More people could achieve their dreams, more women could get what they want, and more people could get to live - isn't it time to give women more choice?
@Neil O'Brien, this was a great piece, so I was surprised to see the ratio of comments to likes. But the explanation is straightforward: you've triggered the usual small subset of adoptees who are unhappy with their lives and want to blame their unhappiness on their being adopted (in which they're abetted by a culture that openly prefers death to even modest suffering).
I'm an adoptive parent and the child of an adoptee. This has not been without troubles, whether from adoptive paternal grandmother's ignorance about boys or bio mother's drug use during pregnancy, but it's preposterous and insulting to my father and some of my children to say that they didn't deserve to live in the first place.
It really is not a small subset. The statistical evidence that is emerging from long overdue research on adoptee outcomes is shocking. You are also an adoptive parent, which means that you are already trying to defend your entrenched position as a saviour.
Let the free market solve the problem. We allow parents to pay surrogates, we should allow parents to financially compensate mothers when they give up their baby.
The point of making abortions legal until birth is not so that a 39-week pregnant woman can suddenly decide “you know, I changed my mind, I actually don’t want to have this baby,” it’s so that when a pregnant woman has a medical emergency, doctors can intervene to save her life without having to waste time consulting with lawyers about exactly how close to the line on “life of the mother” they are.
Wide majority of abortions take place within 10 weeks of pregnancy via taking a pill. VASTLY different than going through a 9 month to term pregnancy. You're talking apples and oranges.
So... instead of adoption, people are murdering their children? Indeed, it might well be said that the rise of child-murder has led to the dearth of child adoption... since they both represent a devaluing of child life. It seems as if they message really seems to be, 'better dead than adopted'.
I actually think you are off your rocker. If you look at the US where the removal of Roe v Wade has lead to a decrease in abortion. The mothers who are denied don't choose to have that child adopted. In the majority of cases they choose to parent. So what you are saying is that by making it more difficult to abort, adoptions of babies will go up, this just isn't true. Forcing women who don't want to carry a baby to carry won't increase the numbers of babies available for adoption. It will increase poverty, it will increase the burden on the welfare state, it will increase suicides and it will increase violence against women.
Next, the impact on those children. I was adopted at 7days old, worst thing that ever happened to me. I now find out I have CPTSD and I am neuro divergent because of this separation as a baby and the effect of being taken away from my mother.
Rhetoric like yours is damaging and hugely dangerous.
you have written a substack encouraging a system by which women are forced to give birth in order to provide a childless family with a baby. It's some form of handmaid's tale ideology which turns women into brood mares. If a woman chooses abortion, that is her right. Forcing that woman to give birth against her wishes is just plain evil and as I said it doesn't work. Deny abortions and those children don't become available for adoption. Your views are archaic and out of date not to mention highly misogynistic. At the end of the day, adoption inflicts huge trauma on all parties and should be abolished in the form that we see it today. Women certainly don't need men like you telling them what to do with their bodies.
As someone who was adopted at 9 weeks old in 1964 (my two siblings were adopted at 6 weeks and shortly after birth), this fills me with such sorrow and anger. My parents were unable to have children, yet they gave me and my siblings all the love, advantage and opportunity that anyone could possibly ask for. The analysis Mr O'Briean presents shows that we are essentially killing off our legacy with abortion on demand up to the point of birth (according to the new Labour legislation) yet we have made it almost impossible for those who would prefer to not abort their child to allow it to be adopted childless couples. Just as with importing uneducated and unskilled culturally alien individuals to depress wages, this policy is designed to continue the depression in birthrates almost deliberately.
I was at my cousin's 80th birthday this weekend, and I (a childless gay man) was in the bosom of his two daughters and their families (two children each), and it dawned on me of how important is the physical legacy a human being leaves. It is an immense regret that my husband and I did not make that decision when we should have, but I would want to encourage all who want a family to seize the moment as soon as they can.
Someone asked Michael Gove a while back why he hasn’t tried to find his biological mother and he said that he felt that would imply that the love his adoptive parents had given him was incomplete, when they had been “brilliant parents” to him.
I may have been the first to mention institutional care but that was in the context of considering what the alternatives would be for trying to ensure that people feel supported to carry their babies to term if they would do so were it not for a lack of financial support and that people who are willing to offer personal homes can also do so. I've at no point said that adoption is evil. In fact I was saying that it was a good thing to support people to adopt if they would like to.
