Adoption aversion

NICOLE FRENCH, HER HUSBAND, and their three children were getting ready to go camping when the phone rang. She remembers exactly where she was in their sunken living room when a caseworker told her their family was about to grow.

“It was like getting a positive pregnancy test,” she said, still excited 13 years after that life-changing call. The caseworker wouldn’t explain much before a face-to-face meeting, but Nicole picked up on a dropped hint: The placement would involve more than one child. But the family had to wait two more days before they would learn about the two sons who would soon join them.

The Frenches spent those days rejoicing. But some family and friends showed less enthusiasm.

Australia, where the Frenches live, has undergone an extreme attitude shift since 1971, when adoptions peaked at 9,798 a year. Nationwide welfare investigations in the 1980s revealed a series of adoption scandals—hundreds of thousands of forced family separations that spanned decades. That news soured public support. Last year, only 208 children found permanent homes through adoption—a 98 percent drop.

In an effort to reckon with past wrongs, Australia made adoption the dead-last option for children needing care. Instead of finding security and stability with a forever family, most children in protective custody now live in a state of relational limbo.

Sarah Lainson and her husband Simon have three adopted boys. Their youngest son, Moe, was one of the 208 children adopted in Australia last year. He joined his two biological brothers already in the family.

Like many Christians, the Lainsons emphasize the Scriptural connection to adoption. “The Biblical mandate to care for widows and orphans, and the picture of adoption just in terms of our adoption into God’s family, really convicted and compelled us,” Sarah says.

Despite its cultural unpopularity, Nicole French’s vision of family life always included adopted children. She and her husband Simon had three biological children and wanted another before they adopted. But then doctors diagnosed Simon with life-threatening osteosarcoma—bone cancer. They told him he’d be lucky to lose only his leg.

By God’s grace, he kept his leg and his life, but the effects of his chemotherapy and Nicole’s early menopause turned their hopes for a fourth child from pregnancy tests to adoption paperwork.

Still, when 8-month-old Rodney and his 2-year-old brother Michael joined the French family 13 years ago, it started as a long-term foster care arrangement. A few years later, the state of Victoria changed the boys’ status to permanent care. Not quite adoption. Not quite foster care.

In the United States, government-run child welfare agencies generally emphasize permanency for children. In 2019, that resulted in 120,869 adoptions—46 times more per capita than in Australia. A 2021 report from the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare tallied 46,200 Australian children in foster care. Almost 500 live without any sort of family, in hotel rooms with unaccredited supervisors who clock in and out. Another 61,000 are under care and protection orders, still living at home in dangerous situations.

The ideal in both countries is for the birth family to live safely together. The difference comes when reunification isn’t possible.

U.S. courts have the option, eventually, to terminate custodial rights, opening the way for adoption and providing the child with all the security and rights of a biological family relationship. But Australia only allows for adoption if the birth parents agree. If they don’t, children are placed into permanent care, an official relationship that doesn’t include a change in name or inheritance rights and ends abruptly when the child turns 18.

EVEN THOUGH they weren’t allowed to officially adopt Rodney and Michael, the Frenches still faced some negative reactions from family and friends—even fellow church members. Nicole said it reminded her of when she told people she and Simon were expecting a baby—before they were married. The situation wasn’t exemplary, she acknowledges, but she expected people to show excitement for the child they were about to meet. Same with the two foster boys.

“I don’t expect people to react perfectly to things. I just expect them to be happy when it’s good news,” she said. But too many Australians don’t see adoption as good news at all.

Reports of forced adoptions in Australia began trickling out in the 1980s, when the government uncovered decadeslong procedures, policies, and laws that fractured hundreds of thousands of families. For just over 100 years, three primary practices divided children from their biological parents and put them in situations perceived as more respectable.

The first targeted what is now called the Stolen Generations. It refers to thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children torn from their homes between the 1850s and 1970s and placed with white families in an effort to Westernize them.

