Too many books? Yes, we had too many books. That’s what our social worker told us when we were being assessed to see whether we were suitable parents to adopt a baby from China back in 1996. It seemed to us, a middle-class, well-educated couple, an extraordinary statement and so it appeared to our friends and acquaintances. But that was, and is still to some extent, the credo at work in assessing potential adoptive parents.
A significant number of social workers continue to believe that a child should be matched as closely as possible with the social class and ethnic background of the adoptive parents, even if that means children being held in institutional care far longer than is good for them. An adoption textbook, published in the 1970s but still being used in the late 1990s, has the following advice, which has endured: ‘Where the choice is between the foreman of a factory and the managing director, all other things being equal, we would favour the foreman as an adopter.’
We took the agency that turned us down to a tribunal and won the right to be assessed by a second one, which approved us. Three-and-a-half years after our first letter (what my husband called an ‘elephantine pregnancy’), we finally brought our daughter home.
The world has moved on since the 1990s. China closed its doors to overseas adoption last November after 32 years. This followed the abandonment of the one-child policy, introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to ease an exploding population, which resulted in tens of thousands of baby girls being left in fields, parks or outside orphanages.
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