Throughout much of the 20th century, many Western countries had legislation intended to prevent adoptees and adoptive families from knowing the identities of birth parents and vice versa.
After a decline in the social stigma surrounding adoption, many Western countries changed laws to allow for the release of formerly secret birth information, usually with limitations.
In most Western countries until the 1960s and 1970s, adoption bore with it a certain stigma as it was associated in the popular mind with illegitimacy, orphanhood, and premarital or extramarital sex.
[2] An active search is a conscious effort to find a birth family member or adoptee with whatever knowledge is available.
A typical problem with disclosure is balancing the desire for information with the promises, explicit or implicit, that have been made to parties in the past.