Paul Kimball is 63 years old, was born in Fort Bragg, California, and has never seen his own original birth certificate. He was given another name at birth before his adoption was finalized, and under state law that document has stayed sealed ever since. A bill that could have changed that for him and thousands of other California adoptees just got shelved in Sacramento.
Senate Bill 381, authored by Democratic State Senator Aisha Wahab, would have let adult adoptees or their adult descendants request their original birth certificates starting July 1, 2028, according to LegiScan. The bill passed the state Senate by a vote of 35-0 in January, but the Assembly Appropriations Committee held it under submission on August 13, effectively halting it for the session. As CBS Sacramento reports, Kimball testified in support of the proposed law, describing what it would mean to finally hold the document. “This is something that states that I am a true, full human being,” he said, according to the outlet.
Kimball told the station he was born in Fort Bragg and given another name, and that his upbringing in his adoptive family was fantastic. Still, he said the bill would help adoptees find closure, and he hopes another lawmaker will pick it up and sponsor it again in the next legislative session. Other adoptees testified alongside him in support of the measure, per the same report, and the proposed law reportedly drew no formal opposition on the record.
Why the Bill Keeps Stalling in Committee
The legislation would have required the State Registrar to establish an optional contact preference form for birth parents, allowing them to state whether and how they wished to be contacted without actually blocking release of the record, per LegiScan's summary of the bill text. That compromise was designed to answer the objection that has sunk this idea before: SB 381 followed a 2024 attempt, Senate Bill 1274 from then-Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman, which was pulled from consideration before any committee votes after lawmakers raised similar birth-parent privacy concerns, according to California Adoptee Rights.
Even with the contact preference form included, the same concern resurfaced this year. State Democratic Sen. Caroline Menjivar, who chairs the Senate Health Committee and has represented District 20 since taking office in December 2022, raised concerns during committee discussions about birth mothers who were not voicing opposition to the bill. “We're not going to hear that side of the story for this bill,” Menjivar said, according to CBS Sacramento's reporting. Supporters countered that DNA testing available through Ancestry.com and 23andMe already allows adoptees to find biological relatives without ever touching a vital record, undercutting the case for continued secrecy.
A Nearly Century-Old California Law
California has sealed adoptee birth certificates for nearly 100 years, a practice that traces back to 1935 legislation intended to shield unwed mothers and adoptive families from social stigma, according to background from UC Davis. Under current law, an original birth certificate sealed after an adoption can only be released through a direct court order from a California superior court, per Health and Safety Code Section 102705 as cited by LegiScan — and judges rarely grant those orders absent extreme legal or medical necessity.
That leaves California out of step with a growing number of states. As of July 1, 17 states now allow adult adoptees unrestricted access to their original birth certificates, according to the Adoptee Rights Law Center, including Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Kansas, Maine, New York, Oregon and Rhode Island. Virginia became one of the most recent additions when its law took effect that same day, letting adult adoptees request their original birth certificate directly from the state's Office of Vital Records through a standard administrative process, with no court approval required, according to WAVY-TV.
A Separate Fix for a Different Backlog
SB 381 was not the only adoption-related bill moving through Sacramento this year. In March, Republican State Senator Kelly Seyarto introduced SB 1186, which would require the State Registrar to issue updated birth certificates for newly adopted children within 11 weeks of receiving an adoption report. That measure addresses processing delays for newly finalized adoptions, a different problem than the one facing adult adoptees like Kimball who are trying to access decades-old, pre-adoption originals.
Kimball's search for identity documents is part of a broader pattern facing older California adoptees. Hoodline previously reported on an Iranian-born woman adopted in the 1970s who faced deportation because her adoptive parents never completed citizenship paperwork before the non-retroactive Child Citizenship Act of 2000 took effect — a separate paperwork gap that has left some international adoptees in a legal gray zone decades later.
For now, state legislative leaders have not called SB 381 to the floor for a vote, and its future rests on whether another lawmaker chooses to revive it next session. Kimball, for his part, says he simply wants to see his own birth certificate within his lifetime.
