Foundling, by Michele Karch-Ackerman, is an exhibition that sheds light on a secret chapter in Canadian history: the stories of young women who were sent to institutions to hide the shame of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Gallery education and media co-ordinator Brigitte Huard explained that once the babies were born they were put up for adoption and the mothers were sent home as if nothing ever happened.

“These women were told to go on with their lives as if nothing ever happened … they were told that one day they would get married and have ‘real babies,’” Huard explained.

She added that in some situations these ‘homes’ were beneficial and other times the women were forced to stay there. She explained that if it were a 15-year-old girl, she may not be able to care for the baby so giving it up for adoption was a wise choice, but some women were dropped off their unwillingly simply because they were unwed.

There were strict rules and regulations in place for the women, including a time schedule which was to be punctually obeyed and rules such as no talking in bedrooms.

“The girls were also given names such as Chastity and Prudence and feminine flower names,” Huard explained.

In Foundling, the artist has stitched a meditation on this suffering by hand sewing 100 baby sleepers from a 1950s pattern and vintage fabrics.

“Each of the sleepers has three buttons, representing the baby, the mother and the mother’s mother. Some of the sleepers have matching buttons to represent a joint decision and some have mismatched buttons to represent a difference of opinion.”

Also included in the exhibition are 100 antique teacup and saucer sets. A tea service will be held on Friday, Jan. 14 form 1 to 2 p.m. Visitors are invited to sip tea from these saucers while contemplating the long months of waiting, only to end with this profound loss. There is also a vintage letter box and letter cards for visitors to express their thoughts.

Huard said it is unusual to see an installation such as this in the art gallery, but it has been well-received. She said art is about ideas, and visitors can walk through and interact with this exhibit.

“Instead of removing you from it, the artist is inviting you to be a part of it,” she explained.

The last day of this exhibit is Jan. 16. The artist will be presenting her catalogue at that time, which features art relating to Foundling.

Admission is free.

January 4, 2011
Copyright © 2011 Welland Tribune

The West Australian Parliament has formally apologised to the unmarried women who were pressured to adopt out their babies between the 1940s and 1980s.

More than 100 people packed the public gallery to witness the apology and applauded the Premier when he finished his speech.

Colin Barnett acknowledged the policies of the day were unsupportive of pregnant, unmarried women and offered this apology on behalf of Parliament.

“Now apologises to the mothers, the children and the families who were adversely affected by these past adoption practices and express my sympathy to those individuals who were not best served by the policy of those times,” he said.

The apology received bipartisan support in Parliament.

The Opposition Leader Eric Ripper says WA is the first state in Australia to formally say sorry for past adoption practices.

“What we do today is unequivically and sincerely apologise to the mothers for fundamentally flawed government policies that meant your babies were taken from you,” he said.

“I’m sorry, the state Labor parliamentary party is sorry.”

Several female MPs have told State Parliament that they have been personally affected by the forced adoptions of last century.

The Liberal MP, Liza Harvey, says her mother was forced to give up her baby.

“After a long, traumatic and difficult birth she had my sister taken from her to be adopted out,” she said.

Ms Harvey says her sister was returned to her mother five weeks later, when she married the father.

The Member for Fremantle, Adele Carles, says her 53 year old mother only recently discovered she was adopted out.

“She had been removed from her teenage birth mother in New Zealand in the 1940s,” she said.

Sue MacDonald was 16 when she had her baby taken from her in 1968.

She says she has been waiting a long time for this day.

“Finally women are going to be acknowledged for the pain and suffering that we endured back then, hopefully it will help our children to understand that they weren’t given away, they weren’t abandoned or given away and I think that this can only set people free,” she said.

At the time it was revealed that an apology would be made, several affected women came forward.

Olivia Pratten’s battle to learn the identity of her biological father — an anonymous sperm donor — went to court Monday with her lawyer arguing she should not be treated as a second-class citizen.

The 28-year-old journalist from Toronto has campaigned for 10 years for the same rights that adopted children have.

Pratten, who was born in Nanaimo in March of 1982, said she has a father and mother and is not looking for another father.

“I want the choice of knowing if I can meet him,” she told reporters outside court.

“When you’re conceived in anonymity, the choice of whether or not you want to know this person is taken away from you.”

Pratten is challenging the laws that prevent her from finding out the identity of the man who donated sperm for her conception.

