Mind Moves: Adoption practices in the past, described in last week's column, were different to adoption today.
This change is exemplified by the new National Adoption Contact Preference Register facilitating contact between those families of origin and adoptees who desire some level of information or re-connection with each other.
Society too has changed in the half century since the first Irish Adoption Act 1952. Many of the 42,000 children formally adopted since then are adults now, informing future adoption practices by their experiences as adoptees. So too are adoptive parents, birth mothers and their families, many of whom have discovered brothers, sisters and cousins whose existence or identity was previously concealed.
The social, psychological, spiritual, educational, economic and domestic world today's newborn enters is markedly different to that of earlier Irish generations. Families have changed. Their compositions, configurations and modes of daily living have fluidity unimaginable in the 1950s. Gender roles have expanded and many fathers are claiming their rights to participate more in their children's lives.
Non-marital birth, the ultimate crime of earlier times, is statistically challenging birth within the married, stable, two-parent, separate gendered, traditional family form of Article 41 of Bunreacht na hÉireann. Life has changed utterly. So too has adoption.
From almost 1,500 adoption orders in 1967, there have been fewer domestic adoptions of Irish children in so-called 'stranger' adoption whereby couples took total legal responsibility for other people's children and birth mothers relinquished all legal, access and information rights to their child. However, kinship fostering and adoption, and the range of domestic circumstances from which children may be adopted are expanding. The "best interests of the child" is becoming more than an abstract ideological aspiration as new forms of domestic adoption prioritise the needs of each child.
Standardisation of practices, policies, procedures and practitioner training is advancing. There has been a steady increase in inter-country adoptions since the Adoption Act of 1990 which has helped expand understanding of the complexity of adoption for all. Adoptive couples have enriched their definition of their parenthood, including warm appreciation for the ethnicity, culture, circumstances and eventual cultural reconnection their child may require.
International research has suggested that, when possible, it is best for children to be brought up by their birth family and open adoption, in most cases (not all), is best for children. Open adoption refers to the continuum of communication among the adoption triad: adoptive parents, adoptees and birth parents.
Levels of openness range from the closed confidential cut-off of former times to mediated contact, prescribed contact or fully disclosed. There are also variations in frequency, intensity, duration and degree of contact although this tends to depend on the wishes of adoptive parents rather than being legislatively prescribed.
The landscape of adoption has changed. Much is now known about what went wrong in a society that penalised single birth mothers, coerced their consent to adoption, kept their offspring in ignorance of their identity and frequently gave traumatised children to adoptive couples, some of whom were themselves traumatised by their own experiences of stillbirth, miscarriages, infertility or grief for the loss of their idealised child.
Much is now known about the distress of adoptive parents when difficulties arose - their acute sense of responsibility for the adopted child, their guilt when accident, illness or emotional distress occurred in that child or when their own biological children were angry or envious of adopted intruders into their lives. More is understood about their ambivalence when unexpected pregnancy followed closely upon adoption after years of waiting for a child. And there is greater understanding of the lifetime of identity angst and isolation of many adopted children of that time.
The early psychological aridity of adoption produced thousands of birth mothers demented by grief and large numbers of their adult 'children' in subsequent search of them. The alteration of documents, disappearance of files, obstruction of search and reunion efforts denied the interests of those whose best interests adoption was designed to serve. Birth fathers did not feature; their names unrecorded on birth certificates and in the narratives of their children's lives. Some adoptive parents have been subsequently demonised as co-conspirators in these sad circumstances rather than people wishing to provide a home for a child and a child for their home: to become a family in ways nature had denied.
It is time to heal another Irish past, but also to remember the many children cherished, nurtured and loved within adoption, those for whom their parents were their adoptive parents and they in turn their child, those who received the love contained in the words "not flesh of my flesh nor bone of my bone, but still miraculously my own. Never forget for a single minute, you didn't grow under my heart, but in it."
For more information: www.adoptionboard.ie; www.adoptionireland.com