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Joy Cheskes doesn't want to know the other path her life might have taken - the only family she needs is the one who loved and raised her.

So today, when more than eight decades' worth of adoption records in Ontario are officially opened, the Stratford teacher knows she will not have to worry about a stranger knocking at her door. Or someone with her name on a piece of paper lingering outside her house, possibly showing up at work - the awkward, unwanted encounters she imagines with the woman who put her up for adoption as a baby.

"I know for some people there is a burning curiosity," she says. "It's not been that way from me."

Ms. Cheskes is one of about 2,500 people, almost equally divided between adult adoptees and birth parents, who have filled out the disclosure veto preventing their records from being released under the new law.

But Ms. Cheskes has more than a personal stake in the law. She was among a handful of plaintiffs willing to go to court - over the opposition of many adoption support groups - to ask for the veto, a step they saw as necessary to protect their privacy.

Ontario joins five other provinces, including British Columbia, which was the first to open its records more than 10 years ago. Prior to the new law, which will affect about 250,000 adoptions dating back to 1921, adult adoptees and birth parents interested in reuniting had to sign a registry, but would only receive information if both parties agreed.

The first version of Ontario's legislation went further than those of other provinces by not including a veto for people who wanted their identities kept secret - an issue heatedly debated by adoption support groups. It was changed in 2007, after an Ontario Superior Court judge ruled that the law, as it stood, was unconstitutional.

As of today, unless a veto has been signed, birth records will be unsealed if either a birth parent or adult adoptee requests it.

Ms. Cheskes knows her position raises eyebrows. "People say there must be something wrong with me, and some day I am going to regret it," says Ms. Cheskes.

"But I just want my life as it is now."

Even in university, when friends would look at her family pictures and realize she must be adopted - most of her siblings are tall and blond, she is short and dark haired - she recalls only a fleeting interest in knowing what her birth parents looked like.

"It's never anything that I thought about for 10 seconds, and I don't think about it any more at all," she says. "I am content and happy. I don't want to open those doors. Why would I? There is nothing I need."

Denbigh Patton, a Toronto-area man who also joined the lawsuit demanding a veto, echoes Ms. Cheskes's views, although it is a decision, he suggests, that non-adoptees have trouble understanding. "My bond with my parents doesn't come from a magical genetic spark, it comes from the love they have shown me and the choices they made."

Mr. Patton notes the law allows him to change his mind at any time. Signing the veto, he says, is "the only way I can influence the timing of the dreaded knock on the door, or just the surprise 'Hi, I'm your birth mother.' "

Now he will decide if and when a reunion should happen, an event, he believes, that should be controlled by the adoptee.

But the bottom line for Mr. Patton was his right to privacy. "This is my stuff. Don't mess with my stuff."