Was my adoption forced ?
The word ‘forced’ is an umbrella term used to describe a collective experience of past adoptive practices and policies. We acknowledge that the term ‘forced’ is a powerful word and may exclude adopted people and mothers from identifying that they were also impacted by this dark period in Australian history.
The use of the word 'forced’ in reference to one’s adoption experience is incredibly difficult to reconcile, especially after being told for a lifetime that our removals were ‘win-win’ and the ‘best solution’ to deal with pregnancies outside marriage.
If you are new to adoptee led advocacy, the following may be somewhat confronting but I encourage you to please keep reading.
For decades adopted people have been indoctrinated into believing that their seperations occurred for a ‘good reason’. Impacted parties may not have considered that the way they were treated during the adoption processes routinely violated the human right conventions for both mother and child. We know that babies deemed for adoption were left in hospitals and mother-baby home nursery’s for weeks and months. We were cared for by a rotating roster of nurses and thus we missed vital foundational attachment milestones with a singular caregiver and this has impacted generations of adopted people and their loved ones. Our births were kept secret and not celebrated, we did not experience joyful visits and long cuddles from our families, who would have also gatekept our vunerable neonatal health and wellbeing.
Adoption was also forced on adopted people. Had we been given a choice and a voice NONE of us would have consciously chose to be removed from our mothers at birth and be dispatched to a biological stranger.
Irrespective of one’s adoptive experience, all adopted people have been exposed to the catastrophic neonatal grief, and the pre-verbal trauma of losing our mother. Some have experienced physical injuries from our high-risk birth, which still impacts us today. Others were deemed imperfect and languished unnecessarily inside our cribs. It is simply no wonder that international research confirms that adoption survivors are 4 times more likely to experience depression, anxiety, personality, inflammation and pain disorders, complex PTSD and to take their own lives.
How do we even begin to reconcile that our mother/father/grandparents did want us and that religious, medical, hospital staff and adoptive authorities used finely tuned strategies of coercive control, offered no other options or parental support and were pushed onto the fast moving freight train of forced adoption.
For the adoptees who attend GSASG we all have a unique lived experience in relation to our adoption, yet many simillarities exist within our life stories. One thing we all agree on is that by diving into our personal information, medical/legal records and other adoption information has been deeply empowering. After decades of unanswered questions and silences much of our truth is finally being revealed. Adopted people have a right to this information. Please check out our ‘Records’ tab for more information.
Adopted people also hold the right to decide for ourselves as to how we wish to frame and understand our adoption. No-one gets to tell us how we should feel or understand our lived experience.