White couple find it hard to adopt a black baby

Press, 18 February 1984, Page 28

White couple find it hard to adopt a black baby

NZPA staff correspondent London A white couple who have been trying for five years in Britain to adopt a black baby may now look abroad because British adoption agencies say racial discrimination is p fact of life.

The “Daily Mail” in London reported that the couple had been told that it could be harmful for black children to be brought up with white parents. Commenting on this, the director of British agencies for adoption and fostering,

Mr Tony Hall, told NZPA that the coping capacity of white families was in doubt when “black people are subjected to discrimination.” Saying that it was “imperative if at all possible that black children go to black families” Mr Hall said

that adoption agencies had increasingly realised "the importance of race” in the needs of a child in recent years. Mrs Julie Stone and her husband Brian, who have four of their own children, decided to apply for adop-

tion after fostering a baby girl for a short time. Mrs Stone, aged 37, said: “We felt we would rather adopt a black or mixed-race baby because there was a shortage of white babies. Because we already have children, it did not seem fair to ask for a white baby.” But she was told by one of the London agencies the latest policy was that it was not a good idea to place coloured children, because it could be harmful for them, with white parents. Mrs Stone and her husband who run a sea-front hotel in Morecambe, Lancashire, are now considering extending their search abroad.

Mr Hall said that there was a lot of confusion between supply and demand. The umbrella organisation for adoption and foster agencies, sponsored partly by the Government, had no statistics at hand for the number of black or white children up for adoption but he said that it was very difficult to adopt children at present.

“The number of adoptions going ahead today has fallen dramatically because there are fewer children up for adoption and more foster parents available. Last year under 2000 were adopted in Britain.”

He said it was difficult to know whether there were more black children than white children for adoption, but there were definitely more physically and mentally handicapped children needing foster parents.

Although there were a lot more older black children in care, Mr Hall said it did not necessarily mean that more black babies were available for adoption.

Mr Hall said that black children had rarely been adopted by white couples in Britain because of the need for a black identity.

The editor of the “Baaf Journal,” Sarah Curtis, recently emphasised that black children brought up by white families often found it more difficult to cope with racial prejudice. The “Daily Mail” reported the well-known English botanist, David Bellamy, who has three coloured children among his four adopted ones, as saying the parents’ colour was not important. “I don’t think it is a problem for a black child to be brought up by a white family. We are all basically human beings and the product of every conception is entirely differennt from its parents,” said Dr Bellamy.

“I can see the point, in a perfect world, that children should go to the same type of family as themselves,” he said. “But I recently opened an adoption shop and I can only hope that some of those kids there find homes. It doesn’t matter what colour the parents are, so long as they want them.”