The Easy Moralism of the Adoption Apology

Between the 1950s and mid-1970s, approximately 150,000 babies of unwed, mostly teenage mothers were adopted by childless married couples in Australia. The national apology to separated mothers, fathers and children harmed by the forced- adoption practices widespread throughout Australia in the postwar period was delivered by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, on March 21.

This apology was in keeping with the spate of official apologies for past policies that have been issued in recent times in Australia and overseas. These occasions give politicians the opportunity to choose the mistakes and errors they say “sorry” for. The general rule is that apologies are tendered for actions taken by those who are safely dead, and for actions that can be easily labelled as conservative and discriminatory because they transgress fashionable contemporary values.

This easy moralism condemns previous generations for past sins, while ignoring current-day sins of omission and commission. The forced-adoption issue, and its continuing implications for the crucial and contentious subject of child protection policy, throws a fierce light on this phenomenon. It illustrates the way the preference for heaping opprobrium on what happened half a century ago, while overlooking the legacy of the so-called “progressive” attitudes and policies of today, hampers the community response to major social problems, including child abuse and neglect.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the institutionalisation of virtual “automatic” adoption in response to pregnancy out of wedlock was considered good social policy. If an unmarried woman did not have financial support from her family, or unless she married the father, the view before the 1970s was that the only realistic option in the best interests of the child was for the mother to consent to relinquish a baby she could not support financially.

The presumption was that unwed mothers without breadwinning husbands would be unable to combine child-rearing duties with paid work. Children would therefore have to be given up for adoption, given that the government benefits then available were insufficient to support mother and child. Adoption of children born out of wedlock was thus designed in part to prevent the creation of a pauper class of unmarried women and children who would inevitably require public assistance.

By these means, traditional family values were also upheld. The widely held conviction was that it was unquestionably in the children’s and society’s best interests for a child to have a married mother and father and to be raised in an intact and financially self-supporting (natural or adoptive) family. Hence, the general acceptance of what is now considered the harsh policy of adopting out the babies of unwed mothers.

The influential 2012 Greens-dominated Senate inquiry into forced adoption had little sympathy for the “conservative societal attitudes” of earlier times. The inquiry recommended that the Commonwealth—which had no constitutional responsibility for the adoption laws and processes overseen by state governments—should issue a formal apology for failing to extend the scope of social security payments to include welfare benefits for unwed mothers, since the provision of taxpayer-funded income support would have enabled many women to keep their children.

This led the inquiry to laud as a social leap forward the Whitlam government’s decision to support rather than stigmatise unwed mothers by introducing the single mother’s (“supporting mother’s”) pension in 1973. This was rightly identified as the moment when social attitudes to marriage, the family, and the raising of children were officially revolutionised. Unmarried women no longer needed to give up their babies for financial reasons and comply with traditional values, as conduct previously considered anti-social now received state sanction and was reclassified as deserving of government support.

For the supposedly intolerant policies of the Menzies era, the nation was asked to be truly sorry. The inquiry reflexively praised the diversity of family types the single mother’s pension made possible, and condemned previous generations for discriminating against unmarried women by making strict judgments about the best circumstances in which to raise children. This was in line with the standard “progressive” account of the evolution of the family over the last forty years, which celebrates the rise of single motherhood and the decline of the institutions of marriage and the traditional nuclear family as victories for tolerance, feminism and the status of women.

However, this supposed story of social advancement does not accord with the far-from-positive relationship between the social policy changes of the early 1970s and the wellbeing of children.

Expanding the availability of welfare benefits helped end forced adoption by enabling unwed mothers to financially support their children. But the politically unfashionable reality is that establishing the “right” to receive welfare has led to the emergence of the very social problems that forced adoption was designed to prevent. Welfare for the unwed has made having children out of wedlock a pathway to dependence and dysfunction for a significant underclass of never-married mothers and their children—and contributed significantly to the scale of the child protection problems confronting the nation.

The inconvenient truth, supported by evidence from international and Australian studies, is that child abuse and neglect are far more prevalent in single-mother families. Most families, regardless of composition, that frequently come to the attention of child protection authorities tend to share problems usually linked with welfare dependence—such as drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence and mental illness—and the consequent breakdown of behavioural standards concerning the proper care of children.

These kinds of single-mother families are significantly over-represented in cases of child maltreatment in Australia. Currently, 15 per cent of children aged under eighteen live in single-mother households, according to the ABS Family Characteristic Survey; in 2010−11, “female single parent families” accounted for 33.7 per cent of all substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect. The rate of child abuse and neglect in these households is more than twice that expected given the number of single-mother families.

It is no coincidence that the state-sponsored breakdown of the family has coincided with the perpetual crisis that has engulfed the Australian child protection system. The tragic reality is that due to the normalisation of welfare dependence there is a growing underclass of inadequate parents who are not fit to care for children. Child protection services have failed to respond appropriately to the crisis because of the shift in the past forty years from traditional “statutory intervention” into problem families (court-approved removal and provision of alternative accommodation) towards the “family preservation” (or “family support”) approach to child maltreatment.

