But first, in this book, Barbara has laid bare her own life experiences to illustrate why New Zealand’s 65 year-old adoption laws must be fixed.

It’s a beautifully written story of a child’s journey through the early years to motherhood, to adulthood. It reveals how Barbara was always aware that her identity was denied her, of how she tried to answer the unanswered questions of who she was, who she is. It’s sometimes sad, it’s wonderful, it’s often tragic, it’s intimate, it is brave. And, this book has a purpose. Legislative reform.

So join us at 8pm tonight (Wednesday September 23) to hear from Barbara about this most important work – about her commitment to make sure any new laws on adoption place children and adults (who were adopted) at the forefront of positive change.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: You can buy Barbara Sumner’s book Tree of Strangers via her website BarbaraSumner.nz (both hard copy and digital).

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1960 was a big year for my adopting parents. First came the infertility diagnosis. Then a new baby arrived with little warning and no fanfare. Followed within days by a new refrigerator.

I was one of over 103,000 New Zealand babies forcibly removed from my single mother. Her dying mother sent her to the doctor’s house with a couple of months to spare. The generous Dr Gerald Gleeson put her to work cleaning and scrubbing. Weeks before I was born he promised me away to the “an attractive young couple who belong to the Church of England.”

It was a typical story. The same thing happened in Canada. They describe it as one of their “most agonising scandals and one which for decades was covered up – the forced adoption of hundreds of thousands of babies born to unmarried mothers.” A full-scale inquiry is ongoing.

In New Zealand, we pretend it never happened.

In the total absence of government action, apology or investigation, I’ve been unraveling New Zealand’s history of forced adoption.

We’ve wrapped adoption in secrecy, tied it up with clichés and obfuscated the truth at every turn. We’ve conflated orphans with the illegitimate. We’ve never once paused to inquire about outcomes.

With so much around adoption shrouded in legal black holes and social expectation, most adopted people struggle to talk about it. Not only their own but the practice itself.

If you experience a difficult time in your natural born family, people understand. A violent father? A cold mother? There’s plenty of support for that trauma. .

But if you’re adopted that toxic family story takes on another element. When you try to speak about it, someone will ask the ‘what-ifs’. What if you’d been aborted? What if your natural family were worse? You could have grown up in an orphanage? In care? On the streets?

This is often followed by the, “I know a happy adoptee,” narrative. As if that one person’s experience is more significant than everything you’ve lost. And all the wrongs of being taken from your mother and stripped of your identity are irrelevant.

But what if you do grow up in a loving adopted family? And you really are that ‘happy adopted person?’

In many ways, this makes it more difficult. If you feel even the slightest bit ‘not right’ in your happy family there’s nowhere to place those feelings. To express doubts, to acknowledge a yearning for blood in the face of good parenting is almost impossible. Even to yourself.

And so the fog descends. The disconnect between your inner life and external expectations is vast. Often the fog is preferable.

Whether you recognise it or not, adoption is trauma. In truth both the idyllic and the unfit family is invested in being better than the mother they took you from. The person you might have been, the life you would have lived, if not for them, is rarely acknowledged. But no matter the quality of your upbringing, we all live with a sense of a yearning for blood connections.

For me, as young teen all I wanted was someone who looked like me. I had to wait until I gave birth to my first daughter. She arrived with fine hair and delicate features. But then I realised there were no photos of me until I was three months old. I had no idea if I looked like her as a new baby. No reason, my adopting mother said, casually, when asked. “I was too busy to take photos.”

Except for that camera-worthy new refrigerator. It was either me or the fridge. It’s obvious who won. I have the photo to prove it.

– ref. The baby or the fridge – https://www.barbarasumner.nz/blog/2019/2/13/the-baby-or-the-fridge

As a child, my family saw the musical Oliver. For days after, my adopting mother hummed and sang the theme tune:

Consider yourself one of us
Consider yourself at home
Consider yourself one of the family ….etc etc

The song is a bit of an earworm. I’d forgotten it and the memory until recently when I heard it on the radio.

If you’ve seen the film (or read Dickens), you’ll know that being ‘one of us in Oliver was conditional on acting the part. You had to abide by their code of thievery and obey Fagin, the orphan master.

It makes sense. Like Fagin’s gang, we humans are tribal.

We gather with those who share our values. We’re always on the lookout for casual signifiers of belonging.

When we have kids, family and friends scan the scrunched face of your newborn for resemblance. His father’s nose, her mother’s eyes. When we pull out baby photos of close family and compare them, we recognise the child as one of us.

But does it work the other way?

For a pre-verbal baby, it’s all about smell and sounds. Studies reveal that the basis of bonding is the mothers scent..

Familiar odours wired into a babies brain affect nerve pathways and brain development. One researcher found that in the first few hours after birth, a baby identifies her mother by her smell.

In another study, day-old babies recognised their mother’s voice. They connected pacifiers to tape recorders. One sucking pattern turned on their mother’s voice, while another activated a strangers voice. Guess which sucking pattern the babies used?

So how does this all work for a person removed from their mother for adoption?

In The Primal Wound, Nancy Verrier says there’s an assumption a baby knows nothing. Any deprivation can be overcome by the adoptive parents. But for the infant, absence of her mother is the same as death. She goes through a withdrawal process as her most basic need for connection goes unmet. The loss of the original mother becomes imprinted in the child’s psyche and cells.

Growing up adopted in a stranger family I’ve experienced first hand how deep that loss and grief runs. How everything from smell to sport was wrong. And how the things we ignored, such as lack of family resemblance were the unspoken arrows of daily life.

It’s not easy for the adopting mother either. They also are grieving the child they could not have. They lack hormone bonding. They miss out on that recognition and satisfaction a new mother feels, despite the trials and exhaustion of birth? No one comments on how her baby looks like her. No one expects her child to be like her in any natural way. Instead, she must work extra hard to imprint her culture on the little stranger. While convincing herself that her experience is no different than for a biological mother.

