A submission from a South Australian mother to the NSW Inquiry
STANDING COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL ISSUES
Parliament of New South Wales, Legislative Council
INQUIRY INTO ADOPTION PRACTICES
Since 1986 1 have spoken with mothers in all states of Australia about their trauma, loss and grief I was a committee member for ARMS , WA. then a represent active for ARMS ,N.T and now a representative for ORIGINS, ACT and SA . As a helping professional I have counseled mothers and adopted persons. I can only conclude from mothers’ narratives and from my observations that the treatment they received at the hands of adoption professionals was unethical. Adoption professionals have crossed that fine line between responsible practice and professional abuse.
"A profound lack of empathy is an inherent characteristic of nazi ideology and therefore necessary for it’s enactment."
I have no hesitation in substituting the word nazi for the word adoption in this quotation from a television documentary on Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. Mothers and their babies in Australia, have been treated with lack of compassion and society has had to pass through a period of denial before anyone would listen. Now that there is an inquiry, thanks to Hon. Minister Fay Lo Po there is no guarantee that all victims of the adoption industry will be able to speak out , because they have been traumatised.
POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER
Psychiatrist van der Kolk (1996) refers in physiological terms to a traumatised person being unable to articulate an account of a traumatic event due to decreased oxygenation of Brocas area in the brain ; the person may know implicitly the emotional valence of the trauma without being able to literally give it a voice because the experience is split off from explicit memory. So as you go about the business of gathering information for this inquiry please keep in mind that relatively few mothers have been able to transcend their trauma to speak out.
In some basic sense trauma cannot be witnessed. One has to be not only able to see and hear what is occurring, but also to be emotionally present to ones' own suffering of the event. According to Kaplan (1995) this level of awareness would overwhelm a person’s nervous system so much as to kill a person or grossly weaken mind and body. One needs to inquire then as to how a person can cope with inescapable shock, because to be restrained in a lithotomy position with head in downward position, experiencing overwhelming pain or drug induced lethargy and then at the moment of ones's baby being born being unable to free oneself from the leather stirrups in order to reach up to hold ones' very own baby must constitute inescapable shock.
Social workers advised mothers to use coping strategies to quell the terrible anguish they felt for their absent children when they contacted the department in desperation after their babies had been taken in the hospital. However this advice was not only cruel but also inappropriate as their clients were already suffering post traumatic stress and wanted their babies. I have been told by a social worker that mothers often return to the agency as early as three months after signing consents to beg for their infants return and were turned away. I will argue that mothers who suffered the unexpected and abrupt removal of their babies particularly after a painful and sometimes unnecessarily complicated delivery would have to have dissociated at the time of the event for the obvious reason that this is a threat to physical integrity and involved intense fear and helplessness. Therefore the taking of consents from these mothers in their traumatised state constitutes duress.
According to Shalov (1996) coping efforts are effective only if they match the circumstances of the event and the resources of the individual. Mothers have reported symptoms of intrusion, avoidance, benumbing, anxiety and depression at the time of their personal injury which tended to remain years after the event which strongly suggests that the trauma was outside normal human experience and beyond their ability to cope. I will further argue that many mothers were already in a state of shock during labor due to severe pain, induction , verbal and physical abuse or neglect .Many experienced toxic confusional state caused by the administration of neuroleptics, anxiolytic agents and hypnotics and the effect of these pharmoceutical agents will be discussed further.
"Although the use of out of body experiences and other peritraumatic dissociative responses at the time of trauma may defend against the more catastrophic states of helplessness and terror, dissociation at time of trauma is one of the most important risk factors for the subsequent development of chronic post traumatic stress disorder".
(Van der Kolk 1996, p. 341)
According to Everstine and Everstine (1994) traumatic events of human agency are the most difficult to recover from. The trauma is excacerbated if the action was intentional, because the victim will have to come to terms with the realization that another human being or beings are capable of causing such injury. Furthermore, trauma caused by professional person or institutions can be more harmful than that inflicted by non professionals or strangers because of the abuse of power and violation of trust. Further if the trauma robbed the person of her own infant and prevented her functioning in her maternal role, and deprived her of her sense of worth, the reaction would be more severe. Finally, the effects of the trauma can differ depending on whether or not survival is a source of degradation or pride. There are no T shirt slogans for weeping mothers who have had their babies forcibly removed from them only to be stigmatised for the rest of their lives as those mothers who didn’t want or love their own babies.
