Origins SPSA is the only non-government funded organization in Australia supporting people separated by adoption, with affiliates in Canada, USA, New Zealand, Scotland and more.
The people primarily represented by Origins are known as "Australians Separated by Forced Adoption"(ASFA). Origins is also an organization dedicated to uniting ASFA with the Stolen Generations and the Forgotten Australians.ASFA is not an incorporated body or association but a title used by Australian governments and media in referring to unwed mothers and fathers (or those in irregular relationships) who were illegally separated from their children at birth circa 1950-1998.
The practice of the unauthorized removal of the child at birth (forced adoption) occurred across Australia as the medical files of unwed mothers were systematically marked with versions of the medical code "BFA" (Baby for Adoption), insuring that access to that baby would be restricted partially or wholly from birth prior to any signing of adoption consent papers.
The removal of the child at birth consisted in a major breach of the Common law. Described as "kidnapping in a non-technical sense" (Transcripts of Evidence, Report on Adoption Practices: Second Interim Report, 1999, P. 152), it was forbidden by adoption laws in all states of Australia in occurring prior to when arrangements for the adoption of the child could begin and, therefore, before adoption law could come into effect. The NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into Past Adoption Practices 1950-1998 found such unauthorized removal to be "unlawful and unethical" (Final Report titled "Releasing the Past", 2000). Details of the latter practice as well as associated crimes committed against ASFA can be found at this link.
The removals were also in violation of international human rights covenants to which Australia is signatory because they were exclusive of the child's natural parent/s and kin (closed adoption) and resulted in the eradication of the child's identity.
In 1967 the spokeswoman for the peak training body of the social work profession, the Australian Association of Social Workers, Mary McLelland revealed how and why the new welfare thinking would be achieved via the adoption of 'illegitimate' children (emphasis added):
The Social workers concern is with childlessness or infertility, but the particular area of competence is, not in it's treatment, but in assessment or resolution of the effects on the marital relationship of the couple...The ultimate objective of Adoption is such a planned change, through helping to make a family where before one did not exist...But before the placement can be made there are other minor or contributory changes in the social functioning of various individuals where the social worker's part is well defined...and that is...The natural parents must resolve, if possible, conflicts about the surrender of the child.
In 1956, Reid expressed an identical opinion at a national convention of social workers in America:
An agency has a responsibility of pointing out to the unmarried mother the extreme difficulty, if not the impossibility, if she remains unmarried, of raising her child successfully in our culture without damage to the child and to herself .... The concept that the unmarried mother and her child constitute a family is to me unsupportable. There is no family in any real sense of the word. [3]
Patricia Farrar notes that:
From written or verbal accounts by mothers, it appears that there were details of the experience of giving birth to a baby that would be given up for adoption that were not confined to a particular locale or era. Personal accounts of women's experiences revealed that there were commonalities across the continents of Australia and North America as well as the countries of England and New Zealand in approximately a twenty year period: recurrent themes of coercion, abuse, deprivation and punishment emerged from these accounts of extramarital pregnancy and relinquishment.' [4]
Eugenics
The demand during the era in question was for healthy newborn Caucasians, who were taken to be matched with prospective adoptive parents so as to appear "as if born to them" (misinterpretation of the adoption law, according to Dian Wellfare, A Sanctioned Evil) in a predominantly a Caucasian society. The childless married couple would be helped through that matching process to avoid the stigma of childless marriage.
Adoptions of the period in question were characterized by the practice of eugenics. Due to a misrepresentation of the original meaning of adoption as a means by which to provide stability to an orphaned child, a demand was created by the adoption industry of the day by which a recruited and childless, married couple approved to adopt were considered as having a right not only to a baby but to a healthy baby.
According to the Victorian Government:
Children had to be passed as medically fit for adoption prior to placement; (as) … adoptive parents had a right to the perfect child. Children over the age of six months were considered difficult to place, and older children or children with disabilities were generally regarded as unplaceable. [2]
Consequently, the placement of many taken children was deferred pending the resolution even of minor health problems. As State wards these babies were made subject to medical experimentation. Couples approved to take a child could enter into an interim arrangement with "a view to adoption" of a deferred baby. If the child's health problems did not resolve or prove to be minor, s/he could be returned to the orphanage and exchanged for another baby.
There is ample anecdotal evidence of children being returned also due to superficial features such as hair colour or, as reported by one adoptee in speaking of her adoptive sibling, "a horsey mouth" (A story at Monash University's History of Adoption project website).
Indigenous Subject to Unlawful Removalist Practices
ASFA include Indigenous Australians unlawfully removed from their families of origin due to the unlawful removalist policies of the period circa 1950-1998, as well as those of various other ethnic backgrounds. Crimes against ASFA had nothing to do with racist assimilation policies suffered by the Stolen Generations.
Many ASFA also fit the description of Forgotten Australians, having spent time in homes for unwed mothers or having been left behind to languish in institutions due to deferred adoption status.
[1] Wikipedia, Familialism, accessed 1st November 2010
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familialism
[2] Media student resource kit, State Government of Victoria, retrieved 10 November 2009 from
<http://www.cyf.vic.gov.au/adoption-permanent-care/more-resources/resource-kit>
[3]National Convention of Social Work, "Principles, Values, and Assumptions Underlying Adoption Practice" by Joseph H. Reid
[4] P. Farrar, Relinquishment and abjection: a semanalysis of the meaning of losing a baby to adoption, p.1, extracted 10th November 2010 from
<http://utsescholarship.lib.uts.edu.au/dspace/handle/2100/295>