This is the dirty secret of stranger adoption. Adoption is rarely a first choice. It’s not the same as biological parenting. No matter your parenting skills or commitment, this is not the child you would have had if you could have your own.

You won’t read that in pro-adoption literature. You cannot expect the adopted person to become the child you could not have.

I believe it does something to the adopting mother, creating an atmosphere of rote caring. The mother working hard to be seen to love the child she has no connection to.

In “Blueprint, How DNA Makes Us Who We Are,” Robert Plomin, concludes that babies are not balls of clay. Plomin is a behavioural geneticist. He says babies are not shaped by their parents after birth.  You arrive with imprinted traits from your biological parents.

His research proves that nurturing has little effect on the person you become. Children take after their first parents, not their adoptive parents. From cognitive skills and interests to personality traits. They even resemble their first parents in non-genetic traits. Television watching for instance and likelihood of getting divorced. “This comes as no surprise to first parents who meet their lost offspring. But it’s heartening and reassuring to have our impressions supported by scientific research.”  https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/29/so-is-it-nature-not-nurture-after-all-genetics-robert-plomin-polygenic-testing

So how does an adopted person cope with this? They fake it.

The fantasy of the happy adoptee is ingrained in our society. It becomes the job of the adopted person to prove this story true. To salve the wounds of the adopting parent’s infertility. To act as if they are the missing child, to bend and fold and adjust themselves to fit into the adoptor’s family. As if they have no other mother. As if they are indeed one of them.

Of course, someone will jump up and say “I had good adoption. That was not my experience.’

I’m happy they got lucky. But that’s the point. They were fortunate not to experience abuse in addition to what every adoptee already endures.

Because adoption itself is inherently abusive. To say I had a good adoption is like saying I had a good car accident or a good mugging. Of course, some are worse than others. But they’re all bad things. Every adopted person has experienced separation trauma and had their rights violated. Even if they are not ready to acknowledge it. Adoption itself is the trauma.”

I’d describe stranger adoption as a state of suspended animation. You learn early that your inner need for authenticity will never be met. So you split that part of yourself of. And go through the motions. In adoption circles, this is the ‘good adoptee syndrome’. Your real self packed down tight while you smile and wave at the world.

The idea of being a stranger within your family is not limited to children and parents. In my experience, the wider family feels it too. You are a cuckoo in their extended family nest, treated with suspicion, your provenance a mystery.

Throughout history, humans have distrusted outsiders. We’ve always had city walls and borders and the need to identify ourselves. We’ve always had this innate sense of the good us versus the untrustworthy them. Just as Charles Dickens characters understood.

In the absence of blood ties, the only signifier of being one of us is your behaviour. So be a good adoptee, play your part and all will be well with the world.

– ref. Consider youself one of us – https://www.barbarasumner.nz/blog/2019/1/15/consider-youself-one-of-us

There have always been inconsistencies in my birth story. The dates, the people involved, the actual circumstances. All missing, suspect or manufactured.

As an adopted person I have no legal right to know anything other than the story my adopting parents chose to tell. So I decided to challenge that.

I started with govt.nz, the guide to finding and using government services. Could it really be as simple as requesting a copy of my ‘pre-adoption birth certificate?’

A pre-adoption birth certificate? As if the adoption itself is my starting point. Anything else must fit into the nebulous ‘pre’ where anything before is a priori – based on a theory.

After all, I already have a birth certificate. It records my adopting parents as my natural parents. As if I am the natural child of my adopters. As if I am no different than anyone else.

Except, I came into this world with a background as dark as deep space. My adopting father’s workmate nailed it. “Why would you (adopt), you don’t know what you’ll get?” This story was told as a way to explain what a generous thing my adopting father had done.

His workmate was right. I was an unknown quantity. Not quite natural, not entirely trusted in the way we trust blood. You are, as a relative of my adopting family once described me – strange fruit.

So I requested my pre-adoption birth certificate. That “may contain details of your birth mother and birth father.”

Except mine had my mother only, even though I now know my father’s name is in my file. I’ve yet to meet an adopted person with their father’s name on the original birth certificate. Which makes you wonder if pre-adoption certificates are not designed to document birth. But rather, to further social agendas. Like protecting men from the consequences of their sexual activity.

Next, there’s an age limit. You have to be 20 or older to apply for your pre-adoption birth certificate.

Why 20, you ask. You can have sex at 16, enlist in the defence force at 17, drink, vote and get married at 18.

The New Zealand Law Commission says it was to assuage the fears of adoptive parents. Natural mothers might try to intervene.

Crazy mothers showing up to claim back their babies! That would never do. But hidden beneath that reasoning is the notion of lifetime infantilising.

Because, you will always be an adopted child. Never an adopted adult. A judge nailed it when he described us as “adopted children of any age.”

Luckily I met the over 20 criteria. But instead of receiving my birth certificate in the mail like any other citizen I must see a counsellor. At 58. The counsellor gets to decide if I am balanced enough to receive this information. (I passed the test)

Next step. Govt.nz tells me to contact Oranga Tamariki—Ministry for Children. “An adoption social worker will find your adoption records and give you details recorded at the time of your placement.”

I’m not sure what an adoption social worker actually does. But Oranga Tamariki’s website says, “It may be possible to find information about your birth parent. We can help you with this process.”

And right there we jump from infantilising to farce.

My adoption social worker found my records. With the file sitting on her desk she informed me there was a problem. The law did not allow her to reveal the contents to me.

So she passed me over to a new recruit. A young man, fresh out of social worker school, with no understanding of adoption issues.

I complained. My adoption social worker promised to provide a file number (not the file itself) by the next day. That was months ago.

I complained. She passed me onto the Supervisor at the Caregiver Contact Team. This person sighed and directed me back to my adoption social worker.

I complained. My adoption social worker said she would seek advice from her Regional Advisor.

