Article on adoption in The Age
Today's edition of The Age has an insightful article on adoption and adoption law in Australia. The article, a full-page feature on its last page, discusses the relatively recent changes in the law (enabling access to information regarding the identity of the biological parent) against the backdrop of the personal struggles of several children adopted between the 1950s and 1970s to learn more about the conditions surrounding their birth. The article focuses in particular on the stories of two people from Melbourne who've spent more than 30 years trying to discover the identity of their respective birth mothers. Their inquiries have been thwarted by the fact that the adoption papers of their generation often contained factual anomalies - their birth dates and other details were changed to evade later identification. A historian at ACU argues that this is because adoptions, particularly of children born of unwed mothers, weren't socially publicized. This led several adoptive...