I. What is Adoption?

In this country adoption is the legal transfer of a child from one family to another. The child loses all legal connection with the birth family and becomes a complete member of the new family, just as if born into it. This includes issuing a new birth certificate for the child in the names of the new parents.

Adoption in other countries can have very different meanings. In some countries, such as Japan, there are several “degrees” of adoption. In the United Kingdom there was also a short-lived experiment with a form of semi-adoption called custodianship, developed to deal with situations such as step-families, where it was felt that the child and step-parent needed a legally binding, permanent relationship, but where it was also felt to be wrong to deprive the divorced non-custodial parent of his legal relationship to the child. It was also used in some other cases — for example, older children who wanted to live in a family but didn’t want to be adopted — and where it was felt that there was no need for further supervision or involvement by the social services in the family’s upbringing of the child, which made ordinary fostering inappropriate. Custodianship was introduced under the Adoption of Children Act 1976 but was abandoned under the provisions of the Children Act 1989, which replaced it by residence orders. Under the Adoption and Children Act 2002, section 115, a new type of semi-adoption called special guardianship was introduced, which gives parental responsibility to the special guardian(s), without removing it from those other people who might also already have parental responsibility, but gives the special guardian(s) the exclusive right to exercise parental responsibility powers, with some exceptions. These exceptions include the right of the birth parents to consent to an adoption, the right to change the child’s surname, or to emigrate with the child. Special guardians do not become the child’s legal parents.

In some countries, such as Germany, and some US states, adults can be adopted, and this was quite common in ancient Rome and other societies, but it is not legal in the UK. At various times in the past and in various places it has even been possible to adopt dead persons, for the dead to adopt the living, and also to adopt someone older than yourself. And because of a quirk in British law, it regularly happened that a person had to adopt her or his own born child.

Adoption in Britain today is very different from adoption fifty or 100 years ago. In the old days if a child were orphaned she would be taken in by someone in the extended family, without court involvement, or sent to the poorhouse. A mother with too many babies might give a child to a less fertile relative, again without the courts or social services being involved. An unmarried mother who did not keep her baby could either (quite legally) sell it or give it to another woman, or it would be raised in the parish workhouse until old enough to go into service or go to sea. Nobody bothered about what was best for the child. Even older children who were adopted had no say in the matter and there was no attempt to determine whether the adopters were suitable parents; many weren’t. Many adoptees were treated like servants and expected to be grateful for that; at least they weren’t living on the streets.