Yar...Luciferase. I was a product of that thar "irresponsible breeding".

My biological mother (I've since discovered) wasn't actually forced, but was actively persuaded (against her preference) to adopt me out. She stayed with a "nice" doctor and his family when she was 'with child" - and she assumed with a lot of advice from her aunties that that is the sort of family I would end up with.

Unfortunately I ended up in a family with an alcoholic gambler for a dad - and the "family" eventually shattered into a thousand pieces when I was eight. Of course it could have ended up totally opposite, but it didn't.

Anyway, when I was forty one I got a phone call from a woman I didn't know who told me she was my half sister. So I got a whole lot of info and (at last!) a sense of my own history, which I had sorely craved (Scottish heritage on my mum's side - my father was American, probably part American Indian, but I have hardly anything on him because my biological mother died a year before my sister rang)

When I learned all about my biological mother and her experience, it was her - not myself - that I had sympathy for.

Finally, all them "spawn" are actually "people" who inhabit your world. Some of them like to have the same sense of their antecedents as you take for granted.

What is often sadly lacking in these discussions is a sense of history.

Australia post-WW2 was reeling from the wartime economy that diverted production into goods, mainly agricultural, that were needed by England (largely) for war. Industries had been curtailed, skills and plant lost and the men with the skills and expertise to operate them were dead or scattered to the four winds.

Before were the Great Depression and WW1. No-one now can comprehend the set-backs and suffering. Unfortunately the available sources are predominately the result of the extensive censorship of the time. Oral histories had no priority for governments that had a lot to bury. The sad pun is deliberate.

Just as an example, people thought themselves lucky to have dripping for a white bread sandwich.

On top of that were the dictatorial and uncaring policies of governments, most led by the outrageous cringing sycophantic anglophile Bob Menzies, who infamously declared and meant it, that the population should starve first rather than seek any relief from the repayment of Australia's wartime debt to the UK. On the other hand the UK itself was to delay its repayments to the US to times when inflation reduced its value.

Emphatically YES, the State, the federal government led by Menzies was at fault for opportunistically implementing a policy, closed adoption, that admirably served its own ideological purposes -parsimonious to its own citizens to an extreme- and while at the same time meeting the 'advances' in adoption advised by ivory tower social science academics and bureaucrats whose own 'research' and advice were sadly deficient. They should have tried out their own advice.

It is not the churches but the State, your own government that should be feared. The framers of the US Constitution were right all along.

Poirot, I'm spawn of my parents, you're spawn, we're all spawn and we're people. I don't get the basis of the offense taken.

Suseonline, "Brainwashing and depersonalization to comply with the 'rules'...". Whose "rules" and ho enforced them? Stop leaving families out of it!

Lexi, this isn't poker. Yes, let's give thought to those badly affected by adoption. Where $hit happened, and it was bound to given the sheer numbers and the emotions involved, let's acknowledge that pain was/is suffered. However, let's lay blame where it's due and not on governments for things going on behind doors where families grappled.

I can find no legislation from the 40's through to the early 70's in your reference that involves forced adoption. I do find the following listed, but nothing within to support your insistence:

• Legislation on adoption commenced in Western Australia in 1896, with similar legislation in other jurisdictions following.
• Before the introduction of state legislation on adoption, “baby farming and infanticide was not uncommon.
• Legislative changes emerged from the 1960s that enshrined the concept of adoption secrecy and the ideal of having a “clean break” from the birth mother.
• The Council of the Single Mother and her Children (CSMC) was set up in 1969, which set out to challenge the stigma of adoption and to support single and relinquishing mothers.
• The status of “illegitimacy” disappeared in the early 1970s, starting with a Status of Children Act in both Victoria and Tasmania in 1974 (in which the status was changed to “ex-nuptial”).
• Abortion became allowable in most states from the early 1970s (the 1969 Menhennitt judgement in Victoria and 1971 Levine judgement in NSW).
• Further legislative reforms started to overturn the blanket of secrecy surrounding adoption (up until changes in 1980s, information on birth parents was not made available to adopted children/adults)

Luciferase,

"....I don't get the basis for the offense taken."

No, I don't expect you would.

............

I'll add that I believe the chief motive for adoptions, forced or merely encouraged, back then, emanated in the main from a collective societal morality.

An interesting finding is that women's magazines were very strong supporters of removal of babies from unwed mothers, removal immediately after birth and closed adoption.

Doubtless the women's magazines were reflecting the attitudes of women at the time. It must be a bitter pill for the mothers affected that the moral majority of women judged them so harshly and were so enthusiastic, zealous, and heavy handed in extending and implementing the policy.

Nursing and other services to women in child birth were dominated and controlled by women.

Government was responsible for the policy that encouraged and permitted the excesses to occur. Government was also responsible for the social problem attributable to the lack of support for unplanned pregnancies.

Dear Luciferase,

Again you tell me that you couldn't find anything.
Well you did not look hard enough or in the right
places. Try again Googling -

forcedadoptionsapology@a.g.gov.au.

And scroll down the left-hand side to a heading
entitled:

Related Websites:

The following comes up :

1) Senate Committee Report on former forced adoption policies and
practices.

2) Impact of past adoption practices: Summary of Key Issues from
Australian Research.

3) Past adoption practice page - Dept of Families,
Housing, Community Services.

And if you still can't find it - Give up.

And you're right this isn't poker - it's called Research.