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Fertility, Birth and Adoption News

Births - A little girl in the Phillipines named Danica has been named the 7 billionth child born in the world. I'm not sure how they pinpointed her, or the Phillipines, but assume that it was symbolic.

All women giving birth in the UK are to be given the choice over having a caesarean delivery, according to The Sunday Times. The NHS has previously limited caesarean sections on the basis of medical need; however, according to the National Institute for Health & Clinical Excellence (NICE), women should be able to make an informed choice. It could help women who have experienced some trauma in previous childbirth. This decision is not without controversy. There are doctors who do not believe in performing surgery that is not medically required, but they will have to refer their interested patients to other NHS doctors who are willing to perform the c-section. Doctors are also concerned about the added financial burden on the NHS, as a caesarean costs approximately £800 more per patient than vaginal delivery.

Adoption - David Cameron has announced that there will be a crackdown against the worst performing Councils who ban certain people from adopting, frown on cross-culture adoption or delay the process by taking too long to carry out investigations of potential adoptive parents. As it stands now, some local authorities refuse to consider smokers or overweight people as adoptive parents, while others won't allow white people to adopt black children, even if there is a shortage of black parental candidates.

Martin Narey, Cameron's adviser on adoption, is the former chief executive of Barnardo's the children's charity. He stated this weekend that while it is important for the system to be rigorous in vetting potential adoptive parents, it should move much more quickly than it does. At present, only about 60 children are permanently adopted each year in Britain. Baroness Oona King, the former MP, spoke movingly on TV news this morning about the delays in the adoption process that "lost" her the first 13 months of each of her adopted children's lives.

The team behind Fertility Road and the Fertility World Show launch Pink Parenting

Congratulations to Jeff Crockett and Giorgiou Severi on the upcoming publication of their new glossy magazine, Pink Parenting, next month and on Tuesday's feature in i, the mini-newspaper put out by the Independent.  If you don't know of them already, Jeff and Giorgiou are also the publishers of European glossy, Fertility Road, as well as the team behind the Fertility World Show which debuted in London this year.

Same-sex couples who are parenting have been in the public eye this year more than ever, as celebrities lead the way in talking about their new families, including Elton John and David Furnish, pop star Ricky Martin, and actresses Cynthia Nixon and Jane Lynch.  Meanwhile, behind the scenes, gay couples have been quietly creating families through sperm donation, surrogacy and adoption.  Under the Adoption and Children Act of 2002, same-sex couples have exactly the same right as heterosexual couples to adopt in England and Wales. In practice, however, it hasn't always been so straightforward for gay couples to find the help they needed to create their families of choice. Thankfully, this is now turning around, with research and polls suggesting that:

• same-sex parents can make better parents than a woman and man;
• children of gay parents are no more or less likely to be gay; and
• approximately 64% of people think that same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt.

I wish Jeff and Giorgiou every success in their new venture. As Giorgiou said about gay surrogacy and adoption in i, "the world is ready for it now.

Fertility World Show, NEC Birmingham, 22 - 23 October, 2011.

 

The adoption scheme that is flourishing in Harrow

I love spreading news of a family-building scheme that works. Put children who need loving, capable parents together with adults who have love and a nurturing home to share together. It sounds simple, but we know it isn't. As with many other social services in Britain, there is a postcode lottery, meaning that parentless or homeless children in some locales have a better chance of being adopted than a child elsewhere. Statutory guidelines differ, the view of adoption as the best option can vary among local authorities and social workers can dismiss prospective parents who don't "match" waiting children, failing to refer them to neighbouring authorities where they may find a better match.

The Times has gone so far as to call the overall scheme in this country "Britain's adoption crisis;" a result of only 2% of children in care being adopted last year in places such as Croydon, the worst performing council of all in Greater London. "Across England, the rate of adoption has been static for the past four years, with 13% of children in care being adopted annually." That begs the question of what is happening to the other 87% of children who don't have a real home. People who want families have been long put off by how difficult it can be to wade through the challenging bureaucratic tangle of the adoption services. They can face rigourous scrutiny, perhaps warranted, but also negativity, overly strict rules on ethnic "matching," long delays and an overall lack of support.

I was surprised and delighted to hear that my own local council, Harrow, is doing far better than most. According to Rosemary Bennett in The Times, the council that had one of the worst records of adoption in the country is approaching "best" now. The longer a child is in the care of social services, the harder it is to find them a permanent home, the more detrimental to the child's emotional wellbeing and the greater the financial cost to the community. Harrow's record of moving only 2 - 3% of children from care to an aoptive family, as recently as 2005, indicated ineptitude, but credit is due to someone at the local authority for realiing that they needed outside help to turn it around. They brought in 2 social workers and an administrator who were employed by Coram, a children's charity, and instituted controversial, but ultimately successful, systems.

This is what is working here in Harrow:

• The Coram staff work full-time in the local authority, find and assess prospective families, resulting in a pool of approximately 60 adoptive families under consideration at any one time;
• Adoption is considered from the outset, every time a child is taken into care, regardless of the age, race, religion, disability or number of siblings involved;
• The adoption plan is considered simultaneously with other plans which investigate how to support the child within their birth family, so that no time is wasted;
• the decision on whether or not a child should be adopted is taken within 4 months of arriving into care, exceeding the national guideline of 6 months; and
• 100% of those children are actually placed within a year.

