Blood parenthood and the hierarchies of dispossession in English adoption cases, 1946-70.

Abstract

This article charts shifting judicial and medical framings of child welfare in adoption legislation and practices from 1946 to 1970, illuminated through adoption cases, press coverage, and sociological, medical, and law case reports. Adoption legislation illuminated post-war state paternalism and societal anxieties to reemphasize a moral order within the domestic private sphere. Extramarital parental rights were deprioritized in the courts, reframed as oppositional to child psychological welfare. Under the Adoption Acts of 1950 and 1958, a 'successful adoption' was redefined as the permanent legal, physical, and emotional separation of mothers and babies to ensure the stability of life-long 'substitute' parenthood. Statutory interpretations of the Acts granted judges broader powers to dispense with parental rights if mothers were deemed to be 'unreasonably' refusing their consent to the adoption of their children. In the 1950s and 1960s, 'evidence' deployed in court to illustrate 'unreasonable' refusal of adoption was often pathologizing and disadvantageous to extramarital mothers. By the mid-1960s, the judicial definition of 'unreasonable' refusal of parental consent to adoption now included a parent's refusal to adhere to medical opinion that the child's psychological welfare would be damaged if they left the custody of the married prospective adoptive parents. The opinions of doctors became judicial grounds for dispensing with parental rights. Nevertheless, these new statutory grounds for removing parental rights in the 1950s and 1960s were not wholly accepted in British society, and dissenting legal and philanthropic voices expressed concern about financial, emotional, and administrative coercion in adoption cases experienced by unsupported mothers.