The victims of forced adoption want an apology from the Commonwealth government.
Nikkirk
Author: Susan Gair
Senior Lecturer, Department of Social Work and Community Welfare at James Cook University
A long-awaited Senate Committee report will tomorrow reveal whether the Commonwealth’s policies and practices played a role in coercing young, unwed Australian women to give up their newborn babies for adoption.
The practice, known more recently as forced adoption, was reportedly common in Australia between the 1950s and 1980s, with authorities failing to gain free and informed consent from thousands of young, unwed mothers before their newborns were removed.
The Senate Inquiry received hundreds of submissions, including many personal accounts of coercion, trauma and ongoing mental health problems associated with forced adoption.
Long and painful history
Legally, adoption was a confidential, irrevocable process where “unwanted” babies were placed predominantly with childless couples, relieving the state of the burden of their care. Close to 200,000 children have been adopted since the first Australian legislation facilitating adoption was enacted in 1896.
By mid-20th century, adoption was increasingly seen as western society’s answer to several emerging social problems – illegitimate children, single motherhood and infertility.
From the 1950s, babies of unmarried women were labelled illegitimate and, as such, the women were deemed “unfit” to mother. These young women could best serve society and themselves, they were told, if they relinquished their child for adoption. Then they could “get on” with their lives.
It seems that religious and welfare bodies agreed that the solution to illegitimate babies was adoption by a married woman who was “fit” to mother. From the 1950s to the 1970s, these organisations established homes across Australian to support and protect young, single pregnant women. But many of these women now have revealed the suffering they experienced at the hands of these institutions.
In many cases, the signed legal paperwork appears to show the birth mother’s consent for adoption. However, it’s common for women whose children were lost to them through closed adoptions between the 1940s and 1980s to recount traumatic stories of immense emotional pressure and coercion to sign.
Birth mothers were silenced when it came to speaking out about their hidden pregnancies, their treatment during the birth – which was frightening and traumatic – and their grief after losing their child. Their pain was seen as punishment for their immorality because of falling pregnant.
'Illegitimate' children were adopted by wedded or widowed women who were deemed 'fit' to mother. Junoic
Many of the women were young, vulnerable and experiencing personal crises. They were not informed of any legal rights to keep the child, and were made to feel inadequate, immoral and undeserving when it came to raising their own babies. Birth fathers were generally disregarded and blamed for corrupting innocent girls.
In some cases, single mothers may have been deliberately denied access to counselling services prior to giving consent. Adoption was upheld as the only option for these women because of a lack of financial and other support, and the stigma associated with illegitimacy and motherhood out of wedlock.
Adoptive parents were encouraged to raise the child as if it was born to them. The family was legally complete when the adoptive parents were named on birth certificates as the parents to whom the child was born.
Many adoptees say they experienced positive family relationships with their adoptive families. But many others have reported severe emotional disturbances and significant feelings of loss.
For adopted people, the grief associated with “not knowing who they are” is common and relates to the loss of identity, the loss of information about their origins, the loss of both birth parents, and for many, including Indigenous children, a loss of their culture of origin.
Research shows a high incidence of grief among birth mothers after the loss of their baby to adoption, and these feelings often intensify over time. Some of the women who experienced this grief following forced adoption practices in in Australia told their stories in the Four Corner’s documentary, Given or Taken, which screened last night on ABC1.
The Commonwealth’s role
Submissions to the Inquiry suggest the Commonwealth government has a case to answer in supporting forced adoption. This is based on the denial of the same financial support to unwed mothers that was available to other women who were widows, deserted wives and divorcees.
This was the case until the early days of the Labor Whitlam Government, when a universal single mothers' benefit was introduced to support all mothers in need, including unmarried women.
By withholding financial support until the 1970s, the submissions argue, the Commonwealth can be seen as condoning forced adoptions and contributing to the coercive policies and practices of state welfare, church and charity organisations.
Equally, up until the 1970s, reliable birth control was difficult to access and was disallowed by some religious groups. Termination of pregnancy was illegal under Commonwealth and state legislation. So while state legislation governed adoptions, some submissions to the Inquiry argued that the Commonwealth’s public and social policies endorsed a moral stance that enforced marriage or adoption to secure care for children.
Time for an apology?
