In Dr. Smith's book "You're Our Child: The Adoption Experience" attached as Exhibit 11 of Tab A in Vol I of the transcript brief page 3, he states:
Adoption has undergone changes over time. Initially, adoption was strictly a legal process and the primary concern of adoption laws was the specification of procedures that would insure the contractual integrity of the transaction. Protection of the adoptive parents' rights was of paramount importance, symbolized by the sealing of birth records and the issuance of a new birth certificate.
There has been in recent years a sharp decline in the availability of healthy white infants for adoption. The decline has been so significant as to force social agencies, heretofore predominantly dependent on adoptive placements as principal professional service, to seek other professional service foundations. As recently as ten years ago, most people hoping to adopt a child found a healthy white infant after waiting only a brief period of time. Today a couple may wait years before their name reaches to the top of the waiting list maintained by an adoption agency or attorney.
Response: Oh, geez the lawyers might have to work for a living!
The education of woman was greatly retarded on the basis that wider knowledge would only make them dissatisfied with their role in society.
Mr. Justice MacIntyre in Irwin Toy at p.1008.
Response: Ditto for adopted people.
We were all children once, even lawyers.
Charles Lamb from the over page of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
Children's ability to endure comes from their lack of alternatives.
Maya Angelou from 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'
Mankind is possessed of no greater urge than to try to understand the age-old questions:
'Who am I?' & 'Why am I?'
Even now the sands and ashes of the continents are being shifted where we made our first steps as a man. Religions of mankind often include ancestor worship in one way or another. For many, the future is blind without the sight of the past.
Those emotions and anxieties that generate our thirst to know the past are not superficial and whimsical. They are real and they are "good cause" under the law of man and God.
From Brady v. South Carolina , Elizabeth J. Samuels, 'The Idea of Adoption: An inquiry into the history of adult adoptee access to birth records'. 2001 53 Rutgers L. Review 367.
Response: Give this judge the Atticus Finch Award for Humanitarianism in a Judicial or Legal Capacity