Lawyer Joe Arvay, a constitutional expert, said the current laws deny a person’s constitutional guarantees to security of the person and to equal treatment under the law.

“[Pratten] doesn’t want to interfere in [her biological father’s] life,” Arvay told B.C. Supreme Court Justice Elaine Adair.

“She wants to know who this person is who gave her life.”

The legal team for the defendant Attorney General of B.C. has argued in previous proceedings that the records of Pratten’s biological father were destroyed years ago, so the case is moot.

Pratten is not convinced that is so.

When she met in 2001 with the Vancouver doctor who performed the procedure on her mother, he told her the donor was a medical student and a Caucasian with a sturdy build, brown hair, blue eyes and Type A blood.

When she pressed him further, the doctor allegedly told her, “Don’t worry, dear. I did a verbal medical check and he was healthy,” she said in an affidavit.

Pratten, like many adopted children, is concerned that the absence of medical records of her biological father could lead to her own medical problems, and she worries that she could possibly date or marry her half-brother or half-sister.

Arvay’s co-counsel Sean Hern told the judge the donor, who was presumably a young man 29 years ago, may have changed his mind about remaining anonymous over the years and may be interested in connecting with Pratten.

There are an estimated 16,000 such children in Canada. But unlike adoptions, there is no legal requirement for doctors or the government to keep records of biological parents.

Pratten’s the first case of its kind in North America.

“I’ve met many, many people, at many conferences, here and in the U.S. I’ve never met anybody who is happy with anonymity,” said Pratten.

The trial is expected to last one week.

© Copyright (c) The Province

Living Reporter
Nicole Baut

The past year has been emotional for many adults who were adopted in Ontario, and for their parents, both biological and adoptive.

On June 1, 2009, Ontario opened its adoption records, after a 30-year fight launched by members of the adoption community. Adult adoptees and biological mothers could finally apply for copies of their adoption orders and birth registrations by mailing applications to the Office of the Registrar General.

Those who wished to remain anonymous could file a disclosure veto to protect their identity.

Over the following months, and slowly at first, birth names and post-adoption names were removed from long sealed files and sent by mail to people who, in many cases, had longed for years or even decades to see them.

As of April 20 of this year, some 10,300 people had applied for such information.

There have been happy reunions. There has also been disappointment.

Some people’s searches led to graveyards; others to non-disclosure vetoes and the discovery that the person they sought didn’t want to be found.

Sharon Doerr was rejected when she contacted her 49-year-old son. She found him working in the medical profession in the U.S. He had applied for a non-disclosure veto in September, but he did it too late — Doerr had already applied for and received his post-adoption information.

Doerr, 69, looked him up on the Internet and found a photograph. He looked like her father, who died when she was 7. Doerr sent a registered letter marked “personal” to her son’s office, then called the office in horror when she found out that someone else had signed for it.

She received a letter in response. Her son said he has had a good life and harbours no resentment toward her. But he does not want contact.

“I’m just hoping that somewhere down the road he may change his mind,” Doerr says. In particular, she wants him to know she had a brain aneurysm, which would be hereditary, but she has no way to tell him.

Some, like Catherine McPherson, were welcomed with arms wide open. In December, she found her 28-year-old son living in Surrey, B.C., and messaged him on Facebook.

David Hart, who works as a dump truck driver, had tried looking for his biological mother in the past, and was not surprised to hear from McPherson. “I just figured that if she’s anything like me she’ll probably come and find me,” he says.

McPherson flew west to meet Hart a few months later, spending eight days with him, his very welcoming adoptive family, and his 3-year-old daughter, Devlyn.

“It was one of the most natural things I’ve ever done,” McPherson says. They have stayed in close contact and are planning future visits.

The Internet has facilitated many reunions. Almost immediately after receiving her 20-year-old son’s name, Rebecca Fraser also found him on Facebook. On April 15, he came to her Scarborough home. “He was very polite, very sweet,” Fraser says. They plan to see each other again.

Monica Byrne, national director of Parent Finders of Canada, says the adoption legislation needs fine-tuning in a few key areas, the first being the fact that biological fathers’ names are not on the documents being released — even though some fathers signed a declaration of paternity or other paperwork during the adoption process.

That means adult adoptees often cannot find their fathers and that fathers cannot access to their child’s post-adoption information.

According to the Ministry of Community and Social Services, the legislation will be reviewed in 2014. A spokesperson said the ministry did not yet know how the review would be conducted and whether other stakeholders would be involved in the process.

