I Could Have Gone To Prison For What I Did To Find My Birth Parents

Late at night, in my childhood room, questions haunted me: Where did I come from? Why was I adopted? Who was my original family? Though my parents informed me of my adoption at a young age, beyond that the subject of adoption was taboo in our home.

When I gathered the courage to pose those questions, I got vague answers: In a hospital. Because we wanted you. People who couldn’t keep you. Because my parents treated the details of my adoption as secret, I desperately wanted to locate my birth family. It was an almost cellular urgency that surged when I became a mother myself.

In 1986, there was little information available to adoptees. Searching was something well-adjusted people didn’t do or even talk about. But on a follow-up visit to my obstetrician after the birth of my twins, I found a waiting-room magazine featuring the title of an article on the front cover that read, “Adoptees Find Birth Parents With Help of ALMA.”

I dove into reading about an adopted woman who had found her birth family with help from the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association (ALMA). After my doctor’s appointment, I slipped the magazine into my purse and brought it home. ALMA would end up shepherding me through a frustrating, emotional decade of searching for my birth family until, at last, I found them.

On Oct. 1, 2023, ALMA’s founder, Florence Fisher, died at the age of 95. An adoptee herself, Fisher and her organization were a major force in assisting many adoptees like myself to find our origins and in pressuring states to open sealed adoption records.

Fisher was a savior and a hero to countless adoptees, a woman who would do almost anything to uncover information, including once dressing as a nun to sneak into a Roman Catholic adoption