The Body Has It's Own Wisdom

`The body has its own wisdom and its own truth. If an illusion is presented to you and you believe it, you can find out that the body does not believe it. The body will tell you it is not true. You listen to the order and the harmony of the body as an integrated whole. Your body is a truth detector. If you present a lie to the body as fact, it will resist it.'

by Unknown

Many mothers, led to believe they were sacrificing their own happiness for the sake of their beloved child, and for the sake of their child's future happiness they willingly made that sacrifice. Tragically, after a life of regret, pain, and sadness they discovered their sacrifice was not for the happiness of their child after all. They have come to realise they have been swindled out of their baby and out of their own happiness not for the baby's sake, but to provide happiness to total strangers they had been forbidden to know.

The following passages from a meeting of adoption professionals is certain indication that the promotion of the adoption of newborns has been based on false advertising, misrepresentation, devious promotion and an outright lie. The perfect swindle - the construct of adoption relied on outright lying to the natural mother that adoption was in the interest of her child when it was no such thing.

Both the mothers fertility and her child have been deviously exploited in the industry's quest to obtain suitable babies to fulfil their ultimate objective of providing `biologically matched' infants to their primary clients - the childless couple.

Having nothing whatsoever to do with the child's best interest (as also established in adoption regulations and law), the horror of such human engineering is that our children were then expected to comply with the `created lie' at the expense of their own emotional well being and their own reality.

The resultant well known mental health problems in many adopted children, being denied their truth and living a life of pretence, is a result of the schizophrenic existence the construct of adoption demands of them.

Address to General Meeting
Children's Welfare Association of Victoria
Friday October 27, 1972
by the Rev. Graeme Gregory, B.A.,Dip Soci. Stud.M.S.W.
director, Methodist Department of Child Care

Traditional adoption practice has been based on certain assumptions regarding of the needs of adoptive parents and the role of the adoption agency.

For most of these adoptive parents and also for the community, adoption is the second best to having a family of their own. This is not meant to be an unkind judgement, but rather a realistic approach to adoption motivation. Not many adoptive parents consciously choose adoption as an alternative to having children of their own. This group of traditional adopters, then, inevitably seek in the adopted child a biological expression of themselves. They hope that the child will `fit into their family'. They do not want the child to be different. They find it difficult to accept the child of another nationality, particularly Southern European. They have difficulty in accepting a child who has anything more than a superficial disability. Unconsciously adoptive parents are seeking to have no break in their genealogical line.

This view of adoption is related to our view of parenthood. If we seek children as a biological expression of ourselves, if parenthood is primarily a matter of begetting and conceiving, gestating and giving birth, then we will want to relate any alternative ways of becoming a parents to this primary role.

One of our problems in adoption is that we have tried, both from the agency point of view, and from the adoptive parent point of view, to provide not only the nurturing function but a function as near as possible related to the biological one. Thus often in the interests of the acceptance of the child, adoptive parents, specify narrowly, the sort of child they wish to adopt, and agencies bend over backwards to match child and adoptive family.

".... An adoption agency has the responsibility not only of placement of children, but also toward, for instance the childless couple whose needs will no longer be met through adoption if there is a scarcity of infants without problems available for adoption." A couple considering adoption want a child like the one they could have had. This reality is reflected in agency practice which gives preferential treatment to infertile couples, and matches couple and child, thus reflecting cultural attitudes towards adoption, and to some extent, institutionalising these feelings.