The state Senate committee could vote this morning to recommend floor debate on a House-passed bill allowing most Missouri-born adoptees access to copies of their original birth certificates - with their birth parents' names included.
But one group doesn't want the bill passed unless compromise language added in the House is removed.
"Our position is open records for adult adoptees. No contact vetoes," Connie Hall of the group Missouri Open explained Monday. "Not having access to your birth certificate? That's a civil rights issue.
"Adoptees should have the same rights as people who are not adopted and, at this point, they don't."
Under current law, once an adoption is final the original birth certificate becomes a sealed record, and is replaced with a certificate showing the adoptive parents' names.
Rep. Don Phillips, R-Kimberling City, sponsors the bill to change that, and told the Senate 's Seniors, Families and Children Committee last week the House-passed bill includes changes sought by opponents, who argue birth parents were promised confidentiality when they agreed to put their babies up for adoption.
"They didn't have the right or the authority to make that promise," Hall said. "The law said that the original birth certificate and the adoption records would be sealed at the time of the adoption, not at the time of the relinquishment."
If a child were turned over for adoption but, "for whatever reason they ended up in the foster care system and they were never adopted, that file is not sealed," she said. "That birth certificate is not sealed."
And the child has access to the records.
The change in the bill's original language includes a contact-preference form which would give birth parents the option to refuse to be contacted by the adoptee, to be contacted by a go-between or to have direct contact.
And that's the point where Missouri Open members would prefer the bill die than pass with the contact-preference form in it, Hall said.
"It's really a disclosure veto - it goes further than just a contract preference," she said. "A contract preference would say, you prefer no contact, but the adoptees still get their information.
"And that's not what they're doing."
In some cases under the bill, a no-contact preference would prohibit the adoptee from getting the original birth certificate at least until the birth parent died.
But, Hall noted: "If you're supposed to be able to get it upon the birth parent's death, how do you prove that someone - who you do not know the name - has died?"
Missouri Open is a group comprised mainly of adoptees.
Hall, who lives in Ozark, is an adoptee who won't benefit from the proposed law because she was born in Arkansas.
"Mine was a private adoption that was handled by an attorney and a doctor," she said. "I have no information other than a copy of my final decree - and that's all I can personally get."
She said Missouri adoptees already have a better law than Arkansas, "because right now, you can get - with the birth parents' permission - you can get identifying information, if you go through the county's court system and request it."
Kansas never has closed its adoption records, Hall said."Once the adoptee reaches the age of 18, if they like, they can go down to the Vital Statistics office, pay the fee and get a copy of their original birth certificate."
Her group wants it to be that easy for all Missouri adoptees.
"I think the way it's going to come down, eventually, is that it's not going to be just the people who are touched by adoption who are for this," Hall said, "but the general public is going to see that, "Wait a second, these people are going to be denied their civil rights.
""They have less rights than the rest of us, and we need to remedy that.'"