This shift accounts for the current over-emphasis placed on “supporting, not separating” the increasing numbers of problem families in the community, with serious concerns for the safety and wellbeing of children. It has been partly driven by ideological developments in the field, and has also occurred in reaction to reconsiderations and recriminations about the past practice of forced adoption.

The family preservation approach developed out of the radical school of social work that emerged in the 1960s. This school was critical of supposedly “bourgeois” institutions, such as marriage and the nuclear family, and of official policies that reinforced the hegemony of these institutions, such as forced adoption.

When subjected to radical scrutiny, forced adoption, and child abuse in general, was portrayed as a structural feature of an unfair society. Both were seen as caused by poverty, or rather, by inadequate government support for parents who regardless of marital status struggled to care for their children. Parental responsibility for properly caring for their offspring was hereby transformed into a “right” to parent children with adequate transfer payments and appropriate social support services.

The traditional approach to child protection involving the removal of abused and neglected children into state care was considered inappropriate, and permanent removal by adoption was especially condemned as unjust. Child removal was portrayed as punishing the poor, and all adoptions, even when court action to legally sever parental rights was deemed necessary for child protection purposes, were viewed as “forced”.

The radical parental rights agenda gained influence in university social work faculties and became the foundation of the training received by social workers. It quickly had an impact as the emphasis on family preservation became the orthodox policy and practice employed by the state and territory child protection services.

These services only remove children from unsafe homes as a last resort, and only after extensive social service interventions to help parents address the social and personal problems that impede proper parenting. Removal to foster care then occurs only on a temporary basis, followed by attempts at family reunion. The permanent removal of children by taking legal action to terminate parental rights and to free children for adoption is officially taboo.

Well-intentioned social services are designed to help struggling parents care for children. Unfortunately, services that try to build personal capacity and family resilience struggle to overcome the entrenched behavioural problems in the underclass of families with the most serious child welfare problems.

The overarching flaw with the family preservation approach is that everything possible by way of providing support services is done to keep even highly dysfunctional families together. The result is “under-responding” to child maltreatment because child removal is relegated to a last and reluctant resort, even when abusive and neglectful parents are demonstrably unfit. Statutory intervention often occurs too late, if at all.

Action is only taken after a child has been damaged by prolonged exposure to neglect and abuse, often with lifelong consequences (including crime, prostitution, drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness, mental illness, jail, unemployment and welfare dependence). Many children are further damaged by unstable living arrangements when foster placements break down because of children’s personal and behavioural problems, and when they are repeatedly taken into and out of “temporary” foster care after attempted family reunions inevitably break down because of recurring parental problems.

An alternative strategy for stopping child maltreatment is for child protection services to take more timely statutory action to permanently remove children from unsafe homes for adoption by suitable (and properly vetted) families. This policy prescription is controversial. State and territory child protection services prioritise the preservation of the relationship between children and their biological parent(s) at nearly all costs, partly because of the social work profession’s desire not to repeat what are now regarded as historic wrongs. Permanently removing children even from bad parents by adoption, whether by consent or by court order, contradicts the family preservation orthodoxy, which says all parents have a “right” to receive government support to parent their children. It is also considered akin to the discredited forced-adoption practices of previous eras.

Before the 1970s, most adoptions in Australia involved the children of young unwed mothers. The increased availability of contraception and abortion, and the introduction of financial support for single mothers by the state, caused the number of adoptions in Australia to plummet in the mid-1970s and rapidly decline and dwindle thereafter. The conventional wisdom in child protection services is that children are almost always better off with their natural parents, so all efforts must be made to keep and restore children to the family home, because removal and adoption do more harm than good.

As a result of this thinking, the pendulum has swung too far towards family preservation and parental rights at the expense of the best interests of at-risk children. This explains why legal action is almost never taken by child protection authorities to free children for adoption, even for children who languish in foster care with little prospect of ever safely being returned home. In 2010–11, fewer than 200 children were adopted in Australia, despite more than 37,000 children having been in government-funded care placements, and despite more than 25,000 of these children having been in government-funded care placements continuously for more than two years.

The taboo on adoption as a means of protecting children demonstrates how culturally and politically powerful is the history of forced adoption. This history is also used and abused by vocal opponents of adoption in all forms and any circumstances today (including inter-country adoption).

The anti-adoption movement in Australia led the calls for the national apology for forced adoption. It consists of influential advocacy groups, backed by vocal academics, such as the sociologist Professor Denise Cuthbert of Monash University, who maintain that having heard the stories told by the victims of forced adoption, we should learn from the past: since we now know that adoption harms not only the separated parents but also their identity-deprived child, we must “never again” repeat “the mistakes of the past”—meaning all adoptions should be banned.

This powerful and morally intimidating argu­ment is designed to discredit all uses of adoption as wrong, harmful, and socially and politically unacceptable in modern Australia, even if adoption is necessary to protect children from demonstrably unfit parents. This is achieved by characterising any move to lift the number of children adopted from out-of-care as a “re-emergence of ‘forced adoption’”. This is code for continuing with flawed family preservation policies or else (in the words of the Vanish lobby group) “any national apology will be undermined”. The political strategy is to make policy-makers reluctant to support adoption for child protection purposes lest they be accused of backtracking on the apology and of once again “stealing” children from devastated parents.

