Lesbian and gay couples can adopt and birth details will no longer be secret. NAOMI LARKIN on proposed new adoption laws.
Michelle and Craig Wallace met the mother of their third child at a formal and uncomfortable meeting in the barren little Hamilton office of the state welfare agency.
The mother, a professional woman in her 20s, was nervous and very pregnant. But once she spoke with the Wallaces, she wanted to reassure them that her child would be theirs - that she would not "snatch him away four days later."
Michelle Wallace also felt nervous, but the process was familiar - she had already adopted two sons.
The meeting was the beginning of an open adoption, which means Daniel Wallace, now aged 2, does not live in a world where secrets surround his birth and parentage.
"There is no secret for them here. They all know they are adopted," said Michelle Wallace.
It is this ideal scenario that the Law Commission hopes its proposed changes to adoption laws will promote.
The changes, tabled in Parliament yesterday, outline a radical overhaul of adoption laws that have not altered substantially since 1955. The review was ordered by the former Justice Minister, Tony Ryall.
The report's central recommendation is that the child's welfare and interests be paramount throughout the adoption process. To ensure this, the Care of Children Act would be created.
Other recommendations include:
Allowing gays, lesbians and de facto couples to adopt, and scrapping the ban on single men adopting female children. Adoption is confined at present to married couples.
A child should be adopted by a family of the same culture.
Adopted children be given two birth certificates, one showing the details of the adoptive parents and another full certificate listing all details of birth, given name and subsequent adoption.
Legal consent by the birth mother would be valid after 28 days instead of 10.
All placement options to be explored, with adoption a last resort.
The changes would not be retrospective. By incorporating provisions from existing laws - including the Guardianship Act and the Child, Youth and Family Act - the new act will enable previously fragmented legislation to operate seamlessly, says the report.
Sue Devereux, director of Catholic Family Life, said allowing same-sex couples to adopt was not promoting the rights of the child.
"The fundamental right of the child is to have a mother and a father."
Rotorua lawyer Annette Sykes, who has lodged a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal that the Adoption Act contravenes the treaty, said the recommendation for same-culture adoption was consistent with whangai, or Maori customary adoption.
"Whangai recognises the spiritual links a child has with its ancestors and those links, if broken, can have spiritual damage on the child.
"It's well-documented that placements through Social Welfare that took Maori children during the 1960s and 70s outside their whanau and hapu have caused irreparable damage for some of those placements."
The commission is pushing for open adoption, which it claims will legalise much of what is already taking place, albeit inconsistently.
"Although open adoption is being widely practised, it is not recognised in law, and Family Court judges struggle to reconcile open adoption with the Adoption Act, which acts as a statutory guillotine, effecting the complete severance of ties between birth parents and children and suppressing the fact of their relationship," the report says.
Daniel Wallace's birth mother said she had to push Child, Youth and Family Services, which organised the adoption, to let her meet the Wallaces. "They were very much less than comfortable with it."
Megan Fowler, a founding member of Open Adoption Network, said the social climate had changed since 1995, with open adoption becoming more common, but it should be enshrined in law.
"At the moment an open adoption is a moral undertaking. Because there is no legal backup, it doesn't offer anyone any protection."
Open adoption need not involve face-to-face contact within the adoptive triangle, but was an acknowledgment that birth families should play a part in their children's lives.
Daniel Wallace's birth mother said openness was vital if an adoption was to succeed.
"Our case is not the norm. It's possibly the most extremely perfect scenario that there is."
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