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What happens if a Provisional Adoption Order is not completed?

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The first thing to draw attention to is the fact that a UK Provisional Adoption Order is permissive. It gives the applicant(s) permission to ‘remove the infant from Great Britain for the purpose of adopting him/her’. Without this court order, removing a child from the UK would have been illegal and punishable. The reason for the child needing to be removed from the UK was the it was illegal for a non-domiciled individual to adopt a UK citizen in the UK.

The responsibility was placed by the County Court and Social Services onto those wishing to adopt.  By seeking to gain a UK Provisional Adoption Order the adopting couple indicated to the court that they were willing and able to complete this task in their home country.  Unfortunately this was not always understood by the couple and a legal adoption were not often completed. Because the process of gaining an Adoption Order was very similar to a PAO the legal advice might not have made the difference clear. The court did request assurance from a legal professional from the couples home country stating that the couple were eligable for adopting in that country and that the legal professional would complete the adoption process.  Once assurance was given the court issued the PAO, but the couple often misunderstood this as being a request for a character reference and not part of an on-going yet to be completed process.

There were a number of studies done by social workers in Oxfordshire in the 1970s who uncovered the fact that the main group of individuals seeking PAOs were American Servicemen.  The studies also revealed that many of those who succeeded in being awared a PAO did not in fact complete the process in the USA.  I have attempted to gain access to these studies but they were destroyed by the Oxfordshire Council.

If an adoption was not completed by the couple in the country that they settled in, for example the USA, and they did not apply for social welfare no one would be the wiser.  The child would continue to exist with their UK passport and enter into that countries system just like any other child.  If they never travelled outside of that country the passport would never need to be renewed.  The big difference being that without an adoption certificate they were acutally an illegal immegrant.  This situation could be rectified until the age of 18 by completing the adoption process, unfortunately only in rare cases did this happen.  Once the child passed the age of 18 there was little if anything that could be done.  I know of two cases where adults who have lived their entire lives in the USA have been deported to the UK as illegal immegrants because their PAO was discovered by the American government.

On the other hand if the child and their ‘parents’ remained in the UK and never moved from it, UK law was happy to look between it’s fingers and behave as if an adoption had happened.  So in answer to the question, it all depend on the country that you are in.  If you are in the UK, then everything can continue as if nothing happened.  The UK authorities are not intrested in solving this situation as it is too embarrasing and far too much work for them; afterall the only people who are impacted are adoptees.  If on the otherhand you are in any other country, especially the USA, the only advice that I can give you is to seek the best legal advice that you can afford.  If you are in this situation, please can you let me know you name and details. I will add you to a growing list of names that I intend to submit to the UK government in an attempt to gain recognistion of this problem and hopefully a solution to our shared problem.

Link

I need to take a step back and answer some questions at the heart of my adoption.  I have been told that when I was adopted the process “was fairly simple and straight forward.  There is no doubt that many more regulations are in place now and hind sight is a great thing but at the time of [my] adoption, the whole process went smoothly.”

To answer this we need to look at a few facts. 1) a definition of what adoption is 2) what were the rules that were in place in the 1960’s to deal with adoption 3) is there any way that there could have been a misunderstanding in what a provisional adoption order was.

1) a definition of adoption

Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting for another and, in so doing, permanently transfers all rights and responsibilities, along with filiation, from the biological parent or parents. Unlike guardianship or other systems designed for the care of the young, adoption is intended to effect a permanent change in status and as such requires societal recognition, either through legal or religious sanction. Adoption – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Every culture has their own way of dealing with the issue of adoption.  Many answer the challenges of the permanent change in status through legal processes.  In recent times the Hague Adoption Convention has become an internationally recognised convention dealing with the issue of international adoption.  Whatever the name of the process or convention the underlining idea is the safeguarding and protection of the child that is to be adopted.  In this regard there is little that is ‘simple’ it is in fact incredibly complex, as it should be.

2) What rules were in place in the UK that governed adoption in the 1960s & early 1970s

While there were early regulations governing adoption in the UK, the first modern regulations were known as the Adoption Act 1958 and came into force on 1 April 1959.  This was the result of the report of the Hurst Committee, delivered in September 1954.  On the basis of the Committee’s findings new laws were put into place governing the consent of the natural parents, qualifications of adopters, adoption procedure and the procedure used in cases where the adoption is disputed.  In addition to the regulations put in place by the UK government, the government also accepted the European Convention for the Adoption of Children in 1968.  This placed further requirements on the process of adoption that all involved with adoption in the UK had to adhere to.

