Jilly Cooper: Why can’t we adopt newborns any more?
Children in care damaged by delays, claims author
UNABLE to start a family naturally, Jilly Cooper describes the children she adopted as her ‘miracles’.
But the author believes social workers and the bureaucracy surrounding adoption today ‘damage’ youngsters.
Her children, property developer Felix and make-up artist Emily, are now in their 40s. But today, she says, it is now almost impossible to adopt a ‘white, newborn baby’.
Under reforms made to the 1989 Children Act, it can now take anywhere between six months and two-and-a-half years to adopt.
Mrs Cooper, 79, said: ‘I bonded with [my children] from the start because they were such miracles.
‘We got Emily in six weeks and Felix in six days, something that would never happen now if you wanted a white, newborn baby.
‘Children are put into homes and then social workers, probably for all the right reasons, take months, sometimes years, finding a suitable family. But, by that stage, a child’s personality has been shaped and, dare I say it, sometimes damaged.’
Mrs Cooper, who was married to her late husband Leo for 52 years before his death from Parkinson’s disease in 2013, made her comments in Woman’s Weekly magazine. The author and Mr Cooper adopted after a doctor told her she was unable to conceive naturally, back in the days when young girls were encouraged to give up their babies for adoption.
Mrs Cooper once suggested she never would have been a novelist had she given birth, saying: ‘I got the fantastic bonus of a career, suddenly becoming a writer.
‘From infertility came this explosion of creativity.’
She has also cited her desire for babies as one of the reasons behind some of her more risqué work.
‘I so longed for a baby,’ she once said, ‘that we didn’t bother with birth control. Perhaps for this reason, my books have never been precautionary tales.’
While the process of adoption was much speedier, with minimal red tape, in the 1960s and 70s, today there are many stages, and reams of paperwork, prospective parents must complete. Local councils and other agency adoption panels are heavily involved in the notoriously complex process.
Would-be parents must undergo a rigorous assessment of their circumstances and background which is usually carried out by the local authority.
The child is then subject to a Placement Order, which must have the consent of his or her birth par- ents. During this period, the child is placed in care. A 2011 report by the Department for Education found children spent 2.7 years on average in care before being adopted.
It also revealed only 60 babies were adopted out of a total of 3,050 children adopted overall – a drop from the 3,330 total in 2007. Some 65,520 children were in care in the same period, up from 59,970 four years previously.