To negate the loaded sentiments that seek to delegitimise adoption, policy-makers need to be armed with the facts about the causes, consequences and solutions for the child protection crisis. The blanket claims made regarding the allegedly inherently harmful effects of adoption are not supported by evidence. Studies have found that by providing stability and permanency, adoption for child protection purposes produces better outcomes for abused and neglected children by removing them early, speedily and permanently from dysfunctional parents.

This stands to reason. The failure to use the proven and effective strategy of early removal and adoption exposes children to serious maltreatment and other problems, such as repeat entries into temporary foster care, leading to attachment problems and other psychosocial disorders.

The significance of this cannot be overstated. The claim that child removal and adoption does more harm than good is wrong. The harm done to many children in the name of avoiding repeating past mistakes, due to child protection practices doing “too little, too late” to stop abuse and neglect, is ignored by those unwilling to countenance adoption in any form.

The positive impact that adoption by wealthier, functional families can have on the lives of disadvantaged children is also overlooked—as is the fact that the vast majority of adoptions these days are “open”, with contact being maintained with natural parents to ensure adopted children are aware of their origins and heritage.

The harsh reality is that many underclass families are not only broken but unfixable. Efforts to support, not separate, these families are counterproductive in terms of outcomes for children. The priority given to family preservation at the expense of protecting children is inappropriate. A child-centred approach is needed, and must include the use of adoption to provide good, safe and stable adoptive families for vulnerable children requiring permanent removal from the custody of abusive and neglectful parents.

In the United Kingdom, this realisation is starting to shape the debate on child protection policy in the best interests of children. Martin Narey, the former chief executive of the children’s charity Barnardos and current adoption adviser to the Cameron government, has even recommended that social workers resume the once standard practice of advising struggling, welfare-reliant single mothers that consenting to adoption will give their babies the best chance in life.

In Australia, support for adoption has been gradually emerging in response to mounting concerns about the parlous state of child protection services. However, the politics of adoption remain fraught. Proposals to lift the adoption rate remain controversial because of the forced-adoption issue.

These tensions were recently exposed by the discussion paper on “options for reform” released by the Queensland Child Protection Commission of Inquiry in October 2012. The commission’s report noted the evidence that shows adoption is in children’s best interests, but was reluctant to strongly support greater use of adoption primarily due to concerns about the “historical practices of forced adoption in Australia”, and consequent doubts about whether adoption is an “appropriate twenty-first-century option for children who are unable to remain with their family”.

A national apology is the means by which current generations pass judgment on what are believed to be the misguided actions of previous generations. Given the different standards and circumstances that applied in earlier eras, apologies for past government policies should be made only when the means and ends pursued were demonstrably morally deficient.

Previous generations believed that adoption of children of unwed mothers was an effective way to prevent a serious social problem by preventing the formation of fatherless families. Looking at the child abuse statistics on children from single-mother families, who can say unequivocally that our forebears were entirely wrong in deciding to forestall anticipated social harms and not add single mothers to the welfare rolls? By facilitating dependency and dysfunction, welfare for the unwed has significantly contributed to the creation of an underclass of abused and neglected children in need of removal and adoption by good families.

Politicians have the right to be critical of policies and practices they consider misguided products of less enlightened times. But they also have a responsibility to face up to the consequences of today’s “enlightened” policies, and the duty to promote social policies that advance the welfare of children. This isn’t to say that the past should be whitewashed by treating forced adoption as a necessary means to a justifiable end. But what needs to be recognised is that “progressive” social values and welfare policies have proven anything but unalloyed social advances, and that the state-sponsored breakdown of the family has proven toxic for child welfare—as the over-representation of single-mother families in the child abuse caseloads demonstrates.

This social disaster has been compounded and amplified by the family preservation policies that have enfeebled the community response to child abuse and neglect. Politicians should realise that history will hold them to account for current child protection policy. Another apology may well be needed in the future—but this time to the damaged children not removed from unsafe families.

Modern-day evils, and not just the sins of earlier times, need to be kept in mind. The problem with official apologies, including the apology for forced adoption, is that they tend to descend into simplistic condemnations of people and times past, and inevitably morph into uncritical celebrations of how tolerant and progressive contemporary society is by comparison. Instead of indulging in mindless self-congratulation, the focus should be on taking responsibility for the negative consequences of social policy developments since the 1970s.

It is time therefore to acknowledge that many children in underclass families, including children in too many underclass single-mother families, would be better off being removed and adopted. Increasing the numbers of underclass children that are adopted is essential to prevent the intergenerational transmission of dependence and dysfunction from parents to children. If this causes discomfort by recalling the history of forced adoption, it is better to disturb complacent social beliefs (including politically correct attitudes towards family diversity) than continue to tolerate rampant dysfunction, abuse and neglect.