ABSTRACT
Adoption is one of Western society’s best kept secrets. Many people in the United Kingdom have direct experience of adoption, or know someone who has, but it remains relatively invisible. The ideal of the nuclear family, in which natal and social parents are one and the same, is so strongly reinforced that instances of children raised by non-biogenetic parents are masked or denied.1 Families may be regarded as ‘making the best’ of a situation, compensating for the inability of a biological mother to raise her child or children. Despite the numbers of children waiting in the care system for new homes, the United Kingdom struggles with
an ‘anti-adoption’ culture, or at least a profound ambivalence towards adoption.2