The State’s apology to unmarried mothers illegally separated from their babies under harsh adoption practices is set to happen within weeks.

WA is to become the first State or Federal government worldwide to admit hospital and welfare authorities were wrong to immediately separate mothers from their babies after giving birth out of wedlock. Mothers from around Australia keen to hear the apology have been told it will be delivered in Parliament on October 19.

Experts say tens of thousands of WA babies were adopted illegally when their unmarried mothers were prevented from seeing, touching, naming or bonding with their children immediately after birth between the 1940s and the early 1980s.

Health Minister Kim Hames said the exact format of the apology was still being finalised but it would be “to unmarried mothers of adopted children who were adversely affected by past adoption practices”.

Christine Cole, of the NSW-based Apology Alliance, said it was also important for the Government to say sorry to the children taken. “They were denied their family of origin and the culture of that family,” she said.

- CBC News

The Yukon government is getting ready to open up adoption records it has kept secret for decades, making it easier for adopted children and their birth parents to find each other.

Parents or adopted children who want their adoption files kept confidential have until the end of April to make that request.

The Yukon is following the lead of provinces like Ontario, Alberta, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador and British Columbia, which have all opened up adoption records in recent years.

B.C. made the change in 1996 at the urging of advocates like Nancy Kato, who heads up an adoption support society in Surrey, B.C.

“It’s your heritage; it’s your genetic extension,” Kato told CBC News on Monday.

“Every child has a right to know what that is, and every birth parent has a right to know their child is alive and well.”

The opening of adoption records does not always result in happy reunions, Kato said, but nevertheless, the Yukon government is doing the right thing by ending the secrecy surrounding adoptions.

“They just want to know who they are,” Kato said. “They just want to know what their history is. They want to know what their medical [history] is. It’s just information.”

Yukon government officials say they will be advertising across Canada and contacting agencies such as Kato’s to get the word out to birth parents and adopted individuals about the unsealing of the territory’s adoption records.

They are charged with the most essential of duties: protecting vulnerable children from abuse and neglect. They will intervene in the lives of roughly 200,000 Canadian children this year.

For most of us, they are generally unseen, save for occasional mentions in news reports, when they rescue children from misery. Or, as sometimes happens, deliver it.

Canada’s child-welfare agencies, says University of Manitoba social work professor Brad McKenzie, have among the broadest intervention powers in the Western world.

Caseworkers come armed with vaster powers than any police officer investigating crime. It is an immense authority easily abused, without vigilant restraint.

It is time, critics say, they were reined in.

“The social worker system, as it applies to children, is out of control, seriously out of control,” says Katherine McNeil, a children’s advocate who has worked with families in Nova Scotia and B.C. “And nobody’s doing anything about it.”

Child-welfare agencies step in when kids are homeless, exploited, hungry or abused. They do not stop there. As the highly publicized neo-Nazi case in Winnipeg demonstrates, they might seize children from parents for teaching racist views, or for “emotional neglect.” They have taken newborns from parents considered insufficiently intelligent; from religious families believing the Bible commands them to discipline kids with a rod. They order homeschooling parents to enroll children in public school, deeming them inadequately socialized.

“They violate all kinds of privacy and rights,” says Chris Klicka, senior counsel for the Home School Defense League, which represents Canadian and American parents.

Whether we wanted it or not, knew it or not, over time, the work of child-welfare organizations has become “parenting by the state and the imposition of their value system on other people,” says Marty McKay, a clinical psychologist who has worked on abuse cases in the U.S and Canada. Provincial agencies have the power to intervene when children are considered “at risk” of abuse or neglect – even if none has actually occurred. Or, where spousal abuse happens, but kids are untouched. And what they do with the children they take can sometimes be worse than what they suffered at home.

***

When journalist J.J. Kelso founded Canada’s first Children’s Aid Society in 1891, it was from revulsion at what he had witnessed working in Toronto’s slums: the filthy, homeless urchins begging on the street, the school-aged girls whored out by parents for whiskey money; children needing “rescue,” Kelso exhorted, “from the environments of vice, cruelty or mendicancy.”

Courts could imprison parents for cruelty, but not revoke custody. Backed by the 1893 Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to and Better Protection of Children, the society had unique authority to directly interfere in affairs of parents and children: Anyone under 14 found begging, receiving alms, out late, homeless, orphaned, imprisoned, thieving, or associating with thieves, drunkards or vagrants, would be appropriated by the province.

