I wish we could go back 75 years

This is UK bassed but from what I hear things were not much different in most of the US Secrecy was introduced in to adoption by a bunch of creepies who wanted to play let's pretend, and beggar the consequences. I wish we really could go back to 1927. . You may have seen this before, but I make no apology for posting it yet again, as it is very relevant to what is happening now in the UK. There have been a lot of false arguments about secrecy in adoption and past promises made, in the last few years of the consultation processes surrounding the Adoption and Children Act. 2002 A reminder for some that at the outset of legal adoption in England & Wales in 1927 it was not meant to be the ridiculously secretive affair that it later became. The secrecy was introduced largely at the behest of the Christian based adoption agencies that grew under influence from the USA in the 1940s. Certainly up until 1952 in most cases it would have been possible for the birthmother to know the names of the adopting parents, as it was recorded on the paperwork that she would signed to give consent. Though I am told agency and moral welfare workers often illegally covered it up with another piece of paper. Until 1958 all adopting parents would have a received a copy of the adoption order from the Court which would have shown the name of the birth mother, it was entirely up to the adoptive parents whether or not they passed that information on to their adopted child. Since 1958 Adoption Orders have still shown the original name of the child, making it quite possible for an adoptee to obtain a copy of his own original birth certificate with birthmother's name and address at time of birth, if his adoptive parents had passed on that information. See [url]http://robin.robin.org/ao[/url] So it has always been possible for some adoptees and birth relatives to find each other in England & Wales. Yet strangely neither the institution of adoption nor society its self ever collapsed as a result. The following is a letter from A.E.A Napier (one of those who drafted the Adoption of Infants Act 1926) to a Mrs. Hubback of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, 11/1/1927. "... It is not intended that the name of the proposed adopter should be concealed from the natural parent It is essential... that before a legal adoption takes place, the natural parent should have sufficient knowledge with regard to the proposed adopter to give a real consent... and it would not be possible for the Rules made under the Act to prescribe that the natural parent might purport to consent to the adoption without knowing who the proposed adopter is ..." Quote taken from, Struggle for Identity: Issues Underlying the Enactment of the 1926 Adoption of Children Act by Dr Jenny Keating [url]http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/HUMCENTR/usjch/jkeating3.html[/url] These letters in the National Archive show that the government still did not consider adoption to be as secretive as some would have liked even the 1950s [url]http://www.pro.gov.uk/inthenews/adoption/Adoption2.htm[/url] Robin Harritt [url]http://harritt.net[/url]