When a child is surrendered to adoption, all legal recognition that he/she is part of his natural family is terminated. The child and his natural family become "legal strangers" to each other. When adopted, the child is considered "as if born to" the adopters. The technical term for this legal relationship is "Filiation":

"577. Adoption confers on the adopted person a filiation which replaces his original filiation. The adopted person ceases to belong to his original family, subject to any impediments to marriage." - Civil Code of Quebec, S.Q. 1991, c. 64, Book 2 The Family, Title 2 Filiation, CHAPTER 2 ADOPTION, SECTION III EFFECTS OF ADOPTION

Legal recognition of a family relationship is similar to the difference between marriage and living common-law. One is recognized by the Law as existing, and the other one isn't. One has legal rights and obligations, and the other one doesn't.

Is this a step in healing for natural families separated and/or damaged by adoption?

Anywhere that families were separated by the closed adoption system, which includes most major English speaking countries. Unfortunately, the U.K. does not have laws permitting this yet. Many parts of the U.S. and Canada do. In Australia, adoptees can annul their adoptions, achieving the same result.

Exiled mothers and the adult children they lost as infants to the adoption industry (via agencies, maternity homes, social workers, hospitals that routinely removed babies from unwed mothers, etc.)

There are four parties in any infant adoption: the agency, its customers who wish to adopt, the natural parents, and her baby.

Two of these parties held power: the agency and the adopters. Two held little if any power: the natural parents and her infant. The agency (maternity home, social workers, government, hospital etc.) obtained the baby and had the power to broker it as a commodity. The customers had money and societal approval and the "purchasing power" to pay the fee for the commodity. The infant had no power to make any decisions and most times the natural mother didn't either. Most surrenders were, and still are, coerced, with mothers losing children they loved and wanted to keep. Others made decisions affecting the mother and child.: including terminating their legal parent-child relationship and thus making them legal strangers to one another.

A natural mother's love for her child, her desire to reunite with her child, is proof that she never wanted to lose this child to begin with, that her child was not unwanted or unloved.

Now that many natural mothers amd the adult children they had lost to adoption are reuniting and re-establishing loving family relationships, some reunited families are taking back what had been been forceably removed from them: Filiation, the legal recognition of being related to another person.

The once-powerless now have the power to make a decision for themselves re the legal status of their personal family relationship.

After reunion, when the adopted person is a legal adult. In a society valuing rights and freedoms, two consenting adults should have the right and freedom to choose to re-establish a family relationship which was previously removed from the two of them by force.

Also, when the child is still a minor, if/when adopters realize that the natural parents of the child they are raising were coerced or forced to surrender and give their consent to the adopting-back process.

Restoring the legal recognition of a family (parent/child) relationship could be done by either (1) adoptees terminating their adoption, or (2) natural parents "adopting-back" our adult children (with their consent).

• Is there any reason to limit anyone to having only two legal parents?
• What about name changes?
• What is a family?
• What about inheritance rights?
• Sealed adoption records from infant-adoption: Shouldn't they be opened if you're being "adopted back" by your natural parents or terminate your adoption? Why should they be closed at all?
• What about people who have adopted infants who are now adults?
• How might this affect the adoption industry if its "commodities" can decide to return to their natural families again as adults?

When they were infants, "adoptees" were not given the right to choose - they were traded as commodities in many cases, with money changing hands between customer and business. Shouldn't they, as adults, have the right to choose their legally-recognized families? The once-powerless finally have the power to decide.

"Adoption Loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful" - The Reverend Keith C. Griffith, MBE

"Adoption is a violent act, a political act of aggression towards a woman who has supposedly offended the sexual mores by committing the unforgivable act of not suppressing her sexuality, and therefore not keeping it for trading purposes through traditional marriage. The crime is a grave one, for she threatens the very fabric of our society. The penalty is severe. She is stripped of her child by a variety of subtle and not so subtle manoeuvres and then brutally abandoned." - Joss Shawyer, Death by Adoption, Cicada Press (1979)

Share Your Story? Have you adopted back your child? Have you, as an adult, been adopted back? Have you terminated your adoption? Are you now a former adoptee? Please share your story with others. Email it to contact@adoptingback.com