Adoption in Australia - Changing Attitudes

Changing Attitudes

While the first adoption legislation in Australia in the 1920s fostered relatively "open" adoptions, a second wave of legislation passed in the 1960s had emphasised the importance of a "clean break" from birth parents and enshrined the principle of secrecy around the adoptive status of children, who were to be raised by their adoptive parents "as if born to them". This principle was meant to provide adoptive parents with heirs without fear of stigma or interference from the biological parent/s, but also operated to allow the unmarried mother, her child, and her family, to be shielded from the shame of an "illegitimate" birth.

Subsequent revelations decades later of the history of the treatment of "removed" children, whether indigenous, white Australian, or the British children who travelled to Australia in imperial forced migration schemes well into the twentieth-century, had a profound impact on public perceptions of adoption. The notion of "coming home", mobilised with great effect by indigenous Australians to account for their experiences of separation from family into institutions or adoption, came to stand for the adoptive experience generally. This concept stigmatised adoptions in general as entailing loss, removal from roots, and pain while at the same time idealised the birth family, minimising if not shutting out the role and experiences of the adoptive family.

Recognition of the damaging effects of previous adoption policies had burgeoned in the 1970s and 1980s. Beginning in the mid-1970s, all Australian states and territories reviewed adoption legislation and embarked on initially cautious reversals of previous (secretive) practices throughout the 1980s. National Adoption Conferences, convened in Australia in 1976, 1978 and 1982, brought together people affected by adoption with professionals and researchers. These conferences served as important for a for activism and agitation on adoption law reform. Workers in the field began to tend towards the view that children should be with their biological parents where possible. Sociologist Rosemary Pringle suggested as late as 2002 that adoption in Australia had lost virtually all social policy credibility.

Then, in 2005 and again in 2007, in two significant reports from the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Human Services, adoption appeared to reemerge on the political agenda as viable social policy. The 2005 report endorsed not only intercountry adoption, but suggested that adoption, rather than foster care and other out-of-home-care, might also be in the best interests of many Australian-born children. It also reversed the Australian tendency towards non-interventionism in family matters. The Standing Committee stated that it had concluded it was "unequivocally in support of intercountry adoptions as a legitimate way to give a loving family environment to children from overseas who may have been abandoned or given up for adoption". This is contrasted with the negative attitudes to adoption found within the state and territory welfare departments responsible for processing adoption applications at the time. These attitudes ranged "from indifference to hostility".