For the greater part of the 20th century Ireland was marked by a culture of shame that separated thousands of women from their children, many of whom were forcibly given up for adoption. The trauma inflicted by these separations was compounded by legal barriers that prevented adopted people from accessing information about themselves.<\/p>\n
However, on Tuesday May 12, the Irish government published a draft bill that would give those adopted the right to access their birth information. This comes in the wake of decades of activism by adopted people<\/a> and their supporters, and has the potential to significantly reform an adoption system historically marked by secrecy, shame and the trauma arising from institutionalisation<\/a>.<\/p>\n In modern Ireland, institutions such as mother and baby homes and the Magdalene Laundries<\/a> were tasked by the state to deal with \u201cfallen\u201d women who had transgressed ideals of Irish femininity, especially by becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Their children were either boarded out to foster parents, institutionalised, or adopted by families of the same faith, some as far away as America, and \u2013 as survivors, advocates and researchers have long maintained<\/a> \u2013 often under questionable circumstances.<\/p>\n Many searches by birth parents and children have been thwarted (as poignantly captured in the Oscar-nominated film Philomena<\/a>), and adopted people in Ireland have been denied information about themselves \u2013 if it still exists \u2013 that is readily available in other jurisdictions. Although there have been media investigations and the government commissioned a 2019 review<\/a> into a small sample of illegal adoptions, and published its mother and baby homes investigation<\/a> in March, there has never been a fully fledged investigation into adoption practices in Ireland.<\/p>\n The information we do have, including testimony from adopted people and their birth parents, calls into question the legality and morality of such practices. A recent RT\u00c9 Prime Time investigation<\/a> showed how familial relationships were deliberately and systematically severed, with children taken and given away \u2013 all to enforce a particular moral code.<\/p>\n That code, as we now know, was highly problematic, informed by a social conservatism and Catholic moral teaching that particularly penalised women and children. As with so many investigations into Ireland\u2019s past, shame featured here as a frame with which powerful figures \u2013 seemingly acting with impunity \u2013 established women as deserving or undeserving of children.<\/p>\n Shame, and the potential revealing of one\u2019s \u201cshame\u201d of being pregnant, was used as a means of control. The fall-out from this culture and the consequences of its secretive and illegal separation of women and children, was movingly related by adopted people in the RT\u00c9 documentary. They highlighted the ongoing hurt such practices have caused down through the generations, compounded by their inability to access their birth records.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nPunishing women and their children<\/h2>\n