How can one put into words the experience of a surreal trauma which renders life nightmarish, if not devoid of meaning for the rest one’s life, which makes one feel alienated from one’s family of origin, one’s group of friends, one’s husband ,one’s society. The surreal nature of trauma disturbs one’s sense of belonging in the universe because there is a loss of part of oneself; there is a part of oneself alive out there and one has psychic experiences which suggest that one’s child is still alive. However one can't be sure ... and so the agony of wondering is continuous and sometimes unbearable. Mothers have told me of the night terrors they suffer and there is a common theme in all of them - the ghastly death of their babies and the persecution of themselves by authority figures.
Reunion for both mother and grown up baby is like flying blind while in trauma and there is this incredible joy and grief simultaneously and then the sad realization that ones own flesh and image has a gratuitous loyalty to the adoptive caretakers and in some way feels that you abandoned him/her. Or there is the awful discovery that one’s baby didn’t get the love and security that could only have been given by oneself, the mother. Prior to reunion adopted adults have a deep seated fear that they will be rejected by the mother because they believe the myth that their mothers didn’t want them at birth. After reunion the mothers are subjected to adoptees testing behaviour, and the ever present fear that their children will disappear again and this fear is often confirmed.
There is a loss of generational continuity ; mothers have spoken of their inability to function in the post reunion phase when their stolen adult children give birth, because once again they are disentitled as the adoptive caretakers intervene and claim their grandchild as well. The birth of a grandchild also triggers the original trauma so that mothers feel that they are losing their child all over again.
EFFECTS OF ADOPTION ON SUBSEQUENT CHILDREN
There is a more insidious side to a mothers grief which is not spoken of and which concerns subsequent children . Not only do these children suffer their own grief with respect to their siblings forcibly removed for adoption, they also fear that they too could suffer the same fate, because if what society, family and social workers say is true ,that their own mothers abandoned one child, then why not them too. Worst of all Kaplan (1995) has described the real damage done to children of trauma victims in one word - transposition.
"Transposition describes the uncanny experience where the past reality of the parent intrudes into the present psychological reality of the child ... transposition is generational transmission run amock.. .it is a feature in every child’s life however in the child of a mother who has survived the theft of her first born (italics mine) transposition is already present when the subsequent child’s life begins"
MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES
A mother who had her child taken for adoption purposes is prevented from mourning. To show any sign of grief means that one is not well adjusted. Paradoxically mothers then develop pathological grief alongside PTSD. They then become lost in the system and mental health professionals pick up from where the adoption professionals left off. Mental health professionals are either in total denial of "adoption related problems"or more likely in collusion
with the adoption industry . Psychiatrists, general practioners, social workers and nurses close ranks and attribute mothers’ and adoptees’ symptoms to other irrelevant causes or to DSM-1 V criteria. I know of cases where mothers have received bilateral electroconvulsive therapy and drugs without the slightest reference being made to adoption in their medical records. As much as she would want to live in the here- and -now a mother clings to her memory of her missing baby because in my opinion not only was the task of mourning not allowed, the resolution of grief is impossible anyway. How can one complete the mourning process of one’s own living infant who is in the arms of a strange caretaker?
According to Hale (1991) mothers have recounted significant issues in subsequent pregnancies ,at delivery and in the short and long term after the births of subsequent children. (Appendix 1) I witnessed a vulnerable single twenty six year old school teacher in the mental health system being deprived of her subsequent new born during breastfeeding in the N.T.because midwives and social worker pronounced her unfit. They refused to accept that this mother was experiencing a re-emergence of the trauma of having lost her first baby to adoption. I fought for this mothers legal rights and the baby was returned to her. Mother and baby were doing as well as could be expected in the circumstances at follow up.
Psychiatrists have observed that mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina who had their children "disappeared" by the Proceso appeared to maintain their psychological integrity by speaking out, compared to those who had been frightened into silence. The latter not only suffered unresolved grief, due to not knowing the unpredictable fate of their stolen children, but in order to protect themselves from the full awareness of what had happened, they had to deny reality itself. They still suffer many psychological disorders, including memory disorders, dissociative disorders and loss of sense of self.
