The adoption abuse scandal

Sad Case of the Webster Family: Save our Children | Muhabbat ul Deen

One of the legacies of the child abuse witch hunt culture of the 1990s and early 2000s, which saw at least three innocent women sent to prison for "murdering" babies who in fact died in cot deaths, is cases like that of the Websters of Norfolk, whose three children were seized from them after doctors accused them of causing fractures to one of them deliberately, and adopted. The couple fled to Ireland after Nicky Webster became pregnant a fourth time, but returned to England and spent several months in a parenting assessment centre. They have been allowed to keep the fourth child, but a court ruled this week that adoption orders are final, and they have lost the older three permanently.

The children were adopted in 2004 after a court found that their second child's fractures were caused by assault; they were, in fact, caused by a vitamin deficiency caused by a diet consisting mainly of soya milk, advised by their GP (family doctor). They are now aged seven, five and three (nearly four), which meant that they would have been very young indeed – four at the oldest – when adopted. All but the eldest would have very vague memories, if any, of living with their birth parents. Marcel Berlins argues in the Guardian today that the court's decision on the finality of the adoption is the only one it could have made, which may well be true in this particular case. However, I do not believe this should always be the case.

Much older children than the elder Websters have been taken into care because the parents have been deemed abusive or incapable of looking after them for reasons such as mental illness. The Spectator, a few years ago, carried an article about a mother who had lost her daughter to the care system, and then to adoption, because of mental illness when there was no suggestion that she had abused the daughter; the orders were based on speculations and suppositions by "experts" that she was at risk of emotional abuse. If it was a case of the daughter merely being removed from her mother's care for some time, it would not be so bad, but adoption involves all ties to the old family being cut, and unless the child is old enough to remember details about their previous family, or have some other means of contacting them such as their address or telephone number (and manages to keep this secret from the adoptive family), they cannot use the facilities to trace them until they are adult.

The normal excuse given is to protect the child from distress, which is all very well, but it does not justify nullifying the rights of their parents over them. Parents can, and do, uproot their children all the time by taking them to another district or even another country in pursuit of a better job, for example. The divorce of parents also distresses children, as do remarriage and the moving of one set of children into the same house as another, yet both of these are quite legal. Why should the ending of adoptions prompted by false abuse accusations be any different? Besides, the distress caused by the initial adoption, particularly for an older child, might well be considerably greater than any subsequent reunion.

Berlins argues that to abolish the principle of the finality of adoption would open the floodgates for many other adoptions to be questioned:

Or should the "adoption is final" principle be jettisoned, in order to conduct an investigation into the state and feelings of the children, post-adoption? Are they content with their adoptive family? Would they prefer to be handed back to their original parents?
Which of the competing parents would be able to give their children a "better" life, however defined? We come across another fundamental legal principle, that the welfare of the child is paramount.
But if that is truly to be applied, and there is a dispute over where the child is to live and with whom, surely the competing claims need to be explored. But that cannot be done if an adoption order is final. The two important principles are incompatible.
Moreover, if the law were to be opened up to allow adoptions to be questioned after they had been confirmed, it could affect large numbers, and would introduce inquiries into whether or not an adoption has been a success. That is inconceivable.

But why is it inconceivable? Quite apart from the fact that a substantial number of adoptions are prompted by the mother giving the baby up of her own free will (or, at least, out of necessity), it is only inconceivable in that money would have to be spent on these investigations; however, they are likely not to be that many. The biggest distress in overturning wrongful adoptions would be to the adoptive parents. In the case of families where adopted children have been settled for some time, one solution would be to permit the real parents some degree of access, but in all cases bar those in which a child has been adopted at a very early age and lived with their adoptive parents for several years, the possibility of overturning these adoptions must exist. That, however, may not be the case for the Webster children.