Robin's blog

I've just taken about a years holiday from actively trying to get the whole of my adoption file and records of how I came to spend time in care, this has been a 17 year fight so far, I'm about to have another go at getting some more.

I feel a bit like Oliver Twist, asking for more all the time I have the luxury of living in country where we adoptees have had the RIGHT to have a copy of our original birth certificate since 1976 (original in every respect apart from having "Adopted" typed or written in the margin).

Scottish adoptees have always had that right since the first Adoption Act there in 1930, they can now have their birth records unsealed when they are 16, the rest of the UK it's 18. If you were adopted before 12 November 1975 in England & Wales they try to make you have some dodgy "counselling" with a social worker who probably doesn't know much about what it's like to be adopted or to have relinquished a child for adoption.

I was one of the lucky ones who had access to the Adoption Order that has my original name on it, so I could have gone to the Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths in the area I was born and got a copy any time I pleased, so I did.

It's always been up to the adoptive parents here whether they give their adoptee the information that is on the adoption order http://ao.postadoption.info

Sorry not been around

Adoption fatigue, need another subject to think about every now and then. That and loonies trailing me around the internet and the danger of them following me here

Adoption fatigue, anyone else get that? Just want to forget it for a while if you're allowed? Some chance

Had some quite difficult atypical ones on the helpline that have reminded me just how complicated it all is though, especially for those of us thinking more about our natural father's part in it all. Any natural fathers here, lost or found? Mine died in 1982 but he'd been a bit prolific in the fathering game (or sperm donoring as some might have it)

Robin

I first aired this on the Norcap Forum some time ago, because they seem find it difficult to get beyond the triad concept of adoption at times, even to the  point of using the impossible triangle illusion as their corporate logo.

I've always disliked the use of the words triad and triangle in adoption, which invariably involves a whole network of different people and interests, not just three. I find the triad and triangle symbolism a constant burden especially when trying to communicate with the government departments involved in adoption, they sometimes seem to find it difficult grasp just how complicated the network of broken and re-formed relationships in adoption can be.

One of the questions in the Civil Registration: Delivering Vital Change Consultation here in England & Wales was Supplementary Question S6: Do you have any views on the proposed definition of family in respect of accessing registration records? My answer was as follows

<<<........ I can see very little merit in the Government taking some arbitrary definition of family and making it a mandatory definition for the purposes of this legislation. A family should be defined by those who comprise it, and not by the state.

Families come in many shapes and sizes and different kinds. I and my brothers and sisters consider ourselves to be a "family". But we have been adopted or kept by nine different other "families" some of which include other adoptees from different "natural families" and there are probably eight different fathers involved whose "families" one or more of my half siblings also belong to.

Ah well I've been on alt.adoption for nearly 10 years in various guises, been looking in there for 15, so I probably qualify on 'sick sense of humor' criteria to be here.

I've a little experience of children's homes way way back the age of 2 and that was a long long time ago. Getting access to records from organizations that were active in for want of better word, childcare, and adoption is what I have a bit of experience of as some of you've probably seen.

The main problem with adoption in my time was once parents got that piece of paper http://ao.postadoption.info/  no one in any adoption agency or any childcare agency ever gave a fuck anymore, whatever problems an adoptee might have post-adoption could go unnoticed by anyone who would know what to do about it. These days in the UK its probably more a matter of far too much interference before adoption and sometimes too much of the wrong kind of interference after

If you want the full story on forced adoption in the UK go to FASSIT. Most of the relatively few (compared to the US) adoptions in the UK are necessary adoptions but there are an increasing number of cases over the last few years where there is very serious cause for concern over the motives of Social Services departments in making an adoption plan for those children.

Financial incentives for local authorities meeting adoption targets intended to get kids trapped in care out of care are being misused and there has been an increase in baby adoptions where the motive for an adoption plan is very questionable in my opinion. See http://www.fassit.co.uk/ also http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/facethefacts/transcript_20070824.shtml I have a recording of that show if its any use to anyone, also have the recording mentioned here which they were forced to take off YouTube
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/19/nsocial119.xml