"This experience of speaking out for the truth is healing precisely because the individual who has known traumatic loss is no longer cut off from the group. Her loss is no longer individualized, detached from its historical context and from the collective process, but is now part of the political struggle which produced it and can now potentiate its reparation."
(Hollander cited in Kaplan ,1995, p,154)
Adoption professionals and even some government funded adoption -support groups perpetuate the silence by not validating mothers’ experiences in the labour room and wards of hospitals, mothers homes and at the Department of Community Services. Mothers can do some healing by being validated, however there are few avenues open to them to do so. According to Van der Kolk (1996) in his analysis of war victims, "the expression of rage, overwhelming anxiety, anger and grief was literally life threatening... suppression of these emotions was a necessity." Shame and guilt eliciting factors contributed to the erosion of an individual’s self esteem and integrity. Similarly the conspiracy around the removal of babies from their mothers has trapped the mothers into a pathological way of coping with affects. They are treated like worthless creatures simply because of their unmarried or deserted status and therefore seem to have internalised feelings of badness and feelings of deserving ill treatment.
RE RELINQUISHMENT "COUNSELLING"
"My discomfort is greatest when therapy is acting to adjust individuals to that which is unjust" (Cross, 1994)
Whilst Judith Cross was speaking for therapists her statement applies to all helping professionals, including the adoption professionals. Historically adoption professionals have acted in bad faith by using social worker Leontine Young’s idealism based on psychodynamic theory to convince themselves that the baby is a means to an end, not wanted for itself but to fulfill a neurotic need in the mother. Incidentally this theorizing is used by psychiatrists and medicos when the mother presents for treatment for psychological problems after separation from her baby. In consequence she is traumatised all over again by the lack of empathy and failure to address the actual cause of her distress.
Mothers didn’t receive counselling as such, but instead were encouraged to agree with the social workers’ thinking which created a situation for deference and dependency. This is no different from mind control . The social worker constructs a reality for her client and proceeds to brainwash the client into accepting responsibility for what the social worker herself has decided for the client. Social work counselling is in fact a swindle, designed to trick the mother into believing that she gave up her own baby - hence the term "relinquishment" -a term close to a social workers heart and which some mothers use to describe their experience because they haven’t yet woken up to the fact they were deceived.
I believe that sanctioning the permanent removal of babies from their mothers as being in the child’s best interests is child abuse. The research done twenty years prior to the bumper adoption era at a Sydney University clearly warned of the risks inherent in such a venture to both mother and child. Research which is heavily evidence based against adoption being in the best interests of the child continues to proliferate, but is basically ignored.
Fifty per cent of mothers I have spoken with were not minors under the law at the time of removal of their babies, however, given that teenage mothers face the developmental tasks of adolescence according to La Barre (1969) cited in Alexander et al (1990) would not the grief and trauma of being permanently separated from their babies put them at graver risk and retard their development? There is no justification for removing a baby from its mother whatever her age because firstly the practice of doing so is illegal and secondly any perceived advantage in doing so is far outweighed by the negative effects. I never cease to be amazed by social workers who romantisise adoption as though it were a panacea for all problems when they are fully aware that the mother and her baby will inevitably suffer severe grief reactions by separation.
The pre relinquishment counselling offered to mothers by departments and agencies currently fails to warn the mother of dire future regret and ensures that she will feel like a not good enough parent. The relinquishment counselling is a sham and by definition tends to direct the mother’s focus from her unborn child, newborn, young baby or toddler to consideration for needy infertile strangers who are on long waiting lists in the hope that the mother will slip up. Some of the most professional adoption research centres are thinly veiled adoption agencies serving the needs of infertile couples. They lure the mother under false pretences to consider open adoption. This more recent social experimentation has led to the recent suicide of a 19 year old mother who could no longer endure the grief of being permitted to hold her baby for only one hour a week! However why bother with counselling when cost effective methods such as baby snatching ensure that the government purse is kept intact in the short term and infertile couples get the babies. The truth remains that social workers in collusion with obstetricians
and midwives have acted illegally and continue to do so to this day. I personally am aware of a baby being removed from her mother during the birthing process in the ACT as recently as 1996. Almost all mothers I have spoken with in all Australian states said their babies were taken at birth and hidden from them. These practices among many others constitute duress under the Adoption Act and kidnapping under the Crimes Act and must be stopped now, not just in N.S.W. but in all states of Australia. I believe that due to the current shortage of babies for adoption purposes that there would be even more pressure put on mothers who seek help.
