“In the Best Interests of the Child”: Mapping the (Re) Emergence of Pro‐Adoption Politics in Contemporary Australia

Abstract

This article seeks to understand, in historical and international perspective, recent governmental initiatives that aim to reinstate adoption as a viable policy option for the care and placement of children in Australia, with reference to two recent reports of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Human and Family Services, Overseas Adoption in Australia: Report of the Inquiry into Adoption of Children from Overseas (2005), and The Winnable War on Drugs: The Impact of Illicit Drug Use on Families (2007) which raises adoption as a policy option for children of drug‐addicted parents. These reports appear to signal a discursive shift away from the anti‐adoption attitudes that have characterised the post‐1970s period in response to the Stolen Generations and other past adoption practices. It is argued that this change can be understood as having been pushed to the fore by the conservative family policy of the Howard era and further fostered by international trends in adoption policy.

The future of inter‐country adoption: A paradigm shift for this century

“…The rhetoric at a broader political level in receiving countries such as Australia is on the best interests of the child, but those promoting the practice have discursively conflated these interests with the interests of prospective parents to the point of being indistinguishable (Fronek, 2009b; Murphy, Quartly & Cuthbert, 2009), while the right of children to grow up in a family appears to exclude the families and communities of origin. Given the degree of influence and wealth of receiving countries, this has in effect hindered the identification of and responses to the issues that make children available for adoption in the first place.…”

No‐man's Land: Adoption Storied Through the Aotearoa/New Zealand Adoption Act 1955

“…Excluding blood‐kin relationships was justified through the gendered moral positioning of the birth mother. The practice of secrecy was important to ‘protect’ the birth mother and her family from the shame of her weak moral character (Gediman & Brown, ; Murphy et al, ). The complete break strategy was maintained through the social power relations that constitute women's sexuality and reproduction as uncontrollable (Bartky, ; Cuthbert, Murphy, & Quartly, ; Cuthbert & Quartly, ; Kitzinger, ; Sawicki, ; Ussher, ).…”

“…At the same time, the Australian Government conceded its discriminatory adoption practices by offering an apology and compensation to unwed mothers for their immeasurable suffering, as they were coerced, bullied and terrorised into relinquishing their babies from the 1940s onward. Within the contemporary geopolitical landscape of Australia, there has emerged a climate of apology that sought to redress the abuses of government policies that produced what is known as the ‘stolen generation’ of aboriginal children and the national shame of breaches of indigenous rights (Cuthbert & Quartly, ; Murphy, Quartly, & Cuthbert, ). By 2012, inquiries into the removal and mistreatment of children had extended into the culturally and legally constituted governance of the forced removal of children for adoption and led to the inclusion of adoptees and their birth mothers into ‘the space of national apology and regret in Australia’ (Cuthbert & Quartly, , p. 179).…”

“…At the same time that the Australian government was apologising for past abuses, there has emerged an ‘unashamedly pro‐adoption discursive space’ (Murphy et al, , p. 204) that appropriates the call of the adoption reform movement's claims in the ‘best interests of the child’. In such space, it is argued that adoption may be more effective as a permanent solution to the problems of foster and out‐of‐home care for Australian children.…”

Operation Babylift: advancing intercountry adoption into Australia

“…3 ICA to Australia has been defined by polarised perspectives on whose needs are met; its success is measured by the number and speed of adoptions achieved. 4 ICA, whose modern origins began during World War II, 5 diffused into Australia twenty years after its emergence on an unprecedented scale within North America and Europe during the Korean War. 6 Officially sanctioned adoptions from Vietnam to Australia began and ended with the airlift of children from Saigon: Operation Babylift.…”