I followed up. She was now seeking advice from her Supervisor. I let the usual ten working days elapse and followed up. “I need to seek advice from my Regional Executive Manager,” she said.

That person referred me back to the Adoptions Services team. And you guessed it, they referred me back to the social worker.

Weeks turned into months. Then my adoption social worker came up with the answer. I needed to make a request for my file through the Privacy and Official Information Services.

I filled out the paperwork. They missed the statutory deadline to answer my query. I followed up. They’d forgotten to send my request to the correct person. I waited. 20 days later they directed me back to my adoption social worker. Who missed her deadline to reply. I followed up. And she referred me to her advisor at the National Office.

And that’s where we’ve left it, with my file on any number of anonymous desks. My information denied to me.

Such paternalism and control litter the history of adoption in New Zealand. Single mothers suffered unconscionable cruelty. Child trafficking and medical and social experiments were par for the course. Today, in service to those ideologies government departments peddle disinformation. While the staff delay, deny and deflect anyone who questions the official story.

I’m told the reasons revolve around privacy. Given anyone who might be affected is dead, I suspect the real goal is to preserve secrecy. To continue to hide our recent and most shameful past.

As a baby, I was the object of a transaction, a contract I was not a party to. I’d like to know when will my rights as an adult transcend the rights of people involved in that contract? And what will it take for the government to give up those secrets, apologise and make amends?

– ref. Strange fruit – https://www.sadiesumnerbooks.com/blog/2018/11/22/strange-fruit

The Gallows Bird is a historical trilogy I have coming out next year. There, we meet Mr Fingleston, a silk merchant and tailor.

The character of Mr Fingleston visited me in the early hours, over 20 years ago. I described him as an ivy bush of a man, small and messy with a moustache drooping below his chin.

The timing is important.

For most of my adult life I’ve been on a shadow journey to find my biological family. In 1983 after an overheard comment and some pre-internet sleuthing I found my mother. Shortly after she died in a fiery plane crash on her way to meet me.

From that point on I searched for my father. There were many wrong turns, false information, raised hopes and deep disappointments.

I found him, finally in 2017. Five years too late.

In finding my father, I discovered a new sister, a genealogist cousin and a very detailed family tree.

Including my great-grandfather, Alfred Fingleston.

And yes, he has the same name as my invented character. Yes, he was a master tailor. And yes, he lived where my novel is set. Then I find I look just like my father. I share a skill set with one of my sisters and have the same passions as another. Our children echo one another.

It makes you wonder to what extent our behaviour is predicated on the long-ago past? On DNA and genetic determinism.

25 years ago, proponents of the Human Genome Project said DNA would change everything. It would lead to ‘a new understanding of what it means to be a human being.‘

“Genetics and the Sociology of Identity”, a social sciences publication, studies genetics’ penetration into social life. How we negotiate the space between self, others and institutions in light of DNA. They worry about genetic determinism. The idea that genes control your behaviour.

Reading the science (as a non-scientist) I am struck by how nervous the writers seem.

And so they should.

Because it’s stepping back in history. Way back. To Plato and Aristotle. To Essentialism and Determinism. To the idea that every entity has a predetermined, genetic set of essential attributes necessary to its identity.

That belief held sway through history all the way until  Charles Darwin and Karl Marx changed the world by theorizing that external material conditions create identity.

This philosophy had to be if they were to end the inequities created by birth. (For men anyway. Women were still expected to behave in a gender deterministic way)

Nurture over nature.

Except DNA came along. Is DNA the elephant in the room of social sciences and social determinism?

Because DNA delivers a high degree of certainty about who we are. Race, ethnic origin, kinship, propensity to hereditary diseases and other traits.

But NZ law says otherwise. Under the Adoption Act 1955, I have no heredity rights. The act says I am ‘as if’ born to the people who adopted me.

I am a social experiment. My whole life It has been concomitant on me to play the part of the happy(ish) adoptee. To prove that social determinism is indeed a valid way to run society. While behind closed doors my behaviours and actions are still discussed as aberrations. A flaw in my genes.

It was not Karl Marx’s fault. It was my fault I did not fit the family deemed more socially acceptable than my unmarried birth mother.

Meanwhile, the Adoption Act 1955 remains firmly in place. Propped up by unthinking judges and social workers. And by successive governments.

Between 1955 and 1990 the government took over 103,000 children from their mothers. They did it in the name of social engineering. Not one of us has ever had our rights restored.

Yes, DNA has given me some freedom. But my files remain locked away, my legal right to my history is still denied.

The Adoption Act 1955 remains able to separate children from their parents.

Thanks to DNA, Plato’s idea of essential nature is again a determinant of identity. Science, medicine, insurance companies, employers, government departments, policing and childcare services all seek to ascribe status and identity using DNA.

Except in New Zealand legislation. which still believes nurture can cure nature.

And The Gallows Bird? Thank you for asking. It should be available in about six months. Send me an email if you’d like to join either my author newsletter or the Like a Stranger newsletter. hello@sadiesumnerbooks.comT

There’s a cartoon doing the Internet rounds. A mum and a dad look down at their little girl: “Sarah, I’m afraid we’re not your real parents. You were made with sperm from Germany and an egg from Denmark from an Italian man and a Swedish woman, born to an English surrogate, rejected because you were a girl, adopted by Californian lesbians, looked after by a Cuban nanny and found by Derek here in a skip when you were three”.

Little Sarah looks bewildered. She’s in good company. Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have created thousands of people.

It’s a genomic revolution.

But like stranger adoption, there has been next to no public conversation on the outcomes.

Back then they framed stranger adoption within the historical shame of illegitimacy. This was a failed experiment in social engineering. But our collective amnesia ensures we never talk about it.

Now, within that silence, a new generation of disinherited people is being born.

The genomic revolution is replete with social, scientific and human complexity. But the ramifications are hardly touched on.

