Frozen Embryo Open Adoption Raises Issues

"[When] contracts for human life take precedence over maternal instincts and the psychological well-being of children, we are in trouble as a society." - Nancy Verrier, adoptive mother and author of The Primal Wound.

"I was born to a woman I never knew and raised by another who took in orphans. I do not know my background, my lineage, my biological or cultural heritage. But when I meet someone new, I treat them with respect. For, after all, they could be my people." - James Michener

"Those who know their mothers cannot imagine what it is like not to know the woman who brought you into the world. What it is like to be forbidden by law to see her face, hear her voice, know her name. No one can imagine it because it is unimaginable." - Betty Jean Lifton, in Journey of the Adopted Self

"[America], with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it..." - Abraham Lincoln, Inaugural Address (1861)

"Far from being the passive protohuman of early developmental studies, an infant has a direct experience of relationships and subsequently the self...the foundational attachments made in early life are powerfully influential on later relationships." - Balswick, King, and Reimer inThe Reciprocating Self

" ...simply to give children away, or to take children when there is no emergency, produces great guilt. Adoption is justified when there's no one to take the children...[but] when children are adopted capriciously, and taken away from their parents and grandparents, it is an injustice." - Bert Hellinger, in Acknowledging What Is

"[Humanity possesses] a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is a vacuum and emptiness and a most disquieting loneliness." - Alex Haley, author of Roots

"I have four children, two of which were adopted. I forget which two." - British Business and Political Correspondent Bob Constantine

"Equal access to birth identity is like the right to vote. Some choose to exercise it, some don't -- and the outcome may or may not be what you hoped for -- but no one should be barred from the right to know the names of their blood kin." - Rich Uhrlaub, Colorado adoptee

"No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him." - Thomas Jefferson

"I wouldn't give a puppy to someone I didn't know. I had to give my baby to people I had never met. " - a Mother