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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is so much wrong with this, but let’s start with the commodification of children, ie as a resource for childless couples to ease the trauma that they experience through infertility.
As an adult adoptee, I find the framing of this article profoundly troubling.
The fundamental problem is that it treats adoption as a way of reconciling the problems and desires of adults: a woman who feels unable to raise her child on one side, and people who desperately want a baby on the other. The baby becomes the means by which those two adult problems are solved. That comes dangerously close to treating children as commodities.
The sentence that prospective adopters “don’t get that chance any more” is particularly revealing. Nobody is entitled to the chance to acquire somebody else’s newborn child. Infertility can be devastating and deserves compassion and support, but adoption does not exist to cure infertility trauma. The first question should be what is in the interests of the child, not how to satisfy adults who want one.
Nor can adoption simply be inserted into the abortion debate as though abortion and relinquishing a living child were interchangeable alternatives. They are completely different experiences, with consequences for different people. An adopted baby becomes an adopted child and eventually an adult adoptee, carrying their ancestry, genetics, identity and the consequences of separation throughout their life.
There is an extraordinary historical blindness here.
In 2022, Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights published The Violation of Family Life, following extensive evidence from mothers and adoptees affected by the mass adoption of babies between 1949 and 1976. It found that many mothers had desperately wanted to keep their children but were presented with adoption as effectively their only realistic option. Parliament subsequently examined the lifelong consequences for adopted people, including identity, access to records, medical information and psychological wellbeing.
That work culminated this year in the Government’s formal apology for historical forced adoption. On 2 July, Keir Starmer acknowledged an injustice affecting an estimated 185,000 mothers, adopted people and their families. The Government explicitly recognised that children had been separated not merely from their mothers, but from their families, identity and history.
Six weeks later, we are apparently discussing whether we should “bring back baby adoptions”.
Nobody is suggesting that Neil O’Brien wants to recreate the coercive practices of the 1950s and 60s; he explicitly says that he does not. But that does not make the history he invokes irrelevant. In fact, it makes it more important.
Coercion is not confined to physically forcing a woman to surrender her baby.
If a woman wants to keep her child but believes she cannot because she is poor, inadequately housed, unsupported or frightened about her financial future, the first obligation of a decent society should be to ask what support would allow that family to remain together.
It should not be to notice that another, wealthier family desperately wants a newborn and then present the situation as an elegant matching problem.
That is where adoption starts to look less like child protection and more like a system designed to meet adult demand.
None of this means pretending that children should remain with parents where they are unsafe. Children sometimes need to be removed, and some will need permanent alternative families. But protecting a child from harm is not the same as deliberately increasing the supply of newborn babies for adoption.
We should also be willing to ask whether permanent care always requires the extraordinary legal mechanism of adoption: severing one legal family relationship and constructing another, often accompanied historically by replacement birth certificates, restricted records and the effective rewriting of a person’s origins. Long-term guardianship and other forms of permanent care deserve much more serious consideration where they can provide security without requiring that degree of identity erasure.
Most strikingly, the adoptee is almost entirely absent as a person from this argument.
We appear as babies who need homes. Then the discussion moves on to the adults who want us.
But babies grow up.
Adult adoptees have been telling governments, researchers and adoption organisations for decades about loss, identity, belonging, genetic bewilderment, fractured family relationships and the difficulty of discovering information about our own origins. Loving adoptive parents do not magically make those questions disappear. Acknowledging that reality is not an attack on adoptive families. It is a refusal to centre adoption exclusively around the adults who wanted to become parents.
The lesson of Britain’s adoption history should not be that we once had a plentiful supply of adoptable babies and ought to find a more acceptable way of recreating it.
The lesson should be that children are not a solution to adult problems.
Wherever safely possible, policy should support children to remain within their families and retain their relationships, history and identity. Where that genuinely cannot happen, alternative care should be organised around the rights and needs of the child, not around satisfying a demand for newborn babies.
After everything adoptees and mothers have spent decades telling Parliament, and only weeks after the British state finally apologised for failing them, it is astonishing that this is even being proposed as a solution.