Since then, as child-welfare agencies multiplied across Canada, their authority expanded, too.

One Calgary mother said her kids were recently pulled from class and questioned by a caseworker after she kept them home from school for a week, fearing they might be exposed to Swine Flu. When the mother protested, the worker threatened to seize all six children in her house, including two toddlers.

“All because I was overtly concerned about my children’s health,” says an incredulous Ms. K, who, as is the case with all investigations, cannot be identified. Nor can she ever know who lodged the complaint against her.

The worker later visited the house. There, Ms. K reports (and witnesses confirm), when she further protested the interference – at one point calling police – the agent hollered at her, physically accosted her, and threatened to report her for abuse, of which, the caseworker later relented, there was no evidence.

The secrecy that envelops these cases makes it nearly impossible to fully investigate Ms. K’s remarkable claims: caseworkers do not permit “clients,” as they’re called, to record meetings, and agencies cannot comment on any case. But the account doesn’t shock those who work closely with the authorities.

“I’m certainly not surprised, and hear over and over again of workers … threatening [parents] with apprehension. They’ll never admit it in court, of course, but I hear it all the time,” says Bradley Spier, a Calgary family lawyer. “Most of the time they’re above board. … They all have an attitude, but they’ll do their investigation and, if they can’t substantiate it, they’re generally pretty honest about that, and won’t take any action. But until then, they’re god-like creatures, for lack of a better word. Or they think they are.”

***

The government’s role in protecting vulnerable children treads an impossibly fine line. Without anonymous complaints, and the power to interview and apprehend, some children would undoubtedly suffer terribly. Accordingly, legislators grant workers astounding licence: a social work graduate, fresh from college, can enter a home without warrant; apprehend children without due process; and commandeer police officers to enforce his or her efforts. A caseworker can order children dressed, fed, medicated, and educated any way they consider appropriate. Parents who do not submit risk losing custody, even visitation of their kids. Or have them taken away permanently.

It is an authority that is sometimes severely misused. When that happens, Ms. McKay says, families can be traumatized in a perversion of the very system designed to prevent abuse.

The anonymous process, for example, invites bogus tips – commonly from divorcing parents, for instance, since agencies can unilaterally alter custody arrangements. Most complaints prove “unsubstantiated”: 55% according to the most recent Health Canada study.

“Children’s Aid, even when they don’t start an investigation [themselves], they can be manipulated by people,” says Ms. McKay.

Prof. McKenzie says child-welfare agencies typically do good work under difficult circumstances. Overstretched caseworkers, with general training, can be unequipped to specialize in interventions and the complexities each case brings. What some, middle-class agents might consider neglect, for example, is often a matter of poverty, not necessarily cruelty.

And some child-welfare workers also exploit their tremendous clout to behave unethically, prejudicially or illegally.

“Some of them get a real power complex because they have a bachelor of social work, or a masters, and they suddenly have this power [to] apprehend,” says Ms. McKay. “They throw their weight around.” She sees in some workers a “police mentality.” It may be a coincidence, but in the largest English-speaking provinces, Alberta, B.C. and Ontario (Quebec data are incomplete), the number of children taken into care by provincial agencies between 1993 and 2001, rose a remarkable 97%, 63% and 72% respectively.

Prof. McKenzie is encouraged by a nascent trend in Canadian agencies away from historic, heavier-handed investigative and apprehension focus, and toward working more co-operatively with families to improve home conditions.

Studies show that under the current system, he says, “generally we find that the majority of children that are served [by welfare agencies] do well” – meaning they thrive at school, seem generally well-adjusted, are free from abuse and neglect. About 15% to 20%, he says, do not.

That is not a trifling number. But the stories behind it – let alone the validity of the initial apprehensions – can prove impenetrable. Cases are shrouded in silence, media blocked from reporting details, or questioning workers, in the legitimate name of protecting children involved (even in the high-profile Winnipeg neo-Nazi case, most details were concealed). But such limits thwart public scrutiny into an arm of government as capable of error as any other, yet, in determining how much or even whether families stay together, working with some of the highest stakes imaginable.

