Amber Hunt

ahunt@enquirer.com

In a Columbus hospital bed, the 14-year-old mother was awash in a mix of relief and regret as she awkwardly held her newborn son.

Relief because the delivery was over and, compared with the horror stories Lori Smith had heard about childbirth, it had gone easily.

Regret because she knew this would be the only time she'd ever hold the little boy she couldn't help but love.

"I just knew I couldn't give him a life," the woman – now known as Lori Gray – said in December, more than 40 years after she said goodbye to the son she birthed in 1975 and held for just 20 minutes. "I thought about him all the time. Every day, every second – about where he was, if he was having a good life."

She'd spot men around his age in shopping malls, and she'd wonder each time if that was the boy she'd given up when she was just a teenager. She'd always been willing to meet him, but Ohio law made that impossible: From 1964 to 1996, the state sealed its adoption records.

Her son grew up – first, just across town, and later, across the country – with his adoptive parents. Brad Watts wondered often about his birth parents, having been told only the basics: They were very young, not even 16. His father was athletic. His mother had olive skin and was allergic to penicillin. All other information, per Ohio law, was off limits.

Until last year.

In March 2015, legislators made adoption files available to Ohio children adopted during the 32-year blackout period – a move affecting more than 400,000 families. The files include the children's original birth certificates, bearing the names of their biological parents. The children could learn, too, whether their birth parents were willing to be contacted by the children they gave up.

The state fielded more than 7,200 file requests in the first seven months, and officials expect more to come as word spreads about the law change.

"We've heard all kinds of stories," said Betsie Norris, executive director of Adoption Network Cleveland, a statewide nonprofit organization. "Some of the stories are bittersweet. Some birth parents have been found who aren't ready for contact. But we've mostly heard of lots of happy reunions."

A happy story

Watts' story is one of the happy ones.

He grew up with Nanci and Byron Watts, a married couple who'd been trying without success to get pregnant. Though the couple began the process two years earlier, they still felt ill-prepared when the call came in early July 1975 that a days-old baby boy could be theirs to keep.

"They basically said, 'You can go in, you can spend time with him, and if you decide you don't want him, that's fine, too,' " recalled Byron Watts with a laugh. "Of course that wasn't going to happen. He was a four-day-old baby boy with really dark black hair, and he was very cute."

The Wattses took him home and struggled with all the challenges first-time parents face: sleepless nights, dirty diapers, waves of self-doubt. But there were other worries, too. They didn't know how they'd answer his eventual questions about his ethnic origin, nor did they know if their son would be prone to any hereditary medical conditions.

That's the concern that drove Bette English to try to learn more about her adoptive daughter's birth parents.

Suzanne Warden, born in 1965, began having fainting spells and petit mal seizures when she was 5. Doctors couldn't find anything wrong with the girl, and Bette Warden hated being unable to provide a medical history for her daughter.

She reached out to the adoption agency with which she'd worked, but hit a wall.

"They said they didn't know anything more than they'd told me," English said.

Warden eventually grew out of the seizures – just as her biological mother had before her, a fact she wouldn't know until she was 50.

She had a good life, too, landing with English and her husband, a Cleveland-area couple, after spending months in foster care. She was raised with an adopted brother in a "rather idyllic Midwestern" setting in North Olmsted, where English stayed at home with the kids until they began Catholic school, and dad was a hard-working salesman.

"We had woods behind the house and a community pool where we swam with our friends," Warden said. "I don't remember them ever telling me about the adoption, so they must have told me very young."

Still, not knowing her family history gnawed at Warden, especially when she got married and pregnant herself. She hired a private investigator who came up empty, thwarted by Ohio's law.

"I remember when Duncan was 9 months old, the age I was when I was adopted," Warden said. "I remember sitting on the floor and just crying because I realized I'd not been connected to any family for nine months. I realized how developed a child is by that age, and what that disconnection could have done. That was a poignant time."

Warden gave up hope ever knowing, until she got a letter from the state telling her the law was changing.

Opening the closed door

Betsie Norris, of Adoption Network Cleveland, also was raised by adoptive parents.

As an adult, she decided to search for her birth parents, and had little trouble because she was adopted a few years before state legislators voted to start sealing the records.

It was a happy and welcome reunion on all sides, she said.

"It was such a grounding feeling to have my birth certificate, and to realize that (my birth mother) had even named me," Norris said. "It was a huge chunk of my identity, which I don't think I fully realized I was missing until I got it."

When she learned that it was by luck of her birthdate that she got answers denied to other adopted children, she set out to change the law.

