Michele Gianola met the doctor over coffee at a pancake restaurant in the heart of New Town. The 33-year-old accountant told the doctor she wanted to find her mother, who gave her up for adoption in 1951.
Although original birth certificates and adoption files are sealed in Illinois, the doctor told Gianola she could produce her adoption file.
Then she told her the price: $1,500 immediately, another $1,500 in two weeks, and another $1,500 when the file was handed to her.
Michele Gianola didn`t get the adoption file. She just got angry.
She is one of hundreds of people who, according to adoption-support groups, have been exploited by lawyers, doctors, private detectives and genealogists who claim they can find children for parents who gave them up or find the parents for the children, for fees as high as $25,000.
Gianola`s adoption records are among more than 300,000 sealed in the Illinois Department of Public Health. Those records can be opened only on order of a judge who finds a compelling reason to release the identity of the natural parents, but the department gets, on average, only 20 such orders a year.
The secrecy of the records has created a market in which some adoptees and mothers are victimized by unqualified researchers and others pay large fees for sealed records that may be obtained through theft or bribery.
The abuses are as small as the $350 a Queens, N.Y., couple, Richard and Olga Alvino, said they paid a Chicago attorney to find the identity of the two daughters Mrs. Alvino had given up for adoption in the early 1960s. ”For that money, he wrote one letter saying a judge had refused to open the adoption file,” Richard Alvino said.
They are as large as the $4,500 Gianola says she would have paid if she had the money; the $10,000 a Chicago detective said an Alabama man looking for his mother paid to investigators before coming to him; the $25,000 that the founder of an adoption-support group says a Chicago couple paid to find their son.
”You`ll pay any price for that information, because you want to look at that child and say, `I didn`t give you up because I didn`t love you,` ” said a Des Plaines woman who last year found the son she had given up and who has aided others who have paid large sums to investigators. ”The cases are heartbreaking. There`s so much money and anticipation involved–you`re hanging on the edge and thinking somebody is doing something for you, and you find out they`ve done nothing.”
Barbara Gonyo, the president of Truth Seekers in Adoption, a nonprofit group with 1,000 members in Chicago that aids adoptees and mothers, estimates that one in six people who come to the group has already paid large fees to find their lost families and gotten no information.
Truth Seekers was founded in 1973 by Laverne McCurdy, a Marengo businessman who paid $8,000 to investigators who failed to locate the child his wife had given up for adoption.
The group, for a $50 membership, assigns a research assistant to people trying to track down their natural families and holds monthly meetings to bolster those going through the often emotionally trying process.
Truth Seekers has referred its toughest cases to a respected for-profit group in Round Lake called Tracers Ltd. It was founded by Gari-Sue Greene, a former debt collector who went into the adoption-tracing business after she found her husband`s natural mother. Greene said that Tracers charges a flat fee of $800, plus expenses, for a three-month contract, and $100 a month, plus expenses, if the search goes on beyond that time. She said expenses include such things as travel, postage and photocopying. Greene said the group has located the families of 65 of its 67 clients.
”The problem is when people charge fees by the hour, and these people don`t realize what it can cost,” Greene said. ”There`s a great market for abuse, because they don`t know they have options.”
The growth in the number of adoptees seeking their families has spawned several efforts to provide low-cost help for adoptees and ”birth mothers”
(natural mothers), such as statewide and nationwide registries and a national magazine, People Finders, based in Batavia. The magazine`s second issue, published in February, included more than 300 classified ads from people seeking their families.
The truth about adoptions can often be startling. Michele Gianola learned through her own search aided by Truth Seekers that her mother had sold her in 1951 for $600 and had sold three brothers and three sisters for varying amounts of money. Gianola has found two of her brothers and is searching for the others, but that hasn`t eased her anger over the whole clandestine adoption system.
”It`s like a grotesque circle,” she said. ”First they make money selling us, then they make money telling us where we came from.”
The legitimate adoption-information groups argue that opening adoption files would break that circle by ending the need for adoptees and mothers to seek help from ”underground” groups.
But others say that open adoption files could spur kidnapings by natural parents who want their children back, break up marriages that were preceded by a child whose birth has been kept secret, and compel women to choose abortion over adoption.
”There is a clear right to confidentiality and to privacy,” said William Pierce, president of the Washington-based National Committee for Adoption. ”Many women placed children for adoption with the understanding that those records would be sealed and they would not have to tell their children, their relatives, their neighbors, about that out-of-wedlock pregnancy.”
”I don`t want to open Pandora`s box,” said Eileen Muro, 27, of Streamwood, an office manager and the mother of two children who is searching for her natural mother. ”My mother could be married to someone who doesn`t know anything about it. But I feel I have a right to know this information, and I`ll have to do it as gently as I can.”
”It`s embarrassing to me to see adoptive parents so paranoid, so frightened,” said Sue Martin, a Wilmette mother who has a 13-year-old adopted son. ”It can be a barrier, a secret that prevents a real attachment in that
(adopted) family.”
Pierce charges that the question goes beyond the emotions of the adopted child and family–that both legitimate and ”underground” adoption-information groups use such devices as bribing court or hospital workers to learn the identity of natural mothers.
”It`s very clear what`s happening,” Pierce said. ”I would challenge them to say what their legal means are, because they`re not legal.”
Adoption-search groups and private investigators here deny that they use illegal means to obtain information, but they concede that they know of clients who received information on their own through surreptitious means.
Investigators are also closed-mouthed about the techniques they use to gather information. Some are as simple as poring over high school yearbooks and telephone books for a face and a name. But they say that if they reveal other resources that are available to find natural mothers and children, opponents of their efforts would move to have those sources closed to public scrutiny.
The adoption-search groups acknowledge it is unlikely that Illinois law will be changed in the near future to open up adoption records.
Only two states, Kansas and Alabama, have completely open adoption records, according to the National Committee for Adoption. Six states have a
”search and consent” system, under which adoption agencies or the state on request will attempt to locate an adoptee or natural mother and ask whether they would agree to a meeting.
The Illinois General Assembly last year established an Adoption Registry similar to systems in 11 other states that will match adopted children with their parents when both register their names. But the registry, which went into effect on Jan. 1, is so little known that only six people in Illinois have filed with it.
Because the state records are unlikely to be opened, some adoption-search groups suggest that individuals and groups be licensed to conduct such searches.
One respected 25-year veteran investigator, Stan Myers of Myers Service Inc., proposed a procedure similar to licensing requirements for detectives, who must work three years for a licensed detective agency or a law enforcement agency and pass a state examination.
”Too many people hang up a sign and say they can do this, because it is quite lucrative,” said Myers, whose North Side company conducts 30 to 40 adoption searches a year. ”But they`re just not qualified.”
