Tag Archives: adoption orders

How long does a Provisional Adoption Order last?

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In a recent telephone conversation with the General Records Office (GRO) I was told very clearly that the solution to my situation was to approach the authorities in the country that I was living in.  All that needed to happen was to convince the authorities to ‘formalise’ the Provisional Adoption Order (PAO) that had merely lain dormant since it had been issued.  This was the advice that the GRO expert had to give me and it seems to be very sensible and reasonable as well.

Having read that the PAO might in actual fact have a short legal lifespan I asked if this was actually true.  The answer was emphatic, once a PAO is given by the County Court they are active until they are formalised. This would of course be a fantastic option, but it is not quite true.

In my initial writing of this post in April 2014, I had read the article published in the ‘The Modern Law Review‘ Sept. 1959, Volume 22, Issue 5, on page 503.  In it the statement was made that As before the Act was passed, interim orders may be made for a maximum of two years, but now where the original interim order is for a lesser period, it may be extended to a maximum of two years in all.  I had read this to apply to the case of the PAO and in hindsight it is easy to see how you might link the word interim  and provisional, as they are very close in meaning.  In actual fact they are two very different and distinct types of processes and I made a honest mistake in confusing these two and I apologise for not double checking my facts.  The fact is that the PAO is not limited like interim adoptions to a two year period.

Does this mean that the GRO was correct?  While they were correct in saying that there was no legal restriction placed on the time frame inside of which a PAO could be enacted, there is another time frame for adoption in general.  The answer to the question ‘who can be adopted?’ is that to be eligible for adoption a child must be under the age of 18 years. A child who is married or has been married cannot be adopted.  In this framework as the last PAO was issued in the early 1970s, a child provisionally adopted would now be a minimum of 40 years old and so if they have not been formally adopted they would now be ineligible for adoption.

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.