Former P.M. opposes adult adoption bill

Press, 8 February 1985, Page 3

Former P.M. opposes adult adoption bill

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington

History was made in Parliament yesterday when the former Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon, appeared in person before a Parliamentary select committee to oppose legislation. Sir Robert said he had never been as opposed to anything in all his years in Parliament as he was to the Adult Adoption Information Bill.

This bill is conscience legislation on which all members of Parliament will have a free vote, and would liberalise access to adoption records. Sir Robert said his main reason for opposing the bill was its impact on elderly women who had given a child for what was believed to be a secret adoption many years ago. “In their case this is retrospective legislation of a most cruel kind, and should not be contemplated in today’s society,” he said.

These women had become pregnant at a time when abortion had been a “back street” crime attended with grave physical dangers. It had been normal at that time for a woman to be counselled to have her baby, sometimes in another town, to agree to its adoption, and then put the whole experience behind her.

Many thousands of woman had had this experience over the years, Sir Robert said. Most had married subsequently and experienced a normal family life thereafter. In many, probably most, cases the husband had not been told of the earlier experience, just as many a woman today would not give a prospective husband a detailed account of her previous sexual experience. “It is a matter of record that large numbers of women in this situation are today terrified of the passage on this bill,” Sir Robert said. “It is this terror that has

been brought to my notice in so many cases since the public became aware of the proposal. “Mental anguish and torture equate physical pain, and I do not believe that the reasons for passing this bill are adequate to permit the mental anguish to be inflicted on so many woman,” Sir Robert said.

It was no answer to say that a woman could register the fact that she did not wish her name to be disclosed. For many women, particularly the elderly, the mere fact of registration was an ordeal from which she was entitled to be protected.

Specific examples included a Catholic nun, a prominent sportswoman, a single woman a headmistress of a school; in each of these and similar cases the act of registration was an unwarranted invasion of privacy. To require this act to be repeated every 10 years for the rest of the woman’s life

was repugnant, Sir Robert said. In many thousands of cases the women concerned would not even be aware that the legislation had been passed. There had been little publicity since its introduction, and it was a fact that many women paid little attention to the news media. “The bill is written in terms of the rights of the child,” Sir Robert said. But going back to the time when children of today’s elderly women were born, many of those children, had the mother become pregnant in today’s society, would have been aborted under the law. Without exception, those children would have preferred a permanently secret adoption to the alternative of abortion.

It is thought to be the first time a former Prime Minister has appeared as an individual to give evidence to a Parliamentary select committee hearing points of view of pending legislation.