Sir, - Reading Prof Casey's piece in your newspaper (Opinion, November 9th), I tried to imagine how I would feel had I recently placed a child for adoption or were I contemplating adoption. The use of words like "repellent" and "pornographic" and the suggestion that social workers treat women considering adoption as "pariahs or misfits" would actively discourage me from seeking information on adoption.
Prof Casey does not understand or empathise with the birth parents undergoing the experience of parting with a child for adoption, or with the ongoing impact of that decision. She poses the question of whether adoptive parents should assess one another. Is there a stronger argument that birth parents would be much more suitable to assess adoptive couples? As far as birth parents are concerned, there are never enough questions to be asked of adoptive parents.
It is completely wrong and a simplistic analysis to blame social workers for the fact that some women choose abortion as an option. Evelyn Mahon's study Women and Crisis Pregnancy, published in 1998, highlights the underlying complex reasons behind women's choices, which includes the fact that women are no longer forced to place their children for adoption.
Rather than Prof Casey's assumption that it is social workers who discourage birth parents, it is more realistic to consider the wider social context in which families, peers and the community discourage birth parents from placing their children for adoption. Perhaps the current debate would be more constructive if we were all to examine our attitudes to pregnancy outside marriage, adoption and lone parenthood. - Yours, etc., M. Hartley,
Leixlip,
Co Kildare.