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Mummy: Is foreign adoption the best option?
When Damian Hall received a letter from Leeds City Council addressed to him
and his wife Charlotte, informing them that their application to adopt a
child was “unable to progress ... due to the concerns that the medical
advisers have expressed regarding Mr Hall's weight”, they were distraught.
At 6ft 1in (1.8m) tall and 24.5st (156kg), 37-year-old Hall has a body mass
index of 42. “I'm not a couch potato and I don't sit eating takeaways every
night,” he said at the time. “We don't drink or smoke and we could give a
child a safe and happy home.”
The council said that the Halls' application was still active and insisted
that the couple had not been turned down but had been given advice on how to
proceed. Yet their story, and others like it, serves to exacerbate a growing
belief that whether you are fat, thin, gay, Christian, Muslim, blonde, grey,
black, white or working, it is almost impossible to adopt in Britain.
The health writer Jane Clarke was criticised by social workers because her
house was too minimalist (she adopted her daughter, Mia, from India).
Another mother was turned away because she mentioned that she liked girls
with long hair. A third made the mistake of admitting that she had asked her
GP for medication for her migraines.
There are more than 64,000 children in care in Britain, of whom more than
12,000 have been in care for more than five years. One couple in ten find it
impossible to conceive. Adoption seems an obvious answer, yet it is not
happening. Why is this?
One reason is that there are simply too few babies to adopt. Since the 1976
Adoption Act, under which local authorities were made responsible for
looking after children whose parents could not care for them, the number of
adoptions in Britain has fallen from 21,290 a year to 4,438, mostly by
relatives or step-parents.
This decline is due largely to a transformation in the function of adoption
services. In the 1970s, when having a child out of wedlock was still taboo,
thousands of mothers gave up their babies for adoption at birth.
Developments in contraception, abortion and the welfare system since then
have made unwanted pregnancy less of an issue. “Nowadays very few people
choose to give up their child,” says June Thoburn, Emeritus Professor of
Social Work at the University of East Anglia. “Instead, the numbers of
children being adopted from the care system have gone up. This means that
while prospective parents are queueing up to adopt babies with no
difficulties, there is no queue to take difficult ten-year olds.” About 60
per cent of children in care are over 10, while just 5 per cent are under a
year old.
Added to this is a greater sensitivity about the welfare of the child. Some
believe, for example, that cross-ethnic adoption is destabilising. Others,
such as the Conservative MP and Shadow Secretary of State for Children,
Schools and Families, Michael Gove, disagree.
“The key thing is to give a child a great start in life,” says Gove, who was
adopted at the age of four months. “The ideal, of course, is to place an
adopted child with a family whose circumstances and background match its
own, but in the search for that match it is often black and Asian children
who suffer. The longer they are in care, the more difficulties occur.
“I don't know much about my birth parents but there were significant
differences between their backgrounds and those of my adoptive parents. It
made no difference to me.”
Another complicating factor is the shift in sentiment, among some social
workers as well as the public, away from keeping a child with its mother,
the benefits of which were emphasised in the past. Especially since the case
of Baby P, there is a feeling that this may be misguided.
In 1989 the “no order principle”, introduced under the Children Act of that
year, ruled that, in law, a court could not order a child to be taken from
his or her home and adopted unless it was satisfied that the child's life
would be better if such a change was made.
The principle still applies today but infuriates many. A clinical psychologist
in Harringay, North London, where Baby P died, says: “Social workers have a
reputation for taking children away from their parents but actually the
system is over-obsessed with the importance of biological mothers. We spend
years sending children back into families that, if we are honest, we know we
wouldn't let our pets anywhere near. By the time the system recognises that
the child should be adopted, it is too late. Babies need to make secure
attachments by the age of 2 or they will find it very hard in later life.
That is why so many adoptions fail.”
Research shows consistently that the younger a child is when adopted, the more
likely it is that the placement will be successful. But with one social
worker post in ten unfilled, many local authorities feel overwhelmed and
demoralised, which often means a painfully slow process from application to
approval.
“There are too many examples of children waiting too long for a decision to be
made or acted on,” says John Simmonds, director of policy, research and
development at the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF).
