Governor Abigail Spanberger is considering a bill that would reveal the identity of parents who put their children up for adoption.
People who were adopted often struggle with wanting to know more about where they came from and who their parents are. Now, members of the Virginia General Assembly are sending a bill to the governor that would unseal adoption records.
"Fundamentally what we're talking about; a government withholding basic information about who they are," says Senator Jeremy McPike, a Democrat from Prince William County. "And that's a pretty big government action of holding the core information about where you are in the universe."
Senator Emily Jordan is a Republican from the Isle of Wight who was adopted, and she says she's fine with unsealing information about hospitals and locations. But she says unsealing names is a bad idea.
"We are taking away someone else's rights that made a decision 18 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago away from a person that made a decision at that time retroactively," Jordan says. "I would wholeheartedly support this bill if we had redaction of those names."
A spokeswoman for the governor says she’ll consider this bill along with hundreds of other bills lawmakers are sending her this month.