Many submissions to the Inquiry argue the Commonwealth should play a leadership role in helping to heal the wounds of past wrongs in forced adoption. This would include publicly acknowledging the many stories of distress, trauma and violations of mother-child relationships as a result of forced, coerced, or unethical adoptions. Compensation could then be sought for the resulting trauma.
Evidence has been submitted to the Inquiry that some professionals involved in past adoptions might have acted unprofessionally, inappropriately, unethically and without informed consent to facilitate the adoption of children. While not wanting to find scapegoats for past wrongs, these actions should be acknowledged in an apology.
But not all those involved want an apology. Many just want the truth to be heard, acknowledged and accepted.
More practically, the Inquiry is likely to recommend a nationally funded framework of counselling, specifically tailored to support the well-being of those affected by forced adoption. This would be developed in consultation with the key stakeholders – birth parents, their extended families and adopted people – to provide ongoing emotional support.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Re-writing Australia's history of forced adoption
Monday, February 27, 2012
Given or Taken? - Four Corners
Given or Taken?
Updated
The heartbreaking story of forced adoption in Australia.
Over five decades thousands of women gave up their newborn children for adoption. While they were supposed to make their decision freely, many claim they were coerced, bullied and their children were effectively stolen.
It's now a cornerstone of social welfare policy that children should, if at all possible, stay with their birth parents, in particular their mother. Not so in years gone by. Right up to the 1970s, having a child out of wedlock was frowned upon and young women who fell pregnant were actively encouraged to give up their babies for adoption. Authorities argued this was done with good intentions, but now a powerful Senate Committee has heard evidence that tells a very different story.
It now seems many young, single mothers were never given the option of keeping their child. Unmarried mothers automatically had their hospital records marked ready for adoption - even before giving birth. There is evidence that some were sedated. Others were denied access to their babies as they were making crucial decisions about their future. As a result, these women have suffered terrible emotional distress throughout their lives.
This week reporter Geoff Thompson talks to some of the women who lost their children. Crucially, they reveal the truth about the way they were treated in the hours after they gave birth:
"(A nurse) started strapping up my right wrist. I was puzzled, I didn't know what she was doing, and then she secured me to the side of the bed... I became unconscious. And I don't know how long I was unconscious for, but when I eventually came to, my son was gone."
The program hears allegations that sedatives were used to help control young mothers and push them towards relinquishing their babies. As one person who's examined a variety of evidence says:
"I have no doubt that some illegal activity occurred, I have no doubt that women were subject to what nowadays... we would call abuse; that forged consents occurred."
The program also hears from the nurses and social workers of the time who claim that, while there might be evidence of wrong doing, most hospital staff acted in good faith:
"Most of them would say, 'I don't have to see my baby do I?' And you'd say 'No, you don't have to'... a young woman could not be forced to sign those (adoption) papers, could not be."
Over the past decade individual hospitals and the West Australian Government have offered an official apology to the women who lost their children. Now the Federal Government must decide if its policies contributed to the suffering. It also has to decide what can be done to help those involved and if a national apology is needed.
"Given or Taken?" Reported by Geoff Thompson and presented by Kerry O'Brien goes to air on Monday 27th February at 8.30 pm on ABC 1. It is replayed on Tuesday 28th February at 11.35 pm and can also be seen in ABC News 24 on Saturdays at 8.00 pm, on iview or at abc.net.au/4corners.
This recent broadcast by Four Corners (abc.net.au/4corners) investigates the complaints and claims of unmarried mothers in Australia:
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2012/02/23/3438175.htm
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Pope tells infertile couples to shun artificial procreation
VATICAN CITY (AP) – Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday urged infertile couples to shun artificial procreation, decrying such methods as a form of arrogance.
Speaking at the end of a three-day Vatican conference on diagnosing and treating infertility, Benedict also reiterated church teaching that marriage is the only permissible place to conceive children. Matrimony "constitutes the only 'place' worthy of the call to existence of a new human being," he said.
The pope pressed the church ban against artificial procreation, saying infertile couples should refrain from any method to try to conceive other than sex between husband and wife.
"The human and Christian dignity of procreation, in fact, doesn't consist in a 'product,' but in its link to the conjugal act, an expression of the love of the spouses of their union, not only biological but also spiritual," Benedict said.
