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33
"The adoption as you know is illegal, and the only
method of dealing with the case seems to be through your
Authority. I have suggested to the Secretary this morning
that he should write to you so that whatever is done can be
done on an amicable basis, as the adopting parents of course
have the right to put the child outside the gate, in which
case of course she would be brought to your Institution, but
I think it will be far better if the thing can be done in
decency and in order.
" I enclose herewith a copy of my letter to the legal
Adviser to the Society, from which you will see the line I
took up then. The old Society officers fought against the
child being taken back, but the present regime have recognised
that in justice to the adopting parents the only thing
to do is to relieve them of a burden which cannot be fastened
on them by the law."
Eventually in the Autumn the child was got away to a
Home, under the Middlesex County Council, and the adopting
parents freed from what had been latterly an intolerable burden.
The tragedy of it all is this. The adopted child, owing to
its mental defect, was not in a position to realise the advantages
of its adoption. The adopting parents have now passed the age
when they want to undertake another adoption, and some normal
child has been deprived of a home in good circumstances, with
people whose childless life had left them with an aching hunger
for someone on whom to bestow their affection ; their patience
in the early years of this tragedy was pathetic.
I wish to pay a special tribute to the assistance rendered by
Miss Musson, the Secretary of the Society for the Unmarried
Mother and her child, and also to the present Secretary of the
National Children Adoption Association, who, recognising the
justice of the fight I was making, entirely reversed the attitude
I met with at the beginning.
It does seem to me imperative that there should be an
amending Bill, so as to safeguard adopting parents. As I
pointed out in the correspondence, they postulate when they adopt
a child that they are being given a normal child, and that they
have a right to expect that it is normal, and should the child turn
out to be abnormal it is surely their right that the adoption
should be cancelled