That distinction ought to matter. More than that, it ought to be the starting point.
Another adoptee here and I echo everything Mark and Kim say. Reading this article makes me feel physically sick and, before anyone says it, no, I didn't have a 'bad experience' and, yes, on balance I would rather the foetus that became me had been aborted.
As we've seen from the discussion around the recent forced adoption apology, 'force' doesn't necessarily look like ripping babies out of women's arms. It can look like poverty and/or a lack of support, leading women to think they're making what looks like the only possible - irreversible - choice. Let's spell it out, if something looks like the only option it's not a choice.
There's a paucity of research into long-term outcomes for those affected (I wonder why people are so terrified of asking adoptees over 25 what their experience shows), but what there is strongly suggests infant adoption is good for neither mother nor baby-who-becomes-adult.
I wonder whether the dynamics of adoption for over 1s - which also has a dramatic decline - are themselves driven by abortion. Roughly speaking: children born after 1964 were less likely to be "unwanted". Perhaps a mother unintentionally gets pregnant in 1963 and carries the baby to term, and tries to look after him. But it's tough and she adopts the baby out when he's 5, in 1968. An equivalent mother falling pregnant in 1964 has an abortion, so there's a "missing" adoption of a 5 year old in 1969.
Countervailing effects coming from the demand side: fewer babies available for adoption raises demand for adopting 5 year olds.
In principle one could study this in some way by looking at results by birth year cohort
Can you clarify - are the conception statistics actually conceptions, or are they births + abortions? (ie how are miscarriages treated)
I love this piece. I think on a practical policy front, family policy could be designed to support people in having babies for adoption and in supporting others adopting. If we ever did introduce a baby bonus or (more plausibly) a large component of existing child benefit claimable on birth (effectively a baby bonus but working within the existing framework), we could ensure that even those who give their child for adoption are eligible for that first payment _and_ ensure that the adopting parents are eligible (so that they're not out of pocket relative to other parents).
You love this piece !! … this is trafficking of children. Nowhere in this article was there any concern on the impact of the child being traded. Have we learnt nothing from past practices. You stun me with your uneducated response
Okay so your view seems to be that it's better for the children never to exist at all or better for the children to be in an impersonal care institution. It's very easy to stick a label on something and call it evil but I think that rushing to that without considering the counterfactual is what is really an uneducated for human flourishing kind of attitude.
I think, unless I've missed it in the thread, you're the first person to mention institutional care. No-one here is advocating that.
You do realise that many of the people who've commented on the post are adoptees, don't you? Far from 'rushing' to label adoption as evil, we've been living it for decades and have formed, and revised, views over that time. I suggest you stop and listen.
Really good article - unfortunately adoption is so little spoken about or understood in the UK. Many people, for instance, believe that biological parents and prospective adoptive parents can privately agree adoption as in America. They fail to understand that children up for adoption have - almost ubiquitously - been removed by force after grotesque amounts of abuse and neglect, and are placed within the family before, it that fails, being taken into care. They fail to realise how few babies are up for adoption, and that those that are are forcibly removed after birth because the mother has *already* had children removed - and that those babies are often born with severe foetal alcohol syndrome and/or drug addictions. They fail to realise that babies removed from their parents’ care are often simply fostered on a “foster to adopt” programme, with the aim being that a foster couple care for the baby before it is returned to the parents, and that there is no guarantee the adoption will occur. They fail to realise that social workers can be ignorant of or intentionally hide needs, desperate to get children out of care, and then rescind help. They do not know how many adoptive parents are arrested on spurious claims of abuse or rape from incredibly vulnerable children with needs they cannot meet (though the BBC did a good investigation into this recently). There’s some interesting data out there on babies’ brain development and how it is affected by neglect - even a child removed from a neglectful household after months (and, as you say, it is usually many years later) has neural pathways that have not and will not ever be created. The key timeline is a matter of days or scant weeks, not months. Adoption and fostering in this country is a quagmire.