Instead of engaging with this we stick to the idea of a couple struggling with infertility. Our couple visits a specialist to have their gametes extracted. They create an embryo that is then implanted in the intending mother. It’s a private medical issue, only a few steps removed from natural conception.

There’s nothing wrong with this picture. Except, like the myth of successful stranger adoption it doesn’t match reality.

Inside the ART industry, there’s little distinction between the two types of children. One, conceived with medical help from its parent’s gametes is born to its natural mother. The other curated, from an anonymous gamete lookbook, a surrogate and its parent’s bank account.

Rather than make those distinctions we look to Hollywood to define the issues for us. In the movie, The Switch Jennifer Aniston’s character is looking for a sperm donor. Her friend played by Jason Bateman’s asks: “What sort of qualities would you be shopping for? It’s a throwaway line in a rom-com with a twist. In The Kids are Alright the sperm daddy enters the lives of a lesbian couple and their twins. They make a mess of the consequences, tune it for bittersweet comedy, and ignore the real issues.

Films like these reveal how normal it has become to acquire a family in these ways.

In Los Angeles, so many are ART conceived. There, teenage cryokids check their donor numbers to make sure they’re not ‘hooking up with a syb.’

Many of us are unaware of how far science has advanced and how unprepared New Zealand is.

Currently, in New Zealand, we are looking to loosen regulation to allow the creation of a market to import and export gametes and embryos. England is assessing bio-prospecting and has allowed three-biological-parent IVF. Germany has debated pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and the spectre of eugenics. In India, they colonise the wombs of the poor and reproductive tourism is a hot-button issue. In Spain, a shortage of donor eggs has given rise to research into the creation of children from eggs gathered from aborted fetuses. In the US where anything goes if you can afford it, the production of twiblings is on the rise. While saviour siblings are no longer rare. Clinics author traits such as hair, eye colour, height, muscle strength and skin colour. In Australia, a leading fertility clinic is listed on the stock exchange. They run a chain of cut-price clinics. Another Australian clinic sidesteps local laws on PGD by owning a clinic in Thailand. While also in Thailand an illegal surrogacy slave ring was recently uncovered.

In New Zealand, the Advisory Committee on Assisted Reproductive Technology (ACART) assesses these technologies. It was set up to plan policy and advice specific to New Zealand and is open to public submissions.

But in reality, since the disbanding of The Bioethics Council in 2008, we do not have a public forum. (one of the National Party’s first actions on coming into power.) So very little public discourse takes place on any of these issues.

Instead, we have the fertility industry working as an active advisor to the ministry. They insist they are trust-worthy to lead all fertility regulation and decision-making.

Just as the church did back in the 50’s as they helped frame up adoption legislation.

Then it was the Anglican and Catholic churches and the Salvation Army. They played up the sin of illegitimacy and the sanctity of marriage. They created the fantasy of mothers happily giving up their babies to save them from shame.

In the end, it does not matter if you use science or morality to seperate people from their heritage. The result will always be the same – disenfranchised people, turned into commodities to satisfy a religious, social or financial agenda. Try being fully human when that is your legacy.

– ref. We’re not your real parents – https://www.sadiesumnerbooks.com/blog/2018/10/30/were-not-your-real-parents

While browsing Instagram, an image jumped out at me. A woman and her husband stand beside the bed of an exhausted mother who has given birth to twins. The woman, identified as the #IP (intending parent) has her hands clasped in prayer or gratitude. Her husband is leaning over looking as exhausted as the new mother.
Posted by a surrogacy agency, the photo features the photographer’s comments. (Yes, the IPs hired a photographer to cover the event.)
The photographer says: “Previous to witnessing this surrogate birth I found myself wondering – isn’t it hard to give up the babies you grew from nine months? Isn’t it hard to recover from birth without the end reward of a sweet baby to care for and love? What about your milk production? And so on. But now I understand. Surrogacy is a selfless act, and the definition of selfless is to be concerned more with the needs and wishes of others than with one’s own. That’s a beautiful thing to witness.”
A selfless act is the bugle call of surrogacy.
Framing the work of one woman growing children for another as selfless is essential. Because if it’s not altruistic or selfless, then it’s paid work.
But when we discuss the ethics of paying surrogates, we balk.
The Creative Love Agency who posted the image does pay. But it’s like a peppercorn rental: That exhausted woman will get $1000 for clothes and $5000 for the babies, and maybe a few other costs covered.
It’s hard enough carrying a single baby for nine months, let alone twins, but $555 a month must not be enough to break the selfless ceiling. You have to ask why we value this work so low and why we need to frame it as altruism and selflessness.
The reason is simple. Society believes if you were to pay real money for growing a baby that would turn the child into a commodity.
I disagree.
The child is already a commodity. The ethical issue of paying or not paying is a smokescreen.
Because it is the demand for a child that turns it into a commodity. Not the payment of fees.
In economics, they use the equation ‘demand = desire + ability to pay + will to spend’ to quantify if something is a commodity.
The demand for babies is ancient. In Genesis 30:1 Rachel pleads with Jacob, “give me a baby or I will die.” She instructs him to bed her maid. Bilhah is forced to carry two sons for Rachel. After that Bilhah disappears from history, her sex and surrogate work forgotten.
Not much has changed in the idealogy of entitlement,
It’s the same as when they took me from my single mother and placed me with a married couple mid last century. Their infertility and desire for a child created the demand.
That demand saw an entire group of young, single, pregnant women turned into suppliers.
They used the same words the back then too. It was an act of altruism and selflessness to ‘give away’ your child. People still say to me “but your mother gave you away.”
But ask one of those mothers today and you’re likely to hear a different story. How they were shamed, pressured and coerced into providing the cure for infertility.
Now that we have science to create our babies to meet that demand we imagine things are different.
Unless you ask someone like Gracie Crane, a woman conceived from a donor embryo. Interviewed by a newspaper in 2014, Gracie was one of the first donor conceived babies in the UK.
Now, annoyingly, she is no longer a baby. And she is not happy.
Like adopted people in New Zealand, she also has no right to her biological history.
Gracie says “If I cannot be looked after by somebody I am genetically part of then I don’t feel I’m part of a family. Families are like packs, they look alike, but I don’t resemble anybody I know. I brought a friend home from school recently and I’d never told her how I came to be born, so when she saw my parents, I think she was quite shocked. I tried to explain, but it’s not like adoption, so people find it really hard to understand.”
As an adopted person I know precisely how Gracie feels because it is like adoption.
We were both procured to resolve a couple’s infertility.
I am not one to downplay the power of desire for a child. After all, Rachel in Genesis believed she would die without one.
But many things in life are unattainable. Stuff we want but know we do not have an inalienable right to. Except, it seems, children.
In my perfect world, where the needs of children are paramount, here are the questions the photographer should have been asking:
Isn’t it hard to give up the mother you’ve known for nine months? Isn’t it hard to recover from your birth without the reward of your mother’s skin? Her heartbeat, the sound of her voice, the touch of her hands, the safety of her care and love? What about her milk? Your perfect food that changes daily depending on your needs?
In all that gushing about a selfless act, the photographer apparently forgot about the most import people in the room – the ones being born.