I'm feeling increasingly frustrated in this thread because it appears that people are quite consistently arguing against positions which I have never actually advanced and ascribing them to me.
Some things I don't belive:
I don't believe adoption is evil.
I don't believe human trafficking is good.
Some things I do believe:
Adoption by a loving family tends to be better for the child than institutional care.
It is good if people who would have aborted their children out of financial hardship have that hardship resolved.
"It's very easy to stick a label on something and call it evil..." your words. I know you're not saying adoption is evil. I thought you were saying that some of us commenting were rushing to describe adoption as evil. Whilst I wouldn't personally use the word 'evil', adoption is far from an unequivocal good for reasons that others have rehearsed in this discussion.
We're agreed that human trafficking isn't good. Where I suspect we differ is that I think adoption with its transferring of children between families and money changing hands (albeit in the UK it's not individuals buying babies) comes dangerously close to trafficking.
The institutional care point in this context is a bit of a red herring, I think. The author is talking about actively encouraging adoption of infants - rather than abortion, not instead of institutional care.
I agree that if someone would have terminated a pregnancy purely because of financial hardship could have that hardship resolved it would be a good thing. However, I'd add 'to enable them to parent their child'.
I think we broadly agree on the principles then! Just a quick clarification: I'm not sure if you can see, the thread is looking convoluted to me, but I made that comment in response to someone saying that the policy I suggested was evil, so I was trying to defend my specific policy, as opposed to saying that anyone had said adoption writ large was evil.
I think we also agree that supporting people to parent their own children is the ideal, and the policy I suggested would also be supporting this!
I would be ignoring that alternative if it weren't for the fact that the policy I'm suggesting would also involve financial support for those who choose to keep their kids. I think you're arguing against a position I don't actually hold.
For context I made the comment about what an uneducated position was in response to an allegation that I was making an uneducated analysis rather than just randomly cranking out that term.
Neil, the most glaring flaw in your article is that the one group of people who actually live with the consequences of adoption are almost entirely absent from it.
You talk about women who don't want an abortion.
You talk about couples who want a baby.
You barely talk about adoptees.
That's extraordinary given that adoptees are the very people who have spent decades explaining the lifelong consequences of adoption, and only weeks after the Government apologised for historical adoption practices and the harm they caused.
Throughout the article, adoption is treated as a way of solving adult problems. A woman has a problem. A couple has a problem. Adoption fixes both.
But the child isn't a solution. The child becomes an adoptee.
And that adoptee then has to live with the consequences for the next 70 or 80 years.
There is a substantial body of research showing adoptees experience significantly elevated rates of mental health difficulties and suicide attempts compared with non-adoptees. Meta-analysis has found suicide attempt rates around two to three times higher amongst adoptees, with some studies finding risks even higher.
None of that appears anywhere in your article.
Nor do you engage with what we now know about maternal-fetal attachment. A baby is not some isolated individual that suddenly appears at birth. Human development, attachment and stress responses begin long before delivery. There is extensive research on in-utero development, maternal stress and intergenerational effects which utterly undermines the simplistic idea that a baby can simply be transferred from one family to another without consequence.
Most remarkable of all, you present the collapse of infant adoption as a problem.
Many of us would argue it is evidence of progress.
In societies where women have adequate support, housing, healthcare, financial security and freedom from social stigma, infant relinquishment becomes increasingly rare. That should be the goal.
If a woman wants to keep her child but feels unable to because of poverty, housing, childcare or lack of support, the answer is to fix those problems.
The answer is not to create a more efficient pipeline supplying newborn babies to adults who want them.
Nobody is entitled to someone else's baby.
Not because they are infertile.
Not because they would make wonderful parents.
Not because there is demand.
After everything adoptees and mothers have explained, after parliamentary inquiries, after official apologies, after decades of evidence, it is genuinely shocking to see someone look at the near disappearance of baby adoption and conclude that what Britain needs is more of it.
The lesson of history is not that we need to find a nicer way to separate mothers and babies.
The lesson of history is that we should be doing everything possible to stop those separations happening in the first place.
"Nobody is entitled to someone else's baby." - I don't say this at any point. You are attacking a whole bunch of arguments which do not appear in the article above.
As you are well aware, my argument was not that you literally claimed anyone is entitled to somebody else's baby.
