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Thanks to the hard work of adoption activists, hundreds of thousands of adults who were adopted as children in Canada and Colorado will now be able to do what the rest of the population does with hardly a second thought: get a copy of their birth certificate.

Under a new Ontario law that took effect June 1, both first parents and adoptees gained access to original birth certificates and other adoption records, information previously kept hidden by provincial law. In Colorado, a Court of Appeals decison in April unsealed the records of adoptions finalized between July 1951 and July 1967.  Original birth certificates will become available to affected adoptees once the State creates a proper application process.

Original birth certificates can contain vital clues to an adopted person’s identity, including the name given to him/her at birth, his/her first mother’s (and sometimes first father’s) name, and the hospital where the birth took place. They are regularly sealed in most places once adoptions are finalized, and laws granting adopted adults access to them currently exist in only a handful of states. Detractors of open records argue that they violate birth parents’ privacy, a position rejected by many courts.

Even so, the opposition’s influence shows in the recent two decisions. In Ontario, closed records supporters forced a provision that allows birth parents or adoptees to remain anonymous by filing a ‘disclosure veto’ that blocks the other parties from accessing the records.  (As of May 1, just under 2,500 people–less than 1% of potentially eligible parties–had applied for the veto.) And in Colorado, the ruling still left records between 1967 (when state law first instructed that anonymity should be part of the relinquishment and adoption process) and 1999 (when the laws again changed to stop sealing records) closed shut. Showing again that there is still much work to be done until all adopted people enjoy the basic civil right to information about their own origins.