That's when she learned her adopted father was among those who'd helped close the records in the first place. William B. Norris, a Cleveland-area lawyer and community activist, had been shocked that adoption records were open to the general public. He considered it an invasion of privacy and helped craft the 1964 law that sealed the records.

William Norris died 10 years ago. Before his death, his daughter recorded him talking about his reasoning behind the law.

"Frankly, I was unable to see the impact this would have on my own adopted children when they became adults," he said. "I now recognize that closing those birth records to adoptees was a grave mistake."

Overturning the law was no easy feat, Betsie Norris said in December. Legislators shot down one version after another of the law during the '80s and '90s. Norris got a win in 1996 with the unsealing of future records, but the 32-year period prior remained untouchable.

That partly was because no other state had opened previously sealed records before, and anti-abortion advocates worried that unsealing adoption records could prompt some birth mothers to choose abortion instead of adoption.

But as time passed, other states trailblazed on that front, and the data supported Norris' contention that abortion rates were unaffected by adoption records being unsealed.

So, in December 2013, legislators – with bipartisan support – passed a bill giving Ohio adoptees the ability to request their adoption files from the Ohio Department of Health.

Norris said the first wave of adoptees requesting their records largely understood the gravity of what they were asking. Most have been yearning for years to know their backgrounds, medical and otherwise.

She worries the second wave of requests might be less prepared.

"Not everyone really realizes how earth-shattering it's going to be until they're holding that piece of paper in their hands," Norris said. "It's a major life event."

Ready-made family

For Brad Watts, it was more than that.

He and his wife, Tiffany, who live in St. Louis, had daughter Addyson nearly 12 years ago. They were pregnant again in 2013, but their son was born prematurely at 27 weeks and didn't survive.

"When that happened, after we mourned, I just kept thinking, my birth family knows about me, knows that I was adopted, but it was kind of like I died for them. They don't know if I'm alive or if I was raised properly." If they were anything like him, he figured they'd want to know he was OK.

After he filled out the paperwork requesting his file, he began calling and texting his wife daily from work to see if his packet arrived in the mail.

Finally it did. His wife called him in tears.

"It's here! It's here!" she said. He excitedly ordered her to open it. She admitted she already had.

Watts, with his boss' blessing, started searching the Web and Facebook at work. He quickly found his mother still living in Ohio, and he learned through an obituary of a relative that he had at least two brothers. The obituary listed his grandfather's name, and he discovered that the now-elderly man lived in the same house, with the same phone number, he'd had in 1975.

"Google is an amazing thing. Google and Facebook," Watts said. He was too excited to make the phone calls, tasking his wife to do it instead. They approached Gray cautiously – "I didn't know if she'd told her family, and I wasn't there to mess up anybody's life," Watts said – and learned an amazing tale:

Lori Smith had become pregnant by her junior high sweetheart, Matt Gray. The two gave up their firstborn, but they eventually went on to marry and have five more children – four boys and a girl. All were full-blooded siblings to Brad, and they all had been told about the brother they never met. Some had even attempted to find him.

By the time Watts found Lori Gray, she was divorced from his father. She was also sick with cancer.

The two reunited in a hospital room.

"We have to quit meeting like this," Watts quipped.

Laughter cut through Gray's tears. "I only got to hold you for 20 minutes before they took you away," she cried.

"I'm a bit bigger now," Watts said.

He bonded immediately with his siblings, who embraced Watts' 11-year-old daughter Addyson as their niece. He, in turn, welcomed six nieces and nephews into his life.

Watts had grown up with a sister two years younger than he was – it turned out his adopted parents were able to conceive after all – but now his family was huge. All five brothers got matching tattoos – a cancer ribbon with wings on it – in honor of Gray's fight with the disease. They marveled at their similar personalities.

"On my adoptive side, I was pretty much the only boy," Watts said. "My whole life, I was told to be calm and quiet down. The Grays are the funnest people, and the loudest people, I've ever known. I'm like, 'Oh, good, there's more of me!' "

His adoptive parents are thrilled with the reunion. They've met some of Watts' biological siblings, as well as his birth mother, and say they've embraced the clan as extended family.

"The law should have been changed a long time ago," Nanci Watts said. "In our case, everyone was open to finding out. He's ecstatic that he has these answers."

His biological mother said she's just as happy. Lori Gray seems to have beaten the cancer, with her last chemotherapy treatment set Dec. 29.

She credits the reunion with her son – and Ohio's law change – with helping her recover.

"I never thought I'd see him again," she said. "It's probably the best thing that ever happened to me."