He told the science and fertility experts in his audience to resist "the fascination of the technology of artificial fertility. Benedict cautioned the experts against "easy income, or even worse, the arrogance of taking the place of the Creator," an attitude he indicated underlies the field of artificial procreation.
Sperm or egg donation and methods such as in vitro fertilization are banned by the church for its faithful.
The emphasis on science "and the logic of profit seem today to dominate the field of infertility and human procreation," the pope said.
But he added that the Church encourages medical research into infertility.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Without saying so out loud, the Pope also makes it apparent that the natural children of single mothers and fathers are acceptable targets for the infertile "faithful" couple.
Identifying birth defects early creates new questions - Spokesman.com - Feb. 25, 2012
February 25, 2012 in Nation/World
Identifying birth defects early creates new questions
Blood test finds genetic details of fetus weeks into pregnancy
Lisa M. Krieger San Jose Mercury NewsSAN JOSE, Calif. – Raising the prospect of a world without birth defects, a Stanford University-created blood test that can detect Down syndrome and two other major genetic defects very early in a woman’s pregnancy will be available next week.
The simple blood test spares women the risk and heartache of later and more invasive tests like amniocentesis.
But it has startling social implications – heralding a not-distant future when many fetal traits, from deadly disease to hair color, are known promptly after conception, when abortion is safer and simpler.
The $1,200 test, which analyzes fetal DNA in a mother who is 10 weeks pregnant, is being offered to doctors Thursday by Verinata Health, a biotechnology company in Redwood City, Calif. It licensed a technique designed by Stanford biophysicist Stephen Quake.
“It’s a game changer,” said Stanford University law professor Hank Greely, who studies the legal and ethical implications of emerging technologies. The controversy over abortion “is about to be hit by a tsunami of new science.”
There are two converging trends, Greely said. “We’ve got politicians running for president who are really trying to whack away at reproductive rights at a time when the science is about to vastly expand the information that parents have about their fetus.”
A similar test is already available from the San Diego company Sequenom, and at least two other San Francisco Bay Area companies plan to offer noninvasive prenatal genetic testing.
The market is huge: 4.5 million U.S. births a year, of which an estimated 750,000 are “high-risk” due to age or family history.
The current crop of tests only seeks major abnormalities on three chromosomes: 13, 18 and 21. They can also tell whether a fetus is a boy or girl.
But perhaps within the next five years “it seems likely that a simple blood draw from the pregnant woman will be able to provide genetic results for a fetus about not just Down syndrome, but cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease and a host of other diseases,” Greely said.
“I don’t think many parents would abort a fetus because it is blond or because it doesn’t have the best genes to be an athlete,” Greely said. “But I do think it will greatly increase the number of fetuses aborted for mainly medical reasons and sometimes for nonmedical reasons, like sex, because it is so much easier to find out. And you find out faster.
“You can make the decision before anyone else really knows you are pregnant – and when abortions are less complicated, medically and socially.”
The test’s effectiveness was reported Thursday in the long-awaited findings of a Verinata-sponsored clinical trial published in the journal of the American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
For women with insurance coverage, Verinata said it would provide documentation to support a claim. But in cases where the claim is denied or a woman is uninsured, it will negotiate a discount, it said.
It accurately detected all 89 cases of Down syndrome in 532 maternal blood samples. It also detected 35 of 36 cases of Edwards syndrome and 11 of 14 cases of Patau syndrome – two far more devastating chromosomal abnormalities.
The disease occurrence was high because women were selected for the research trial if they were considered high-risk due to advanced age, if their fetus tested positive through conventional tests for chromosomal defects, or if they previously had a baby with chromosomal defects. The test predictions were compared with the actual birth outcomes.
Quake became interested in this approach in 2004 when he first became a father, “and I saw the invasive tests to my wife and unborn child. I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’ ”
He happened across a 1948 discovery about free-floating fetal DNA in maternal blood – called “cell free DNA.” But scientists then could not measure the genetic material precisely enough to make a diagnosis.
The new test counts the millions of DNA molecules from both the mother and baby and can detect excessive genetic material that signals a birth defect.
Katie Fischl Fuller, of Santa Clara, whose baby is due in March, said she would have welcomed the test.
“Amniocentesis is horrible. It’s very invasive,” she said. “A needle is inserted through your stomach into the uterus, which risks injuring the baby. Risk of miscarrying is 1 in 250 or 300 … when you can feel the baby moving, and you’ve already connected.”