– ref. A selfless act? – https://www.sadiesumnerbooks.com/blog/2018/10/22/a-selfless-act

How special do you feel? What factors make up your sense of special – or otherwise?

Many adopted people remember being told they were ‘special.’  “We chose you,” is a standard phrase for adopted people.

At the same time, it is implied there is no difference between you and the non-adopted.

The law backs this up, stating the child is “as if” born to the adopters.

But with adoption, there’s only one way to make ‘no difference’ work. You must deny all nature in favour of nurture. Where that leaves being ‘special’ is uncertain. Because, how can you be special for being adopted and no different than non-adopted at the same time? (see below for comment on open adoption.)

In my case, there was no place to acknowledge or accept difference. But still, you’re special. You must be. Your friends weren’t chosen as you were. You arrived by unknown means. You are like the mystery prize at the fun fair.

Psychologist Edward Dreyfus says the need to feel special is common to human beings. He posits that we are all hoping for special treatment. The issue, he says, is how we deal with the reality of when we are not. And whether we can distinguish between being special and being treated specially.

And that’s where it gets murky for adopted people. Because legally we are anything but special. With no legal right to access the files held on us, we are the opposite of special.

But, if you want to try to access those files we must convince a judge that you have a ‘special reason’.

In my recent application Judge P J Callinicos denied my request. But he did throw me a bone. He said: “I invite her to state all reasons, preferably special ones, why otherwise restricted records should be made available to her.”

But that’s a trick. Because ‘special grounds or reasons,’ is not defined in law.

This has tripped others up in the past.

In one application, the anonymous ‘B’ asked to inspect files to “meet her natural mother.” She wanted to ‘ascertain Jewish blood,’ because she was ‘undergoing an identity crisis.’ The judge held that these did not constitute special grounds.

When ‘P’ applied, the judge ruled the “psychological comfort” of the adopted person was not considered special enough.

In another case, an adopted woman discovered her mother had died of a heart-related illness. She wanted to know if they ran in the family. The judge said heart issues are common in Western civilisation, so that did not constitute special grounds. He advised her to get a check-up.

It’s not only adopted people. In another case, a mother who lost her child to adoption was terminally ill. She begged the judge to open her file so she could find her child. He refused.

In their refusals, judges say things like this: “While it may be reasonable and justifiable to want to know family background, this does not constitute a special ground.” Or, “It is natural and certainly not peculiar or special that the applicant should wonder about her mother.”

One of the most stunning comments I found came from Judge G F Ellis. In attempting to define special grounds he said that an adopted person wanting to know family members meant the breaking of confidential records to which they were not party.

Think about that for a minute: Records to which they were not party.

In essence, the judge is saying that adopted people are non-persons.

But mothers and their babies were routinely denied independent legal representation when their lives were signed away. On the other hand, adopters did have a lawyer. In truth, the mother and her baby were considered expendable once their role in resolving infertility in a married couple was completed.

This turns us, the people who were adopted into objects, something I find as painful as it is absurd.

Dreyfus says feeling special is all about receiving that extra bit of attention to let us know that we matter in this very impersonal world; we want to be seen as a person, to be validated as unique.

In New Zealand, the law says adopted people are only special in the way they are denied their most basic human rights.

We shall see if my re-submission before Judge PC Callinicos will succeed or follow almost all the others in the last 60 years. Will my grounds (the anomalous birthdates held in the files) be found special enough?

Of course, now I’m worried. Was I too demanding? Did I make too much of my right to know? Did I show too much emotion? Are my reasons special enough? Am I special enough?

Given the law is clear, what do you think my chances are?

Watch this space.

*There is no open adoption in NZ. The idea is little more than adoption industry PR. A legal judgment states that while the process of adoption now often proceeds on an open basis, what still remains not open is the wish of a child (at any age) to understand more about their background.

*All quotes and comments are taken from the case notes of specific legal judgments handed down by the NZ courts.

*All italics are mine.

Who owns you? Have you ever asked yourself this question?

If you are a non-adopted person then the idea that someone could own you may never have occurred to you.

If you are an adopted person, you may not be aware of the terms of your adoption. Or how current adoption laws resemble sale and purchase agreements.

I had this lesson rammed home last week.

While I have been writing about the Adoption Act 1955, I had no idea about the Births, Deaths and Marriages Act 1955.

Each of us has a birth certificate. But Births, Deaths and Marriages also hold two more essential documents. The first is known as the ‘source document’. It details everything factual about you and your parents. Filed first with Births, Deaths and Marriages, many are still completed by hand.