For children who spend most of their childhood in care, the statistics are
stark. They are 25 times more likely to be abused than a child who is
adopted, and 50 times more likely than other children to end up in prison. A
quarter of girls leaving care at 16 have already become pregnant, and 63 per
cent of children in care leave school with no qualifications. Yet a child
adopted in its first two years has almost the same chance as other children
of going on to higher education or getting a job. “Many of us in my
profession think that we should say the obvious,” says the Harringay
psychologist - “that some biological parents can't parent. It's not in the
interests of babies to keep them in their abusive, violent homes when they
can go to loving families.” In other words, they should be removed as
babies.
As adoption in the UK is so complicated, many frustrated would-be adopters
decide to give a child from abroad a home - although this is not necessarily
an easier option. “I always wanted to adopt from abroad,” says Jane Clarke,
who adopted Mia from India, “but social services were very difficult - they
worried about all sorts of bizarre things and the assessment was a
nightmare. They didn't mind that I was a single mother but I think they
frowned on my being well off.”
She thinks that public opinion has turned against adoption: “One mother asked
me accusingly how much my daughter had cost. You can have ten children by
different fathers and no one questions your motives, yet you are considered
strange if you want to adopt a baby.”
One couple who succeeded in adopting a baby are Mark and Ian, in their early
thirties. “We now have a gorgeous little boy of 19 months old. When he came
to us five months ago he was very withdrawn and aggressive but he has
settled down fantastically,” Mark says.
He thinks that being gay may have helped, “only because gay couples know
immediately that they can't have children, so they don't waste time trying
to conceive naturally - which means that they are often a better age to
adopt and so come higher up the list,” he says. “It also helped that my
mother was a foster parent and that I was happy to stay at home full-time to
look after the baby. The whole process took less than two years.”
Emma, who was told that she could not conceive naturally at 25, also succeeded
in adopting. “Lots of my cousins were adopted so it seemed normal,” she
says. “But the process was like The X-Factor - you knew you had to keep
saying and doing the right thing or you would be voted out. We got a baby
only because the mother hadn't realised that she was pregnant. She insisted
from the beginning that she wanted her baby adopted. Our daughter had foetal
alcoholism but it hasn't stopped her doing anything.”
When Emma and her husband went back 18 months later to adopt another child,
though, they were told by the council that it would be impossible, as no
babies had come up for adoption in the previous year: “They explained that
adoptive parents were the final, unwanted option and that they would do
anything to keep a child with its mother, so we were being greedy to even
think of asking for more.”
Instead, Emma “adopted” an embryo and had it implanted. “Suddenly it was easy.
Everyone was on our side,” she says. “That's what is so weird about this
whole process. Try to adopt an unwanted child and everyone is against you.
You are seen as greedy and needy. But take another person's sperm or egg and
everyone is thrilled.”
But what is Emma and others see as red tape is regarded by others as crucial
for the welfare of the child. “Despite the meticulous assessment process,
one adoption placement in five breaks down,” says John Simmonds of the BAAF.
“That causes great distress to everyone, especially the child who has
already lost their biological parents.
As for the future, there are no plans for any changes to the adoption laws.
National adoption targets ended in 2006. In a statement to The Times, the
Department for Children, Schools and Families said: “The challenge for
social workers is, as far as possible, to keep children safe and keep
families together. Sadly, sometimes this isn't possible, and it is crucial
that children's welfare is put first and that they are effectively
protected.”
While many couples will continue to feel frustrated by a system that seems to
ignore their needs, others, such as Simmonds, would ask them also to
understand the needs of the child: “The important thing to say is that
adoption is not the same as having a child by the normal method. Her or she
is likely to have been maltreated, and is often very distressed. The child
has already lost its birth family. It's very important that this not going
to happen again.”
The figures
59,500 children were in the care of local authorities in England on March 31,
2008
71 per cent of those were living with foster carers
12 per cent were in children's homes
8 per centlived with their parents
4 per cent (3,200 children) were placed for adoption
8 months target time to approve an adoption application
233 applications for inter-country adoption in 2008
16 per cent decrease in the number of children adopted from the care system
between 2004 and 2008
21 minimum age to apply to adopt (there is no national upper age)
78 per cent of adopted children are white
84 per cent of adoptions last year were with married couples
3 per cent of adoptions last year were with same-sex couples
2 years 7 months: average time between entry into care and adoption
