With new adoption legislation promised, it is vital that those dealing with women with crisis pregnancies have a full understanding of the adoption option, writes Olive Braiden
The Crisis Pregnancy Agency's mandate is to prepare strategies to provide for a reduction in the number of women with a crisis pregnancy opting for abortion by offering services and supports which make other options, such as adoption or parenting, more attractive.
The agency has just published its latest piece of research, which was undertaken to assess the level of service provision in domestic adoption and crisis pregnancy counselling services in Ireland. The research has thrown up a number of important pointers.
Adoption is an option chosen less and less frequently in recent years. The Crisis Pregnancy Agency's research, which was supported by the Adoption Board and carried out by the department of social policy and social work at UCD, paints a very different view of adoption in Ireland today compared to earlier years.
The research had information on 12,693 women who experienced a crisis pregnancy in 2002. Of this group, 162 seriously considered adoption as a solution. Of this group, 40.8 per cent decided to keep their baby after birth, 26.2 per cent placed their baby in temporary foster care before having the baby adopted, 14.6 per cent took their baby back after placing it in temporary foster care, and 3.8 per cent placed their baby in long-term foster care. In the remaining 14.6 per cent of cases, the final outcome was unknown in the research.
As is clear from this, the majority of those who considered adoption at some point eventually decided to keep their baby. This is in comparison to the thousands who went for adoption as an option in the 1950s and 1960s.
The research has highlighted that frontline professionals, such as GPs, social workers, counsellors and others, who are likely to be the first point of contact with women with a crisis pregnancy, are reluctant to present adoption as an option either because of the negative stigma that society perceives as now attaching to adoption, or due to a lack of information about current domestic adoption practices.
The Crisis Pregnancy Agency wants services to improve for women with crisis pregnancies and we wish for all of the options to be presented. The agency believes Majioritythat people working in the field of crisis pregnancy, including GPs, nurses, counsellors and social workers, need to be fully versed in adoption as an option for women.
As the research makes clear, service providers and key communicators working in the field of crisis pregnancy need to be fully versed in the issues surrounding adoption as an option today, not as it was in years gone by.
To address these needs we have developed a range of materials to be sent to GPs, youth workers, social workers, school counsellors and anyone who might be in contact with a woman with an unplanned pregnancy.
The availability of open adoptions, where the birth parents have some continuing contact with the child, was an important consideration of the birth mothers who participated in the research.
The current arrangements in Ireland for open adoption are voluntary and unenforceable.
The study supports calls for legal provisions to be put in place to ensure that where a birth parent wishes to have continued contact with his or her child after making an adoption order, such contact should be made a condition of the adoption order and be legally enforceable. The Crisis Pregnancy Agency supports proposals by Minister of State for Children Brian Lenihan to publish legislation to make this provision in the autumn.
The Minister is also correct in saying, as he did when he officially launched our research on the role of adoption in crisis pregnancy, that legislation is only one part of making open adoption a positive option for women in crisis pregnancies. Adoption has to be explained and presented by professionals dealing with women with crisis pregnancies and there must be much better linkage between crisis pregnancy counselling services and adoption counselling services.
Because of the small number of domestic adoptions - there were just 76 non-family adoptions of Irish children in 2002 - we must also ensure that there is a professionalism, consistency and competency across the country in the kind of information and procedures in relation to adoption that are available to women with crisis pregnancies.
To this end, the Crisis Pregnancy Agency has developed a manual of good practice and other resources for frontline professionals who are likely to be consulted by women with crisis pregnancies. Through these, the agency is working to develop better links between professionals, bringing GPs, social workers in maternity hospitals and adoption counselling services into better contact with one another.
The Crisis Pregnancy Agency is seeking to remove many of the barriers that women feel exist in accessing counselling, including cost, waiting lists, refusal of information and the perception of counselling agencies and counselling.
The agency is also putting training in place to up-skill crisis pregnancy counsellors, to standardise delivery and to promote good practice in the field.
The Crisis Pregnancy Agency already has a very strong record in developing technology-based services and we will be looking further at web-based information sites and text services to meet the needs of those seeking information on counselling services for crisis pregnancies. We have received 200,000 inquiries for information via text message on our text service since its establishment.
While this highlights clearly the need for easy-access/user-friendly services, it also tells us that while we have come a long way in our attitude towards crisis pregnancy, women still appreciate the fact that they can obtain the information privately and anonymously.
Olive Braiden is chairperson of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency. The full text of the research report is available at www.crisispregnancy.ie and www.adoptionboard.ie