The ‘birth print out’ comes next. That’s an extraction of the source document. This contains all your relevant information in a shorter version. It also includes the name of the informant, the person who reports your birth.

Birth certificates are created from these documents. And that’s you. That’s how society identifies you. That’s your founding document, your social contract with the world. It says: I am.

You can get copies of these documents for $20 each.

Unless you are adopted.

That’s when s s76(3)(d) kicks in. This stealthy little clause in the BDM act says the Registrar-General may permit a person to inspect any document containing information if –

(d) the adopted person concerned, the adoptive parents or the adopted person’s natural parents are all dead; or

(e) that 120 years have passed since the birth of the adopted person.

I’ve edited out the wordy legal language. But here’s the thing. The Judge refused to permit me to inspect my own documents, because (a) I am still alive, (b) one of my adopting parents is still alive, (c) I’m not 120.

The Judge has left me with one option: to apply again under s76(4)(c) and try to prove ‘special grounds.’

But nowhere is special grounds defined. In the files held by the Ministry for Children, my birth date is six months earlier than on my birth certificate. But not knowing when you were born and suspecting your birth certificate is incorrect is not special grounds enough.

Here’s where ownership comes in. My parents are both dead. That leaves my adopting parent holding the key card.

I am 58 (or nearly 59, I’m still not sure), but my information is owned by my adopting parent.

I am in essence still an adopted child. I have no agency of my own, no control over the information held on me, nor any right to see it.

The people I am interacting with inside the system have so normalised this abuse they think it is natural to withhold your identity.

I am forced to enter this arcane labyrinth. On a good day, I am treated with strained politeness. On others, there is a callous disregard. At other times I have faced outright hostility. I am forbidden to speak to the judge in person. I am told over and again that I have no moral or legal right to my information.

Have you noticed so far the one voice missing from this?

The people who adopt.

Aside from the adopting mother of one acquaintance, I’ve not met a single adopter agitating for change. Where are the adopters outraged their child is so disenfranchised? Where are those parents demanding their son or daughter’s most basic human rights?

Instead, I hear them falling back on tired phrases. ‘We didn’t know.’ ‘We did as we were told.’ ‘We did our best.’

I could go on about willful ignorance. Or extrapolate on why an adopter does not want their child to experience the same freedoms they have.

But the phrase that hits home the most is: ‘We loved you as our own.’

Because surely no parent would want this for a person they profess to love. Would they?

Right now, there is no other group of people in New Zealand living under such laws. We have so few advocates in a system stacked against us. There are mothers and adopted people who’ve been fighting for decades against the silence of bureaucracy. Most have all but given up.

I can rant all I like about this. I can scream ‘why’ to the rafters. But all I’ll hear back is an echo of my own voice.

So my options are limited. Keep agitating and writing. To anyone and everyone in power who might want to do the right thing. Or wait until I’m 120.

Dear Toni Street
Congratulations on the arrival of your child born through a surrogate. I have read of your frustration at the hoops you must jump through to now adopt him.
Thank you for lending your profile in support of a petition to update the Adoption Act 1955. By doing so, you are raising awareness of the inadequacies of this act.
The petition describes the Adoption Act 1955 as outdated, complicated and not clearly understood.
As a person adopted under that act, I would add that it is an archaic, moralistic and cruel piece of legislation.
The guise was saving children from the shame of illegitimacy. The real purpose was to provide children for infertile married couples.
As you have discovered, it is wholly unsuited to contemporary family building.
But in reading through the petition, I am struck by one thing. This call for change appears to encode the worst consequences of the 1955 act.
The act legalised the grafting of one family line onto another and the erasure of the family of origin. All family ties, whakapapa and genealogy were severed.
Back then the assumption was the child was a blank slate. The baby handed to worthy adopters was little more than dough to mould and shape as they saw fit. The very idea of inherited traits, of quirks and complexities, was anathema.
The act required a child to have two birth certificates. The first showed the mother’s name and held this as a state secret. Even after the introduction of the misnamed Adult Adoption Information Act 1985, the father’s name was often redacted.
The second public certificate showed the names of the adopters as natural parents. Nothing on this document hinted that the child was acquired through adoption.
Today this same concept is at the heart of the petition.
Intending parents with children created through assisted reproductive techniques want to be listed as parents from the day the child is born.
They want no legal reference to egg donors, sperm donors or surrogates.
Tell me, how is that different from the old severing of all ties? How is this different from birth certificates that list adopters as natural parents?
The 1955 act supports the rights of the parents over those of the people they adopt. Today’s new parents seem to be trying to achieve the same thing. Only they want it with less fuss, less red tape and less cost.
That person you’ve created is a sweet bundle in your arms for such a brief moment. As they grow are they not entitled to the same rights of heritage that you enjoy?
So what are we to do?
Assisted reproductive technologies, surrogacy and all the complexities are here to stay.
If heritage means anything, how do we enshrine it in a document as simple as a birth certificate? How do we also recognise the central role of the commissioning or intending parents?
First, we must commit to ending all secrecy, not only in the home but also in legislation.
Then we must provide a birth certificate that details all those involved. To do that we need a new vocabulary.
Something like this might work.
Fictive kin: Unrelated by birth or marriage, fictive kin have an emotionally significant relationship with a child, with all the characteristics of a family relationship.
If you create a child using outsourced gametes you are the fictive or commissioning kin.
Where one person in a couple is related genetically to the child, they would appear as lineal kin.
Lineal kin: Lineal kin are the man and the woman whose donated or purchased gametes created the child. They represent your child’s direct ancestors.
Affinal kin: Affinal kin is most often used to describe those related to you by marriage. But the term seems appropriate to describe the surrogacy relationship.
The woman whose blood runs through your child’s veins, whose uterus their fingers brushed against to form fingerprints, whose smell and voice and heartbeat your child know like their own, should be recognised as a new form of affinal kin.
When a surrogate is also a genetic mother, then she should appear on a birth certificate as lineal and affinal kin
These new terms allow for the complexities of assisted reproductive technologies. With the tradition of a married mother and father long gone, they allow for diverse forms of family.
But most importantly they provide the person created with a genuine and authentic life.
The secrecy of the Adoption Act 1955 has fueled the disenfranchisement of thousands of New Zealanders. It has cast them as second class citizens with no rights to their own histories.
This extends to their collateral kin, that is, lineal siblings, their nieces, nephews, cousins and descendants.
So, Toni, I’m 100% with you in wanting this act overturned.
It is time we built a new family tree. One with a lineal trunk, with collateral kin forming the branches, while affinal and fictive kin are the leaves and fruit upon that tree.
Together they make up the actual life of the person you create.
What matters most is that you tell the truth.
Once we enshrine a person’s most basic right to authenticity at the core of new legislation, all other contractual issues can be resolved.
How hard can that be?

