Birth Family Search

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How Many Adoptees Search?

• Between two and four percent of all adoptees searched in the year 1990. (American Adoption Congress, 1996)
• A survey conducted in the late 1980's estimated that 500,000 adult adoptees were seeking or have found their birth families. (Groza and Rosenberg, 1998)
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Why Do Adoptees Search?

• In a study of American adolescents, the Search Institute found that 72 percent of adopted adolescents wanted to know why they were adopted, 65 percent wanted to meet their birth parents, and 94 percent wanted to know which birth parent they looked like. (American Adoption Congress, 1996)
• The psychological literature has established that the desire of 60 to 90 percent of adoptees wanting to obtain identifying information regarding their biological parents is a normative aspect of being adopted. (American Adoption Congress, 1996)

What are the Attitudes of Triad Members Towards Searching?

• In a comprehensive study of the issues involved in adoption, the Maine Department of Human Resources Task Force on Adoption found in 1989 that every birth parent who was surveyed wanted to be found by the child/adult they had placed for adoption and 95% of the adoptees who were surveyed expressed a desire to be found by their birth parents. 98% of the adoptive parents supported reunions between their adopted child and members of the adoptee's birth family. (CWLA, 1998)
• Sachdev's 1991 study found that a substantial majority of birth mothers (85.5%) and adoptees (81.1%) supported access by adult adoptees to identifying information about their birth parents. (CWLA, 1998)
• Avery's 1996 research on the attitudes of adoptive parents in New York regarding access to identifying information found that 84% of the adoptive mothers and 73% of the adoptive fathers agreed or strongly agreed that an adult adoptee should be able to obtain identifying information on his or her birth parents. (CWLA, 1998)

Bibliography

Babb, L.A. (1996). Statistics on U.S. Adoption. The Decree, American Adoption Congress.

Freundlich, M. (1998). Access to identifying information: what the research tells us. CWLAdoption News, 2(4).

Groza, V. and Rosenberg, K. (1998). Clinical and practice issues in adoption: bridging the gap between adoptees placed as infants and as older children. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger.

Credits: Child Welfare Information Gateway (http://www.childwelfare.gov)