A LEGITIMATE LIFE

This website is for adoptees, reunited adult adoptees, first parents, adopters, researchers, and those professionals who work with adoptees!  I want to thank all of my adoptee friends for their support and good reviews of my book! We get it, while so many remain uneducated about our issues. Anyone who exposes a family secret or secrets may be called delusional, a liar, crazy, or get reabandoned by those who do not want the truth told. I took the risk!

Melinda was born during the Baby Scoop Era (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Scoop_Era)- A period of time in US History where it was deemed morally unacceptable for a single woman to become pregnant and try to keep her child. Thousands of young women were sent to maternity homes where they were usually forced to work while pregnant, serve the prospective adopters tea without their knowing, deliver their child, and were then brainwashed to sign their babies over for adoption by parents, the clergy, or social workers representing the adoption agencies. Time frame from the late 40's through the early 70's.    

Melinda had to take the long way home back to find her biological relatives and decedents. She began her journey home in 1970 and finished in 2015! Her memoir ends before her reunion with her paternal second cousins once removed in 2009 and her paternal half-siblings who came to meet her in 2010. She is now a happy reunited adult adoptee and not a 'state secret' or suffering in silence anymore!! 

Her book A Legitimate Life tells the journey of how she went to asking Who Am I to knowing Who I Am! One will wonder if 'art imitates life' or if 'life imitates art' as deep within her she had total recall of her lost bios all along, as well as telepathy to help her find the truth and connection to her biological identity. 

Reuniting with biological relatives is becoming the new normal for adoptees and first families, plus open adoptions as well! Facebook, Google and DNA testing have opened the doors for those searching for biological relatives at last! Many reunited adult adoptees are finding they are deeply connected on a cellular level to their bios and yet, can and do love those in adoptive families as well! 

As I no longer believe in random coincidence, I believe in synchronicity; proof that connection to ones family is sacred and can never truly be severed by adoption or any other human manipulation of truth because memories and DNA connections never die as they are genetically hard wired into us at birth. My gosh! The twists and turns we need to go through to get to the TRUTH and get everything about us to finally fit into place! Please read my book and then come back to this site to understand how my search was necessary to find and reunite with bios to bring order out of the chaos to my 'disconnected self' to the reality of the person I was before I was adopted due to the closed record system. 

Read how I retained mystical memory connections to my biological ancestors and how my book, as well as my art, reflected the hidden connections to all my bios and how reunion face to face gave me my lost self, my sanity and genetic mirrors back!

Chapter One of my book has come out of the shadows and can finally be written!

Please get out of denial and give adoptees the right to know who they are and open the records. The closed record system is a very cruel practice for both mother and child! It goes against nature and what we know to be true about genetics! Many adoptees get lost and misdiagnosed in the mental heath system.

When a child is relinquished the OBC (Original Birth Certificate) remains on file until adoption. If said child is not adopted the OBC stands on record... therefore. NO CONFIDENTIALITY IS POSSIBLE AND IF PROMISED WAS AN OUTRIGHT LIE. When the child is adopted the adopters change the adoptee's name to theirs and an amended birth certificate is issued. (It's a lie---name change and identity changed).

 

Open records for adoptees is a human rights issue like slavery was... Federal jurisdiction. If it gets passed by the US government we do not need everyone in each state to have to work so hard for one state at a time.

 

In 1980, after holding numerous hearings around the country on this issue, the then U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare issued a Model Adoption Act stating:

“There can be no legally protected interest in keeping one’s identity secret from one’s biological offspring; parents and child are considered co-owners of the information regarding the event of birth….The birth parents’ interest in reputation is not alone deserving of constitutional protection.

 

” No one should be denied an identity to save someone from embarrassment, and certainly the state should not be by law punishing one group to save face for another."

 

 

Until then we must continue our fight in NYS and elsewhere.

 

 Best sentence ever written "...that the rights of the adoptee to know their origins trumps anyone else's right to keep secrets...."