Footnotes:

1. The petition represents a single view. The Adoption Act 1955 has impacted the lives of more than 100,000 New Zealand mothers, their children and the people who acquired them.

Any change to the Adoption Act 1955 without a full inquiry into forced adoptions would be a further crime against the humanity of every one of us caught up in this act.

2. The need to provide a secure home for a child with no kin to care for them will always present a requirement for society. This care should take the form of Enduring Guardianship. All ties are preserved, all needs for security for both the child and the people acting as parents are also maintained.

– ref. Dear Toni Street – https://www.sadiesumnerbooks.com/blog/2018/10/7/dear-toni-street

But I can’t. Biographies and especially autobiographies unsettle me. It is not the sweep of grand lives that leaves me undone. It is the minutiae.

In ‘I Always Wanted to Go to Patagonia’ a short story by Bruce Chatwin he describes tiny details of his childhood. A book from his aunt, a wooden camel from his father, a pink conch shell. Each piece is a talisman, freighted with meaning and connection. Then he says, “The Chatwin’s were fanatical sailors.”

Such a small comment. And yet, it all reeks of belonging. Of all the pieces of his life fitting together like the internal workings of an old clock.

I have none of those types of memories. No special objects. No touchstones to take me back to another time. Because I was not there, not really, not in any emotionally tangible way.

It’s an adoption thing. To not be present, to be in a dissociative state, fragmented and ambivalent.

Nancy Verrier, nn Coming Home to Self, talks about growing up with genetic amnesia. Where you have no reference points for one’s being, no reflection of one’s Self.

She says some adopted people are aware of this (while feeling abnormal). Others, disconnected from emotion and not knowing anything else may think their experience is normal.

That was me. Because closed or secret adoption is a form of gas lighting.

Not your everyday gas lighting where one person works to warp another’s mind. It is more of top-down abuse.

In her paper Adoption Law in New Zealand: the rights and well-being of the child, Catherine Moody argues genetic determinism dominated adoption law. “Since most adopted children were ‘illegitimate’, and were therefore considered to come from sinful families, it was believed that the sin would be passed on to the child.”

A complete break was the only answer. Nurture over nature was the only way to save the child from the immorality of the mother.

That was the job of the adopting parents. They had to wipe out their kids pre-loaded sin by pretending they were their natural children. It was a big ask. And it was a big lie.

But truth nibbles at the edges of everything and that’s where the dissonance creeps in. Adopted people often describe their childhoods as shrouded in fog.

My childhood is like a half-remembered dream. And yet the pressure to stay asleep is huge. It’s not enough to be an adopted person. You have to be a good adopted person. And good adopted people do not need to know about their origins. And I wanted to be good.

Because at the edge of the fog was a vast and lonely desert. A place reserved for adopted kids when they let down the people who worked so hard to nurture them.

Of course, not all adopted people feel this way. But aside from one person I know, who seems to like living in his fog, I’ve not met any.

I guess that’s what strikes me about Chatwin’s writing. He lives inside the life he is living. He is confident and complete. He is so taken up by his life that he never stops to question his right to it. And why should he? He knows without question that he owns his story and by extension, that of every Chatwin who came before him. In essence, to make sense of a life story, you need an authentic history.

So I avoid biographies. Not because they are poignant or sad or dramatic. But because they make me aware of all I missed out on while living a lie. All the time and energy expended in trying not to be me.

Now, I am gathering myself to fight to end the rule of the archaic Adoption Act 1955. And I think of myself as a salmon swimming upstream. I will never conquer the waters downward flow. It is a torrent of bureaucracy that has defined the lives of adopted people for over 60 years.

Instead, I am trying to catch the counter-flow. Tiny streams of water within the cascade that help to push the beleaguered salmon upstream.

But a salmon knows where it comes from and it returns there with eerie accuracy every year.

While an adopted person has no such surety of identity. And when you don’t know where you come from, there really is nowhere to return to.

Thanks to Mary Trainor Bigham for your contribution

– ref. Why I hate biographies – https://www.sadiesumnerbooks.com/blog/2018/9/27/why-i-hate-biographies

So ask me again what more do I want? I dare you.

And a few comments from other adopted people:

“I would like (all of us) to have equal rights to our/my original unadulterated birth certificate.”

“I/we need to be able to access citizenship to the appropriate countries of our/my kin/heritage.”

“I want recognition from our government that adoption, closed stranger (& maybe other scenarios) weren’t ideal (jeez, aren’t I generous).”

“I want recompense for a life half-lived. For the time in anguished searching and no access to appropriate counseling. For my parallel life, in a crazy wilderness of non-familial closeness.”

“I want adopting parents (even today) to to know that adoption is not a substitute for having a biological child or a replacement for a lost child.

I want adopting parents to educate themselves on what adoption means for the people grafted onto their family tree.

“I want the end of adoption. I want it replaced with enduring guardianship.”

“I want people to know I am not the problem, that adoption is the problem.”

“I am sick of living inside a world of fantasy and fiction.”