My argument was that your article discusses the wishes of adults who want children and the circumstances of women facing difficult pregnancies whilst giving remarkably little attention to the people who will spend the rest of their lives living with the consequences of being adopted.
You have chosen to focus on a single sentence near the end of my comment while ignoring the actual premise.
You have not addressed the adoptee mental health evidence.
You have not addressed the elevated rates of suicide attempts found in adoptee research.
You have not addressed maternal-child separation, identity, ancestry, belonging or loss.
You have not addressed the testimony of adult adoptees.
You have not addressed the recent Parliamentary inquiries into historical adoption practices or the Government's apology only weeks ago.
Instead, you have selected one phrase and presented it as though it were the entirety of my argument.
The central criticism remains exactly the same:
Your article proposes increasing infant adoption whilst devoting remarkably little attention to adoptee outcomes.
Multiple adoptees in this thread have raised that concern.
To date, neither your article nor your response appears to engage with it.
I am sorry, but I profoundly disagree with your argument, as an adoptee. Yes, there can be problems, but in a loving home (which can be just as much an adopting family as a natural family) we can prosper. And, conversely, the natural family can also result in trauma and issues.
Steve, I'm genuinely pleased that adoption worked out well for you. I wouldn't wish a bad adoption experience on anyone.
But a positive adoption experience does not invalidate the experiences of adoptees for whom it didn't.
For many years I would probably have made a similar argument myself.
The difficulty is that this discussion isn't about whether some adoptees can thrive in loving adoptive families. Of course they can.
The question is whether adoption is a benign intervention that we should deliberately increase.
That's a very different claim.
We now have a substantial body of research showing elevated rates of psychological distress, mental health difficulties and suicide attempts amongst adoptees as a group compared with non-adoptees.
We also have decades of testimony from adoptees describing issues around identity, belonging, separation, ancestry and loss that can persist even when adoptive parents were loving and well-intentioned.
One thing I have learned is that adoption is not always experienced in the same way throughout life. Many adoptees only begin to understand the impact it has had on them later in adulthood, often following major life events such as becoming parents themselves, bereavement, reunion with family, serious illness or other significant transitions.
That was certainly true for me. For many years I would have described my adoption very differently to how I understand it today.
None of that means every adoption is harmful.
Equally, it means we cannot assume that a loving adoptive home erases the consequences of separation.
Natural families can absolutely be traumatic (as can adoptive families). Nobody is denying that. Sometimes adoption may be the least harmful option available. If so, I would argue the support available to adoptees, birth families and adoptive families is still nowhere near what it should be.
But that doesn't make adoption neutral.
Nor does it justify deliberately increasing the number of infant adoptions when the alternative may be supporting mothers to keep and raise their own children.
There is no need to erase a person's legal identity, family relationships and history unless all realistic alternatives have been exhausted.
Adoption should be a last resort for children who genuinely need it.
I would also point out that this isn't simply a debate between older adoptees and younger adoptees. Many of the concerns being raised by adult adoptees today are also showing up in contemporary adoption research and in surveys of adoptive families themselves. Changing how adoption is presented does not automatically remove the underlying issues around identity, separation, belonging and loss.
My concern with Neil's article is that he is not describing adoption as a last resort.
He is proposing increasing infant adoption as a policy response.
You are essentially promoting the legalised trafficking of infants and removal of their rights.
Being childless is painful, I know, but that does not give any of us the right to take the children of others and pretend they are ours.
Only just last month we had an apology from the government for the forced adoption era. Perhaps you should read and listen to the testimony of those who were taken and entered into this industry without consent or way out.
Adoption law is a adult-serving abuse of human rights and deserves to go the way of the Dodo.
I suggest you look into funding effective supports for adopted people who were wrecked by the very process you are advocating to reinstate, before you even consider pushing for another generation of traumatised infants to be produced.
Read the testimonies from the forced adoption era. Listen to the select committee. There is plenty out there if you do some reasearch. Of course not all adopted people are affected int the same way but all have been entered into a legal arrangement without consent and no means of exit. This alone makes it not fit for purpose.
All adoptions are forced on the children, especially infants. The only time an adoption is no forced on the child, is when they are old enough to consent.
