Sir, – Is the Government prepared to deny all Irish-born people the right to their own birth certificates? If not, then there must not be further discrimination (on family status grounds) against adopted people. This “right to access” is not a “major breakthrough” unless any clause in the Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill, whereby adopted people would only have conditional and therefore compromised access to their birth certificates, is removed.
Discrimination against adopted people in this regard has been permitted for more than 63 years, and in many cases against people who had been “de facto adopted”, “boarded out”, or raised in institutions in preceding or following years.
Adopted people should only have to bring their adoption certificate to the General Register Office, along with proof of adopted identity and a current address, to acquire their birth certificate.
Contact with birth relatives is an entirely different issue. – Yours, etc,
MICHELE SAVAGE,
Dublin 12.
Sir, – The Government’s planned legislation on adoption, which would make it easier for adopted children to discover their birth parents, may undermine the whole concept of adoption in Ireland.
When birth parents make the difficult decision to place their baby for adoption, it is done on the understanding that the biological parents and the child may never meet again, and that suitable and loving adoptive parents would take the child as their own.
Under the Government’s proposed legislation, however, biological parents would no longer be confident that the child they might place for adoption might not soon return to them, and adoptive parents would no longer be confident that their adopted child would definitively be theirs.
Adoption, generally speaking, offers a double blessing – it gives a good home to a child who may not otherwise have one, and it gives a child to a husband and wife who may not be able to conceive their own. For many pregnant parents in difficult circumstances, who feel that they cannot keep their child, the option of placing their child for adoption after birth also acts as a positive and life-affirming option. – Yours, etc,
JOHN B REID,
Monkstown,
Co Dublin.
Sir, – The years are passing swiftly by for the thousands of people given up for adoption in the 1940s and 1950s. Some of the birth mothers will have died, others will be in poor health. Time is running out for both parties to meet up. I will be 60 next year and from the little I know of my birth mother, she will be 85 if she is alive. How unjust and sad it is that an adopted person might never get to meet their mother, never get to touch their hands, never get to share a hug. Any change in the law should at the very least enable these experiences to be possible. – Yours, etc,
ANNE MARIE MORAN,
Raheny,
Dublin 5.