Then came the child migration program known as Home Children. Welfare workers in the U.K. and Malta sent boatloads of children to other countries. Between 1832 and 1953, at least 7,000 children landed on Australia’s shores, where institutional care was cheaper. The children were often told that their parents had died, although many were simply considered too poor to properly care for their children.

The third set of practices produced the Forced Adoption era. From 1945 until the 1980s, about 250,000 mostly unwed mothers were forced to relinquish their babies for adoption. The mothers were threatened, coerced, and shamed into signing documents nullifying their parental rights.

Between 1969 and 1973, Australia embraced new policies that made adoption a rarity. But vulnerable children still needed care.

While U.S. foster care policy takes a child-safety approach that often means immediate removal of children from the home, Australia’s child protection services emphasize early intervention and direct family support services. Except in extreme cases, a parent may receive up to 40 warnings before a child is removed from the home and placed into foster care. After that, the parents have two years to make changes and show they can parent safely. The ultimate hope is to reunify the family.

Nicole French noted these children aren’t just born into broken families. They’re born into a broken system where red tape makes it difficult for caseworkers to do the right thing: “There are so many scenarios, but they’ve got just one way of dealing with it. And it’s not very good.”

The Lainson family at home in New South Wales Photo by Tracy Mock

SIX YEARS AFTER the boys joined their family, 7-year-old Emily came for a visit. Emily had already lived in several foster care homes. Nicole played dolls with her. Simon had her help him in the garden. Later that afternoon, the caseworker asked Emily if she wanted to stay. Nicole remembered thinking that was an awfully big question for a little girl whose life up to that point had been filled with chaos. Emily was so used to brokenness that she talked about her parents’ physical fights as if that were a normal part of life.

But Emily did stay and ended up living with the Frenches for seven years. When her doctor told her she had ADHD and would need all the assistance such a diagnosis required, her behavior began spiraling out of control. She told Nicole, “I don’t want to have a life where there’s so much stuff to talk about.” She began vaping in her room and faced accusations of shoplifting. She openly defied them.

Her actions didn’t make the Frenches love her less. In fact, they reiterated to her, “We love you and we want to keep you safe.” But they had no legal authority to make her stay.

After a disagreement over her phone use, Emily packed her things.

“We don’t want you to leave,” Nicole told her on the way to school the next day. “We love you. Do you feel loved?”

“Yep,” Emily replied, according to Nicole. “I just don’t want to live here anymore. Too many rules.”

In September, 14-year-old Emily left the Frenches’ home. Caseworkers admitted such an outcome isn’t unusual: 85 percent of children in permanent care run away in an attempt to reunite with their birth parents. That made Nicole wonder if Michael and Rodney would leave too. But they say they have no intention of leaving.

Emily has since stayed with friends, friends of friends, or total strangers. The police told Nicole that it happens all the time. But when authorities find a foster child who’s been reported missing, they just file a report noting that they found her. They won’t bring her back. The Frenches are devastated, worried Emily could be in danger and is not being protected—by her family or the state. They refuse to relinquish their permanent caregiver rights, even if she refuses to live at their house. They tell her they are her family, and she’s stuck with them.

The members of their Bible study at their new church have supported them, prayed for them, brought meals, and recognized that they’ve lost a child. Yes, Nicole admitted, it’s a different loss but no less of one than if Emily had grown inside her body.

Photo by Tracy Mock

NEARLY TWO-THIRDS OF Australia’s adoptions happen in the state of New South Wales, the only state that prefers adoption over long-term foster care. That’s where the Lainsons live with their three adopted sons. Sarah Lainson, a drama and Biblical studies teacher at Illawarra Christian School, remembers getting anxious the night before an overseas trip she and Simon took while their children stayed with family. The boys’ adoptions weren’t finalized yet. She began thinking of all the “what if” situations—like, what if the plane went down over the ocean and she and Simon died? She realized she didn’t have authority over their future and immediately sat down to craft what she hoped was a legally binding letter regarding their care if something happened to her and her husband.

Now that their adoptions are finalized, she says, it has created an invisible blanket of security—that her kids have family no matter what happens. And she has paperwork to prove it. That’s a significant step in their children’s identity, and in her own.