There is no evidence for it whatsoever, because it flies in the face of all testimony and experience from first mothers. No-one has an abortion when they really wanted an adoption. But hundreds of thousands had an adoption when what they wanted was an abortion. Which the real agenda here; the usual making politics a battle over the control of women's bodies and choices. We've been down the road and it is horrific.
As an adoptee, what troubles me most about this piece is the framing.
Adoption should exist to find families for children who genuinely need them. It should not exist to create a supply of newborns for adults who would like to adopt babies but do not want to adopt older children.
Those are fundamentally different things.
You acknowledge the history of women being coerced into relinquishing their babies, yet the solution you propose still raises an uncomfortable question: if a pregnant woman is considering abortion because she does not have the financial resources to parent, why should society provide her with “practical help” to continue the pregnancy and relinquish her child rather than providing practical help so she can keep her child if that is what she wants?
Poverty should never be treated as a pipeline to adoption.
And I think the adoptee is strangely absent from a proposal that would create more adoptees. You discuss women with unintended pregnancies and adults waiting for newborns as two groups who could “help each other,” with the baby almost positioned as the mechanism by which their needs are solved.
But that baby becomes a person who may grow up with questions about identity, ancestry, medical history, belonging, separation and why the circumstances surrounding their birth resulted in them being raised outside their family of origin.
Adoption can absolutely be necessary. It can also be loving. But it begins with loss, and that reality should make us extremely cautious about policies designed to increase the number of infants available for adoption.
The goal of child welfare should be fewer unnecessary family separations, not more adoptable babies.
Children are not the answer to a shortage of newborns for prospective parents. It’s not the responsibility of the adoptee to replace what is missing an adults life who may be barren or struggling to conceive. Sorry that’s not our problem. Adoption is a for profit system. Period.
Stop talking about Adoptees as if we have no civil rights or opinions. We had no choice in the matter. Nobody asked us what we thought or what we think but for some reason folks who don’t know nothing about the nuances surrounding adoption always bark the loudest about adoption.
You say, "why should society provide her with “practical help” to continue the pregnancy and relinquish her child rather than providing practical help so she can keep her child if that is what she wants?" I don't argue against that - I am talking here about people who do NOT want to bring up a child.
100% correct. I’m stunned by this article. Have we still not understood the harm caused to hundreds of thousands of babies removed from their mothers voluntarily or not. This article is uneducated and what is proposed is totally unethical. Are we really going to start trading babies again.
I explicitly say - I am not advocating that babies are involuntarily removed from their mothers. Nor do I call for "trading babies". What are you arguing against? It certainly isn't my article.
I understand that you are not advocating involuntary removal. That was not my argument.
My concern is that “voluntary” relinquishment does not exist in a vacuum. If a woman does not want to parent because she cannot afford housing, childcare, food, healthcare, or basic stability, then material hardship is part of that choice.
You are proposing policy intended to increase infant adoption while also acknowledging that economic circumstances influence reproductive decisions. That is exactly why I am asking whether the support should first be available to help women parent if they would choose to do so with adequate resources.
And as an adoptee, I am also challenging the premise that a shortage of newborns available to prospective adopters is a social problem that needs solving. Adults wanting newborns does not create an obligation to produce more newborn adoptees.
My concern is not forced adoption. It is creating incentives and systems that make family separation more likely, while framing that separation primarily as a solution for adults.
As an adoptee from the baby scoop era whose whole life has been damaged by the impact of adoption this is an appalling suggestion. The suicide rates amongst adoptees are significantly higher than those of the rest of the population. There are significant mental health challenges for adoptees not helped by the fairy tales of adoption being so amazing. There is no guarantee of a happy family life and increasing evidence of adoptive parents struggling with maintaining a positive relationship with their child from adolescence. There is significant scientific evidence of the biological and psychological impact on the brain, body and psychology of adoptees. The in vitro bonding and effect of an unwanted pregnancy is now understood. This creates lifelong issues with relationships for adoptees. There was a reason the government issued an apology to both mothers and adoptees from the baby scoop era. Having been adopted I am very pro choice as abortion is the kinder option. Please do your research and listen to those with lived experience.
@Neil O'Brien, this was a great piece, so I was surprised to see the ratio of comments to likes. But the explanation is straightforward: you've triggered the usual small subset of adoptees who are unhappy with their lives and want to blame their unhappiness on their being adopted (in which they're abetted by a culture that openly prefers death to even modest suffering).
