Political Representations of Adoption in Australia, 2005–2007

Abstract

Political Representations of Adoption in Australia, 2005–2007 By Marian Quartly, Kate Murphy, and Denise Cuthbert Australia has one of the lowest rates of adoption in the western world. It now stands at about five hundred adoptions annually, a dramatic decline from its peak of nearly ten thousand a year in the early 1970s. The major causes have been a decline in the numbers of babies available for adoption, thanks to the advent of the contraceptive pill and a supporting mothers’ pension, together with changing community attitudes about single parenthood; and changes in public opinion and in policy, law, and practice in welfare administration which actively discouraged people from adoption.1 Adoption is commonly seen to have done more harm than good, with the antidote to that harm being the “romance” of the reunion of adopted children, often as adults, with the mothers who relinquished them; this story is common fare in popular women’s magazines and similar media. The nation was entranced by one such homecoming romance in the early months of 2005 when the Federal Minister of Health, Tony Abbott, went public with his story of the “homecoming” of Daniel, the now-adult son given up for adoption when Abbott and the boy’s mother were in their late teens. In the popular Australian imaginary, the trope of “coming home”2 has been mobilized with great effect by indigenous Australians to frame their experiences of separation from birth family into institutions or adoption, and this has come to characterize adoption in general. This trope registers adoption as invariably entailing loss, removal from roots, and pain. Problematically, the “coming home” trope also idealizes the birth family, occludes the role and experiences of the adoptive family, and perpetuates potentially limiting essentialism in our understandings of “family” and the role of the mother, in particular. Yet, it has and persists in having huge emotional force in the popular understanding of the adoption and post-adoption experience. The persuasive power of this way of narrativizing child removal and adoption has been augmented by the profound impact of serial, harrowing revelations in the last two decades of parlous treatment of “removed” children, whether indigenous, white Australian, or British children who traveled Adoption & Culture 2 (2009) 142 here in imperial forced migration schemes well into the twentieth century.3 The other major factor shaping the story of adoption as loss has been the formation from the 1970s of advocacy groups who brought into the public arena the voices of mothers coerced into relinquishing their babies, and of adult adoptees seeking information about their origins. National Adoption Conferences, convened in 1976, 1978, and 1982, heightened the impact of these groups in Australia. These conferences brought together people affected by adoption with professionals and researchers and served as important fora for activism and agitation on adoption law reform.4 The sociologist Rosemary Pringle remarked in 2004 that the “climate of apology” surrounding adoption in Australia, linked with understandable shame regarding past adoption practices and the “stolen generation” of Aboriginal children, meant that it had become “almost impossible” to endorse adoption as a policy option (225). However, just a year later, in November 2005, a government inquiry into overseas adoption chaired by the politician Bronwyn Bishop opened up an unashamedly pro-adoption discursive space, co-opting the expression “in the interests of the child” (previously the catchphrase of anti-adoption groups) to endorse not only inter-country adoption, but more tentatively to suggest that adoption might be “in the best interests” of many Australian-born children. The committee recommended an inquiry into domestic adoption practices, stressing that the dominant anti-adoption culture must be changed so that adoption could be understood as a “legitimate way to form or add to families” (Australia, House of Rep. Standing Comm. on Human and Family Services, Overseas 9). Two years later Bishop released the report of a second inquiry, The Winnable War on Drugs: The Impact of Illicit Drug Use on Families. It made the news chiefly due to its controversial recommendation that the children of drug-addicted parents should be adopted out.5 The inquiry specifically recommended that a national adoption strategy should be implemented that recognized adoption as a...