SHORT CIRCUITING THE BIRTHING PROCESS AS A FUNCTION OF ADOPTION PRACTICES
Humans have a gestation period of 266 days. Gestation is continued from within the womb (uterogestation) ,to gestatation outside the womb (exterogestation)... the baby is behaviourally, biochemically, psychologically underdeveloped and dependent on the mother at birth. (Montague, 1986) . According to Pearce (1992) the mother’s role is absolutely critical at birth, immediately before birth the baby’s body releases adrenal hormones which (a) prepare it for the 10 cms journey through the birth canal , (b) convert back through the umbilical cord and trigger the mother’s body to prepare for the baby’s birth and (c) accelerate the baby’s brain growth. These adrenal hormones maintain the mother-baby unit in an acute state of alertness until the birth process is finished.
"Should the birth completion fail to take place, and hormone production continues for too long, a "critical mass" level of hormones accumulates in the system and the infant goes into shock ranging from mild to severe enough as to cause death."
(Pearce, 1992, p.111)
According to Pearce (1992), completion of the birth necessarily includes the bonding process. According to mother nature the mother places her baby in the left arms / breast position close to her heart and this action triggers a flow of overlapping functions which cause the adrenal hormones to cease and promotes adaptation to gestation outside the womb. Pearce states that this direct proximity to the baby also activates dormant intuitive and nurturing intelligences in the mother, causing a cognitive shift (related to the cyngulate gyrus area in the brain) and permanent behavioural changes.
Pearce refers to that critical period of 45 minutes in which the adrenal cortex pumps out the hormones and if the baby is not in close proximity to the mother in this time the newborn confronted with acute fear and abandonment screams for a short time and then goes quiet and motionless. The ‘critical mass" of hormones have caused the baby to go into shock and withdrawal. The baby recovers from the shock some ten weeks later when he/she resumes a "tentative "consciousness. (Pierce, 1992). Not until three months later is visual acuity restored whereby associated face recognition occurs and the baby is able to smile. The experience of abandonment is the most distressing event of life and compromises the baby emotionally, psychologically and physically. All this unnecessary trauma and delay has occurred because the baby is snatched from the mother. The mother herself reacts to the abandonment by experiencing depression as her newly awakened intelligences are left in suspended animation trying to find expression. She too is severed from the bonding which was meant to happen. The predators have come and gone .(Pierce,1992)
Are not the obstetricians simulating a stillbirth? Equipped with all their obstetrical knowledge they choose to abuse their power and put mother and baby in a crisis from which neither truly recover. How could this happen systematically Australia wide? It did happen Australia wide in all the public hospitals because the many mothers I have spoken to for more than a decade have said the same thing - that their babies were taken from them at birth.
THE BIRTH PLAN
I personally was horrified when informed of a testimony by Pamela Thorne (nee Roberts) at the court hearing of W versus the State of N.S.W. in 1997 that there is a Birth Plan in place for unmarried mothers. This information confirmed my worst fears that there was and is a conspiracy, that mothers were unable to prevent the loss of their babies.
The Birth Plan is characterised by a code which has multiple functions including treatment of the mother at delivery, location of the mother and baby and drug therapy. Admission records across Australia were marked BFA or For Adoption unbeknown to unmarried mothers. That evil code which held such significance meant that it was never intended that mothers have access to their babies and to achieve that goal the health professionals put the mothers in a situation to render them helpless and then drugged them for good measure. A health professional once said to me in reference to ‘mentally ill’ clients ..." Who needs a gun when we can use drugs ?" Mothers were treated similarly - those who were not rendered speechless from their trauma in the delivery room and were able to protest at having their babies removed from them were considered difficult and given sedation. Health professionals would like to be thought of as acting from altruistic motives and maybe they were , but when I hear from mothers the indignities they suffered I remind myself that health professionals are as prejudiced as the society in which they live, but the difference is that they have to be accountable for their actions.
