Apology Alliance Australia

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20140209/lead/lead3.html

In Australia Barnardos is promoting its Open Adoption Scheme by claiming it is different from old style adoption as parents get to see their child 3 times a year.  Open adoption was used in the past to lure,  usually young, poor mothers to part with their newborns.  Now it is a ploy being used to convince society and welfare workers that people will not end up as damaged as they were under the closed secret system.   Another smoke and mirrors campaign.  Mothers and babies separated by adoption are traumatised by the act of separation, and adoptive parents do not want contact with the adopted child’s original mother.  Mothers have committed suicide when adopters have reneged on their open adoption agreement.  I have written about the use of open adoption as a tactic of deceit in Part 8 of A new Stolen Generation in the Making. As one mother stated:

“One of the most revolting tactics used to obtain babies is the promise of “open adoption”, the promised of continued contact with their child, made only with the intent to lure in unsuspecting mothers who might have otherwise kept their child.  Open adoption agreements are not legally binding as other child custody or visitation agreements are and this frequently has devastating consequences.  Many a mother is grieving the loss of a child to adoption.  This grieving is compounded when she has so obviously, blatantly been used as a baby-making machine and then tossed out like yesterday’s garbage oncer her child is in possession of the adopters”.[1]

Just after World War II, Hollywood film star, Jane Russell, searched Europe in a bid to adopt a child after finding out she could not have her own. At the time intercountry adoption was considered an embarrassment by countries whose children were adopted by wealthy Americans. In fact members of the British Parliament demanded that: “American movie stars stop “stealing” British and Irish children”.  http://tradescant.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/jane-russell-and-south-lambeth-adoption.html

Russell formed an intercountry adoption agency, W.A.I.F., and used it to promote the concept of  “saving orphans”  and to normalise the moving of children from their own country to the US. In the process Russell adopted 3 children and was responsible for over 40,000 intercountry adoptions, including babies from Ireland.  There is a reference to Russell in the movie Philomena.

http://www.independent.ie/woman/celeb-news/whatever-happened-to-janes-baby-26543607.html

“After discovering firsthand that adoptions overseas were mired in red tape, Russell succeeded in lobbying Congress to ease the regulations then in force. To aid her cause, she also founded and helped finance the Women’s Adoption International Fund to facilitate U.S. adoptions of foreign orphans”.

Behind her screen image she was an evangelical Christian

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-01/jane-russell-monroe-s-sidekick-in-gentlemen-prefer-blondes-dies-at-89.html

Russell was married 3 times, suffered from alcoholism and depression.  She entered rehab at the age of 79. She described herself in her later years:

““These days I’m a teetotal, mean-spirited, right-wing, narrow-minded, conservative Christian bigot, but not a racist,” she told The Daily Mail of London in 2003. Bigotry, she added, “just means you don’t have an open mind.””

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/movies/01russell.html?_r=3&

Russell’s backer throughout her career was the billionaire Howard Hughes. See Jane Russell on the Biography Channel,  8 Feb 2013.

“She walked the halls of congress and was instrumental in getting 4000 children into the US every year”. According to her friend and movie star, Adrian Booth Brian, even though Howard Hughes wanted her to maintain her public profile as a sex goddess not a “mother of orphans”, he “Literally paid her way around all the time she was doing it [saving orphans]”.

The Biography channel painted Russell as a “big hearted actress” who had adopted and formed the WAIF organisation because of the number of orphans left after the war.  However the reality was that because of her infertility, caused by a botched abortion, she felt compelled to adopt and this led, as it still seems the case, to put her energy into saving orphans globally.  Russell first tried to acquire a little boy in Europe. She states:

“I hoped I would be able to find a boy in Europe, but it seems to be impossible … the British law will not allow me to take a child from England. In Italy I could not get a child because I am under 40; and, anyway, there were difficulties because Italy is a Catholic country and I am a Protestant. Now I have been advised to try Ireland; but I am worried in case the same difficulties would arise there. My husband is Irish, and he would very much like to adopt an Irish baby. If it is possible, I would like to fly to Dublin this week to pick out a child and make all the arrangements for bringing him to America”.  Historian  Moira Maguire discusses the event and the outcome:

