The International Adoptee
Congress was set up in 2006 as a membership organisation for adopted
people from all over the world with the basic aim of improving the lot of
adopted children by providing a forum to offer guidance and practical
support to booth adoptees and other organisations concerned with adoption.
In older civilisations than ours the main reason for adoption was the
continuation of a male-headed family line which was often desirable for
political, military, religious or economic reasons and very often those
who were brought into a family were often already adult and almost
invariably male. It followed that no real effort had to be made to attend
to their welfare and indeed the opposite was often the case since these
young people were regularly destined for positions of power and influence.
Prior to the First World War the rights of children who were put up for
adoption had not changed substantially for hundreds of years. The dreadful
slaughter of the trenches, however, followed by the influenza pandemic
left a great many children parentless; the loosening of sexual mores that
were accelerated by the war then led, inexorably, to a huge increase in
illegitimate births. All of a sudden governments throughout war-torn
Europe and the USA were faced with a new problem; how to give all these
children, who had already suffered so much, a stable and happy family life
as well as an adequate diet and a satisfactory education. Even so, in the
UK it was not until 1926 that adoption became a legal possibility; well
behind much of the rest of the western world.
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The next great conflagration, World War Two, may have led to fewer
military casualties but the death toll of civilians surpassed those of WW1
many times over. Another factor in the equation was that the war spilled
over into territories all over the world and the almost inevitable
consequence of this was that American and European soldiers, sailors and
airmen fathered children by women of different races and international
adoption started to become widespread. As it became more socially
acceptable to adopt children from abroad thousands of families welcomed
arrivals from areas of the world which were scarred by conflict,
oppressive regimes or military disasters. This was not without problems
since the majority of parents were white and financially comfortable and
many of the children were coloured and from far poorer communities; claims
that this amounted to cultural genocide came up against equally arguable
claims that the children were being shown a better life and that
inter-racial adoption was a powerful weapon in breaking down racial as
well as class prejudices. The arguments still continue to this day.
The next major change for adoption came in the 1960s with the discovery of
effective means of birth control, and with it a greater sexual freedom.
Not only were fewer children being born but also it became more acceptable
for a young mother to rear a child on her own. As a consequence there were
far fewer children available for adoption and with the change in moral
attitudes came a change in the accepted criteria for the suitability of
prospective adoptive parents; single parent adoptions became acceptable in
many countries and even adoption by couples of the same sex, a factor
viewed by some as the height of civilised behaviour, by others as the
depths of depravity. One must make one's own decision on which view is the
correct one.
