Is adoption now a bad world?

THE PAIN of mothers forced to give away their babies and never see them again the deep need of some adopted children to trace their roots these are stories with which we have become familiar in recent years. But what of the third strand in the weave of relationships that make up adoption adoptive parents? Has the recent focus on the other two sides of the story made them feel undermined?

There is nothing new in adoptive parents staying in the background, says Helen Gilmartin, secretary of the Adoptive Parents' Association, and mother to four adopted children. "Adoption by its nature is a private business," she says. "From the moment you are handed your child, you put its interests first, which means putting your head down and getting on with it.

"At the same time, you have a strong underlying sense of another woman out there who, for whatever reason, had to place her child for adoption. No matter how right that choice might have been for her, you would need to be very insensitive not to reflect on what it might have meant in her life."

Ireland's examination of its national conscience in relation to babies given away by their natural parents in a by gone age has not included a great sensitivity towards adoptive parents. Many of them feel that in our efforts to disassociate ourselves from the forced and hidden adoptions of the past, we have sent the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction.

"I think that in some circles, adoption has become a bad word," says spokeswoman for Adoptive Parents, Helen Scott. "In the past a pregnant woman with a crisis pregnancy had no option but to give up her baby and that was terrible. But today we're still limiting her options. It's almost as socially unacceptable now not to keep your baby.

"Pregnant women have rung the association to say they would prefer to give their child up for adoption but nobody was supporting that decision. Younger social workers in particular tend to hone in on a young Mum's feelings about separation. But sometimes it can be the right choice, for all the grief at the time. If we're serious about putting the child's needs first then adoption should be there with the other options."

Helen Gilmartin agrees "Some social workers can be convinced that the right place and only place for a baby to be is with the birth mother. In a perfect world, that would be true. But circumstances sometimes conspire against the birth mother, making it impossible for her to give her child all that she would want to give. If she is very much unable to cope, the child may even end up in care later, which is obviously terribly damaging for both mother and child. So, in our imperfect world, there are times when keeping the child may not always be the best option."

However, it is the option that most Irish women now choose. The number of domestic adoption orders granted in 1994, the most recent year for which figures are available, is just 424. That compares to 9,585 children born outside marriage in that year. "It is important to recognise that pregnant women have voted with their feet," says Nora Gibbons, senior social worker at Barnardos.

"Once the massive social stigma against single motherhood was removed, most mothers chose to keep their children. But it is also important to recognise that this partly reflects the closed system of adoption which was in place in the past. There was this idea of the clean break now we know that this simply doesn't work."

It doesn't work for the birth mother because of the psychological distress engendered by pretending such a momentous event never happened. It doesn't work for the child, who often grows up to develop a burning curiosity about its birth parents. And so it doesn't work for the adoptive parents either.

In fact, adoptive parents have been vigorously campaigning for a national register, which would enable adult adoptees and birth parents to state whether or not they wish to be contacted, as well as counselling services to encourage a successful outcome in the event of contact being made.

Those who adopted children in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were never prepared for the fact that their child might want to trace his origins. For such parents, the overwhelming emotion can be fear fear that their child might be hurt fear that the search might be handled insensitively fear that the birth parents might not want to know and their child might feel rejected twice over or that the opposite will happen and their child might end up rejecting them. In the words of one adoptive parent "I felt like I just babysat for 20 years, waiting for this to happen."

WITH counselling, most adoptive parents turn out to be very supportive. But counselling is what they don't get.

"At the moment the system is so overstretched that the counselling services available to birth mothers and adopted children is inadequate," says Nora Gibbons. "Adoptive parents don't even get a look in."

But a comprehensive system of adoptive support is urgently needed, Gibbons believes. "In the past the attitude to adoptive parents was `There's your child, now go off and be a perfect family'," she says. "The reality, of course, was that adoptive parents experienced a range of difficulties, some related to usual family problems, but some attributable to the context of adoption."

Nora Gibbons believes the best way to prevent such difficulties arising in the future is more open adoption procedures. "We believe the best scenario is where everybody meets everybody else and things are kept as open as possible."

Helen Scott however, has reservations. "There is pressure on adoptive parents to agree to this," she says, "and of course when you are waiting for a child you'll says `yes' to anything. But having discussed this with a number of adoptees I'm not sure that it's for the best.

"In your teenage years you just don't want to be different. If you're going to meet your birth mother next Sunday that raises all sorts of questions that can be difficult to handle. `Why did she give you away?' can be a devastating question for one teenager to hear from another. A 15 year old may understand why in her family context, but how on earth does she explain it to her 15 year old friend?

"I think we have a tendency in Ireland to go too far in every direction. Yes, it's good for the adoptive parents to meet with the birth mother beforehand so that both can be reassured and relevant questions can be raised. Yes, I would strongly recommend an exchange of letters and pictures through the agency if that is what both parties want. `But a very `open' scenario, I have my doubts about. There is no research that this is the best thing for the child."

As one adoptive parent put it does a child want two mothers when all their friends have one?

The best thing for the child is also at risk in a small proportion of cases where disputes arise over consent. As legislation currently stands, there is no statutory time limit between a mother giving her consent to her child being placed with adoptive parents, and the final adoption order going through. What that means for adoptive parents is that they can learn to love a child as their own, only to find it taken from them, months or even years later.

"Although this is a moving plight for adoptive parents, which needs only a tiny change in legislation to put right, no adoptive couple is going to go public on it," says Helen Scott. "Much as they could do with the publicity and public support, the risk of identifying themselves to the birth mother, and of fingers pointing at their child for years afterwards, keeps everything private."

ANOTHER factor is that adoptive parents may feel a strong link to the birth mother, an awareness that their joy is born out of her pain. "Most adoptive parents feel tremendous gratitude to birth mothers, for they have given them the greatest gift," says Helen Scott. Many have some ritual by which they remember the birth mother. The Scotts, for example, always light a candle for their adopted daughter Kate's birth parents at Christmas, and on Kate's birthday.

A national contact register, a statute of limitations on consent orders, adequate counselling services these are the main concerns of the Adoptive Parents' Association and it is no accident that they would also greatly benefit adopted children and their birth mothers too. For the happiness of all is dependent on each.

"This is not a struggle, one side against another, " says Helen Scott. "We're all looking for the same thing the right combination of privacy and support to allow us to live our lives with dignity."