But even though I knew my whole life that my adoptive parents desperately wanted me, somewhere in my mind, I knew that my birth parents didn’t. My mom had given me the party line about them being too young and not ready to have a family-and logically I understood that-but emotionally, I felt like I’d been tossed aside. I guess I wanted to know why. So after a talk with my adoptive parents-one during which my mother cried the whole time she promised to help me-I tentatively waded into the search that I’d been toying with for the past six months.
Being adopted felt like reading a book that had the first chapter ripped out. You might be enjoying the plot and the characters, but you’d probably also like to read that first line, too. However, when you took the book back to the store to say that the first chapter was missing, they told you they couldn’t sell you a replacement copy that was intact. What if you read that first chapter and realized you hated the book, and posted a nasty review on Amazon? What if you hurt the author’s feelings? Better just to stick with your partial copy and enjoy the rest of the story.
Adoption records weren’t open-not even for someone like me, who knew how to pull strings legally. Which meant that every step was Herculean, and that there were far more failures than successes. I’d spent the first three months of my search paying a private investigator over six hundred dollars to tell me that he had turned up absolutely nothing. That, I figured, I could have done myself for free.
The problem was that my real job kept interfering.
As soon as we finished showing the O’Keefes out of the law office I rounded on my boss. “For the record? This kind of lawsuit is completely unpalatable to me,” I said.
“Will you still say that,” Bob mused, “if we wind up with the biggest wrongful birth payout in New Hampshire?”
“You don’t know that-”
He shrugged. “Depends on what her medical records turn up.”
A wrongful birth lawsuit implies that, if the mother had known during her pregnancy that her child was going to be significantly impaired, she would have chosen to abort the fetus. It places the onus of responsibility for the child’s subsequent disability on the ob-gyn. From a plaintiff’s standpoint, it’s a medical malpractice suit. For the defense, it becomes a morality question: who has the right to decide what kind of life is too limited to be worth living?
Many states had banned wrongful birth suits. New Hampshire wasn’t one of them. There had been several settlements for the parents of children who’d been born with spina bifida or cystic fibrosis or, in one case, a boy who was profoundly retarded and wheelchair-bound due to a genetic abnormality-even though the illness had never been diagnosed before, much less noticed in utero. In New Hampshire, parents were responsible for the care of disabled children their whole lives-not just till age eighteen-which was as good a reason as any to seek damages. There was no question Willow O’Keefe was a sad story, with her enormous body cast, but she’d smiled and answered questions when the father left the room and Bob chatted her up. To put it bluntly: she was cute and bright and articulate-and therefore a much tougher hardship case to sell to a jury.
“If Charlotte O’Keefe’s provider didn’t meet the standard of care,” Bob said, “then she should be held liable, so this doesn’t happen again.”
I rolled my eyes. “You can’t play the conscience card when you stand to make a few million, Bob. And it’s a slippery slope-if an OB decides a kid with brittle bones shouldn’t be born, what’s next? A prenatal test for low IQ, so you can scrap the fetus that won’t grow up and get into Harvard?”
He clapped me on the back. “You know, it’s nice to see someone so passionate. Personally, whenever people start talking about curing too many things with science, I’m always glad bioethics wasn’t an issue during the time polio, TB, and yellow fever were running rampant.” We were walking toward our individual offices, but he suddenly stopped and turned to me. “Are you a neo-Nazi?”
“What?”
“I didn’t think so. But if we were asked to defend a client who was a neo-Nazi in a criminal suit, could you do your job-even if you found his beliefs disgusting?”
“Of course, and that’s a question for a first-year law student,” I said immediately. “But this is totally different.”
Bob shook his head. “That’s the thing, Marin,” he replied. “It really isn’t.”
I waited until he’d closed the door to his office and then let out a groan of frustration. Inside my office, I kicked off my heels and stomped to my desk to sit down. Briony had brought in my mail, neatly bound in an elastic band. I sifted through it, sorting envelopes into case-by-case piles, until I came to one that had an unfamiliar return address.
A month ago, after I’d fired the private investigator, I had sent a letter to the court in Hillsborough County to get my adoption decree. For ten dollars, you could get a copy of the original document. Armed with that, and the fact that I had been born at St. Joseph Hospital in Nashua, I planned to do some legwork and ferret out the first name of my birth mother. I was hoping for a court intern who might not know what he or she was doing and would forget to white out my birth name on the document. Instead, I wound up with a clerk named Maisie Donovan, who’d worked at the county court since the dinosaurs died out-and who had sent me the envelope I now held in my shaking hands.
COUNTY COURT OF HILLSBOROUGH, NEW HAMPSHIRE IN RE: ADOPTION OF BABY GIRL
FINAL DECREE
AND NOW, July 28, 1973, upon consideration of the within Petition and of the hearing and thereon, and the Court having made an investigation to verify the statements of the Petition and other facts to give the Court full knowledge as to the desirability of the proposed adoption;
The Court, being satisfied, finds that the statements made in the Petition are true, and that the welfare of the person proposed to be adopted will be promoted by this adoption; and directs that BABY GIRL, the person proposed to be adopted, shall have all the rights of a child and heir of Arthur William Gates and Yvonne Sugarman Gates, and shall be subject to all the duties of such child; and shall hereafter assume the name of MARIN ELIZA BETH GATES.
I read it a second time, and a third. I stared at the judge’s signature-Alfred something-or-other. For ten dollars I had been given the earth-shattering information that
1. I am female
2. My name is Marin Elizabeth Gates
Well, what had I expected? A Hallmark card from my birth mother and an invitation to this year’s family reunion? With a sigh, I opened my filing cabinet and dropped the decree into the folder that I’d marked PERSONAL. Then I took out a new manila folder and wrote O’KEEFE across the tab. “Wrongful birth,” I murmured out loud, just to test the words on my tongue; they were (no surprise) bitter as coffee grains. I tried to turn my attention to a lawsuit with the thinly veiled message that there are some children who should never be born, and winged a silent thank-you to my birth mother for not feeling the same way.
Piper
Technically, I was your godmother. Apparently, that meant that I was responsible for your religious education, which was sort of a colossal joke since I never set foot in a church (blame that healthy fear of the roof bursting into flames), while your mother rarely missed a weekend Mass. I liked to think of my role, instead, as the fairy-tale version. That one day, with or without the help of mice wearing tiny overalls, I’d make you feel like a princess.