by Lily Arthur, Coordinator
Origins - Supporting People Separated by Adoption

Penny Mackieson’s book Adoption Deception is a well-researched documentation of adoption denial in Australia.

By denial we mean that the complex issues associated with the separation of mother and child is ignored in favour of the needs of those who wish to create a family at all costs, the book reinforces the Origins perspective that adoption only serves the needs of those that choose or unable to have their own children.

Origins members fought for over 20 years to expose the unlawful and harmful practise of adoption managing to obtain a semblance of justice.

That sense of justice was quickly erased by the subsequent trivialising of this great human rights issue.

As Penny rightfully points out the hypocrisy of the apology, and then for the governments of this country to revert back to the same immoral and once again forced adoption practices staggers the imagination of most active of human rights campaigners.

Penny as a worker in adoption sees and articulates the covert actions of the media and politicians that dance to the tune of the rich and powerful.

This cynicism of a sincere apology by Origins members became blatantly obvious when Tony Abbott came into the role of Prime Minster, by the lack of funding, consultation etc. If one were paranoid we could say that he was ‘paying’ us back due to his embarrassment at being ‘outed’ as a putative father and partner to a woman who lost her son to adoption.

Penny articulates the very reason why we as activists need to maintain a righteous indignation at those who in their ignorance promote the separation of families. Promoting adoption misery that is not only an affront to a moral society that is hell-bent on pursuing its own self-interest at the expense of the most vulnerable. Once again the vulnerable and powerless are being exploited at the expense of those who cannot withstand the might of the system, in effect nothing has changed in the past 6 decades.

If we do not speak up as those who have lived through this experiment then we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction where the natural order of our own individual identity will be replaced by those who will take away the core of our individuality.

Finally what needs to be understood is that adoption removes all traces of the adopted persons rights to ancestry, culture and identity, and once taken can never be fully restored.

Penny has articulated all the reasons why adoption must be erased from society and left where it belongs, in the history of our country where the Common Law and the Australian family came second to the demands of those who had power and means to ignore it.