Thanks to Gillian Moynihan for contributing ideas.

– ref. What more do you want? – https://www.sadiesumnerbooks.com/blog/2018/9/24/what-more-do-you-want

There once was a woman who kept changing everything: her hair, her glasses, her furniture, her style, her husbands and her lovers. She moved 34 times and changed her name seven times. Her restless journey was almost unconscious. She described herself as emotionally and physically peripatetic. The idea of not belonging was who she was. It was not so much that she had lost her identity, but that she never had one.

I am that woman.

Identity as a concrete concept would hardly occur to any of us if it were not denied in some way. The idea of ‘having an identity’ is not relevant when ‘belonging’ defines your reality.

In our slumbering selves, we go way back, not to the moment of our birth or even conception. We go back to the dark reaches of our ancestors. Some cultures sing to their ancestors. Some dig up their bones and worship them. Others keep their ashes in finely carved containers. While others mark their graves for centuries.

These conversations with our dead are how we make our own stories real. We are here because of them, and their echoes inform our lives.

In The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit says ‘to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.’

That vastness has swallowed the thousands of New Zealanders denied their real stories.

I have been one of them.

The practice of secret, stranger adoption was widespread in New Zealand. For many years, the government sanctioned the forced removal of babies from their mothers.

The reasons were always spurious and moral and based on marital status. Those babies were then deposited with women considered more worthy – read married. In essence, making one woman childless to resolve another’s childlessness.

Children were handed over by the state as if they were inanimate objects, commodities, pets or windfall fruit. Blank slates.

You arrive into this new family reduced to nothing but your breath and your body.

The adopters must then infuse you with their culture, their family, their history and their mores and beliefs.

As if there is only nurture. As if nature is an aberration, worthy of denial.

But what happens when you grow up utterly unlike them? Taller, stronger, more fleet of foot and mind than those who took you?

In a dozen different ways, my adopting mother asks why can’t you get over it. My need to know exasperates her. As if I am somehow a defective person for not being ‘like them’.

If an open conversation were possible I would answer, why can’t you acknowledge what happened? How can you not see that closed secret adoption causes a primal wound?

And this is the question I will be asking of the courts.

Why can’t you get over your control and power of my life?

Why am I denied the most basic human right that many of you here enjoy?

I will ask the Judge, the stenographer, the officers and the lawyers – do you know your whakapapa? Do you have grandparents? Great-grandparents? Do you have famous ancestors? Are your roots Irish? German? Scandinavian? Polynesian? Jewish? Are you even a little bit interested in your family history? Have you had your DNA done? Do you have a family tree? Do you have cousins and siblings and aunts and uncles? Do you think you look a little like great aunt Sally? Do you share a trait: physical or intellectual with a forebear?

If you answer yes to even one of these questions then you are enjoying the complexity of your heritage. Something I am still fighting for.

I am a 58-year-old mother of four, stepmother of one and a grandmother of six. In this time of DNA, I finally know who my parents were.

My mother and I connected when I was 23. She was desperate to get to me and boarded the next flight out of Madrid. That plane crashed, and she died. She left behind two other daughters. For many years now we have been close and loving sisters.

I found my father only last year using DNA. He died five years ago at 92. Now I have another sister to make our family whole.

Identity may be porous but it is also rooted in our genes. One sister wrote columns and articles in the UK. I wrote columns and articles in New Zealand. Another sister loves to ride horses. I loved and longed to ride horses. My parents had significant lives, painted on large and complex canvases. My father was famous in his time. A jazz drummer and a race driver, his ribald humour, and bon vivant lifestyle was widely written about. My mother had a business brain, developed a remarkable tourist destination and possessed endless energy and verve.

These are the tiny scraps that constitute my inheritance.

I will also tell the court that DNA technology has negated the moralistic need to protect families from the spurious religious inspired shame of the past.

The governments continued theft of my identity serves only to protect the Catholic and Anglican Church, the Salvation Army, the doctors and institutions who all claimed the moral right to abduct children from their mothers.

You might reply that since I have this information, why do I need my birth files opened?

Because I want and need a complete picture. I want to know what the files say about me. And because to fully normalize my life I need to remove the stigma of being considered an illegitimate person. I am an equal citizen. I am owed the same right as non-adopted New Zealanders. The same right my children and grandchildren have to access their birth files.

Why do my birth files constitute a risk to society? And why am I still subject to a law created in 1955 and the narrow religious morality of those times?

The foundation of closed secret adoption in New Zealand is identity theft. As an adopted person, you lose your birth certificate. You lose your mother, your father, cousins and siblings. Aunts and uncles and grandparents disappear. In short, you lose everything and everyone that makes you unique. And your own children and grandchildren also lose their rightful place in the sweep of humanity.

Every single day of my life I long for my mother. For her smell, her touch, the sound of the voice I heard for nine short months. I am 58 years old, and I still grieve that I will never have the chance to hold and be held by my mother.

I have two birth certificates. The one I consider legitimate has me stamped as illegitimate. The other is a legal fiction showing my adopters as my biological parents. Then there’s the dropped comment from an Oranga Tamariki worker who had my file in front of her – that I’m actually born six months earlier than my birth certificate. And then a third item: a single sheet of yellowed paper, attesting to my time at Bethany Home. Except the dates do not match.

So which one is true?

How can the state continue to deny me the right to confirm the actual date of birth? How archaic. How cruel.

The very least the courts can do is hand over my records. And the records of anyone trapped in a closed secret adoption.

And, if not now, then when will the state return my identity to me?

 sketch at top by Meryl – a frustrated me talking to Ministry for Children

– ref. Like a Stranger – https://www.sadiesumnerbooks.com/blog/2018/9/24/like-a-stranger

Most respectfully
Barbara Sumner
Cloud South Films

– ref. Letter to Jacinda – https://www.sadiesumnerbooks.com/blog/2018/9/24/letter-to-jacinda