A Facebook poll has revealed that 93% of those surveyed are in favour of scrapping the UK’s full, forced adoption policy and replacing the model with simple adoptions.
Simple adoptions allow children and their birth families to remain legally connected, and encourage meaningful, child-focused contact with biological parents while in the care of adoptive parents, wherever possible. Adopted children are able to keep their original surnames and can inherit from both families.
Under the UK’s current adoption policies, which feature a full adoption process, all ties between birth families and their children are severed when an adoption order is made.
While post adoption contact is possible under existing legislation, the policy behind the law is weighted heavily in favour of the adoptive parents’ wishes and wants, making physical contact almost unheard of in adoption cases.
France uses a two-tier system which features both full and simple adoptions, but since the 1990s, the number of simple adoptions have far exceeded the country’s full adoptions, making simple adoptions the most common form of adoption in France today.
Luxembourg, which also uses simple adoptions, only allows a simple adoption to take place where there are strong grounds, and if it offers advantages for the adoptee. Interestingly, the law in Luxembourg also requires that the adoptive parent must be at least 15 years older than the child, unless there are compelling reasons to permit otherwise.
The survey, which this site ran on Facebook, gathered 445 votes and found that 93% of those polled wanted to see the UK’s current adoption policies removed and replaced with a simple adoption process, while just 7% did not want to see the current full adoption policy scrapped and replaced with a simple adoption framework.
One poster commenting on the poll said, “I Don’t think adoption should exist. I think working with families so much better for the kids overall health wellbeing.”
Another poster said, “Adoption should only happen with the consent of everyone involved.”
And another commentator responding to the survey wrote, “In cases where the parents are either dead or doing life in jail and NO ONE else could have the child, I don’t see it as a bad thing. However, we all know it is being abused…. It’s horrific how something that I am sure was devised with good intentions, is being used to target the ‘lower classes’.”
Adoption, by law, should always be the last consideration in any child protection case but in rare instances where it is an appropriate course of action for a child, adoptions should be fully transparent.
In practice, that means each adoption plan must be highly tailored to each child to ensure birth family ties remain, and should be reviewed regularly and updated to reflect a child’s developmental needs.
Researching Reform 
If parent(s) fight forced adoption in court they should always win! Cruel parents would never bother and would usually give courts a very wide berth.It must always be wrong to forbid a parent to contact their child unless that parents has been convicted in court of a serious crime against that child.
It is tragic to hear of mothers who reported abuse by the father then deprived themselves by heartless judges of all contact ,face to face or email or phone .Barbaric acts that should be punished………
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Just as an observation, Ian, an adoption does not, per se, prevent a birth parent from contacting their child. If the parent can find the child, there is nothing to stop them contacting them, unless the court has made a specific order stating that contact is not to take place. I’m not disagreeing with anything you’ve said, just pointing out that an adoption is not a “no contact order”.
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Tuppenny blue I was referring to the many cases where judges make orders forbidding mothers to contact their children by phone,email ,text ,or accidental meeting
Vicky Hague for example got sentenced to 3 years prison for speaking to her own daughter when accidentally meeting her at a petrol station .
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Absolutely! I am very familiar with Vicky’s case, having had 30 kilos of her paperwork in boxes in my bathroom for two years! I commented because there is a common misconception that an adoption order prevents a birth parent from making contact with their child, and this is simply not the case, as I am sure you are aware. It is also true that a birth parent who makes contact with their now-adopted child may well find themselves faced with the sort of order to which you refer, but, until that happens, they are free to do as they please: I just didn’t want to see any parent deterred from searching for their child because they understood that they might be breaking the law.
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Yes I encourage mothers to track down their forced adopted kids and results can vary. Maureen Agnew found where the adoptive parents lived and police were called for harassment and she was ordered to stay away which she did until they were older
and I reckon she will soon have a happy reunion.
Winona Varney and her sister Danielle were found by their mum and had been told by adoptive parents that their mother was a wicked woman who did not want them !
When she found out this was a lie she and her sister (now teenagers) left theb adoptive parents and returned to their birth family.
Two cases in which I was quite heavily involved ;
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Forced adoption does stop it as you can’t write love you or put dad in letters ect it’s almost like a stranger writing to the child forced to say what social services tell the parent to say or they don’t allow that letter to reach the child not even allowed to send photos it’s corrupy
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Well said ian,why dont people wake up and see what’s happening to these families and children ?It’s got to stop.
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Tupennyblue..in the USA most “open” adoptions close by the 5th year with nothing parents can do, since they have no legal protection room for Visits and contacts.
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i would think 93% would be pretty much the same vote on a national basis.
fact is Forced adoptions need to end for good. the misery involved and the money being made by agencies is nothing short of outrageous.
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