There are “local authorities” that are part of the adoption council in each city or state. Point 1 of article 7 states: “Each of these local authorities, as mentioned above, has the power to arrange for and participate in the adoption of children as part of its functions under a law relating to children.” All local authorities have the right to review the documents of potential adopters; they kept and had access to registers of children in adoption societies; and legal action could be taken if they found things that were not appropriate. It should be noted that unmarried persons and same-sex couples are allowed to adopt jointly, and the concept of special guardianship has also been introduced, whereby a child can be cared for in a jurisdiction by a person with rights similar to those of a traditional legal guardian. however, without the requirement of absolute separation from the dissolution of the marital bond from the biological parents of the child. How should the transition from birth to adoptive parent affect the adoptive parent? The Tomlin Committee had no difficulty in recommending that adoption should effectively transfer to adopters the right to what may perhaps be called guardianship of the child, and the 1926 Act provided for such a transfer in resounding language.42 But the Committee43 took a cautious approach (p. 604)44 On the question of the right of succession of an adopted child and the impact of an adoption decision on the degree of marriage prohibited: an adoption order under the 192645 Act has left unchanged the position of the adopted child in these two areas. The Children Act 1948 imposes extensive obligations on local authorities to care for children, and local authorities have the power to assume parental rights over children in their care in certain circumstances. This was not a legal presumption; But he began to realize that adoption could be an effective long-term solution for the child who would otherwise likely remain in a children`s home or other form of community care. Adoption was also used in a way that was certainly unpredictable in 1926: stepparents and family members increasingly resorted to adoption as a technique to make them the parents of the child who was actually living in their household. The 1926 Act did not satisfy a large number of people professionally involved in the placement of adoptions. In particular, adoption societies tended to attach great importance to “secrecy,” which meant (as the Tomlin Committee put it)46 “that the transaction itself should not be public knowledge, but that the parties themselves should not know each other, that is, the biological parent should not know where the child is going… ». The Committee47 dismissed these concerns; And when the Lord Chancellor`s officials came to write rules, they assumed that to ensure that the biological parents` consent to adoption was genuine and informed, the court should see the biological parent (p. 605) and that the biological parent should also know what should happen to their child.48 If it is not a mother, Who proposes to hand over his child to a stranger, wants to be satisfied The character and personality of the adopters? Didn`t she want to know something about the house where her child was to grow up? For these reasons, the adoption order49 provided that not only the names but also the addresses of the adoptive parents had to be indicated on the form required for the granting of parental consent.

I am very grateful to Dr. Grey for his positive and detailed review of my book A Child for Keeps. He raises a number of useful points in his analysis of this issue. In particular, it highlights the problem of lack of access to adoption and adoption society records, which makes research very difficult for those attempting to write a social rather than a political history of adoption. I hope that at some point, one of the major charities that have made adoptions as part of its child rescue efforts will be persuaded by a persuasive researcher to provide access to its records. I didn`t succeed with this, but I did my research in the late 1990s/early 2000s and the 1920s are now even further away from us. Alternatively, one of these charities may consider having its institutional history written by an academic researcher who could examine its adoption work in the context of its broader activities.