Why do middle aged women have to lobby Parliament
for a Public Inquiry into past adoption practice? To answer
this I need to talk about the history of adoption.
Prior to 1926 - guardianship, wardship and
the private adoption of mainly older children were the norm.
The 'bad blood theory' prevented most people from adopting
infants - as adopted parents wished to see how the child
progressed before making a commitment
The 1926 Adoption act was initiated so that
adoptee's could inherit, the increased stability (not the
inherent secrecy) the act gave to the adoptee/adoptive family
was more a by-product of the 1926 act and had never really
been considered a reason for the inception of the policy.
Adoption was still only for un-titled plebes, it was not
legal for the landed gentry and the peers of the realm to
bequeath their titles and estates to their adopted children,
you see the aristocracy believed then as they still do today,
in the blue blood line and pedigrees'.
The majority of adoptions preceding and post
the 1926 act were still of older children, with a trickle
of numbers approx. 5K per year up to the Second World War.
Child Migration accounted for a huge number
of babies and children being sent to the colonies - over
a 100k between 1900-1967. Some were as young as 18 months
of age, all sent without parental consent, for economic
and social/racial engineering purposes. At that time it
cost 15s per week to keep a child in care in the UK, in
1948 in Australia it was half that amount. Australia was
also terrified of being invaded by the 'yellow peril' and
wanted to populate with good British Stock! The blasé attitude
with which philanthropists and social workers administered
child migration laid the foundation for the way unmarried
mothers would be treated in the post-war period.
The history of social work is interwoven with
the history of adoption. After the First World War women's
roles changed forever. They were expected to find paid employment
- that is the ones that could not find a husband to keep
them. There was a huge shortage of single men, and for the
first time single middle class women looked for work. Many
went into social work in private agencies with a philanthropic
fervour (men had always done this work prior to the first
world war) They brought with it a bitterness, punitiveness,
and a huge chip of moral outrage to their undeserving clients
who so desperately needed their help.
Jane Rowe a leading adoption social worker
in the 50's, 60's and 70's stated "White girls who
have illegitimate babies by coloured men are often emotionally
ill as well as socially defiant" Rowe further claimed
"that married women having out-of wedlock children
tend to be rather disturbed people. While the American middle-class
girl flouting the conventions by an illegitimate pregnancy
may well be emotionally sicker than her English, working-class
cousins".
Adoption didn't begin in earnest until after
the Second World War, following the inception of Beveridge's
1948 National Assistance Act
Beveridge had expressed a patriarchal concern
for the importance of children being reared in the proper
domestic environment, and was anxious not in any way to
encourage illegitimacy, or immorality. Evidence of patriarchal
domination by Beveridge is revealed through his conditions
of claim for divorced and separated women, a woman had to
prove that she was the innocent party in a divorce or separation
to claim a separate allowance. Beveridge's document also
encouraged a pervasive concern pertaining to reinforcing
and encouraging marriage, which almost amounted to marriage
being defined as a vital occupation and career. Welfare
Benefits were only payable when certain standards of morality
(as defined by the ruling patriarchy) were adhered to. Women
'living in sin' were targeted by this 'new morality' legislation,
which in fact denied benefit to any woman cohabiting, this
ruling and other similar practices were strictly enforced
by an army of official snoopers, employed by the Government
during the 50s, 60s and 70s.
The Church also jumped on this reproductive
soapbox when the Archbishop of Canterbury declared to the
Mothers Union in 1952, the "One child deliberately
willed as the limit is no family at all but something of
a misfortune, for child and parents. Two children accepted,
as the ideal limit does not make a real family - a family
only truly begins with three children'.
We now all know that this was Government propaganda
at its finest, all that was missing was Lord Haw Haw narrating
the plot. The Government had to get women out of the work-place
and out of the factories where they had replaced the men-folk
at war, get them back into the home, behind the kitchen
sink, pregnant and barefoot were they belong, so that their
men could have their jobs back and of course retain the
power and control.
Bonnie Burstow provides the following clear
definition of patriarchy: "In the world that elite
males create and that other men and women are at once privileged
and victimized by, women are less than men; Black and Red
men are less than white men; Black and Red men's women are
less than white men's women; the working class are less
than the ruling class; nature is an expendable commodity
to be exploited; and the objectifying stance on which this
is all based is celebrated as the scientific method".
It is quite important to understand what power
has to do with adoption - it can be defined as follows:
Some women have power over other women and benefit from
maintaining the status quo. For example, it is not difficult
to imagine how these relations of power may work in an area
such as adoption, and that it was no accident that placements
of children in adoption tend to mirror these relations of
power - poor to rich; Black to White; 'third world' country
to 'developed' country.
There has been approx. 890k adoption since
1926, of which 750k have been of infant/new-born babies,
adoptions that have denied the natural mothers the opportunity
to parent their offspring - babies adopted out to strangers.
