Professor Nahum Mushin, Chair of the Implementation Working Group for Forced Adoption, warned that Tony Abbott’s policy of making intercountry adoption “easier, quicker and cheaper” for childless couples could end in a baby trafficking scenario similar to the one that operated in Australia for decades. Approximately two hundred and fifty thousand newborns were taken from their single mothers and given to white married couples because they were considered “more effective” parents purely and simply because of their marital status.
Mushin states:
“The working group, together with the whole of the forced adoptions sector, have grave misgivings about the continuation of inter-country adoptions per se. They assert that inter-country adoption should be seen as a last resort after all other measures to assist children have been exhausted,” chairman Nahum Mushin wrote to the inquiry.
“The forced adoptions era in Australia saw the development of a ‘baby industry’ which privileged the needs of middle-class childless couples over the wishes or rights of single women and their babies. Inter-country adoptions do the same.”