          

                      HISTORY OF WHEN & WHY RECORDS CLOSED

                                                    "ENJOY"

                                                                                                        DO YOU KNOW

 Adult adoptees are among the last groups of individuals in the US who are legally discriminated against and have their DNA identities stolen from them at birth. THIS IS NOT NORMAL!

We need to fix the adoption law in 44 States that deny nearly 7 million adult adoptees access to their original birth certificates (OBC) stating on it the REAL name of their biological mother and where they were born. An amended birth certificate stating their adopters names as an adoptee's real name is dishonest, a terrible cover up of the truth and 'forces' the adoptee to live a lie with a false identity. This unequal treatment has subsequently led to some adoptees developing SERIOUS IDENTITY CONFUSION, EMOTIONAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS, not being able to get passports, driver's licenses, medical information and other important items requiring birth certificates for ID!

                                                     http://www.unsealedinitiative.org/   

Melinda Warshaw is the Northern Westchester coordinator for Unsealed Initiative...advocating TO RESTORE SANITY TO ADOPTEES pushing for the 'adoptee bill of rights' to be passed in New York State.

                          Thanks to all involved in making and trying to make adoption open, honest and more humane!!! Adoptees deserve respect and the right to not be forced to live as a fictional person and allowed to know the truth of their biological, medical, psychological history and ancestry! The personality of a person is encoded in the genes at birth! We are not blank slates...we carry our biological ancestors DNA not our adopters DNA..

 My story will take you on a journey of one whose identity was stolen from her at birth and what she MUST GO THROUGH -ALONE-to get it back IN ORDER FOR HER TO BE SANE AND REAL TO HERSELF!

                                                                   TAKE A LOOK!!!                                                                            

My book is available on Amazon and Books-A-Million   http://www.booksamillion.com/?ad=GLBKSBAMM&gclid=CI_A8L_AybECFYao4AodiE0Aqw  AND

 Barnes and Nobel http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ plus through any retail outlet that gets books from Ingram/Lightning Source, which therefore makes my books available in over 22,000 book stores and 3,200 retail sites. Whenever you are near a book store you can go in and ask for it and they will not stock it but they can order it and it will be there in 24 to 48 hours. It is definitely easy to go into Barnes & Noble in NY, Chicago or LA etc and order a copy.  Expanded Distribution also makes the book available to libraries and schools via Baker & Taylor!

I am a member of The Pound Ridge Authors Society-PRAS affiliated with The Hiram Halle Memorial Library in Pound Ridge, NY...you can find my book at the Pound Ridge Library!

A Legitimate Life by Melinda A. Warshaw is also permanently for sale on The American Adoption Congress website.

                                             http://www.americanadoptioncongress.org/

TWITTER: Melinda A Warshaw@MelindaAWarshaw 

FACEBOOK Page Blog: A Legitimate Life by Melinda A. Warshaw  for all sorts of articles, pictures of biological relatives and information.  https://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Legitimate-Life-by-Melinda-A-Warshaw/100876420030591

EDUCATE YOURSELVES AND READ ABOUT A REUNITED, ENLIGHTENED ADULT ADOPTEE  AND HER PERSPECTIVE ON LIFE....IGNORANCE IS NOT BLISS..IT IS LIVING IN DENIAL..read my memoir which is an informational/adoptee advocacy service as well and learn what not to do and what needs to be done to help adoptees and biological mothers, fathers, bios separated by adoption heal..thanks..."

Always remember you cannot erase an adoptee's DNA identity that is hard wired into their memory bank and remains with them at birth and forever...they will adapt to the adoptive family, but not until they find their natural DNA identity and get their genetic mirrors back will they heal from the original separation to become whole and authentic to themselves. My book proves it!

Visit us on FaceBook at A Legitimate Life's Facebook group. (Link)

      Violation of human rights and the unfairness of sealed records are in their nature discriminatory.