It’s Time to End Legalized Secrecy in California
An Open Call to the California Legislative Women’s Caucus
For almost 100 years, the state of California has legally enshrined secrecy in adoption law, making it nearly impossible for adult adopted persons to access their own original birth certificates without lengthy, expensive court processes. That’s not privacy. That’s erasure.
Today, we issue an open call to the California Legislative Women’s Caucus: the time to lead is now.
1 | Secrecy vs. Privacy — Know the Difference
The institution of private adoption has engineered a lie: that privacy over original birth certificates is inherently virtuous. But what we call “privacy” in this context is actually secrecy — a mechanism to shield institutions, not protect people.
Adult adoptees seeking their own original birth certificates do not seek the disclosure of strangers’ private stories. They seek their own truth. But in California, the law treats that as if it were a breach.
We don’t need to preserve secrecy in the name of privacy. We need transformative transparency in the name of human dignity.
2 | Where California Stands vs. The Rest of the Country
California is classified as a “restricted” state. Adult adoptees must petition a court and show “good and compelling cause” to access their original birth records and are rarely granted this right.
Meanwhile, fourteen states now legally allow adult adoptees unfettered access to their original birth certificates, without court barriers in addition to the two states that never passed discriminatory policy restricting adult adoptees rights in the first place.
Compared to those states, California is not only behind — it's one of the most obstructionist places in America for adult adopted persons.
There is no moral high ground in saying “this is complicated” when states across the country are succeeding in dismantling the secrecy and restoring equality while California stands by clinging to a system based on erasure, upholding outdated policies that continue to sever identity, deny history, and fracture families across generations.
3 | The Harm of Inaction
Adoptees live with legal blind spots about their identity, family medical history, heritage, and full personhood.
Women who lost children to adoption continue being silenced by systems that treat their histories as something to be hidden, not reconciled.
Democratic governance suffers when marginalized voices have no seat at the table but it collapses into moral cowardice when those voices speak up year after year and lawmakers still choose to keep harmful laws in place.
By inaction, we allow institutional secrecy to outlast the people it was supposed to “protect.” That’s not gradualism. That’s complicity.
4 | A Direct Call to the Women’s Caucus
You are the leaders we elected to advance justice, equity, and the dignity of all Californians. You have opportunities others don’t:
You are often the first to take up symbolic human‑rights issues, naming harm before the rest of Sacramento is ready to face it.
You bring moral clarity to policy debates, grounded in empathy, equity, and lived experience.
You have the power inside the system to shift what counts as “legitimate” — whose voice matters and whose truth is allowed to surface.
And you can end the dangerous fallacy that keeping people from their own origins somehow protects women who lost children to adoption. This belief never came from those women themselves; it came from institutions invested in maintaining control through secrecy.
Transparency does not harm women. Erasure does. Every day we continue to treat adult adopted persons as legal secrets, we reinforce the same coercive framework that created the rupture in the first place.
To the youngest voices in the Caucus, this is your moment. The next generation of leaders should break the generational secrecy, not preserve it.
We ask:
Sponsor a clean adoptee rights bill in 2026, without disclosure vetoes, redaction, or court‑gatekeeping.
Let the bill be rooted in evidence, truth, and dignity — not the old politics of shame and secrecy.
Own this narrative — not as charity for adoptees, but as a core test of what equality means in modern California.
5 | We’re Watching. We’re Ready.
The window to propose bills is open. Aligning stakeholders, building coalitions, telling stories — that work is already done by community, by lived experience, by centuries of silence.
What remains is political will.
So: we’re publicly asking, right now:
Which member(s) of the Women’s Caucus will step up as a sponsor? Who will lead? Who will right this almost 100‑year wrong?
We will hold you accountable. But more than that — we will cheer you, raise your name, and support you.
Secrecy was never consent. Silence was never justice. Let California lead, finally, on adoptee equality.