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During the past decade, adoptive parents have challenged adoption agencies' right to withhold the medical and social history of an adopted child and the child's biological family by bringing lawsuits alleging the tort of wrongful adoption. This civil action is a recent legal development. The first successful wrongful adoption lawsuit, Burr v. Board of County Commissioners, took place in 1986. The tort of wrongful adoption permits adoptive parents to sue adoption agencies and collect monetary damages if the agencies deliberately conceal, intentionally misrepresent, or negligently fail to disclose the health status or family background of an adopted child [DeWoody 1993; Connelly 1991; Dickson 1991; Maley 1987; Goldenhersh 1992]. Since then, courts in at least five states have upheld wrongful adoption suits against child-placing institutions [Woo 1992; Goldenhersh 1992]. A Massachusetts jury in 1991, for example, awarded an adoptive couple $3.8 million because the state's Department of Social Services withheld the information that the adopted child was developmentally disabled and his biological mother was schizophrenic [Lambert & Moses 1991]. In response to these lawsuits, adoption agencies have claimed that they were following standard social welfare procedure in withholding an adopted child's medical and social history from the adoptive parents.
But have adoption agencies always withheld an adopted child's medical and social history from adoptive parents? The material that follows suggests that the answer is no. It describes the historical development of adoption agencies' policies on disclosing medical and social history to adoptive parents and also seeks to explain why wrongful adoption lawsuits did not occur until recently and why they will probably die out in the next decade. Using a variety of sources, including the adoption case records of the Children's Home Society of Washington (CHSW or Society), annual reports of child-placing institutions, articles in popular magazines, statements by professional social workers, and survey research by the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), this article argues that adoption agencies' release of medical and social history to adoptive parents has been cyclical in nature.
During the first half of the twentieth century, a majority of adoption agencies disclosed all the facts in a child's case record to adoptive parents. Beginning in the 1950s, however, adoption agencies increasingly restricted disclosure of negative medical and social history to adoptive...