Despite Australians’ suspicion of adoption, Christian groups are trying to motivate fellow believers to be a part of mending broken lives and a broken system. Leonie Quayle heads the Homeward Project, supporting people and churches caring for vulnerable children. Last year, she joined with a group of Christian organizations and church leaders to form the Christian Foster Care Network. Quayle says meeting basic needs through a food bank or filling backpacks with supplies shows love for vulnerable people, but Christians also need to do the harder, sacrificial type of work, like opening their homes. One agency in New South Wales says about half of its foster families are Christians. Many of the rest are same-sex couples.

Quayle, who does respite care, said foster parenting is hard. “It gets real pretty fast when you choose to step into places where there’s real brokenness. But it’s a priority area that I think the church can’t not get engaged with.”

Quayle says viewing foster care as a narrative of heroes vs. villains is the wrong way to look at the problem: “We’re not saviors coming to rescue children from evil parents. If we believe in a grace-based theology, we can believe in restoration for the parents as much as for their children. We desire wholeness and healing in every direction.”

SOME OF THE REACTION in the church goes beyond public policy and opinions to personal perceptions about why we are on earth. When the Frenches’ caseworker first met with Nicole and Simon about Rodney and Michael, she admitted they had developmental delays. She wasn’t sure if Michael would ever walk. Some people who found out asked why the Frenches would intentionally make their own lives harder.

“People think we’re supposed to have an easy life here, looking for the easiest thing to do to bring us pleasure,” Nicole said. “They have a sense of how families should be.” People assumed adoption would mess up their family. But she points to all-biological families she knows who have similar struggles.

When people say the Frenches’ children are lucky to be in their family, or they voice anger over the way Emily has treated them, Nicole flips the narrative. She says her children are the most unlucky people she knows. Everything Emily has done makes perfect sense, given what she’s experienced.

“Every part of her life will be coated in this trauma and grief, whether she knows it or not,” Nicole said. “She will have to endure it until Jesus comes back, until there’s no more pain.”

Nicole said it would have been ideal if Emily had grown up in a safe, functioning biological family. It would have been better than being in permanent care or being adopted, better than being in a position where she had to be adopted. But Nicole insisted adoption does not have to be less than ideal. Some call it a lived parable of the grace of God.

Today Emily does stay in touch with the Frenches, and Nicole hopes eventually to persuade her to come home. The family got together at a restaurant to celebrate her birthday. When Nicole met up with Emily to pick out a birthday present, Emily accidentally called her “Mum.” Nicole didn’t say anything, but she smiled all the way home.

Australia’s attempt to make amends

When Lily Arthur met her son for the first time, she had a hard time reconciling the 26-year-old man with the baby boy she last knew in utero. She was just 17 then. After police officers discovered her living with her boyfriend and couldn't contact her parents, they delivered her to a Magdalene laundry for unwed mothers early in her pregnancy. She had hoped to marry her boyfriend and raise their child together, but she wasn't allowed contact with him. When it was time for her baby to be born, hospital case workers in Queensland, Australia, added the code “UB-minus” to her paperwork. It stood for unmarried, not keeping the baby.

As she neared the end of a 16-hour labor, she says the nurses forced her face into the mattress so she couldn’t see her son. The delivering doctor didn’t acknowledge her but instead talked to a colleague about his preference for herringbone stitches. Arthur was still under the effect of birthing analgesics when children’s services workers made her sign papers releasing her son for a closed adoption to a married couple.

At the time, arrangements like Arthur’s were considered a clean break for both baby and mother, averting the shame of an illegitimate birth and providing the baby a chance for a respectable upbringing. Doctors treating infertile couples found a ready supply of infants in need of parents. Doctors, nurses, and caseworkers told Arthur she could move on with her life and forget her pregnancy ever happened. But they were wrong.

In 2013, Prime Minister Julia Gillard acknowledged the lifelong hurt the government’s practices caused. She promised resources to match words with actions. Eleven years later, the state of Victoria launched its compensation program: nearly $20,000, counseling services, and an individual apology for each mother who had a baby taken away. The mostly teenage moms are now in their late 40s to mid-90s. The government expects only about 3,000 women to apply.