Some today will look back at this period as a simpler time in the development of adoption, the reality is very different.  The basis of much of today’s adoption law is based upon the developments following the Adoption Acts 1958.  The one thing that the Adoption Act 1958 cannot be accused of was being simple, it was a very complex piece of legislature that was attempting to ensure the safety of the child facing adoption.  It may not have been successful in all that it attempted to do, but in the development of adoption law it was a landmark.

3) Could there have been a misunderstanding of what a provisional adoption order was?

Given that:

1) this was the focus of a number of Commons debates and was discussed in the papers, this was not a piece of legislature that the public were unaware of.

2) there were only two options available, adoption order for those who were resident in the UK and provisional adoption order if you were not.  The requirements for gaining one of these were slightly different from the other.

3) the adoption agencies were concious of the change of legislation required of them for international adoption

4) the solicitors involved with preparing the paperwork for the County Court would have known the difference

5) the process for gaining a provisional adoption order took double the time than a regular adoption order, it is highly unlikely that someone at some point would not have mentioned the two options needed.

6) In my case I have letters from lawyers in the USA vouching for my ‘adopted parents’ and offering their services to complete the adoption in the USA.

Given all of these factors I think that it is a long stretch of the imagination to believe that someone either did not know or misunderstood what it was that they were getting when the applied for a provisional adoption order.

 

Some new directions

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Since my initial discover of the words Provisional Adoption Order on my birth certificate eight weeks ago I have been on a very steep learning curve.  I have had many a break-through but also suffered a number of set backs.  While I am working on a proper post which I hope to post later on this week I needed to post this.

After a wait of seven weeks the General Records Office have finally responded to my initial question.  That question was ‘what is my status now that I have discovered that I was not adopted?’  The earth shattering response that I have received is……’we are not able to give legal advice’  Thanks A. (who was too busy to even speak to me) and to D. for giving me some advice that was  wrong.  That answer was really worth waiting seven weeks for, especially as this does not answer the question.

The only bit of information that I was able to gain from the General Records Office was about the last person that they dealt with who had been provisionally adopted.  It turns out that he had been living in the USA with his adopted American family, had served in their armed forces and was established there.  When the truth of his provisional adoption was discovered, the American government started the process of deporting him as an illegal alien.  So there are others like me out there!

If you are someone that has experienced a ‘Provisional Adoption Order’ get in contact, I would love to hear from you.

Found Nothing

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I had been sorting out our official papers following my son’s eighteenth birthday when I spotted it for the first time.  In a separate column on my adoption birth certificate were the words ‘Provisional Adoption Order granted October 1969 by Sheffield County Court’.  I know that I had seen this thousands of times before but the words had never really sunk in.  I had always just breezed over them without thinking too much about it, I guess that I just assumed that this was the standard wording on everyones certificate.  Yet this time I looked a little closer.

provisional –

prəˈvɪʒ(ə)n(ə)l/
adjective
  • arranged or existing for the present, possibly to be changed later.
  1. “a provisional government”

What did this mean? That I was provisionally adopted?  If that was the case then where was my official adoption certificate?

I started to look into what this Order might be and came to this page on Wikipedia that dealt with the Adoption Act of 1953.  The key sentence is this one: The Act also created a “provisional adoption order”, issuable by the High Court or County Court, which allows an adopter not domiciled in Britain to adopt a child under the law of the country in which he lives. Such adoption orders require six months notice, and the child must have been in the adopter’s care in Britain for at least six months. Orders last for two years, and are designed to act as a place holder until the adopter’s nation authorises the adoption of the child.  

All of this meant that my ‘intended parents’ had been given a travel permit in order to leave the country with me for the purpose of adoption.  This was not an adoption.  Surely my parents had adopted me in their country of origin? But had they?

After a day of working through the implications of what this meant I reluctantly called my adopted mother and asked.  That was when the final nail was hammered home – I was told that they had never even started the adoption process in their country of origin or in any other country.  And so it came crashing home to me, I could not use my pre-adoption identity because of the rules of the UK government, but neither could I use the identity that I had been given because legally it was not mine.  In the eyes of the law, my birth parents had given me up but my intended adoptive parents had never legally adopted me either.  My birth certificate should have been indicated a completed adoption, but in actual fact I had found nothing permanent.