I'm an adoptive parent and the child of an adoptee. This has not been without troubles, whether from adoptive paternal grandmother's ignorance about boys or bio mother's drug use during pregnancy, but it's preposterous and insulting to my father and some of my children to say that they didn't deserve to live in the first place.
It really is not a small subset. The statistical evidence that is emerging from long overdue research on adoptee outcomes is shocking. You are also an adoptive parent, which means that you are already trying to defend your entrenched position as a saviour.
Let the free market solve the problem. We allow parents to pay surrogates, we should allow parents to financially compensate mothers when they give up their baby.
Once we’ve invented a method of contraception that’s effective and inexpensive. Then we’ll see some changes………..
The point of making abortions legal until birth is not so that a 39-week pregnant woman can suddenly decide “you know, I changed my mind, I actually don’t want to have this baby,” it’s so that when a pregnant woman has a medical emergency, doctors can intervene to save her life without having to waste time consulting with lawyers about exactly how close to the line on “life of the mother” they are.
Wide majority of abortions take place within 10 weeks of pregnancy via taking a pill. VASTLY different than going through a 9 month to term pregnancy. You're talking apples and oranges.
So... instead of adoption, people are murdering their children? Indeed, it might well be said that the rise of child-murder has led to the dearth of child adoption... since they both represent a devaluing of child life. It seems as if they message really seems to be, 'better dead than adopted'.
the solution to one person's problem can simply never be another person
I actually think you are off your rocker. If you look at the US where the removal of Roe v Wade has lead to a decrease in abortion. The mothers who are denied don't choose to have that child adopted. In the majority of cases they choose to parent. So what you are saying is that by making it more difficult to abort, adoptions of babies will go up, this just isn't true. Forcing women who don't want to carry a baby to carry won't increase the numbers of babies available for adoption. It will increase poverty, it will increase the burden on the welfare state, it will increase suicides and it will increase violence against women.
Next, the impact on those children. I was adopted at 7days old, worst thing that ever happened to me. I now find out I have CPTSD and I am neuro divergent because of this separation as a baby and the effect of being taken away from my mother.
Rhetoric like yours is damaging and hugely dangerous.
Can you point me to the place in the article above where I say that "making it more difficult to abort, [will mean] adoptions of babies will go up," ?
you have written a substack encouraging a system by which women are forced to give birth in order to provide a childless family with a baby. It's some form of handmaid's tale ideology which turns women into brood mares. If a woman chooses abortion, that is her right. Forcing that woman to give birth against her wishes is just plain evil and as I said it doesn't work. Deny abortions and those children don't become available for adoption. Your views are archaic and out of date not to mention highly misogynistic. At the end of the day, adoption inflicts huge trauma on all parties and should be abolished in the form that we see it today. Women certainly don't need men like you telling them what to do with their bodies.
As someone who was adopted at 9 weeks old in 1964 (my two siblings were adopted at 6 weeks and shortly after birth), this fills me with such sorrow and anger. My parents were unable to have children, yet they gave me and my siblings all the love, advantage and opportunity that anyone could possibly ask for. The analysis Mr O'Briean presents shows that we are essentially killing off our legacy with abortion on demand up to the point of birth (according to the new Labour legislation) yet we have made it almost impossible for those who would prefer to not abort their child to allow it to be adopted childless couples. Just as with importing uneducated and unskilled culturally alien individuals to depress wages, this policy is designed to continue the depression in birthrates almost deliberately.
I was at my cousin's 80th birthday this weekend, and I (a childless gay man) was in the bosom of his two daughters and their families (two children each), and it dawned on me of how important is the physical legacy a human being leaves. It is an immense regret that my husband and I did not make that decision when we should have, but I would want to encourage all who want a family to seize the moment as soon as they can.
Someone asked Michael Gove a while back why he hasn’t tried to find his biological mother and he said that he felt that would imply that the love his adoptive parents had given him was incomplete, when they had been “brilliant parents” to him.
Hi Emma,
I may have been the first to mention institutional care but that was in the context of considering what the alternatives would be for trying to ensure that people feel supported to carry their babies to term if they would do so were it not for a lack of financial support and that people who are willing to offer personal homes can also do so. I've at no point said that adoption is evil. In fact I was saying that it was a good thing to support people to adopt if they would like to.