Members of the anti-abortion community also said they would welcome the test if it is used to give parents time to prepare for the birth of a handicapped infant.
“But if it’s a search-and-destroy mission, where the baby is aborted, we are not in favor of it,” said Cecelia Cody, administrative director of California Right to Life in Walnut Creek, Calif.
“I don’t think the world is a better place without these babies. It’s getting close to Nazi eugenics, isn’t it, to decide who lives? If a baby is shown to have a cleft palate, do they die?”
“It is difficult to know how people will act on this information,” said Michael Katz, medical director of the March of Dimes.
Although the tests “are no longer experimental … it is the future. Soon all the other tests will be secondary.”
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
If you could erase your most painful memories with a pill, would you take it?
Memories have a way of informing our identities, reinforcing our conceptions of who we are, and helping shape us into the people we will become tomorrow. In almost all cases, our memories — even the unpleasant ones — play a formative role in our lives; but they can also be so painful or traumatic that they become become debilitating.
In the latest issue of Wired, Jonah Lehrer provides us with a detailed look at a future where editing our memories could become a reality. We're not talking Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind style brain-wipes; the memory-editing of the future will offer incredible precision, allowing us to address the neurological underpinnings responsible for everything from post-traumatic stress disorder, to drug addiction, to regret over a one-night stand.
Lehrer's feature explores in illuminating detail the status of research into "forgetting pills;" the incredible potential of such treatments; and the social, behavioral, and ethical hangups of rewriting one's personal history. We've included Lehrer's introduction here, but you'll definitely want to read the rest over on Wired.
Lehrer begins:
Jeffrey Mitchell, a volunteer firefighter in the suburbs of Baltimore, came across the accident by chance: A car had smashed into a pickup truck loaded with metal pipes. Mitchell tried to help, but he saw at once that he was too late.
The car had rear-ended the truck at high speed, sending a pipe through the windshield and into the chest of the passenger-a young bride returning home from her wedding. There was blood everywhere, staining her white dress crimson.
Mitchell couldn't get the dead woman out of his mind; the tableau was stuck before his eyes. He tried to tough it out, but after months of suffering, he couldn't take it anymore. He finally told his brother, a fellow firefighter, about it.
Miraculously, that worked. No more trauma; Mitchell felt free. This dramatic recovery, along with the experiences of fellow first responders, led Mitchell to do some research into recovery from trauma. He eventually concluded that he had stumbled upon a powerful treatment. In 1983, nearly a decade after the car accident, Mitchell wrote an influential paper in the Journal of Emergency Medical Services that transformed his experience into a seven-step practice, which he called critical incident stress debriefing, or CISD. The central idea: People who survive a painful event should express their feelings soon after so the memory isn't "sealed over" and repressed, which could lead to post-traumatic stress disorder.
In recent years, CISD has become exceedingly popular, used by the US Department of Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Israeli army, the United Nations, and the American Red Cross. Each year, more than 30,000 people are trained in the technique. (After the September 11 attacks, 2,000 facilitators descended on New York City.)
Even though PTSD is triggered by a stressful incident, it is really a disease of memory. The problem isn't the trauma-it's that the trauma can't be forgotten. Most memories, and their associated emotions, fade with time. But PTSD memories remain horribly intense, bleeding into the present and ruining the future. So, in theory, the act of sharing those memories is an act of forgetting them.
A typical CISD session lasts about three hours and involves a trained facilitator who encourages people involved to describe the event from their perspective in as much detail as possible. Facilitators are trained to probe deeply and directly, asking questions such as, what was the worst part of the incident for you personally? The underlying assumption is that a way to ease a traumatic memory is to express it.
The problem is, CISD rarely helps-and recent studies show it often makes things worse. In one, burn victims were randomly assigned to receive either CISD or no treatment at all. A year later, those who went through a debriefing were more anxious and depressed and nearly three times as likely to suffer from PTSD. Another trial showed CISD was ineffective at preventing post-traumatic stress in victims of violent crime, and a US Army study of 952 Kosovo peacekeepers found that debriefing did not hasten recovery and led to more alcohol abuse. Psychologists have begun to recommend that the practice be discontinued for disaster survivors. (Mitchell now says that he doesn't think CISD necessarily helps post-traumatic stress at all, but his early papers on the subject seem clear on the link.)
