by John Welford

Created on: July 02, 2008   Last Updated: July 10, 2009

I am living proof of the benefits of adoption, having been adopted back in the early 1950s when a baby. Had that option not been available, my life would have been very different. It might not even have started, had abortion been considered as the alternative, which is so often the case today.

Having pieced the story together over the years, I gather that my birth mother found herself pregnant by a friend of her husband, who was away on overseas service in the Army. She was given an ultimatum, namely that either she went or the baby did. So I went!

Meanwhile, a family hundreds of miles away was incomplete. In giving birth to her daughter, the mother was rendered incapable of having any more children of her own. Adoption was therefore the only way in which they could have the son and brother they wanted.

The fact that adoption was freely and easily available meant that everyone benefited. A child had a proper family life and was given chances that he would not have had otherwise. A marriage was saved. A family was completed. This just has to be the ultimate win-win-win.

My circumstances were relatively straightforward, but it is also true that many adoption scenarios are complex and distressing. There is currently much discussion in the UK about the merits or otherwise of cross-cultural adoption, although the general consensus that is emerging is that the child's welfare is paramount and the color of their skin is immaterial when it comes to adoption. We are a rainbow nation anyway.

Adoption is never undertaken without a lot of background work being done to ensure that the adoptive family will be able to give the child the love and support he/she needs. At least in the UK, finance is not a major issue, as a relatively poor family can be just as good as a rich one in offering a secure and happy home. Adoption is seen as a service offered by both the adoption agency and the adopting family, and there is no question of children being bought and sold.

I have recently been editing the life story of someone whose early life paralleled my own, in that we were both unwanted as young children. He and his brother and sister were not adopted, but were brought up in separate children's homes. Their lives were far from easy and they went through a whole catalog of abuse and deprivation that has affected them throughout their lives. Indeed, the brother's life was cut tragically short when he took a drugs overdose while still a teenager. The sister has disappeared, and the surviving brother has no idea what happened to her.

The irony of the situation is that these children grew up only a few miles from where I was brought up by a loving, adoptive family. Indeed, I used to cycle past one of the children's homes on my way to school, little knowing what was going on inside, or that the path of one of its inmates would cross with mine more than forty years later.

This story brings home to me the true benefit of adoption. Every child has a right to a happy life, filled with hope for the future. Circumstances beyond the child's control do not always make that possible, but there is hope for many of them, and for the donor and adoptive families, through the fact that adoption exists.

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