Why Closed Adoption Records?

Today I decided to try once again to find out who I am.  Let me back up for a moment.  I was adopted as a baby back in 1964.  I never had a huge desire to find my birth parents, but I did feel the need to find out some health information.  Every time you go to the doctor, they ask if there is any family history of heart disease, diabetes, etc., and every time I have to answer, "I don't know...I was adopted."

I understand the desire of a birth parent to remain anonymous.  Back in 1964, it was still unacceptable for an unmarried woman to have a baby.  It was still a stigma.  Today, many woman have babies despite being unmarried.  It's the way times have changed.  I'm not saying that I approve of it, but that's how things are.  But I digress.

I wrote to the adoption agency who handled matters and received a nice letter from the woman who actually handled my adoption!  Of course, she was very limited in the information that she could provide.  I found out precious little about my birth parents.  My "father" had forced his intentions upon my natural mother, and then his father helped him to skip town.  My mother was very young and decided to put me up for adoption.  I'm grateful to her for this decision, not because I think she would have been a bad parent, but because she could have had an illegal abortion!  I think I prefer living, thank you very much.  Anyway, through conversations with my adoptive family, I garnered one precious piece of information.  My sister remembers seeing the file at the adoption agency with the name "Baby Boy Pringle" on it.  Pringle.  That had to be my mother's last name!  So, after a lot of research, I found one piece of information to corroborate my sister's recollection.  In a database of birth records, I found the following:

Last Name:  PRINGLE

First Name:

Middle Name:

Birth Yr, Mo, Day 1964 (and the birth date matches, too!)

Mother's Last Name:  PRINGLE

Sex:  MALE

County of Birth: LOS ANGELES

It all matched.  So I went back farther to see if there were any Pringles who would have been around 17 or 18 at that time.  I could only narrow it down to females born in Los Angeles county in 1945 or 1946.  The chances that a woman would have remained in the same county all her life up to that point were slim.  Still, I found two:  Donna Jo Pringle born in 1945, and Penny Lee Pringle (mother's maiden name Pfeil) born in 1946.  Frankly, I doubt if either one of these are correct.

I even had the adoption agency put a letter and Consent to Contact note in my file to allow my birth mother to reach me if she chose to do so.  She has yet to make contact, and it has been over 10 years since I added that to my file.

What's the point of all of this?  Those of us who are adopted need a little more than our birth place as information.  At the very least, we need medical histories that are as detailed as possible without giving away our birth parents' names or addresses.  It isn't fair that I don't know if my family has a history of cancer, genetic diseases, or even insanity!  (I may be proof of the latter, who knows?)  There are a number of diseases or problems that I might be able to prevent if I knew my family history.  As is, my medical life is a roll of the dice, not knowing what might happen and not knowing if I could do anything to stop a future issue.  I deserve to know these things.  Not just for my own peace of mind, but for that of MY family, who depends on me to provide for them.

If anyone reads this or searches on it and may know anything, please drop me a line.  Even if you don't know anything, just take a moment to think about how beneficial it would be if birth records included medical histories.  It could save a life.

And to birth mother, with the maiden name Pringle...I'd like to know you if you would like to know me.  But even if you want to stay anonymous, a little note to the adoption agency with a medical history for me would be helpful.