Mothers say money can’t compensate for losing a child. While it acknowledges the loss and trauma, it can’t erase it. Arthur has met many moms who never want to revisit that pain, no matter the benefits.

When the government opened previously secret adoption records in 1990, Arthur began to look for her son. That same year her son’s adoptive parents finally told him he was adopted. He was 23 years old. In case his birth mom came looking for him, he put a veto on his records indicating he didn’t want contact with her. “I have parents,” his terse written message read.

Because she couldn't discover his identity from the adoption records, Arthur scoured electoral rolls and school admission lists. She went through millions of names and birth dates. It turned out, he lived two blocks away from Arthur’s own mother.

After they met, her son accompanied her to conferences where she talked about the horrors of forced adoption and advocated for local and global change. But he wouldn’t tell his children who she really was until his 17-year-old daughter finally asked about the woman who kept sending her presents. When her story became the subject of a documentary, the publicity became too much for her son. Arthur now has no contact with her grandchildren. In the past 20 years, she’s only seen her son four times.

Arthur’s struggle to develop a relationship with her biological son is not unusual. Hospital workers took Leonie Bingham away from her 16-year-old birth mother in 1967. They reunited in 2005, after Bingham’s own daughter was born. Bingham says she looks like her mum, they have the same voice, and are both exactly the same height. Despite the similarities, she didn’t feel a connection to her, even though her birth mother wanted to be involved in everything Bingham did. Bingham’s half-siblings didn’t want to meet her because they thought she wanted their money. She says her birth mother is just an acquaintance now.

Michael Sheppard hosts the Adoption Chronicles podcast, interviewing people from all sides of the adoption triangle—birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees. He says the trauma that’s associated with adoption goes to the very core of someone’s being, even if they had a kind and loving adoptive family, like he did.

Sheppard decided not to look for his biological parents when the government finally opened adoption records. But his birth mother found him within a year. “I wasn’t ready emotionally,” he recalled. “You’ll never be ready for that.”

Their relationship started out fine, but then his mother forgot to invite him to his half-sister’s wedding. He felt like an invader in their family, and he let communication lapse. His birth mother has since died. He chooses not to look for his birth father, even though it would be relatively easy with direct-to-consumer DNA tests and someone like Emma-Lee Still to help him interpret the results.

Still calls herself a DNA Search Angel, interpreting people’s results from groups like AncestryDNA or 23andMe. At the start of each analysis, Still warns clients DNA testing often exposes unpleasant secrets. But she believes everyone has a right to know who their biological family is, if only for the medical history information it might reveal.

“I've held the hands of a fair few biological dads who did not know that they had children,” Still says. Even though the media likes to show long lost relatives finding each other, Still says reunions are just the tip of the iceberg. “The way that one person feels at one moment in time does not portray their entire emotional range.”

Since 1978, counselors at Jigsaw Search and Contact have helped moms craft letters of introduction to their children, mediated meetings between separated family members, and helped children search for their parents. They have facilitated nearly 5,000 reunions between parents and children. But a decrease in adoptions across Australia, DNA testing, and the use of social media in searches made much of their work redundant. People still came to them when things went wrong in the reunification process, but in December, manager Isabel Andrews closed Jigsaw’s doors for the last time.

Andrews says reunions are emotionally complicated. Adoptees often wait until their adoptive parents have died, not wanting to seem disloyal to the people who raised them. Elderly mothers often say “no” to contact. “If the birth mom has kept the secret of her child for 52 years, it’s often too difficult for her to unpack that,” Andrews says. “It’s a landscape with a lot of fear, a lot of loss, a lot of sadness.”

Arthur says far from forgetting, the loss of her son has affected every decision of her life. At age 73, she wants to get over the grief and not die from it like other women she’s seen. “I have to find some sort of normal life, you know, know what it feels like to be happy or feel joy because I don't think I've ever been happy in my life.”