Those pressing for change to our 66-year-old much-examined and often criticised adoption laws will be hoping the review announced last week bears fruit.
The many years leading up to this announcement are littered with ignored reports.
Barbara Sumner, author of a poignant memoir about her own adoption published last year, said in the last 40 years there had been 98 unsuccessful approaches to successive governments to change the law. Not doing so meant the country remained in breach of the United Nations Treaty on the Rights of the Child to which we are a signatory.
As the Law Commission said in its 2000 document proposing changes, the 1955 Adoption Act was the creature of an era when mainstream society frowned upon women who had premarital sexual relationships and branded children born out of wedlock as illegitimate. (About 90,000 babies were adopted between 1950 and 1980 but in 2020 there were only 125 adoption applications granted by the Family Court.)
The commission said ‘‘the Act entrenched the theory that all were winners and that the mother could resume her life as if nothing had happened; the adoptive parents gained a much-wanted child; and the child could be treated as if born in wedlock to the adoptive parents’’.
The reality was somewhat different as we have seen highlighted in some of David Lomas’ television shows where he has helped people find their biological relatives.
Barbara Sumner’s story also spelled out the difficulty those who have been adopted can have finding their true identity. She was only able to access files held about her adoption because of confusion around her birth date, something which was accepted as special grounds under the law. Under the existing law there is no automatic right to such access.
As she put it in a Newsroom article, ‘‘it’s not about good or bad adoption or good or bad adopters, it’s about the fact every adopted person lives with a different level of citizenship to biologically-connected people — even if you’ve had a great adoption, the fact remains you are not equal under the law’’.
Recently retired District Court and Family Court judge Rosemary Riddell was blunt in her assessment of the current law in a recent Listener article, saying it was ‘‘completely irrelevant’’ and needed binning.
Many aspects of the law will need to be updated if its replacement is to reflect the values and needs of contemporary New Zealand as Justice Minister Kris Faafoi says it should.
Any new law should have the rights of children at its heart, he says.
Submissions on a Ministry of Justice discussion document ‘‘Adoption in Aotearoa New Zealand’’ can be made until August 31.
Views are being sought on six key issues — what is adoption and who is involved, cultural aspects of adoption (including whangai where children are adopted in the extended family), how the adoption process works in New Zealand and offshore, the impacts of adoption, and how the process works where a baby is born by surrogacy.
This work sits alongside a separate review of surrogacy laws by the Law Commission.
As well as the open submission process, targeted engagement with specific communities, including people affected by adoption, will also be held.
Feedback and ideas from the public will help the Government develop proposals for changes to adoption laws. After the submissions have been considered and a set of policy proposals developed there will be a ‘‘second round of engagement’’.
It is right that the process is thorough, because after all this time we need to get it right. There may well be aspects of what is eventually proposed which may be controversial, but this must not be used as an excuse for further unnecessary delays.
