David QuinnDifference in law on adoption and donor-conception shows hypocrisy, writes David Quinn
There are an estimated 50,000 adopted people living in Ireland. Most of these will be middle-aged and older because adoption is now an almost extinct practice. Only a few dozen adoptions take place in Ireland today and the vast majority of this small number involves adoption of a child by another family member. Very few children are adopted by unrelated ‘strangers’ which was once commonplace.
The Cabinet agreed a new Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill last week. This will give adopted people a right to access their birth certs. Until now, the mother could refuse her child access to the birth cert in order to protect her privacy.
Irish adoption practice was first regulated in the middle of the last century. Until then, adoptions took place on an informal, private basis.
Prevalent
The law then decided to favour the ‘clean break’ approach in accordance with the thinking then prevalent internationally. Ties to the birth mother were to be sundered forever. Sometimes this suited the birth mother and sometimes it did not.
The thinking was that it would be better from the point of view of the child if she knew nothing about her family of origin and could simply get on with her life.
It may seem surprising in retrospect, but Archbishop John Charles McQuaid had misgivings about the new law because he felt it reduced the natural rights of the birth mother to nothing.
Unfortunately, this kind of thinking did not prevail either in the Church or in society at large. The result was that children were taken from their (invariably unmarried) mothers and the mother was often left heart-broken and, in later life, both mother and child were left with a burning desire to find each other.
This could happen where both were traceable and both were willing to be contacted. The hit film Philomena tells the story of one woman whose child was adopted by an American family in the 1950s. She went looking for him years later but learnt that he had since died.
Problems arise when either the mother or the child is untraceable or when one or other does not wish to be contacted. This can happen because sometimes the mother wants to leave her past in the past. Often she will have married in the meantime and had other children and may not have told her husband or those children that she had a child long ago who was placed for adoption.
This is why the proposed new law, although it does allow adopted people a right of access to their birth certs, also (according to reports) requires them to sign a declaration that they will not contact their birth parents unless their birth parents are willing to be contacted. This is in order to respect the right to privacy of the birth parents.
Right here, we can see that a clash of rights is taking place. The adopted person has a right to trace their birth parents. This is a natural right. All of us need to know who we are. This is a multi-facetted question with a multi-facetted answer. But one part of it is the need in many cases to know who we look like, who we take after and where we come from.
Not every adopted person has the desire to find these answers but many do and in any case, a right does not cease to exist simply because we do not wish to exercise it.
On the other hand, a birth mother whose child has been placed for adoption has a right to privacy. The thinking now is that the privacy rights of mothers who placed their children for adoption long ago should be respected but new adoptions should be ‘open’, that is, contact between the birth parent(s) should be open and ongoing.
The fear has been expressed by some that by requiring adoption to be open, some mothers who would otherwise have placed their children for adoption will not do so because they wanted a ‘clean break’ and therefore will have their child aborted instead. It ought to go without saying that adoption policy should be pro-life.
The proposed new law appears to show the importance the Government attaches to the natural ties, but in fact the Government’s overall policy towards this issue is extremely contradictory.
The Children and Family Relationship’s Act, passed earlier this year and without any proper debate in preparation for the marriage referendum, gives extremely short shrift to the natural ties.
That law gives children whose parents are egg or sperm donors the right to know the identity of those parents when they turn 18. This is very different from open adoption which aims at establishing a relationship between the adopted person and his or her natural parents right through childhood.
Even when the child of the egg and/or sperm donor turns 18 they are extremely likely to find out that their egg donor mother and/or sperm donor father is from Ukraine or Denmark respectively and their chances of establishing a relationship with that person will be remote.
In addition, donor-conception is not to be compared with adoption. In the case of donor-conception, the child is conceived using donated sperm and/or a donated egg with the express intention of cutting the natural tie.
In the case of adoption the child already exists and is in need of a home, the tie has been broken through circumstance and before the adoptive parents enter the picture.
A government that took the natural ties seriously would not permit donor-conception at all. It would seek to keep the natural ties intact whenever circumstances would allow.
The fact that it passed the Children and Family Relationship’s Act in the form it did shows that its attitude towards the natural ties is literally unprincipled and hypocritical.
A Government with a properly principled and consistent attitude towards the natural ties would permit adopted people access to their birth records and it would outlaw egg and sperm donation.