Florence Fisher, Advocate for Opening Adoption Records, Dies at 95

Florence Fisher, an adoptee who spent decades searching for her birth parents and then spent another half century fighting to open adoption records for millions of others, died on Oct. 1 in Brooklyn. She was 95.

Her granddaughter, Deborah McDonald, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of a series of strokes.

Mrs. Fisher (as she preferred to be called, using her birth father’s surname) traced her advocacy to a car accident she had in 1969. Though she survived without serious injury, she later said that she could recall the single thought she had the second before impact: “I’m going to die and I don’t know who am.”

By then a mother in her early 40s, she had been searching on and off for her birth parents since she was a child. The accident compelled her to redouble her efforts, and within a few years she found those parents.

But the difficulties she faced — sealed records, silent families — made her think about what millions of other adoptees must have had to deal with.

In 1971, she took out a classified advertisement in several newspapers: “Adult who was an adopted child desires contact with other adoptees to exchange views on adoptive situation and for mutual assistance in search for natural parents.”

She expected a few dozens responses. She received hundreds, many of which recounted deeply personal stories. Inspired, Mrs. Fisher created the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association.

The group grew rapidly. Within a few years, it had 50,000 members, 50 chapters and a database of 340,000 names and other information. Sometimes Mrs. Fisher got involved personally: She once dressed as a nun to sneak into the records room of a Roman Catholic adoption agency.

Mrs. Fisher and her association became a leading force in pressuring states to open their adoption records.

Most states, in fact, had made those records available until the 1940s, when rising birthrates — in and out of marriage — led to a proliferation of babies put up for adoption. At the same time, parents, especially mothers, were often stigmatized for having children out of marriage. Within a decade, almost every state had sealed its adoption records to protect parental privacy.

But the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s did much to give adoption more social acceptability, while various social movements of the era empowered people like Mrs. Fisher to declare that adoptees had rights, too.

“The outrage is that we must respect the rights of the adoptive parents and the birth parents,” she told The New York Times in 1982. “What about the rights of the adult adoptee being conditional on the whims of other people?”

Mrs. Fisher wrote a memoir, “The Search for Anna Fisher,” which was published in 1973. It was one of several similar books to appear during the next decade, including “Twice Born” (1975), by Betty Jean Lifton, another prominent advocate for open records.

Mrs. Fisher testified before state legislatures and appeared on talk shows, taking on the large adoption agencies that saw her as a threat to their industry. She joined lawsuits and encouraged others to file their own. And state by state, case by case, she began to see success.

“The impact that Florence had on the adoptee-rights movement cannot be overestimated,” Lorraine Dusky, another adoptee-rights advocate, said in a phone interview. “Florence came along at the right moment and grabbed it.”

Her victories did not immediately extend to her native New York State, which in 1938 became one of the first states to close its records. Her allies in Albany introduced multiple bills to open the records in the early 1980s, but all failed.

Still, she kept up the fight, and in 2020 New York finally joined more than a dozen other states in unsealing their records. Mrs. Fisher, after waiting almost a lifetime, was finally able to receive a certified copy of her birth certificate.

Anna Fisher was born on May 28, 1928, in Brooklyn. Her father, Fred Fisher, a law clerk who became a Hollywood stuntman, and her mother, Florence (Cohen) Fisher, were still teenagers who did not expect to have a child. Under pressure from her mother’s parents, they married a few months before the birth, put their baby up for adoption and then divorced.

She was adopted by a Brooklyn couple, Harry and Lena (Schechter) Ladden, who renamed her Florence Ladden.

When Florence was about 7, her mother asked her to get a handkerchief from her dresser. Rooting around in the drawer, she found a document mentioning the Fishers and a girl named Anna. When Florence asked her mother about it, Ms. Ladden ripped the paper from her daughter’s hands and forbade her to mention it again.

Her first marriage, to Allen Love, ended in divorce. Her second husband, Stanley Eigenfeld, died in 2013. Along with her granddaughter, she is survived by her son, Glenn Love, and two great-grandchildren. She lived in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn.

Once she located her birth parents — she found her mother in 1970 and her father in 1971 — she began to go by the name Florence Anna Fisher. She was a homemaker until founding the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association, after which she served as its director. The organization closed in June.

Not every story of children reunited with their birth parents is a happy one. Mrs. Fisher’s birth mother, who had long since remarried, kept her daughter at a chilly distance. Things were different with her birth father. Soon after finding Fred Fisher, she went to Los Angeles to visit him.

They spent two weeks together, quickly bonding over interests and quirks they never knew they shared. Toward the end of her stay, they spent a day at Disneyland.

“Only when he saw a father with a little girl would he grow quiet for a moment and squeeze my hand as if I were a little child,” she wrote in “The Search for Anna Fisher.” “And then we’d skip off, smiling, laughing, talking without pause.”