I’m so glad to see you discussing this. We have managed to create a system in this country whereby, if a couple is looking to adopt, the best and safest way is to adopt from abroad - and at enormous expense. This cannot be right when there are so many unwanted babies who are aborted despite there being potential homes and loving families for them.
There is plenty of research which shows that removing even ‘unwanted’, as you put it, babies from their mothers, causes lifelong physical and psychological damage to the baby. Yes, a supply of newborn bandaid babies for people who are unable to conceive can seem like a great idea. It depends on whose interests you have at heart - the adoptive parents or the babies.
Also, maybe another reason that the supply has dried up is that women are no longer shamed into giving up their babies.
Even if this were true, no amount of ‘physical and psychological damage’ to babies in consequence of being adopted by willing parents (who are usually unable to conceive) can be quite as damaging as aborting them and ensuring they never have any chance of life or love.
Interesting, but there’s not much evidence here that there is a sizeable group of women who don’t really want to have an abortion but would prefer it to eventually giving up their baby for adoption. And, even amongst that group, it seems plausible that many would prefer this *in principle*, rather than because of the specifics of the care and adoption systems as they currently stand
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.
Sometimes I come across numbers that truely shock me, for which I can only blame my own naivety and ignorance. Standing aside, for a moment, from Mr O'Brien's excellent analysis, the base facts here are that abortions run at about 1 in 4 to 1 in 3. Does that stun and appal you as it does me?
It makes me sad that methods of prevention have failed and more men are not considering reversable vastectomies.
Maybe concentrate on ways of prevention to bring down abortion numbers.
Losing your mother at birth (which this article is promoting) is an agony no infant should be forced to endure. To then be sent to live with strangers who just want you because they can't have their own children is cruel.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Rubbish!
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.
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.
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.
There is so much wrong with this, but let’s start with the commodification of children, ie as a resource for childless couples to ease the trauma that they experience through infertility.
As an adult adoptee, I find the framing of this article profoundly troubling.
The fundamental problem is that it treats adoption as a way of reconciling the problems and desires of adults: a woman who feels unable to raise her child on one side, and people who desperately want a baby on the other. The baby becomes the means by which those two adult problems are solved. That comes dangerously close to treating children as commodities.
The sentence that prospective adopters “don’t get that chance any more” is particularly revealing. Nobody is entitled to the chance to acquire somebody else’s newborn child. Infertility can be devastating and deserves compassion and support, but adoption does not exist to cure infertility trauma. The first question should be what is in the interests of the child, not how to satisfy adults who want one.
Nor can adoption simply be inserted into the abortion debate as though abortion and relinquishing a living child were interchangeable alternatives. They are completely different experiences, with consequences for different people. An adopted baby becomes an adopted child and eventually an adult adoptee, carrying their ancestry, genetics, identity and the consequences of separation throughout their life.
There is an extraordinary historical blindness here.
In 2022, Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights published The Violation of Family Life, following extensive evidence from mothers and adoptees affected by the mass adoption of babies between 1949 and 1976. It found that many mothers had desperately wanted to keep their children but were presented with adoption as effectively their only realistic option. Parliament subsequently examined the lifelong consequences for adopted people, including identity, access to records, medical information and psychological wellbeing.
That work culminated this year in the Government’s formal apology for historical forced adoption. On 2 July, Keir Starmer acknowledged an injustice affecting an estimated 185,000 mothers, adopted people and their families. The Government explicitly recognised that children had been separated not merely from their mothers, but from their families, identity and history.
Six weeks later, we are apparently discussing whether we should “bring back baby adoptions”.
Nobody is suggesting that Neil O’Brien wants to recreate the coercive practices of the 1950s and 60s; he explicitly says that he does not. But that does not make the history he invokes irrelevant. In fact, it makes it more important.
Coercion is not confined to physically forcing a woman to surrender her baby.
If a woman wants to keep her child but believes she cannot because she is poor, inadequately housed, unsupported or frightened about her financial future, the first obligation of a decent society should be to ask what support would allow that family to remain together.