Last year 20% of children placed in care in Harrow were either adopted or placed under a special guardianship order. Peter Tolley, service manager in charge of children's placements, said in The Times; "[W]hen these children read their records in the future, we want them to be able to see that every option was considered, that there was robust discussion, and that a lot of time and energy went into making the decision we believe is right for them." This message makes me feel personally very optimistic. Not only will more children be taken into families and private homes, but also that they will have a better understanding of why and how that transition took place, perhaps aiding their sense of belonging. Every child matters, but the longer they are a part of a government "system" and not part of a family, the less they may feel they matter. Their security and sense of personal self-worth are at stake andit is up to us to safeguard them.

Hopefully, Harrow Council will improve even further on their record, with the help of the Coram Harrow Partnership. In the meantime, if you are hoping to adopt, it pays to investigate the record of your local authority. and possibly, to move.

 

 

 

Steering IVF patients toward adoption from the start

How would you feel, if on your very first visit to the doctor regarding IVF, you were given an information pack about adoption?

Last week, there was a news report that Tim Loughton, the UK government minister for children and families, announced an initiative to prime childless couples for adoption, rather than fertility treatment. Loughton is concerned that there are too many children in care and too few being placed with families. Only 70 babies were adopted in the UK last year. He has a point. Is it too obvious to state that it is preferable to give a child a stable, loving family environment than to have them grow up in orphanages or foster care? He has good intentions, and the need is present, however, I wonder whether you have thoughts about the method he intends to employ?

Loughton apparently wants to get to childless couples before they begin the medical process to attempt assisted conception. His reasoning is that "they are clearly committed to bringing up children." He may be right, but I think he's missing a step here. At that point, on their very first appointment, they are committed to having and bringing up their own children. I fear that his proposed leafletting might be damaging, both emotionally to the infertile couple and in having the counter-productive impact of sending potential parents running. 

First,  a couple that has just begun to wonder why it's taking so long to conceive is hardly going to think of themselves as childless...yet. They may just be coming around to the realization that they need medical help to have a child, and think that once it's sorted, they will go along their merry way and have the family they want.

Second, it's jumping the gun a bit to approach a couple about adoption, when they are just exploring how medical treatment can help them to have their own child. Children aren't commodities. It's not like going to the shops to place an order for a sold-out product, and being offered a returned item instead.  I believe that with the vast majority of patients, the highest priority will be placed on having their own biological child at that point in the process. They will only be seeking guidance and approval on how to go about it. Some will find this type of information premature and disregard it; others may take comfort that it provides them with a Plan B, while still others may find it hurtful, intrusive or insulting.

Third, for many infertile people, the idea of being like "everyone else" and having a child who joins them as a couple and has recognizable, family traits is the ultimate choice.  We are romantic beings, wanting to recognize in our babies a mother's eyes, a father's smile, a grandparent's colouring or  a sibling's mannerism. With the advent of sperm and egg donation making the experience of pregnancy available to those who would otherwise have missed out, adoption is still seen by many as a last choice. There is not necessarily an immediate leap of consciousness from "why haven't I gotten pregnant this year?" to "let's adopt."

Mr. Loughton, finding out that you are infertile can be very difficult. If medical science can overcome infertility and give a couple what they want most, why shouldn't they go down that route? Additionally,a couple may need to go through a grieving process for the child they will not be able to bring into the world. They will not be receptive to your information packs until they have dealt with their grief. Sensitivity, time and coaching or counselling may be required to achieve acceptance of their situation and mental clarity about what IVF would entail in comparison to adoption. At present, adoption is not all that simple in the UK.

 I suspect that the difficult adoption process is the reason why only 3,200 children a year are adopted. Some people won't even bother trying because they have heard how notoriously difficult, intrusive and judgmental the process can be. The upper age limit for potential adoptive parents ranges between the ages of 35 and 40. Ironic then, that it is being proposed as the preferable option to IVF when many of those seeking treatment will be women in precisely that age range, cutting their chances rather close. Because people are getting married older, and women's fertility goes into rapid decline from age 35, it is often not until this age that they will seek IVF as an option to help them conceive.

It should be pointed out that besides the current, upper-age limit on adoption, the NHS cuts off funded IVF treatment at age 40. We might conclude from this that the government position has been that women aged 40 and older should not become parents, but apparently that's more about cost-effectiveness of treatment for women who have few healthy eggs remaining because of their age.  I wonder if cost plays a part in Loughton's new scheme, as diverting younger couples toward adoption would help both the NHS and Social Services reduce the stress on their budgets.

Adoption is a wonderful thing to do for an unwanted or parentless child and can create families where there would have been none. Thankfully, Tim Loughton wants to address the difficulty of adopting as well as shepherding would-be parents in that direction. He is quoted in The Sunday Times as saying that "the major consideration is [whether there is] a stable, loving environment to bring up a child [now] in care. There shouldn't be a hard and fast age limit or BMI (weight) index. We have older foster carers and we should consider older families to adopt."  He proposes that the upper age limit be lifted.

Tim, I couldn't agree with you more. But, please don't shoot yourself in the foot by pouncing too early on infertile couples who dream of having their own child. I propose that:

• the restrictions on adoption in the UK be revised first, so that more people can adopt;
• Then, a public awareness campaign can reach out to those who previously thought adoption was out-of-reach for them.;
• Only then would I target couples seeking IVF, in the sense of offering them alternatives to explore;
• Perhaps a simple, non-judgemental leaflet and questionnaire sent after an initial medical consultation could encourage those who would consider adopting instead of going through IVF;
• Couples who are willing to explore the idea of adoption could be offered coaching to help them weigh the pros and cons of IVF v. adoption as they apploy to them specifically, find common ground with each other on their values and priorities and make a positive choice for one or the other.