Tag Archives: international adoption

How do I discover if I am Provisionally Adopted?

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To discover if you are affected by a Provisional Adoption Order issued in the UK is quite easy.  It is a two step process and requires that you have access to your UK Birth Certificate.

1) Your first step is to look at the long version of your birth certificate issued by the General Register Office.  There are two versions of your birth certificate, a long version (complete information) and a short version (contains your name, gender and place of birth).  It is only the long one that will give you the necessary information.  On a birth certificate for someone adopted, column (6) contains the the date of the adoption order and description of the court by which it was made.  My column (6) contains the words:

Provisional Adoption Order, Second October 1969, Sheffield County Court

If you find similar wording it means that you too are provisionally adopted.

2) Your next step after confirming that you are provisionally adopted is to look for further information of an adoption.  This would take the shape of an adoption form issued in the country that your adopting parents come from.  You should also have other identifying papers or a social security number issued by the same country as the adoption happened in.  So for example I would have been issued with a social security number from the USA if I had been legally adopted there.  If you cannot find any of these papers then you will need to ask your adopting parents for them, this can of course be tricky.  At this point if you have found these papers or your parents have given them to you, everything is fine and you will have been legally adopted.

If on the other hand you have not been able to locate these papers yourself and your adopting parents do not have them then you will need ask them for the details of your legal adoption.  Once you have the details you will need to approach the authorities and ask them to do a search for your adoption papers.  In my search I have found the authorities to be sympathetic and helpful in this.  If at this point your papers are discovered, read through them to verify that everything is correct and rest assured that you were legally adopted.

If you, like I did, discover at this point that there never was an adoption in any country, you have entered into a profoundly strange and difficult place.  The first thing you must do is seek legal help to sort this mess out.  I wish that I could give clear guidelines but currently there are none.  The second thing you are going to need is an adoption counsellor to help you realign your life as there are some major adjustments ahead.  I wish I could say that everything will be sorted and go back to normal, but unfortunately the fact that you were not legally adopted ensures that it cannot return to normal even if and when everything else is sorted.

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.