Secrecy and Openness in Adoption: An Historical Perspective

The issue of whether there should be continuing contact between those who are adopted and their birth relatives is one of the most contentious issues in current adoption practice (see for example DoH, 1993; McWhinnie and Smith 1994). The view traditionally taken is that adoption in England and Wales has been secret since its legal origins in 1926 and any moves to more fully disclosed information and indeed contact between the parties in adoption is a recent development (see for example DoH 1992). This article considers the history of birth family contact and access to records in adoption from 1926 to the 1958 Adoption Act and examines the factors that favoured the development of closed models of practice where there was no contact between the parties and records became secret. In doing so it challenges the accepted view that adoption has always provided for secrecy in England and Wales and establishes that both the thinking of policy makers and the legislation itself until 1949 provided for more open forms of adoption than we enjoy today. Secrecy, it is claimed, developed as a consequence of a collusion between professionals and the judiciary which disregarded the legal rights of birth parents and failed to respect their entitlement to a proper say in the decisions about the future of their children.