Last year, Ontario MPP Andrea Horwath tabled a private member’s bill to make Children’s Aid Societies answerable to the provincial ombudsman, something Ontario’s Children and Youth Services has repeatedly resisted (ombudsmen in some other provinces, such as Alberta, have that authority). Ontario’s CAS typically refuses to share files with its Child Advocate; in his annual report released earlier this year – which found 90 children in provincial care died in 2008 – Irwin Elman called it “almost impossible” to get information necessary to investigate potential agency wrongdoing. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled parents could not sue child-welfare agencies; provinces, it ruled, owed no “duty of care” to families. The lack of oversight, says Ms. McNeil, creates departments accountable only to themselves.

And there are numerous instances of caseworkers acting improperly. Two years ago, a Nova Scotia judge ruled that workers intervening in a divorce custody dispute were so biased against the mother, and in favour of the father – who lived with a woman previously the subject of interventions for violence and neglect – that they took “intentional and deliberate” steps to “mislead the court” by concealing evidence against him. A few years earlier, the CAS of Prescott and Russell, near Ottawa, and one worker, were convicted of contempt of court for refusing to return a two-year-old boy to his parents, defying a judge’s instructions to do so. Agents insisted they were acting in the boy’s “best interests.” In 2001, two judges in Simcoe, Ont., criticized the CAS there for “arbitrary use of government power” and unreasonableness “verging on blind obstinacy” in fighting to keep children from being adopted by certain foster parents. Several parents interviewed for this story claim to have faced false accusations and bullying from caseworkers harbouring apparent agendas.

A report this year from Saskatchewan’s Children’s Advocate, Marvin Bernstein, found children suffering serious, ongoing abuse and neglect in the care of the province amidst a “culture of non-compliance with policy” among social services staff.

Even when acting with utmost professionalism, whether agents are able to provide children a better, safer environment than where they came from is not certain.

Mr. Bernstein’s report found staff knowingly placing children with histories of committing sexual abuse into crowded foster homes where they preyed on other kids, without alerting foster parents to the problem (one reported that a caseworker assured her “a certain amount of sexual abuse is to be expected in a foster home”). A quarter of children were placed in overcrowded homes, he found, as staff routinely used “manipulative methods” to “trick” foster parents into taking more kids than they were approved for. Two Saskatchewan caseworkers were suspended in February after being discovered shuffling children between foster homes to hide overcrowding conditions from investigators.

“Children’s Aid has no business placing into care a child that they can foresee is going to come out worse the other end than when they went in,” Ms. McKay says. “If that’s the best they can do, just leave them.”

Two teens charged in connection with the recent double murder near Edmonton were in care of a ministry-licensed group home – a place neighbours say they warned the government for years was poorly monitored. In March, a 15-month-old baby in care of Alberta’s Children and Youth Services suffered critical head injuries in a foster home; in the past four years, two Alberta children have been killed by foster parents. A 2008 report found Alberta caseworkers regularly placing kids in unsafe conditions, including abusive situations.

Last year, seven-year-old Katelynn Sampson was killed in Toronto in care of a foster parent with a record of violent crimes, and in Vancouver, police discovered minors in provincial care working as prostitutes. In 2002, Jeffrey Baldwin was abused and neglected to death by a couple with a known history of child abuse but were nonetheless granted custody of the five-year-old by the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto. A 2006 CBC investigation uncovered Ontario caseworkers drugging a seven-year-old Ontario boy into a stupor with massive doses of psychotropic medications, which a psychiatrist would later find had “no actual treatment value,” except making him more compliant in his group home. While in his drugged state, he was sexually abused by fellow residents.

Those who believe in the good intentions of child-welfare agencies argue they lack the resources to deal properly with each case; with some workers handling more than 30 clients simultaneously, it is impossible to act perfectly. One problem, believes Ms. McKay, is caseworkers spread too thin, drifting far from the original vision of the state’s role in family matters: protecting kids from verifiable and authentic abuse, cruelty and neglect.

“They need to go back to the basics,” she says. “Do the children look well-nourished? Do they have bruises on them? Are they molested? Is the house crawling with cockroaches? If not, they’re not being abused or neglected.”

But with powerful, generally unaccountable agencies, dependent on justifying their place in a world far improved from the cruelties of J.J. Kelso’s Victorian Toronto, the need to intervene in more cases, for more reasons, may make such discipline difficult. “I would love to just demolish the system and start from scratch again,” she says. “Because it’s gone very far awry here.”

Link to article

The Adoption Community continues to come forward with position papers regarding adoptions in Haiti.

