Changing attitudes, loyalties, and a right to know

Press, 22 August 1979, Page 17

Changing attitudes, loyalties, and a right to know

'Adoption was a “taboo” subject for many years. Children were often not told they were adopted, let alone given information abut their natural parents.

But attitudes have slowly changed and many of the old misconceptions and prejudices about adoption have been broken down in the last decade.

Miss Shirley Greenwood, of the Social Welfare Department’s Christchurch office, says that fhe department has become more sympathetic to the “problems, uncertainties, and difficulties” for those involved in the adoption process.

As state servants social welfare workers are bound by the Official Secrets Act, and by the Adoption Act, not to divulge information that may lead to the identity of any party involved in an adoption. But the department now realises the importance of providing birth mothers with information about the home to which their child is going, and of giving the adoptive parents much more information about the birth parents, so that this can be given to the child as needed.

“We don’t say the mother was Miss New Zealand 1970 something and the father was a bishop,”’ says Miss Greenwood. Any information that is necessary for the “health and well-being” of the child, such as a history of hereditary illness in the birth parents’ families, would certainly be divulged.

It is also becoming more common for the birth mother to meet the adoptive parents, says Mrs Ruth Paton, of the department. In most cases the girls and the adoptive parents go away happy, she says.

Adoptive parents are also made aware that in later life their adopted child may want to search f .- its natural parents. “We emphasise that adoptees do not think any the less of them because of this. It is they who will have loved and brought them up, and given them a sense of identity.” Mrs Lee Eathorne, a former convener of a course for prospective adoptive parents, run by the Christchurch Parents’ Centre, does not see a possible change in the adoption law as a threat, but as a “positive step.” For many adoptive parents the law is an “unknown factor,” Miss Eathorne says. Most do not think ahead; their immediate concern is to take custody of the child and to tell the child that he or she is adopted, as soon as possible. Adopted parents have to get used to the idea that their child might want to trace his or her natural parents some day, and made to see that this is not a threat to their parenthoood. Social attitudes have to change to allow a more open adoption system, says Dugald McDonald, a specialist in child welfare

policy, and a senior lecturer in social work at Canterbury University.

There is no reason why there should not be continued contact between the birth mother and the adopted child, after the adoption is complete, he says. It would not divide a child’s loyalties; there are a number of cases where contact is maintained — it is calfed fostering, he adds. As adoption becomes more acceptable, arid as children are told of their adoption from an early age and are given background information a bout their parents, the nee* 1 for contact would eventually diminish, Mr McDonald says.

Theoretically, any new Lw which allowed inspection of the records would fall into misuse, fie says. But there is no guarantee that th** adoptive parents will make that information available to the child; “that’s one thing you cannot legislate for." “What we have to get away from is the belief that there is some secret information that is os- . tensibly protecting the rights of the natural and adoptive parents. We have to get around to the view that it is really in the interests of al! parties for a limited amount of information to be shared initially and for this to be increased as a person gets older. Certainly at the age of 18 a person should have the right to know his or her natural parents.” j