QUEBEC CITY – Quebecers who have been adopted made an emotional plea to the province’s justice minister Thursday.
“I hold in my heart, all the love for my adopted parents. I adored them and they adored me, but I miss my roots,” said one member of a group of activists pushing for Quebec to change the law to allow open adoptions.
“If you were adopted, wouldn’t you want to know?”
The concept of open adoption allows the biological and adoptive families to have access to varying degrees of each other’s personal information.
The group, called Mouvement Retrouvailles, argues current Quebec laws prevent people who were adopted from accessing important medical documents.
“We are with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the only provinces with sealed adoption records. It’s not right to keep this information in sealed files,” said spokesperson Caroline Fortin.
Since 2008, three bills have been drafted, but so far, no legislation has been passed.
“Knowing one’s origins is a fundamental need for the human personality,” said CAQ MNA Simon Jolin-Barrett.