Origins-USA is a national, non-profit organization working to protect the natural rights of mothers to nurture their children. Origins-USA released the following position statement this week:

Origins-USA Urges Keeping Haitian Orphans with Their Families

Many news stories have talked about Americans seeking to adopt Haitian orphans in the wake of the devastating earthquake. Origins-USA encourages efforts to help Haitians through donations to respected relief agencies which can use funds to reunite children with their families and to help care for children in their own country.

International adoption should be a last resort, used only when necessary for children to receive medical care that they cannot obtain in their own country (Position Statement on International Adoption). Money spent bringing children to the US is better spent helping their families and relatives care for them in their own countries.

There’s talk about eliminating “red tape” to expedite adoptions. In truth, the so-called red tape is regulations designed to assure children are true orphans and do not have family members or neighbors to care for them. Origins-USA urges you to let your representatives in Congress, President Barack Obama, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton know that family support, not adoption, is the way to help the almost 400,000 children in Haitian orphanages.

Last week, 10 Americans were arrested in Haiti for attempting to illegally remove children from the earthquake devastated country.

The group of men and women, members of a church group in Idaho, are part of the “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission”. They described their effort to save abandoned, traumatized children and the plan to “scoop up” children and relocate them to the Dominican Republic. They were arrested at the border for not having proper paperwork.

The fear that Haiti’s children will be exploited by child traffickers or illegal adoption is a reality.
Children that are parentless or lost are more vulnerable than ever to be seized. While the Americans may have been “trying to do the right thing” – removing children from Haiti is illegal and requires the Prime Ministers’ personal authorization.

While the Americans claim they were acting in good faith, many of the children continued to claim their parents are alive. If a child tells you they are not orphans and their parents are alive – how can you still claim “good faith and doing the right thing”?

Now, it’s up to the legal system to determine whether the Americans were acting out of good faith or are exploiting children.

Haiti’s government halted all adoptions unless they were in progress prior to the earthquake. Children have to be protected from people who will exploit them and from those who think they are doing the right thing.

Humanitarian efforts need to focus on tracking children, reuniting them with their families and taking care of them in their own country.

The Federal Government wants to give forced adoption victims an apology, but seems very keen to prevent the public finding out exactly what the apology is for, writes Emily Wolfinger

During a meeting at Minister for Families Jenny Macklin’s Canberra office on 27 August, the offer of an apology to an estimated 150,000 women and their children who were “unethically” and “unlawfully” separated between 1950 and 2000 was declined by Origins, the official body representing these women.

Macklin’s advisor Tracey Mackey phoned Origins NSW coordinator Lily Arthur the next day, asking whether Origins would reconsider accepting their offer of an apology. They declined a second time. But get this: the apology may still go ahead in November. As if it were an afterthought, the Government plans to tack this apology onto the apology to the “Forgotten Australians”, those half-million Australians abused as children in institutions. The Forgotten Australians are also upset about this, as they want their apology to be their own — and fair enough. However, it seems the Government is determined to kill two birds with one stone.

Far from being a well-meaning gesture, the offer of an apology is an insulting and deeply disappointing outcome for Origins, who have waited nearly 10 years for a Government response on this issue. They have been campaigning for a national inquiry for even longer, and not once have they asked for an apology. According to the group, it is only through a national inquiry that Australians will learn of the nationwide extent of the crimes acknowledged as “kidnapping” by Family Court Justice Richard Chisholm in evidence he gave at the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into past adoption practices in 1999.

That inquiry only served to reveal the extent of criminal and unethical adoption practices committed in NSW. Origins fears that until all states are held accountable in a national inquiry, Australians forcibly removed from their unmarried mothers in other states will remain in the dark about the circumstances surrounding their adoption. A national inquiry will also provide an opportunity for mothers from all states to tell their stories. Origins says it is very unlikely that any of this will happen if the Government goes ahead with the apology, because such a move would look to many as if some degree of recompense had been made.

It makes no sense at all for the Government to insist on making an apology before Australians even know of the nationwide extent of the crimes to which such an apology would correspond. The Indigenous Stolen Generations had their national inquiry first, and it demonstrated very clearly just what was being apologised for. Why not use the same process for mothers forcibly separated from their children through adoption? Is this offer of an apology an attempt at an easy way out of actually doing something to address the damage caused by Australia’s adoption practices? Perhaps, worse still, it is an attempt at a cover-up of the extent of the crimes perpetrated against these women and their babies.