“A member of the Church of Ireland Moral Welfare Organisation advised Russell that she would be unable to adopt a child from a Protestant institution without the requisite home studies and background investigations, so Russell set her sights on a young Irish boy who resided with his parents in England. The chain of events that led Russell from Ireland to England is sketchy at best, but somehow Russell convinced an Irish couple, the Kavanaghs, to allow her to adopt their son Tommy, and within hours the Irish legation in London issued a passport in Tommy Kavanagh’s name. The British press gave considerable coverage to the incident, which in turn fuelled a flurry of reports in other European newspapers about Ireland’s adoption policy …The most damning and worrying article appeared in 1951 in the German Uhr Blatt newspaper, in response to English press coverage of the Russell case … it raised the specter of a black-market baby ring that sold Irish children to the highest American bidder, the irony being that while Irish agencies were willing to do almost anything to rid themselves of the moral and financial burden of caring for illegitimate children, American couples were willing to pay dearly for the privilege of adopting healthy white Irish children. According to a translation of the Uhr Blatt article, an Irish welfare worker in England accused the Irish government of turning a blind eye to the export and sale of Irish children:

‘Our country has today become a sort of hunting ground for foreign millionaires who believe they can acquire children to suit their whims just in the same way as they would get valuable pedigree animals. In the last few months more than one hundred children have left Ireland, without any official organisation being in a position to make any enquiries as to their future habitat.’

… officials were quite willing to issue passports to allow illegitimate children to travel overseas for adoption, [as long as the Catholic Church agreed], but consistently refused passports to legitimate, even orphaned, children”.

(Maguire, M. (2002).  ‘Foreign Adoptions and the Evolution of Irish Adoption Policy, 1945-1952’, Journal of Social History, 36(2), Winter, pp. 387-404).

The article goes on to explain how the church and state conspired to ship thousands of babies of single mothers overseas, to be adopted by wealthy Americans, the only criteria being that they be brought up as Catholics.   So it does not matter how Hollywood spins adoption at its heart it has always been about the interests of those in more powerful positions, not those of the mother nor her child. It seems some things never change

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/i-was-adopted-41-years-ago-and-my-heart-has-never-healed-29984045.html

“But here’s the rub. Despite having three loving parents in my life – my parents, Liam and Mary, and Sarah – the dull ache in my heart endures.

I am not my adopted parent’s child, nor am I my birth parent’s child. I float somewhere in between. An amalgam of the two, a hybrid human. There is nothing that my parents or Sarah can do to make that better. The scar tissue persists. That’s the heartbreaking reality of adoption”.

CAITRIONA PALMER IS WRITING A BOOK ABOUT HER ADOPTION EXPERIENCE

Irish Independent

Pope invited to watch film criticizing Catholic Church

 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/Pope-invited-to-watch-film-criticizing-Catholic-Church/articleshow/29789669.cms

Producers and makers of the film ‘Philomena’ which has been nominated for various awards this year including the Oscars and Bafta have offered to hold a personal screening for Pope Francis. 

Forced adoptions apology was PM at her finest

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/forced-adoptions-apology-was-pm-at-her-finest-20130321-2giu5.html

The above article discusses the apology and the gaff the then Opposition Leader Tony Abbott made.  The media presumed that it was because he referred to us as birthparents – that was only part of it.  The most deeply offending aspect was wanting to include adopters in the apology.  Below is an email I sent to another polly who included adopters –

your speech is excellent except for the following

“We say sorry to the mothers, the fathers, the grandparents, the siblings, adoptees and adoptive parents and families who have suffered from the past practice known as forced adoption.  They have endured pain, grief and harm for decades”. 

What pain have adoptive parents endured?  Every day I cried because I could not watch my daughter grow up whilst her adopters enjoyed her company and witnessed all of her milestones.

Not only did the mothers and fathers suffer, but some of the adoptees who were placed in abusive homes and are still suffering, and there are thousands of them.  The adoptive parents gained by our tragedy. 

When they made submissions to the recent Australia Institute of Family Studies most stated they were very happy with their decision to adopt.  They not only benefited from our tragedy the demands they made on government to provide them with our newborns was a prime incentive for the government to introduce more and more barbaric practices to match supply with demand.  All legislation to do with secrecy was at their insistence and lobbying of the government. When adoptees fought to have their files opened so they could find out the truth of their ancestry adoptive parents lobbied government to keep the files closed – they went against the very wishes of those they had adopted.    17% of the stolen generation were adopted – can you imagine their outrage if their adoptive parents were apologised too?  Why would a group who actively sought our newborns, because of their desire to have a family which they could not create themselves and who  took advantage of us when we were most vulnerable be included in an apology which at its heart was the tearing of the baby from its mother’ womb purely and simply because their was a demand by a section of the community that voraciously sought our babies.

The Senate Report recommended that this apology  not be given to adoptive parents.  

This is an extremely sensitive issue