Adoption in general
Let’s remember that we were children but children grow up into adults and those adults want answers as to who they are and where they came from. Coram IAC owes it to us and our next generation. We are not ornaments or souvenirs, we are people with a past history and an origin story that belongs to us.
In my Christian adoption, it was echoed at every stage: I was chosen not only to be adopted by a Christian couple but also chosen to be welcomed into something bigger than myself.
We need the apology, we need the recognition, we need the acknowledgment that what was done to us was so wrong and we need help: we need help to heal, we need help to get our voices heard and we need the government to take accountability and to recognise the role they played
Freddie’s inability to communicate her true feelings echoes that of us all. We are silenced, unable to articulate the trauma that lives in our bodies. We as intercountry adoptees are made to feel grateful for being saved from a culture that is deemed inferior to western society. However, those same western societies see us as different. This is the paradox of being an intercountry adoptee. We don’t belong to either society and never will.
Beautiful reading from Maggie Lyng on Mother’s Day from the perspective as an adoptee. This is published in the loss section of A Page from my Life
Thank you Maggie!
Every year, I struggled with this Day. Nobody knew. Not one person. Not a teacher, nor my parents, nor my extended family, nor my friends.
Recently Colin Kaepernick has spoken about his experiences growing up as an adoptee of colour. The thing which distinguishes his and so many other adoptions is that his adopters are white.
The sad fact is that there are a disproportionate number of children of colour in the system and available for adoption. Take a look at some American adoption agencies and a small scratch of the surface reveals a sliding scale of fees based on ethnicity with Black children often costing tens of thousands of dollars less than white children. Astounding really when you think of how Black children are objectified within adoption circles.
The media feeds into this obsession with acquiring–collecting–children of colour. Celebrity adopters such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie regularly trot out their tribes of stolen children in a desperate attempt to virtue signal to the world and be lauded. Lauded for what? Taking a child from their country of origin? Removing them entirely from their culture? How is that beneficial for the child? Surely with the kind of wealth they have, if they had a desire to save a child, funding that child to remain in their own country would be a more ethical approach.
Now let’s look at the experiences of transracial adoptees. Many times we are adopted into families as a plan C. Families at the end of their adoption journey having been turned down from other avenues of adoption. Families faced with the reality that there are very few white babies available for adoption, or if funds are drying up, will look at other options. Whether that be domestically or internationally that often concludes with the adoption of a child of colour. That child, ripped out of their culture and often torn from their country, now has to acclimatise to a completely alien environment. As they grow up this feeling of alienation is often compounded by views held within their own families, views often shared and declared within their company.
The comments made towards Colin when he talks about his hair and his family’s reaction to his wish to have braids is a perfect example of the kind of denial of culture TRAs have to endure their entire lives. And denial of culture doesn’t stop at hair care. Denial of culture includes denying access to food, access to music, access to literature, access to community and so in essence: access to self. In the face of such denials of basic human rights, to expect anyone to be grateful is laughable.
You didn’t save us. You inflicted immeasurable damage. You want gratitude? That’s not how gratitude works, to be grateful you first need something to be grateful for.
Friday 3 March, 2023
There is nothing new in the government’s response and even less of value. The only change they are proposing is one they are already consulting on. To say we have had the opportunity to have our voices and experiences heard and to then do precisely nothing to listen to our needs is a repetition of exactly what has happened to us in the past. Many of us were told that adoption was done to us for our own good and felt that we could not express our own feelings or have our needs met. This is not good enough. We have waited patiently but are no longer prepared to be quiet or to accept the gaslighting nonsense of this or any government.
One reason the government is too cowardly to offer an apology for state involvement in adoption—in their response they give many examples while simultaneously denying it happened—is that it would shine a light on today’s adoption practices, which still trample over the rights of parents and children.
We will continue to campaign for real change and we stand with birth mothers who have, after all their emotional labour, been insulted by this pathetic response.
Plenary adoption is what is generally meant when we talk about adoption. It is the legal mechanism by which a child is placed permanently into a family and becomes the child of a new parent or parents. In the UK, the original birth information is placed on the Adoption Register, a sealed record which the adoptee can only access once they turn 18.
An Adoption Certificate is issued which the adoptee will use instead of a birth certificate. This includes the date and place of birth, and the adoptive parent or parents’ names. The original birth certificate can be requested by the adoptee, from the age of 18.