Lily Arthur believes it is. “The reason why they want us to accept an apology is [so that they can] continue to hide the unlawful practices.” She says that the Government is trying to cover for the states who are afraid of what a national inquiry could reveal, and in turn, how much it could end up costing them in terms of redress and litigation.

It’s not hard to see why the many victims of these criminal adoptions are deeply sceptical of government bona fides on this issue. Beyond failing to fully investigate and acknowledge what happened to these women, the federal and state governments are still misinforming people about the bumper adoption era that occurred from the 1950s to the 1980s and even trivialising what happened. The Victorian Government, for one, attributes the decline in adoptions from the mid-70s to “… a number of interrelated factors: the introduction of government benefits for single parents, increasingly tolerant community attitudes toward exnuptual births and single parenthood, improved contraception [and] the widespread availability of pregnancy terminations”.

In fact, while the Supporting Mother’s Benefit for single mothers was not introduced until 1973 under the Whitlam Government (and it did not extend to fathers until 1977 under the Fraser Government), financial assistance was actually available to single mothers well before the 1970s, as outlined in a 1956 government publication titled Children in Need by Donald McLean: “To avoid any misunderstanding or any suggestion that the mother was misled or misinformed, District Officers are instructed to explain fully to the mother, before taking the consent, the facilities which are available to help her keep her child. These include…financial assistance to unmarried mothers under section 27 of the Child Welfare Act …” However, as documented in the transcripts of the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry this fact was largely concealed from mothers.

While that inquiry has put on the public record much that needs to be better understood, there is still much more that needs to see the light of day. An apology, therefore, would be an irresponsibly premature step on an issue already so marked by institutional culpability. Origins want full acknowledgement and accountability first — which they believe a national inquiry would ensure — then suitable redress, and then perhaps an apology.

The other point about government apologies is that they must be done properly, and at the right time — that is, when people want them — otherwise they become devalued. As Arthur also points out, in their eagerness to issue an apology, the Government is reducing the significance of the apology to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous people. “If they are prepared to offer an apology to people who don’t want one, what kind of substance does the original apology to the Stolen Generations have?”

So, what were some of the unethical and illegal practices perpetrated against these women? Well, as documented in the transcripts of the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into past adoption practices, they include: the detainment of unmarried women during pregnancy; the immediate separation of mothers and babies following births (many mothers were not allowed to see their babies until they signed adoption forms and many others never met their babies); the use of coercion to solicit adoption consents from mothers (in some cases, mothers were told the adoption papers were discharge forms); the use of mind altering drugs (not administered to married mothers) following births and preceding consents; promises of a 30-day cooling off period to get mothers to give consents when the rights to revoke consent during this period were rarely observed; the absence of any counselling prior to and following adoptions, and the failure to notify mothers of alternative options to adoption (as noted above, many mothers did not know that financial support was available).

It is not surprising then that these mothers suffer a number of mental health conditions ranging from depression to post-traumatic stress disorder. Half of these mothers did not go on to have more children, while the female suicide rate was highest between 1962-72, reaching an all-time high of 13 per 100,000 women in 1967, compared to 4.3 today. This period coincided with the peak in adoptions — nearly 10,000 in 1971-2. Taken together, these facts represent an appalling and poorly understood blemish on our human rights record.

In a press release on the Sunday following the meeting at Jenny Macklin’s office, the minister said that she had “begun a dialogue” with mothers separated from their babies. However, when asked whether this means a national inquiry is on the cards, a spokesperson from Macklin’s office would not say, sending instead this vague response: “This dialogue will explore what sort of acknowledgement of their experiences would assist their healing process.”

Clearly the Federal Government wants this issue to go away, but that isn’t about to happen any time soon. Arthur says that mothers like her won’t go away until the so-called past adoption practices — or, as she calls them “abduction practices” — are seen for what they were.

Next year will mark 10 years since the Final Report into past adoption practices in NSW, titled Releasing the Past, labelled those practices “unethical” and “unlawful”. It will also mark 15 years since Origins was founded and first started campaigning for a national inquiry. It is time that the Federal Government allowed the country to face the reality of this part of Australian history and set up a national inquiry. National inquiries have been instigated for much less serious reasons than the theft of over 100,000 children.

These mothers want their children to know the full truth. They are not asking for much.