Legalese

In my own experiences with searching for answers about my paternal bloodline, the law has not been my friend. It’s always a little bit disconcerting when legal constraints get in the way of an emotional or personal ordeal and this is especially the case when the law is callous or confusing. I remember when I learned that all records of the procedure by which I was conceived had been destroyed; I thought, “What? Are you kidding me?” I didn’t believe it. A helpful family member forwarded me some relevant law for my home state of California that she pulled from the website of the Center on Medical Record Rights and Privacy at Georgetown University.

 How Long Does My Provider Have to Keep My Medical Record?

California law may require your health care provider to keep your medical record for a certain period of time. For example, hospitals in California generally must maintain medical records for at least seven (7) years after the date the patient was discharged. Records for unemancipated minors must be kept at least seven (7) years or a minimum of one year after the minor has reached 18, whichever is later. There is no general rule for how long doctors in California must keep medical records.

Callous? Check. Confusing? Check. At least, that’s how I saw it.

Under Calfornia law, the records of any artificial insemination procedure can be trashed when the child is just over six years old. This gives the child very few options to explore the circumstances of her conception without her parent’s/parents’ proactive encouragement (and careful planning) of such exploration. Also, the very fact that hospitals can destroy records–anyone’s records, really–after seven years, seems a bit cold to me. It just seems like such a small time fram to do away with documents that are so important to the life of a human being.

This blurb also raised a bunch of questions for me. At first, I got hooked on the “unemancipated minor” bit. An artificial insemination procedure shows up on the mother’s medical record… but does it also show up on the child’s? If it doesn’t, should it? And here’s the big one: where is the line drawn between a mother’s right to privacy and a child’s right to knowledge? In addition to these questions, the sentence, “There is no general rule for how long doctors in California must keep medical records,” seemed to render the rest of the paragraph useless.

I bring this all up as an introduction to a feature of this blog that I’m really excited about. I’d like to provide clear, concise, and accurate legal information for people with one or two unknown parents. Maybe this already exists somewhere out in cyberspace and maybe it doesn’t, but I’d like to find out, beginning with some research from the above mentioned website. Going beyond this, I’d like to explore the extent to which sperm donors, egg donors, and biological parents who relinquish their children are obligated to give personal information (especially racial and ethnic info) and the extent to which children are entitled to find it out.

This will be an ongoing project, since there are different statutes for each state, but it will be a worthy addition to this space and, hopefully, a valuable resource for folks who are wondering about these types of legal questions.