The Adoption Secret in Postmodern Family Law: New Approaches to the Old Canons

The balance of secrecy set by the Soviet legislator, enshrined in the normative structure of the secret of adoption, is seen by many postmodern family researchers as an unfair and inharmonious consequence of adoption. The Russian doctrine intervenes in this problem, but more often it does not succeed in a scientific way The author seeks to scientifically describe a holistic and objective vision of the adoption secrecy extracting for this purpose from current humanitarian discourses unifying topics such as the child’s right to identity and the cchild’s right to know his origin, combining these interdisciplinary aspects into a single analytical structure appropriate for future legal studies of the adoption secrecy. Referring to this structure, the author avoids the trichotomy. The adoption secrecy , the right of the individual to identity and the right of the child to know his origin are investigated as interpenetrating social and legal phenomena. The author’s conceptual thought is based on the substantiation of the theoretical judgment that the theoretical construction of the adoption secret today can no longer be investigated as an absolutely isolated and autonomous construction, scientific attention to which is usually limited to judgments about who benefits from this secret. New theoretical accents should be introduced into this topic, which can modify the traditional perception of the adoption secrecy only as a static act, fixing the fact of adoption and hiding this fact from the public. The research is interdisciplinary and comparative in nature. The final conclusion of the paper is that the adopted children suffer from ignorance of their biological roots not because of the secrecy of adoption, but when the state denies them access to knowledge about their origin, not providing children over a certain age or adult adoptees with access to information about their childhood history. Such a policy of refusing to store information about genetic and social roots of an adopted child and the lack of access to it in today’s conditions in relation to adopted children looks discriminatory.

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