I'm feeling increasingly frustrated in this thread because it appears that people are quite consistently arguing against positions which I have never actually advanced and ascribing them to me.
Some things I don't belive:
I don't believe adoption is evil.
I don't believe human trafficking is good.
Some things I do believe:
Adoption by a loving family tends to be better for the child than institutional care.
It is good if people who would have aborted their children out of financial hardship have that hardship resolved.
"It's very easy to stick a label on something and call it evil..." your words. I know you're not saying adoption is evil. I thought you were saying that some of us commenting were rushing to describe adoption as evil. Whilst I wouldn't personally use the word 'evil', adoption is far from an unequivocal good for reasons that others have rehearsed in this discussion.
We're agreed that human trafficking isn't good. Where I suspect we differ is that I think adoption with its transferring of children between families and money changing hands (albeit in the UK it's not individuals buying babies) comes dangerously close to trafficking.
The institutional care point in this context is a bit of a red herring, I think. The author is talking about actively encouraging adoption of infants - rather than abortion, not instead of institutional care.
I agree that if someone would have terminated a pregnancy purely because of financial hardship could have that hardship resolved it would be a good thing. However, I'd add 'to enable them to parent their child'.
I think we broadly agree on the principles then! Just a quick clarification: I'm not sure if you can see, the thread is looking convoluted to me, but I made that comment in response to someone saying that the policy I suggested was evil, so I was trying to defend my specific policy, as opposed to saying that anyone had said adoption writ large was evil.
I think we also agree that supporting people to parent their own children is the ideal, and the policy I suggested would also be supporting this!
I would be ignoring that alternative if it weren't for the fact that the policy I'm suggesting would also involve financial support for those who choose to keep their kids. I think you're arguing against a position I don't actually hold.
For context I made the comment about what an uneducated position was in response to an allegation that I was making an uneducated analysis rather than just randomly cranking out that term.
Neil, the most glaring flaw in your article is that the one group of people who actually live with the consequences of adoption are almost entirely absent from it.
You talk about women who don't want an abortion.
You talk about couples who want a baby.
You barely talk about adoptees.
That's extraordinary given that adoptees are the very people who have spent decades explaining the lifelong consequences of adoption, and only weeks after the Government apologised for historical adoption practices and the harm they caused.
Throughout the article, adoption is treated as a way of solving adult problems. A woman has a problem. A couple has a problem. Adoption fixes both.
But the child isn't a solution. The child becomes an adoptee.
And that adoptee then has to live with the consequences for the next 70 or 80 years.
There is a substantial body of research showing adoptees experience significantly elevated rates of mental health difficulties and suicide attempts compared with non-adoptees. Meta-analysis has found suicide attempt rates around two to three times higher amongst adoptees, with some studies finding risks even higher.
None of that appears anywhere in your article.
Nor do you engage with what we now know about maternal-fetal attachment. A baby is not some isolated individual that suddenly appears at birth. Human development, attachment and stress responses begin long before delivery. There is extensive research on in-utero development, maternal stress and intergenerational effects which utterly undermines the simplistic idea that a baby can simply be transferred from one family to another without consequence.
Most remarkable of all, you present the collapse of infant adoption as a problem.
Many of us would argue it is evidence of progress.
In societies where women have adequate support, housing, healthcare, financial security and freedom from social stigma, infant relinquishment becomes increasingly rare. That should be the goal.
If a woman wants to keep her child but feels unable to because of poverty, housing, childcare or lack of support, the answer is to fix those problems.
The answer is not to create a more efficient pipeline supplying newborn babies to adults who want them.
Nobody is entitled to someone else's baby.
Not because they are infertile.
Not because they would make wonderful parents.
Not because there is demand.
After everything adoptees and mothers have explained, after parliamentary inquiries, after official apologies, after decades of evidence, it is genuinely shocking to see someone look at the near disappearance of baby adoption and conclude that what Britain needs is more of it.
The lesson of history is not that we need to find a nicer way to separate mothers and babies.
The lesson of history is that we should be doing everything possible to stop those separations happening in the first place.
Children are not a solution to adult problems.
Do better.
"Nobody is entitled to someone else's baby." - I don't say this at any point. You are attacking a whole bunch of arguments which do not appear in the article above.
Neil,
As you are well aware, my argument was not that you literally claimed anyone is entitled to somebody else's baby.
