My son was 12 when he asked what the word "bastard" meant. I tried to mask my stammering reaction by wondering aloud where he had heard the term. No one in my home has ever uttered the word.

He had overheard some kid at his junior high, he said. His voice was casual, his curiosity innocent. He was clearly unaware of the word's power, a reverberation from the past when it was a weapon that disenfranchised and demeaned. I wondered about its potential now to impact the way my son defined himself or viewed his place in society.

A bastard, I explained in the lightest tone I could manage, is a child born to a woman not married to the child's father.

"Like me?" my son asked.

"Yes," I said. "Like you."

My son was born to an unmarried teenager whose love for him gave her the courage to place him for adoption. It was a decision made more difficult because she had been adopted as well. She knew the burdens an adopted child faces – the curiosity of classmates, the hint of pity detected when a neighbor asks what happened to their "real" mother, the shadow of unspoken shame that lingers because most official records of their birth and adoption are kept secret by law.

My son's birth mother chose open adoption – where birth parents decide who will raise their child and often continue contact after the baby is born – in part so that his burden would be lighter than hers. She believed – and I agreed – that even a difficult truth has less power to harm than a secret.

Because of open adoption, my son has always known that he was lovingly welcomed by his first family. He knows his birth mother searched for parents to take her place because she was too young for the job. He knows she chose me and my husband because she thought we were the perfect couple to become his mom and dad.

To a large extent, her efforts have succeeded. No one lowers their voice when the topic of adoption comes up in our house. My sons, 10 and now 14, both of them ours through open adoption, know what happened to their birth mothers because their birth mothers have remained our friends. Their pictures are framed throughout our house, presents exchanged, visits planned.

Openness has improved the adoption experience for many families. Studies indicate that birth mothers in particular have benefited as the grief that naturally follows adoption is more quickly and thoroughly resolved when they have chosen who will adopt their child and know where that child ends up.

More than half the domestic adoptions in the United States are open to some degree, and adoption organizations estimate that the percentage in California is closer to 85 percent.

The shame that long tainted families touched by adoption – for having given birth to, or raising, or being a "bastard" – has faded. Today's unwed mother is more recognizable as the brave and quirky pregnant teenager who opts for adoption that audiences adored in the last year's Academy Award-winning film "Juno" than as "The Scarlet Letter's" long-suffering Hester Prynne.

Yet there's one area where secrecy and the shame it insinuates remain. The very laws that made me my sons' legal mother still hide behind lock and key the most important document about who they are: their birth certificates.

After our adoptions were finalized – about a year following their births – their original birth certificates were removed from the public record and new certificates issued that list me and my husband as their natural parents. The original birth certificates bearing the names given them by their birth families and identifying the mother and father who gave them their lives are in most cases available only by court order if a serious need is proven. And even if provided by the courts, the certificates would likely have the names of the birth parents blacked out.

That's the law in most states. It's the law in California.

Adopted adults are the only citizens of the United States who, as a group, are prohibited from seeing what for every other group is an easily accessible public record. They are the only group lawmakers insist on protecting from the information surrounding their very births.

Laura-Lynne Powell is a Sacramento journalist who writes about adoption and parenting. Contact her at lauralynne.powell@gmail.com.