Description
While the term ‘adoption’ is seemingly straightforward, as a phenomenon it is embedded in a complex historical, political, and social world, and derives from ‘culturespecific sets of legal functions’ (O’Halloran 2001 , p. 13). Adoption and, therefore, adoptive parenthood manifest different features, in different cultures at different times. Even within the one sociohistorical context, adoption can serve different social functions under various legal frameworks and social policy agendas. Children can be adopted by a range of individuals including their relatives or step-parents, referred to in policy and practice as family or kinship adoptions, or by non- relatives, referred to as stranger or non-kin adoptions.
Adoption placements may also be domes-tic (within-country), or international (inter-country).
Historically, adoptions have mostly been made with the agreement of the child’s birth parents. Although birth mothers may feel constrained by social and family pressures to relinquish their child, consensual adoptions are, in a legal sense, voluntary and therefore private law transactions. In recent years adoption has increasingly been utilised, particularly in the UK and USA, to secure alternative permanent families for children in State care who cannot return home to their birth parents or other birth kin. This is referred to as public adoption or adoption from care, and is the main route to adoption in the UK. While the USA has retained higher proportions of inter-country and private, voluntary adoptions, public adoption has a signifi cant role in child welfare policy and is the preferred placement option for children in State care who cannot be re-unifi ed with their birth family (Tefre 2015 ).
This study is concerned with this latter iteration of adoption: domestic stranger adoption, initiated by social services for children in State care. Across the UK 6124 children were adopted from care in 2014, representing approximately 7 % of all children in State care that year. 1 While accurate statistics on care plans are not available in all UK jurisdictions, fi gures in England indicate that there were similar numbers of children waiting to be adopted (4240 children in England). A greater percentage of children in care are adopted in the USA. In 2014, a quarter of all children in care in the USA had a care plan goal of adoption. In the same year, 50,644 children were adopted with public child welfare involvement and a further 107,918 were waiting to be adopted, figures that had remained more or less steady across a five-year period. 2 Proposed legislative reforms in Ireland and Australia give greater consideration to adoption as a viable permanent care option and might lead to increased adoption of children in domestic care in those jurisdictions also (Roth 2013 ; McCaughren and Ni Raghallaigh 2015 ).
The adoption of children in care can be arranged with parental consent; however, it is often contested by birth parents. In some jurisdic-tions contested public adoptions can proceed via legal processes which can determine that parental consent is not necessary. The UK, the USA, Canada, and Australia, for example, have legal provisions to dispense with the need for consent, enabling public child welfare agencies to arrange the adoption of a child without the agreement of their birth parents. In Northern Ireland, where this study took place, only a small minority of children are adopted with the consent of their birth parents and the majority of adoption proceedings are contested, achieved via legislation which allows for the dispensing of parental consent (Kelly and McSherry 2003 ). Therefore, while adoption generally ‘has become a fairly routine and well-regulated part of American social and legal life’ (Conn 2013 , p. 88), public adoption from care, particularly compulsory adoption, is a more contentious fi eld of child welfare practice.
The study is also interested in another relatively recent practice development that has signifi cantly infl uenced the experience of adoption—openness. Many adoptions, both private and public, are now open to some extent and adopted children continue to have some form of contact, whether in person or by letter, with birth parents or other members of their birth family. For reasons that are detailed below, there is a strong expectation of contact in adoptions from care.
While openness has become common practice in domestic adoption (Siegel and Smith 2012 ), it has been and remains a contentious issue. Early debates about open adoption focused on whether it was good or bad over-all for the child and whether contact should or should not be promoted. To date however, research has found no clear association between the form and frequency of birth relative contact, and child outcomes. In the absence of consensus regarding the merits or demerits of children’s ongoing relationship with their birth family, adoption agencies espouse no one par-ticular type of openness and tend to establish plans on a case-by- case basis (Conn 2013 ), although, as discussed later, there is a strong presumption, particularly in the UK, that adoptive parents will facilitate some form of contact post adoption. It is important, therefore, to continue to ask subtle questions to reveal ways of facilitating benefi cial interactions between the birth and adoptive families, and scaffold delicate and complex relationships.
Several studies, as summarised below, have examined open adoption from adopters’ viewpoint and asked important practice-related questions about various openness arrangements. The focus of this study, however, is somewhat shifted from these in that openness arrangements are not the object of enquiry but are understood as a context within which adoptive parenthood is experienced. It is this subjective lived experience of adop-tive parenthood in the context of open adoption that is ‘the thing itself’, the phenomenon of interest. This study therefore simply asks the question ‘what is it like to be an adoptive parent in the context of contemporary open adoption from care?’ It is premised on a methodological and ethical assumption that an effective way to fi nd out what a phenomenon is like is to ask those who directly experience it (Kvale and Brinkmann 2009 ).
The choice of an interpretative phenomenological methodology, as discussed below, fits with important ethical considerations in social work that drive efforts to involve ‘users’ of services in the design, implementation, and regulation of those services. Rather than subject the experience of adoptive parents to service-led agendas, this study gives adopters a voice in shaping the research agenda and through this to subsequently influence the services that affect their lives and ultimately shape their experience. Rather than examine the policies and professional practices of open adoption, or the context, from adoptive parents’ viewpoint, the phenomenological focus of this study is on the lived experience of adoptive parenthood.