It should not be to notice that another, wealthier family desperately wants a newborn and then present the situation as an elegant matching problem.
That is where adoption starts to look less like child protection and more like a system designed to meet adult demand.
None of this means pretending that children should remain with parents where they are unsafe. Children sometimes need to be removed, and some will need permanent alternative families. But protecting a child from harm is not the same as deliberately increasing the supply of newborn babies for adoption.
We should also be willing to ask whether permanent care always requires the extraordinary legal mechanism of adoption: severing one legal family relationship and constructing another, often accompanied historically by replacement birth certificates, restricted records and the effective rewriting of a person’s origins. Long-term guardianship and other forms of permanent care deserve much more serious consideration where they can provide security without requiring that degree of identity erasure.
Most strikingly, the adoptee is almost entirely absent as a person from this argument.
We appear as babies who need homes. Then the discussion moves on to the adults who want us.
But babies grow up.
Adult adoptees have been telling governments, researchers and adoption organisations for decades about loss, identity, belonging, genetic bewilderment, fractured family relationships and the difficulty of discovering information about our own origins. Loving adoptive parents do not magically make those questions disappear. Acknowledging that reality is not an attack on adoptive families. It is a refusal to centre adoption exclusively around the adults who wanted to become parents.
The lesson of Britain’s adoption history should not be that we once had a plentiful supply of adoptable babies and ought to find a more acceptable way of recreating it.
The lesson should be that children are not a solution to adult problems.
Wherever safely possible, policy should support children to remain within their families and retain their relationships, history and identity. Where that genuinely cannot happen, alternative care should be organised around the rights and needs of the child, not around satisfying a demand for newborn babies.
After everything adoptees and mothers have spent decades telling Parliament, and only weeks after the British state finally apologised for failing them, it is astonishing that this is even being proposed as a solution.
That distinction ought to matter. More than that, it ought to be the starting point.
Another adoptee here and I echo everything Mark and Kim say. Reading this article makes me feel physically sick and, before anyone says it, no, I didn't have a 'bad experience' and, yes, on balance I would rather the foetus that became me had been aborted.
As we've seen from the discussion around the recent forced adoption apology, 'force' doesn't necessarily look like ripping babies out of women's arms. It can look like poverty and/or a lack of support, leading women to think they're making what looks like the only possible - irreversible - choice. Let's spell it out, if something looks like the only option it's not a choice.
There's a paucity of research into long-term outcomes for those affected (I wonder why people are so terrified of asking adoptees over 25 what their experience shows), but what there is strongly suggests infant adoption is good for neither mother nor baby-who-becomes-adult.
I wonder whether the dynamics of adoption for over 1s - which also has a dramatic decline - are themselves driven by abortion. Roughly speaking: children born after 1964 were less likely to be "unwanted". Perhaps a mother unintentionally gets pregnant in 1963 and carries the baby to term, and tries to look after him. But it's tough and she adopts the baby out when he's 5, in 1968. An equivalent mother falling pregnant in 1964 has an abortion, so there's a "missing" adoption of a 5 year old in 1969.
Countervailing effects coming from the demand side: fewer babies available for adoption raises demand for adopting 5 year olds.
In principle one could study this in some way by looking at results by birth year cohort
Can you clarify - are the conception statistics actually conceptions, or are they births + abortions? (ie how are miscarriages treated)
I love this piece. I think on a practical policy front, family policy could be designed to support people in having babies for adoption and in supporting others adopting. If we ever did introduce a baby bonus or (more plausibly) a large component of existing child benefit claimable on birth (effectively a baby bonus but working within the existing framework), we could ensure that even those who give their child for adoption are eligible for that first payment _and_ ensure that the adopting parents are eligible (so that they're not out of pocket relative to other parents).
You love this piece !! … this is trafficking of children. Nowhere in this article was there any concern on the impact of the child being traded. Have we learnt nothing from past practices. You stun me with your uneducated response
Okay so your view seems to be that it's better for the children never to exist at all or better for the children to be in an impersonal care institution. It's very easy to stick a label on something and call it evil but I think that rushing to that without considering the counterfactual is what is really an uneducated for human flourishing kind of attitude.
