ST PAUL, Minn. — A new state law took effect Monday in Minnesota opening access to original birth records for all adopted people 18 years and older, offering thousands of Minnesotans a wealth of information that they previously could not obtain through the state.
The law, passed more than a calendar year ago in 2023, lifts long-running restrictions on adoptee birth records that date back to 1939. According to a Minnesota Department of Health spokesperson, roughly 150,000 original birth records are now eligible for public release upon the implementation of the law on July 1.
Joe Duea, who was adopted by a Central Minnesota family as a baby, placed his notarized paperwork in the mail early Monday afternoon so that he can finally obtain his original birth records.
Duea, 56, learned the identity of his birth parents and siblings through Ancestry.com DNA within the past decade or so, but he has been working for years with the Minnesota Coalition for Adoption Reform to broaden access to this information through the state.
"This is a first step for a lot of people's equality of access to what they should have had a long time ago," Duea said. "I'm not expecting to get anything enlightening that I don't already know, but it's just the fact of seeing it on paper, to actually realize that. It's going to be monumental."
Minnesota joins 14 other states in the U.S., including neighboring South Dakota, that allow unrestricted access to original birth records for adopted people 18 or older. Nationwide, these patchwork of laws vary state-by-state. In border states like Wisconsin and North Dakota, for example, court or parental permission are required for access, while in Iowa, the records may be redacted.
Advocacy groups in Minnesota have worked for decades to increase access to these records for adults who were adopted. In 2008, for example, the legislature passed a bill that included enhanced access but Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed the measure, citing privacy concerns for birth parents among other issues.
Under the law, birth parents cannot restrict access to the records. However, they can file paperwork with the state either listing contact information, or marking boxes saying they'd prefer to be contacted through an intermediary or not at all.
"Every adoptee's story is gigantically complicated and everybody's is different. Everybody has a complicated story," said Duea, who now has a close relationship with many of the siblings he discovered. "Throughout my life, I'd always known I was adopted and I've always been interested in the story... I always wondered the story of how I came to be."
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