Children belong with their family of origin. Discuss.
I hadn’t heard of family preservation until I listened to the podcast AdopteesOn and starting following Haley Radke on social media. Haley doesn’t describe herself as anti-adoption, but ‘for family preservation’.
At first glance it seems like something that would apply more to the North American system, where many babies are given up for adoption before they are born, and thousands of pounds are exchanged between adoptive parents and adoption agencies. For many of us in the UK, the film Juno was our first introduction to how things tend to work in the US and Canada.
One argument of family preservation is that if couples are able to raise $50,000 to adopt a baby, that money could instead be used to support the birth parent/s to raise the baby themselves if they choose to.
If anyone has read Celeste Ng’s 2017 novel Little Fires Everywhere you will be aware of how some prospective adopters feel about this idea, and how there is an entrenched bias against working class single mothers (and particularly mothers of colour). This bias against unwed mothers and assumption that a financially comfortable two-parent family trumps biology was why many of us older adoptees from the UK’s closed system were relinquished.
The UK adoption system differs significantly from the US, with the majority of children being removed from their birth families at an older age, usually between one and three, due to issues around addiction, neglect, poverty and – less often – abuse. I worked at the British Association for Adoption & Fostering on their Be My Parent website and magazine, yet family preservation did not occur to me as I edited profile after profile of children waiting to be matched with their ‘forever family’. I was most definitely in the fog!
After listening to a powerful talk from Brid Featherstone and Anna Gupta at The Open Nest conference 2017, I began to think about family preservation from a UK-perspective. As you may know, my sister had her children removed and, although there were some services offered to try to prevent things reaching that tragic conclusion, I believe more could have been done. For example, in some countries a struggling mother has a support worker living with her for a year or more, and in others the mother and her children move in with a family for support. So a bit like the children going into foster care, but mum comes too. I am aware this would not be appropriate in some circumstances, but relevant for all or not, it’s food for thought.
These initiatives led me to think about my own story in this blog piece Better than the alternative. I don’t necessarily advocate spending a lot of time dwelling on what might have been, but – for me - it has been an important element of coming out of the fog. I’ve found it useful to challenge the narrative that my birth mother “had no choice”, my birth father “had no responsibility” and I was “destined” to be with my adoptive family.
Image: Edi Libedinsky
