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Utah Supreme Court rules for adult adoptee who wanted to unseal records for medical and genetic information

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 28, 2024, 8:42 am CST

A district court misinterpreted the law when it ruled that an adult adoptee can’t obtain her 1978 adoption records to provide her doctors with information about health predispositions, the Utah Supreme Court has ruled.

At issue is whether adoptee Marianne Tyson had shown “good cause” to obtain the records as required by Utah law, which seals adoption records for 100 years.

A district court had ruled that Tyson didn’t satisfy the “good cause” standard because the health and genetic information that she sought was not related to a specific medical condition.

The district court reasoned that giving Tyson access to the records would undermine the law’s privacy protections for birth parents.

The Utah Supreme Court ruled that the district court erred by trying “to breathe a more specific meaning into the phrase ‘good cause.’ Although it is understandable that the court would want more guidance than the statute provides, it interpreted the statute in a fashion that rewrote the law.”

“Stated differently,” the Utah Supreme Court said in its Feb. 22 decision, “if the legislature had wanted to impose a requirement that a petitioner point to something more than wanting to know her medical history, it could have put that in the statute. It did not, and it was error for the court to do so.”

The district court had determined that Tyson’s reasons for obtaining the records did not outweigh her birth mother’s interest in privacy.

“But instead of balancing both interests” as required by a Utah procedural rule, the district court “focused solely on the birth mother’s privacy interests,” the Utah Supreme Court said.

The state supreme court said it was returning the case to the trial court to conduct a balancing “that gives weight to both the birth mother’s privacy interests and Tyson’s reasons for wanting to see her adoption records.”

Law.com covered the case, In re M.A.