records, and military and other national records to locate either party in an adoption.

Legislation to give abused women more divorce grounds losesA bill that would have allowed women who are physically abused by their husbands to obtain divorces more readily was defeated in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee yesterday.The measure, sponsored by House Speaker Casper R. Taylor Jr., an Allegany Democrat, and others, would have added two more grounds for a court to grant a final divorce -- "cruelty of treatment" and "excessively vicious conduct."Advocates for victims of domestic abuse had pushed for the legislation, which had cleared the House of Delegates.

EASTON - -The boy was near age 6 when he was abandoned in 1998. Police found him under a bridge in Luoyang, a city in eastern China. Unable to learn how he got there or where he came from, officers deposited him at a busy orphanage in town. That was the story Julia Norris heard two years later, in June 2000, when she visited the orphanage. That was still the story in April 2001, when she returned to adopt the boy and bring him to America. And it remained the story this spring as Christian Norris finished 10th grade at Easton High School, where he plays lacrosse and has a crew of buddies.

It looks like a typical three-bedroom home, with a nursery, a teen game room and fully stocked refrigerator in the kitchen - the works. The only thing different about Harmony House is that no one will live there.

A foster mother who has cared for a city girl for the past year is decrying a decision by the Baltimore Department of Social Services to take the girl away from her six weeks before a juvenile court decides who should raise the toddler: her mother, father or the foster mother, who wants to adopt the child. Foster parent Mary C. Coleman of Randallstown said she agrees that the child's birth parents should have an opportunity to regain custody of their daughter, but she disagrees with the state's decision to reunite the child with her father six weeks before the court date, April 25. Coleman has hired an attorney, hoping to keep the youngest of her six foster and adopted children at home until after the court decision, but she has been told she has no legal right to protest the removal of the girl, a 16-month-old named Serenity.

Growing up in northwest Baltimore, Adam Pertman gave no thought to adoption. He never heard any of the customers at his father's corner grocery store talk about it. He knew no one who had ever been adopted, certainly not any of his classmates at Pimlico Junior High or Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. It was as foreign as his parents' native Poland. But when he and his wife, Judy Baumwoll, decided to adopt seven years ago, a world opened for Pertman, a reporter at the Boston Globe. He soon realized his lack of awareness was not only a common experience but prime evidence of the central problem facing adoptees, adopting parents and birth parents: Secrecy.

Spurred by a new law that opens records sealed for a half-century, hundreds of Marylanders are seeking answers about past adoptions -- and moving a step closer to reunions they once only dreamed of.The law, similar to statutes in 13 states, allows court records to be opened for the first time since 1947, when they were sealed to protect the privacy of birth parents and adoptees.It also allows a state-appointed intermediary to search state tax, motor vehicle, welfare records, and military and other national records to locate either party in an adoption.

A new face will be perched at the Ray family's Thanksgiving table in Elkridge this year, a bundle of joy from Novosibirsk, Siberia, named Robbie. The 20-month-old will be passed around the table like the bowls of mashed potatoes and stuffing, as the family cuddles its newest charge."

...xTC Sen. Christopher McCabe, R-14B, received an award last week from a nonprofit child placement agency for his legislative efforts to improve the state's adoption process.Adoptions Together, Inc. honored the Ellicott City Republican, whose district includes Howard and Montgomery counties, for introducing or co-sponsoring four adoption-oriented bills, in the past four years. They include bills that would permit access to medical records for adoptees and reduce the amount of time birth parents have to revoke consent of their children's adoption.

She was wealthy and single. He was her employee, and their relationship likely was unwelcome just after World War II in the high-society world of New York's Westchester County.A half-century later, that's about all that their son, Del. Frank S. Turner of Columbia, knows about the people who gave him life, then gave him away. It's the kind of private mystery that Turner hopes to end for tens of thousands of Maryland adoptees.Turner, a Democrat, introduced a bill Monday to open all the birth records of adoptees 25 years old or older -- unless either of their birth parents files forms specifically blocking that access.

BOSTON -- The irony is that it all began as a plea for child support. Paula Johnson took her ex-boyfriend Carlton Conley to court in search of more money for 3-year-old Callie Marie.The judge in turn ordered a paternity test. That's how deep the relationship between biology and family law goes. For the most part, the law says: no blood, no money. No DNA, no obligation.The paternity test proved that Carlton wasn't the biological father. But more startling was a maternity test proving that Paula wasn't the biological mother.

WITH 15 months to go before a new Maryland law takes effect that's designed to help adopted children find their birth parents, a lot of people may be getting anxious.As a veteran of such a search, my key advice to adoptees is to proceed with caution. Four years ago, in my home state of New Jersey, which has a similar law, I successfully searched for my biological family, finding answers to questions that had bothered me for a long time.The experience didn't end happily, but it helped fill in details of my life that were missing, allowing me to move on to other things.