My argument was that your article discusses the wishes of adults who want children and the circumstances of women facing difficult pregnancies whilst giving remarkably little attention to the people who will spend the rest of their lives living with the consequences of being adopted.
You have chosen to focus on a single sentence near the end of my comment while ignoring the actual premise.
You have not addressed the adoptee mental health evidence.
You have not addressed the elevated rates of suicide attempts found in adoptee research.
You have not addressed maternal-child separation, identity, ancestry, belonging or loss.
You have not addressed the testimony of adult adoptees.
You have not addressed the recent Parliamentary inquiries into historical adoption practices or the Government's apology only weeks ago.
Instead, you have selected one phrase and presented it as though it were the entirety of my argument.
The central criticism remains exactly the same:
Your article proposes increasing infant adoption whilst devoting remarkably little attention to adoptee outcomes.
Multiple adoptees in this thread have raised that concern.
To date, neither your article nor your response appears to engage with it.
I am sorry, but I profoundly disagree with your argument, as an adoptee. Yes, there can be problems, but in a loving home (which can be just as much an adopting family as a natural family) we can prosper. And, conversely, the natural family can also result in trauma and issues.
Steve, I'm genuinely pleased that adoption worked out well for you. I wouldn't wish a bad adoption experience on anyone.
But a positive adoption experience does not invalidate the experiences of adoptees for whom it didn't.
For many years I would probably have made a similar argument myself.
The difficulty is that this discussion isn't about whether some adoptees can thrive in loving adoptive families. Of course they can.
The question is whether adoption is a benign intervention that we should deliberately increase.
That's a very different claim.
We now have a substantial body of research showing elevated rates of psychological distress, mental health difficulties and suicide attempts amongst adoptees as a group compared with non-adoptees.
We also have decades of testimony from adoptees describing issues around identity, belonging, separation, ancestry and loss that can persist even when adoptive parents were loving and well-intentioned.
One thing I have learned is that adoption is not always experienced in the same way throughout life. Many adoptees only begin to understand the impact it has had on them later in adulthood, often following major life events such as becoming parents themselves, bereavement, reunion with family, serious illness or other significant transitions.
That was certainly true for me. For many years I would have described my adoption very differently to how I understand it today.
None of that means every adoption is harmful.
Equally, it means we cannot assume that a loving adoptive home erases the consequences of separation.
Natural families can absolutely be traumatic (as can adoptive families). Nobody is denying that. Sometimes adoption may be the least harmful option available. If so, I would argue the support available to adoptees, birth families and adoptive families is still nowhere near what it should be.
But that doesn't make adoption neutral.
Nor does it justify deliberately increasing the number of infant adoptions when the alternative may be supporting mothers to keep and raise their own children.
There is no need to erase a person's legal identity, family relationships and history unless all realistic alternatives have been exhausted.
Adoption should be a last resort for children who genuinely need it.
I would also point out that this isn't simply a debate between older adoptees and younger adoptees. Many of the concerns being raised by adult adoptees today are also showing up in contemporary adoption research and in surveys of adoptive families themselves. Changing how adoption is presented does not automatically remove the underlying issues around identity, separation, belonging and loss.
My concern with Neil's article is that he is not describing adoption as a last resort.
He is proposing increasing infant adoption as a policy response.
That is a very different thing.
The content of this article is disgusting.
You are essentially promoting the legalised trafficking of infants and removal of their rights.
Being childless is painful, I know, but that does not give any of us the right to take the children of others and pretend they are ours.
Only just last month we had an apology from the government for the forced adoption era. Perhaps you should read and listen to the testimony of those who were taken and entered into this industry without consent or way out.
Adoption law is a adult-serving abuse of human rights and deserves to go the way of the Dodo.
I suggest you look into funding effective supports for adopted people who were wrecked by the very process you are advocating to reinstate, before you even consider pushing for another generation of traumatised infants to be produced.
Shame on you.
Where do I argue that anyone has "the right to take the children of others and pretend they are ours." ? Odd response.
Adoption takes the children of others and gives them to strangers who pretend they are theirs. Did you not know that?
Rubbish!
Read the testimonies from the forced adoption era. Listen to the select committee. There is plenty out there if you do some reasearch. Of course not all adopted people are affected int the same way but all have been entered into a legal arrangement without consent and no means of exit. This alone makes it not fit for purpose.
