The fact that the government has destroyed dozens of meters of adoption files is criminal

Unimaginable. Dozens of meters of adoption files have been destroyed . Shredded by an unfeeling civil service. People with an adoption background often have a desperate need for this information. Because every snippet might provide answers to their most basic life questions.

Who am I? Who are my parents? Why couldn't they take care of me? Where do I come from? Where did they take me? Why do I have this appearance, this color? Why did I end up in another country? Why in Europe? Why in the Netherlands? Why in this adoptive family? Who, what, where, why, how?

They are endless questions that, if left unanswered, can lead to grief and lifelong trauma.

Wanting to know where you come from is a fundamental building block of human existence. The grief of children of sperm donors shows us how deep that longing can be, how groping in the dark seems to pull the bottom out of your life.

For adoptees you can do quite a bit on top of that. Because no matter how lovingly you are taken care of in your adoptive family; being separated from your birth mother is already traumatizing. Let alone the chaos of being given up, staying in a home and being dragged from place to place. Already in the womb, a fetus attaches itself to the mother, we now know from research. A fetus becomes familiar with the voice and movements of the mother and even starts learning the language in the last term of the pregnancy.

"As long as I don't know who I am, I can't love myself," says Olivier Rousteing in the impressive Netflix documentary Wonder Boy. The French fashion designer takes the viewer on an intimate, frustrating search for his origins. You feel how essential that folder with some documents is for someone. No matter how painful and sad the information in those documents is.

Having access to parentage information should be a starting point for all regulations and debate surrounding adoption, but also for donor children and surrogate mother children. The right to privacy of adoptive parents, sperm donors, surrogate mothers, social organizations and also distant parents should be subordinated to the right to parentage information.

Because the child is the most defenseless party and has not asked to be saddled with a major trauma or a reactive attachment disorder. Something that prospective parents should be well aware of, because it can also cause them great sadness. Because anger and pain in the longer term can lead to a difficult, seriously disrupted or even broken relationship with the child. Always give any need for provenance information, if possible, so as much space as possible.

'I am 30 years old. Imagine I live to be 80 or 90, 100 if all goes well. That means that for the next 60 years I will not know where I come from,' said Rousteing in his documentary. That is recognizable even for our family – my mother was adopted. How we would have loved to have a file of information in our possession. A file from more than 95 years ago. But there's nothing.

It's not the same for everyone. There are adoptees who feel uncomfortable with rooting in their own lineage, who have found peace and acceptance and are afraid to open old wounds. But for many others it is a fundamental need.

Ideally, you want everyone who has been full of questions for a lifetime, if he or she wants to, to have access to the information that forms the foundation of their own existence with a few clicks in a secure environment. That the government destroyed that most vital, intimate information is criminal. Compensation is due.

So that adopted children, for example, do not have to finance costly DNA research themselves. Or to be able to make a trip to their country of origin, whether or not they are looking for family. Where people look like you. Where to find a culture to which you feel a burning curiosity and a deep connection. Because it fills a gap.

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