As of October 2019, all Australian states and territories except South Australia have fully decriminalised abortion. I hate to say this, but it’ll be a matter of time before SA joins the rest of Australia, and I can’t see these laws changing in the future. That leaves us with trying to foster a pro-life culture, but how can that be done? Answer: adoption reform.

I came across a fantastic 2015 opinion piece in the ABC’s The Drum by Dr Jeremy Sammut titled “Our reluctance towards adoption is hurting children”. Here are the important points from the piece:

“… The case for increasing the numbers of overseas adoptions in Australia is that in many foreign countries, children who cannot live with their parents end up spending their childhoods living in ‘institutional’ care, aka orphanages.

The case for increasing the number of local adoptions is different, and yet the same: more Australian children need to be adopted from care in order to prevent many of these children also spending their childhoods in ‘institutions’…

In the early 1970s, there were more than 8,500 local adoptions annually in Australia. The dramatic decline is correctly attributed to social changes: widespread availability and use of contraception, increased abortions, and the introduction of government benefits for single mothers, which eradicated the practice of ‘forced adoptions’ of children of unwed mothers…

Given the harm that past child removal practices did to children, parents, and families, some might argue that the low numbers of adoptions in Australia is a mercy. It is true that adoption was done badly in the past: adoptions were ‘closed’, meaning children did not have contact with birth parents and extended families, and children were treated as ‘blank slates’ with no previous identity and heritage. This created a sense of loss, confusion, and isolation among some adopted children.

But we have learnt the lessons of the past. This is the reason adoptions, both overseas and local, are ‘open’ these days, with opportunities for continuing contact with birth families. Adoptive parents are also made aware of — and recognise the need to cultivate — children’s cultural identities…

The real obstacle to increasing local adoptions is that Australian child protection authorities are wedded to the idea of family preservation.

This means that action is taken to remove children from unsafe homes only as a ‘last resort’, and when removal does occur it is only temporary, with all efforts made to reinstate children in the home as quickly as possible.

The problem with family preservation is that child protection social workers give priority to supporting even highly dysfunctional parents via taxpayer-funded social service interventions in an often futile effort to address the serious and hard-to-resolve issues that impede proper parenting (welfare dependence, single-parenthood, substance abuse, domestic violence and mental illness).

The emphasis placed on keeping children together at nearly all costs profoundly harms children by both prolonging the time children spend in the custody of abusive or neglectful parents, and the time they spend languishing in foster care placements while awaiting family reunions that are highly prone to breakdown, forcing children to re-enter care multiple times…”

Sometimes I hate being realistic: I think the pro-life movement in Australia needs to consider redirecting their energy to pushing for adoption reform as a way to reignite a pro-life culture in our society. At the very least it is a way to reduce abortion regret rates. Winning the war against the abortion industry post-Abortion Law Reform Act 2019 (NSW) has gotten even harder, and the movement has no choice but to regroup and reattack the abortion industry in new ways. As they say, the definition of insanity is…