My piece does not argue for forced adoptions.
All adoptions are forced on the children, especially infants. The only time an adoption is no forced on the child, is when they are old enough to consent.
There is no evidence for it whatsoever, because it flies in the face of all testimony and experience from first mothers. No-one has an abortion when they really wanted an adoption. But hundreds of thousands had an adoption when what they wanted was an abortion. Which the real agenda here; the usual making politics a battle over the control of women's bodies and choices. We've been down the road and it is horrific.
As an adoptee, what troubles me most about this piece is the framing.
Adoption should exist to find families for children who genuinely need them. It should not exist to create a supply of newborns for adults who would like to adopt babies but do not want to adopt older children.
Those are fundamentally different things.
You acknowledge the history of women being coerced into relinquishing their babies, yet the solution you propose still raises an uncomfortable question: if a pregnant woman is considering abortion because she does not have the financial resources to parent, why should society provide her with “practical help” to continue the pregnancy and relinquish her child rather than providing practical help so she can keep her child if that is what she wants?
Poverty should never be treated as a pipeline to adoption.
And I think the adoptee is strangely absent from a proposal that would create more adoptees. You discuss women with unintended pregnancies and adults waiting for newborns as two groups who could “help each other,” with the baby almost positioned as the mechanism by which their needs are solved.
But that baby becomes a person who may grow up with questions about identity, ancestry, medical history, belonging, separation and why the circumstances surrounding their birth resulted in them being raised outside their family of origin.
Adoption can absolutely be necessary. It can also be loving. But it begins with loss, and that reality should make us extremely cautious about policies designed to increase the number of infants available for adoption.
The goal of child welfare should be fewer unnecessary family separations, not more adoptable babies.
Children are not the answer to a shortage of newborns for prospective parents. It’s not the responsibility of the adoptee to replace what is missing an adults life who may be barren or struggling to conceive. Sorry that’s not our problem. Adoption is a for profit system. Period.
Stop talking about Adoptees as if we have no civil rights or opinions. We had no choice in the matter. Nobody asked us what we thought or what we think but for some reason folks who don’t know nothing about the nuances surrounding adoption always bark the loudest about adoption.
You say, "why should society provide her with “practical help” to continue the pregnancy and relinquish her child rather than providing practical help so she can keep her child if that is what she wants?" I don't argue against that - I am talking here about people who do NOT want to bring up a child.
Great response
100% correct. I’m stunned by this article. Have we still not understood the harm caused to hundreds of thousands of babies removed from their mothers voluntarily or not. This article is uneducated and what is proposed is totally unethical. Are we really going to start trading babies again.
I explicitly say - I am not advocating that babies are involuntarily removed from their mothers. Nor do I call for "trading babies". What are you arguing against? It certainly isn't my article.
I understand that you are not advocating involuntary removal. That was not my argument.
My concern is that “voluntary” relinquishment does not exist in a vacuum. If a woman does not want to parent because she cannot afford housing, childcare, food, healthcare, or basic stability, then material hardship is part of that choice.
You are proposing policy intended to increase infant adoption while also acknowledging that economic circumstances influence reproductive decisions. That is exactly why I am asking whether the support should first be available to help women parent if they would choose to do so with adequate resources.
And as an adoptee, I am also challenging the premise that a shortage of newborns available to prospective adopters is a social problem that needs solving. Adults wanting newborns does not create an obligation to produce more newborn adoptees.
My concern is not forced adoption. It is creating incentives and systems that make family separation more likely, while framing that separation primarily as a solution for adults.
As an adoptee from the baby scoop era whose whole life has been damaged by the impact of adoption this is an appalling suggestion. The suicide rates amongst adoptees are significantly higher than those of the rest of the population. There are significant mental health challenges for adoptees not helped by the fairy tales of adoption being so amazing. There is no guarantee of a happy family life and increasing evidence of adoptive parents struggling with maintaining a positive relationship with their child from adolescence. There is significant scientific evidence of the biological and psychological impact on the brain, body and psychology of adoptees. The in vitro bonding and effect of an unwanted pregnancy is now understood. This creates lifelong issues with relationships for adoptees. There was a reason the government issued an apology to both mothers and adoptees from the baby scoop era. Having been adopted I am very pro choice as abortion is the kinder option. Please do your research and listen to those with lived experience.