I think, unless I've missed it in the thread, you're the first person to mention institutional care. No-one here is advocating that.
You do realise that many of the people who've commented on the post are adoptees, don't you? Far from 'rushing' to label adoption as evil, we've been living it for decades and have formed, and revised, views over that time. I suggest you stop and listen.
“Counterfactual” does not mean “the alternative I have invented to make my argument work”.
You offer abortion, institutional care or adoption, while erasing the obvious alternative: properly supporting mother and child to remain together.
That alternative is supported by evidence and by decades of testimony from mothers and adoptees. Your claim is not.
Calling people “uneducated” while ignoring the very people who have lived the consequences of adoption is breathtakingly arrogant.
Really good article - unfortunately adoption is so little spoken about or understood in the UK. Many people, for instance, believe that biological parents and prospective adoptive parents can privately agree adoption as in America. They fail to understand that children up for adoption have - almost ubiquitously - been removed by force after grotesque amounts of abuse and neglect, and are placed within the family before, it that fails, being taken into care. They fail to realise how few babies are up for adoption, and that those that are are forcibly removed after birth because the mother has *already* had children removed - and that those babies are often born with severe foetal alcohol syndrome and/or drug addictions. They fail to realise that babies removed from their parents’ care are often simply fostered on a “foster to adopt” programme, with the aim being that a foster couple care for the baby before it is returned to the parents, and that there is no guarantee the adoption will occur. They fail to realise that social workers can be ignorant of or intentionally hide needs, desperate to get children out of care, and then rescind help. They do not know how many adoptive parents are arrested on spurious claims of abuse or rape from incredibly vulnerable children with needs they cannot meet (though the BBC did a good investigation into this recently). There’s some interesting data out there on babies’ brain development and how it is affected by neglect - even a child removed from a neglectful household after months (and, as you say, it is usually many years later) has neural pathways that have not and will not ever be created. The key timeline is a matter of days or scant weeks, not months. Adoption and fostering in this country is a quagmire.
There is also information out there on the harms of adoption on the child. Please consider reading up on them.
I’m so glad to see you discussing this. We have managed to create a system in this country whereby, if a couple is looking to adopt, the best and safest way is to adopt from abroad - and at enormous expense. This cannot be right when there are so many unwanted babies who are aborted despite there being potential homes and loving families for them.
There is plenty of research which shows that removing even ‘unwanted’, as you put it, babies from their mothers, causes lifelong physical and psychological damage to the baby. Yes, a supply of newborn bandaid babies for people who are unable to conceive can seem like a great idea. It depends on whose interests you have at heart - the adoptive parents or the babies.
Also, maybe another reason that the supply has dried up is that women are no longer shamed into giving up their babies.
Even if this were true, no amount of ‘physical and psychological damage’ to babies in consequence of being adopted by willing parents (who are usually unable to conceive) can be quite as damaging as aborting them and ensuring they never have any chance of life or love.
I suggest you read the testimony of the now adult infants who were trafficked in this way previously as your ignorance is letting you down.
Ignorant misogynistic BS.
Babies are not commodities to be traded.
Interesting, but there’s not much evidence here that there is a sizeable group of women who don’t really want to have an abortion but would prefer it to eventually giving up their baby for adoption. And, even amongst that group, it seems plausible that many would prefer this *in principle*, rather than because of the specifics of the care and adoption systems as they currently stand
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.
Sometimes I come across numbers that truely shock me, for which I can only blame my own naivety and ignorance. Standing aside, for a moment, from Mr O'Brien's excellent analysis, the base facts here are that abortions run at about 1 in 4 to 1 in 3. Does that stun and appal you as it does me?
It makes me sad that methods of prevention have failed and more men are not considering reversable vastectomies.
Maybe concentrate on ways of prevention to bring down abortion numbers.
Losing your mother at birth (which this article is promoting) is an agony no infant should be forced to endure. To then be sent to live with strangers who just want you because they can't have their own children is cruel.