ABSTRACT

Historically the fortunes of the adopted child, as reader have already seen, have been complex and interwoven with cultural traditions, social and religious values, and not least the entrenched belief that if the child was born out of wedlock it was in all probability carrying its parents’ faulty genes or ‘bad blood.’ Several reasons were suggested for the difficulties these adopted children had faced but the most far-reaching of her findings was that their problems were linked to the emotional capacity of the adopting mother. One of the ghosts that still lingered around the adopted child at the time of the research was the unconscious cultural stigma of being born to an unmarried mother. This obviously meant that the child’s birth records needed to be open and available; in this way everyone could see the true nature of the situation and any damaging epithets that might be thrown at the child in moments of exasperation and stress could be challenged.