According to Wagner (1994) "childbearing issues involve fundamental human and civil rights ,which should be inviolable." The World Health Organization submitted a report on health promotion and birth in 1986 and 1987 urging all governments "to include examination of the conditions under which childbearing takes place as one index of any nation’s, or indigenous people’s civil and human rights."
Mothers were deprived of information about the care of themselves and their babies. They were also deprived of the choice of which medical interventions to accept. Most significant of all t hey were deprived of the choice of whether to be separated from their babies or not.
Consider the following factors in the treatment of unmarried mothers as differentiated from their contemporaries, the married mothers.
Whilst uncomfortable to contemplate, administration of anxiolytic sedatives during first stage labor depress the action of smooth muscle in the uterus and thus slow down or stop contractions, so to speed up the process and counteract this iatrogenic condition, some mothers were administered amniotomy and or syntocin which augmented pain so intense as to render them helpless and unable to get on top of the contraction. Thus the normal manageable sequence of labor is interrupted and deliberately medicalised to the extent that it is easier for the obstetrician to extract the baby as you would a body organ and so ameliorate his guilt at having done something unforgivable.
Thus the birth plan has been enacted and its main objective, that of damaging the mother child bond has been achieved.
It is my belief that babies then develop an anxious attachment to their subsequent caretakers. Some adoptive caretakers are honest enough to admit that the babies scream when they attempt to hold them. Young adopted children confide that they want to find their real mummies. Babies who are bonded to their mothers in utero can distinguish their mothers voice from a stranger’s voice in their second week of life. All the senses of the baby are finely tuned to the mother’s presence as nature intended at uterogestation and exterogestation .The mother and baby should not be separated.
SIGNING CONSENTS
Mothers say that consents were taken when they were drugged. Some did not know what document they were signing. One mother said her hand was forced on the document by a social worker’s hand. Others were told they could not see their babies until they signed. Some were bribed with open adoption only to not see or be given information of their babies welfare ever. Some were told that they were not their baby’s mother or that they were selfish for wanting their babies. Some mothers did not know of the revocation period and those who did , realized that it did not exist in practice when they revoked. No mothers knew of the financial assistance available to them. Those who may have asked for assistance were told it didn’t exist.
I strongly recommend that a judicial inquiry into adoption practices at a national level be held as a matter of priority. Illicit practices did not only occur in NSW. It is my concern that these practices continue to this day in all states of Australia.
‘SUCCESS IN ADOPTION CANNOT BE PROPERLY MEASURED BECAUSE THERE IS NO YARDSTICK’ (HUMPREY 1988)
An SA mother
Baby taken QEH 1970
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, J. , Levy, V., and Roch, 5. (1990) Postnatal Care. p. 125. Mcmillan Education Ltd. London.
Cross, J. Politics and family therapy. In Power and Politics in Family Therapy. p. 7-10 Dulwich Centre Newsletter. 1994. No. 1.
Everstine, D and Everstine, L. (1993) The Trauma Response. p. 39-40 W.W. Norton & Co. New York.
Humprey, M & H. (1988) Families with a Difference. p 22. Routledge.London.
Kaplan , L.J. (1995) Lost children. p.154-223. Pandora. London.
Montagne , Ashley (1986) Touching. p. 54-57 Harper & Rowe Publishers. Inc. New York.
Pearce , Joseph Chilton .(1992) Evolution ‘s End. 110-129. Harper. San Francisco.
Shalev, A. (1996) Stress versus Traumatic Stress In Traumatic Stress van der Kolk, B., McFarlane A., Weisaeth L., eds p. 89. The Guildford Press. New York.
Van der Kolk ,B,. Van der Hart, 0., Marmar. ,C. Dissociation and information processing in post traumatic stress disorder. In Traumatic Stress van der Kolk, Bessel. ,Mc Farlane ,A . and Weisaeth L. (1993) eds. p, 314. The Guilford Press. New York.
Wagner, M. (1994) Pursuing the birth machine .p. 363. pp. 96-197. ACE Graphics. N.S.W.