The majority were adopted in the 50s, 60s and 70s the golden
year 1968 when there was 27.5k adoptions, in comparison
last year there was 300 infant adoptions in the whole year
- in 1968 there was 600 per week!
In fact there was such a surplus of babies
at this time that babies with a squint/red hair were unadoptable,
as were babies with minor handicaps. The majority of these
babies were returned to the natural mother to rear, somehow
she was capable of looking after a handicapped baby that
would need expert care, but not of a normal healthy infant.
This was shameful and amoral, did all these
women really reject their first born or was there a deeper
more horrifying reason for this mass maternal rejection?
If so did the Government augment a study into this holocaust?
Pat Basquill's story The damage that coercive
adoption inflicted upon the mother and child was well known
by the professional's involved within the adoption industry
at this time, a 15 year study concluded in 1967 by Wilfred
Jarvis a clinical psychologist in NSW states; "Mothers
who surrender their children for adoption seem to suffer
chronic bereavement for the rest of their lives. And, as
if to complement this, adopted children usually manifest
a keen and often obsessional wish to locate their natural
mothers, which becomes dominant during adolescence"
Dr. Donald Gough spent many years studying
unmarried mothers in the unmarried mother's homes; he spoke
to the Standing Conference of Adoption in 1962 about adoption
being economic, punitive and a cure for infertility. If
only he had known then that the barbaric result of this
insidious practice would result in over one third of natural
mother (250K) having secondary infertility.
Coercive adoption does not only affect the
natural mother and child, it affects all other relatives;
750K natural fathers, grandparents, siblings and partners.
Irish siblings letter. So what went wrong?
How did adoption become a cure for immorality, infertility,
and economic drain? Easy because they could. Young vulnerable
unsupported pregnant girls are easy pickings for powerful
moral welfare workers, who have created a socio-system where
coercive practice and bullying is the norm.
And a loving new unmarried mother is a bad
immoral selfish girl who loves her baby too much if she
wants to keep it for herself. There was also another hidden
agenda, to keep their power and their jobs in the mainly
private adoption agencies/unmarried mother's homes - they
also needed incomes.
Unbeknown to us the state paid these pariahs's
of society to take our babies and to treat us shamefully.
They took our benefits, that we were entitled to and told
us when we asked there was none available and our babies
would starve in our care, all to proliferate their baby
racket!
Adopted parents were charged vast sums of
money by the private and church adoption agencies, some
paying covenants years later.
In 1976 the adoption act was changed so that
adult adoptees would have the right to information concerning
their parentage. Natural mothers were not consulted about
the effects that this would have on their lives, as many
have lived a life of deceit and lies forced upon them at
the point of adoption; 'go away and forget it ever happened
' was a common theme amongst the judiciary at that time.
Imagine living your life being told to go
away and forget, you never truly forget - sometimes you
have 'infantile amnesia' a strategy to help you cope, you
live your whole life not knowing whether your child is dead
or alive'. A mother whose child is lost in battle suffers
a similar experience, however at least she has had the chance
to rear her child.
Val Woodhouse - son's death.
In May 1998 natural mother's from all over
the world attended a conference in Felixstowe, it was extremely
empowering, cathartic and for me a watershed!
Chris Coles language speech.
NPSG has initiated research into past adoption
practice, and can confirm that the law has been broken over
and over again. Between 1948/1976 natural mother's were
supposed to have been given the following choices: Foster
Care National Assistance Welfare Support Housing Benefits
For me adoption should be at the end of a
very long road, at the end of a very long pier, at the end
of the world, having swallowed a bottle of pills, with a
noose around your neck, after consuming several bottles
of spirits.
NPSG has been lobbying Parliament in London
for a Public Inquiry into past adoption practice. We have
the support of over a 100 MP's, with Sir Teddy Taylor leading
the cross party Common's delegation. We have delivered many
presentations in Westminster to many MP's and only a handful
has displayed disinterest - mainly adoptive parents.
If adoption is so good why don't we all have
our babies adopted? I don't know a single mother from the
40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, who said; 'take it, it cries to much,
I want a good night out'.
Why do we need an Inquiry?
We were discredited - we became discreditable.
We became silent - we need to speak and be heard. We were
disempowered - we need empowerment. We were de-humanized
- we need to regain our dignity. We were stigmatized/isolated/excluded
- we need inclusion.
But most of all we need a Public Inquiry for
our daughters, granddaughters - for like the Jewish Holocaust,
if this injustice is never vindicated or acknowledged, what
is to stop society repeating this tragedy against womankind.
For me there are only two reasons: 1. So that
I can hold my head high and people can stop treating me
as a victim as I am a survivor. 2. For my daughter - for
she has lived her life believing that she was unwanted and
unloved - and through this Inquiry she will be able to say
- my mother did love/want me - illegal coercive practices
took me from her.
Posted with permission by Pamela Sharp at Natural Parents
Support Group in England.