Most children who have been adopted are aware but there is no legal requirement for an adopter to tell a child they have been adopted. This has led to many adoptees discovering later in life (Late Discovery Adoptees/LDAs) and some may never know at all, if they do not order a birth certificate.
A health report is prepared before adoption takes place so some information is available to adopters but once adoption has happened the NHS is required to close that child’s health record and open a new one, not linked to the old one, in order to maintain the secrecy about their original identity. This means that adoptees do not have a family medical history and that information about health conditions that show up in the birth family after they have been adopted out is not passed on. They also are unaware if a birth relative has died and what caused their death.
Arguably step-parent adoption does not completely erase a child’s identity, though the parentage is still changed legally. It is less common these days as there is reduced stigma about having different names within families and about non-traditional families.
You may also hear about ‘simple’ adoption in some countries. This is an adoption in which the legal relationship between the adoptee and the birth family is not severed.
An open adoption is an adoption in which the child’s birth identity is not hidden and some kind of relationship with birth family is maintained. It is important to be aware that there is no such thing as an open adoption in UK law. If there is contact with birth family it is often indirect, sanctioned and mediated by social workers and adopters, and can be withdrawn at any time.
Here are just a few things:
1. It commodifies children. In other words, it is legalised trafficking and in the future we believe it will be viewed this way by society. A child is not something to be acquired.
2. It erases identity and separates people from family and culture. This is particularly egregious in the case of transracial and inter-country adoptions.
3. It creates a set of relationships with power imbalances built in. Children are groomed to be ‘grateful’ they have been adopted when in reality, it may be a source of great sadness to them. They are not necessarily told the truth about their families of origin. Contact with birth families can be vetoed by the adopters.
4. It romanticises family-building, encourages saviourism and attracts narcissistic parents who then view themselves as victims when the children act out. Don’t believe us? Check out the #adopteevoices hashtag on Twitter and see how many examples you find of narcissistic and abusive adopters.
5. It is irreversible. An adoptee is entered into a legal relationship with their adoptive family, removed from a legal relationship with their family of origin, and not given the option to release themselves from this contract or revoke the adoption. What other legal arrangement can you be entered into without giving consent, to which you are bound for life?
Yes—and this can be achieved in other ways without erasing their identities and severing them from all birth relatives. Kinship care, special guardianship and long-term foster care are some options. Children are not something to be ‘owned’. And sometimes more could be done to support children staying with their birth families rather than being taken into care in the first place.
Well, no. Parenting is a privilege, not a right. And adoption is by no means the only path to parenting. And even if it were a right, surely the rights of a child trump the rights of an adult?
Everyone has the right to security, food, shelter, and to have their basic needs met. Beyond this, there are rights to family life and rights about identity. There is a UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to which the UK is a signatory, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from looking at our outdated adoption laws.
If, for safeguarding reasons, it is necessary to change a child’s identity then that should not be irreversible—the threat may later go away. Plenary adoption makes it irreversible. Permanently changing a child’s identity allows adopters and social workers to demonise a child’s birth family and blame any problems the child is having on the abuse or neglect they suffered before they were adopted. This is not the whole picture—it ignores the traumas of separation and of being placed with, and dependent on, strangers who are not biologically related to you. As baby-scoop era adoptees we are the proof—we were not abused before adoption and usually not neglected but we still carry these traumas. These imprint on the brain and affect development but it’s easier to blame the birth mother’s behaviour so some diagnoses have become fashionable.
(In general, diagnosis can be useful because it identifies a cluster of symptoms and suggests some possible interventions but it’s more important to identify the underlying cause, which in the case of adoptees is often trauma).
The early separation can also cause us to feel worthless and unwanted, so we are susceptible to further abuse.
As long as plenary adoption is an option, those responsible for child protection will be inclined to think of it as an easy—and cheap—solution when there are child protection concerns. Adoption means the local authority is no longer directly responsible for that child’s care. Money to support adoptive families comes from the Adoption Support Fund. Voluntary Adoption Agencies charge for placing a child (currently over £38,000) and that is still a bargain to local authorities in the long term. And child protection is not always about abuse; sometimes it’s about poverty and resources.
Charities such as Kinship and Family Rights Group are working to help families stay together and to support kinship carers where possible. The government’s response to the Care Review is somewhat encouraging in this regard. And please: adopt a pet, don’t adopt a child.
Genetic mirroring is being able to see yourself in the family that surrounds you because of your shared DNA, something adoptees are denied
