David Quinn
A double standard lies at the heart of reaction to the adoption scandal, writes David Quinn
In November 2016, ITV aired a programme called Breaking the Silence: Britain’s Adoption Scandal. It interviewed seven women who became pregnant decades ago while unmarried and were forced by the state, the churches, their families and their GPs to give up their babies for adoption.
The programme resulted in apologies from the Church of England and the Catholic Church, but none from the state.
Unmarried mothers were treated tremendously harshly by society in the past. The Churches combined with parents and the state and the wider community to ensure their ‘unwanted’ children were dealt with, meaning, in many cases, adopted. For a long time, many died in infancy.
In Sweden, ruled continuously by the Social Democrats from the 1930s until the 1970s, 60,000 women were sterilised during those decades, in some cases because they had children out of wedlock. The same thing happened in parts of America.
Attitude
The attitude goes back a long way. One of the great philosophers and founders of modernity, Immanuel Kant, was particularly harsh about children born outside of marriage.
Kant, who lived in the 18th Century, said: “A child that comes into the world apart from marriage is born outside the law (for the law is marriage) and therefore outside the protection of the law. It has, as it were, stolen into the commonwealth (like contraband merchandise), so that the commonwealth can ignore its existence (since it rightly should not have come to exist in this way), and can therefore also ignore its annihilation.”
Countries like Ireland and Britain ran networks of mother and baby homes. These had mostly closed by the 1970s because of changing attitudes to unwed motherhood and also because of abortion.
Several former residents of mother and baby homes here in Ireland spoke out in favour of keeping the Eighth Amendment on the grounds that had abortion been available in Ireland in decades past, they might have been aborted rather than placed for adoption.
Walter Francis and a man named ‘Patrick’, who spent part of their lives in the Tuam mother and baby home, told this newspaper last year: “We wish to see the Eighth Amendment retained in the Constitution. If abortion was legal back in the day, we mightn’t be here today.”
In the past, it was believed that the best way to practice adoption was to achieve a ‘clean break’ between the child and its natural family. Sometimes the mother wanted this. She wanted to be able to get on with her life. Often, she would go on to marry and have more children and did not want to think about the past.
But a lot of the time it was the mother’s own parents who wanted the ‘clean break’. They received the full cooperation of the Church and the State. The baby was often removed forcibly from the mother. She might have signed a form authorising the adoption but it frequently happened under duress.
Furthermore, the birth certificate of the child was sometimes illegally altered. The name of the biological mother was removed, and the names of the adoptive parents written into the birth cert instead. That is, they were recorded as being the child’s natural parents.
The child might never be told and would grow up never knowing his or her origins, something that is totally wrong and unjustifiable by any standards. The fact that the practice was illegal even at the time shows this. The realisation that this is wrong didn’t simply dawn on us until recently.
Shamefully, the Churches and the State, and every other adoption agency too, cooperated in this terrible practice.
The spotlight has turn again to what we once did because Children’s Minister, Katherine Zappone, last week announced that at least 126 children adopted out by the St Patrick’s Guild adoption society between 1946 and 1969 had their birth certs illegally changed.
Minister Zappone said: “This is a very serious and sensitive issue. People have the right to know of their true origins and, where we have clear evidence, I believe we have an obligation to tell the people affected. Some may know already, but for others it will be entirely new and very difficult information indeed.”
Various commentators have spoken about how these children, the youngest of whom is now 49, have been robbed of their identities, robbed because they were uprooted from the natural families and never told of that fact, robbed because people like to know their origins and know where they are from.
There is, however, a huge contradiction at work because a growing number of countries today allow birth certificates to be deliberately falsified where a couple or an individual have used donor sperm or a donor egg to bring a child into the world.
Donations
A couple might arrive at a maternity hospital to have a baby and never tell the doctors that they conceived the child via sperm donation and that the man is not, in fact, the biological father of the child.
The Children and Family Relationships Act, passed in 2015, allows birth certs to be altered so that the couple or individual who have a child using donor sperm (say) are recorded as the child’s parents. The name of the sperm donor father or egg donor mother is supposed to be recorded, but the child has no right to obtain that information until the age of 18, and then is quite likely to find out that the donor lives overseas. (Much of the donor sperm used here comes from Denmark.)
A State that permits this does not really think the natural ties are important and worries little about the possible identity problems the donor-conceived child might encounter in later life.
This means a lot of our current and justifiable anger at past adoption practice shows a huge double standard at work.
The fact is, the natural ties do matter and should never be broken without very good cause. When they are broken, the child must, whenever possible, have a meaningful way of finding their natural parents again and developing a relationship with them. Anything less is an attack on the rights of the child, something our Children’s Minister ought to appreciate.