Mitchell was right about one thing, though. Traumatic, persistent memories are indeed a case of recall gone awry. But as a treatment, CISD misapprehends how memory works. It suggests that the way to get rid of a bad memory, or at a minimum denude it of its negative emotional connotations, is to talk it out. That's where Mitchell went wrong. It wasn't his fault, really; this mistaken notion has been around for thousands of years. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably. The metaphors for this persistence have changed over time-Plato compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet, and the idea of a biological hard drive is popular today-but the basic model has not. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.
None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don't remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all.
When CISD fails, it fails because, as scientists have recently learned, the very act of remembering changes the memory itself. New research is showing that every time we recall an event, the structure of that memory in the brain is altered in light of the present moment, warped by our current feelings and knowledge. That's why pushing to remember a traumatic event so soon after it occurs doesn't unburden us; it reinforces the fear and stress that are part of the recollection.
This new model of memory isn't just a theory-neuroscientists actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like PTSD and addiction-and even pain disorders like neuropathy. Unlike most brain research, the field of memory has actually developed simpler explanations. Whenever the brain wants to retain something, it relies on just a handful of chemicals. Even more startling, an equally small family of compounds could turn out to be a universal eraser of history, a pill that we could take whenever we wanted to forget anything.
And researchers have found one of these compounds.
In the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.
[Wired]
Friday, February 17, 2012
Eternal Sunshine Drug Points the Way Toward Counteracting the Agony of Chronic Pain | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network
Eternal Sunshine Drug Points the Way Toward Counteracting the Agony of Chronic Pain
By Gary Stix | February 17, 2012
McGill researchers test a rat's pain threshold
One of brain researchers’ closest brushes with science fiction in the last 10 years came with the discovery of a chemical that could completely wipe out memory, a molecule that evoked a real-life version of the scenario depicted in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a couple undertakes a procedure to erase their memory of each other when the relationship falls apart.
Fortunately, the artificial amnesia occurred only in laboratory rats. But the experiment raised an obvious question: What would anyone do with a drug that essentially reformats your mental hard drive?
Who would be interested besides a neurotic Woody Allen trying to reboot his life, or a sadistic Josef Mengele type attempting to conduct the kind of scientific experiment that would be judged a war crime at The Hague?
A group of researchers have now come up with a more pragmatic answer to this question than incorporating the memory-erasing agent as a plot device in a cyberpunk novel
Neuroscientists at McGill University and collaborators have just reported in Molecular Pain that the chemical with the evocative acronym ZIP can selectively wipe out the nervous system’s “memory” of the chronic aches and pains that plague about one in four North Americans, apparently leaving other memories intact.
Pain that persists more than a few minutes leaves a memory trace—that’s why just a light touch is sometimes enough to produce a yelp of agony months after an injury. The archetypal example is the soldier with an amputated leg whose phantom limb still aches years after being severed.
In the experiment at McGill, ZIP administered to the spinal area of rats wiped out pain memories in hind paws that had become tender and hyper-sensitized from the application of capsacin, the compound that produces the burn of chili peppers.
ZIP is the Eternal Sunshine chemical that was spritzed into the memory-forming locus of rat brains to make the animals forget their past. One of the McGill co-authors, Todd C. Sacktor of SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, led the original research that discovered ZIP (zeta inhibitory peptide) along with the memory-preserving enzyme PKM-zeta, which it inhibits.
Years of experimentation and testing would be required to determine exactly where it should be administered to selectively wipe out pain memories without obliterating a lifetime of family recollections. And even then, ZIP will never be an over the counter drug. To be used in medicine, it would need to be injected into the spinal cord to reach the neurons involved with storing the pain memory.
Still, the experiment will leave neuroscientists with a better understanding of the molecular players involved in establishing pain memory. “It gives a clue as to a potential target for influencing persistent and chronic pain,” says Terence J. Coderre, a professor of anesthesiology and neuroscience at McGill who headed the research team.
Even if ZIP never makes its way down the lengthy drug development pipeline, it lays the groundwork for other chemicals that could permanently annul the pain memory that results in the persistent discomfort that turns walking, sitting or even lying down into a daily ordeal for so many.
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