Born Bad. Blame the Mother.
Rescue in the shadow of eugenics
It’s been seven decades since New Zealand introduced a statutory process to erase and replace a person’s identity without consent. In all that time, there has never been a single study on the adult outcomes of adoption.
There is, however, one New Zealand study, albeit in teenagers.
In 1995, researchers published a longitudinal study titled The Adolescent Outcomes of Adoption. It was part of the Christchurch Health and Development Study (CHDS). (not to be confused with the Dunedin study.)
On the surface, this single study appears to confirm a familiar narrative: adoption takes children from disadvantaged origins and offers them a materially improved life.
Framed exclusively through socioeconomic metrics: better health care, more stable two-parent homes, and greater educational opportunities, it seemed to work.
However, when they measured external behaviour in teenagers, the picture changed.
Despite their social advantages, adopted teens exhibited significantly higher rates of conduct and oppositional disorders, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, self-reported offending, police contact, alcohol problems, daily cigarette smoking and cannabis use.
Was adoption itself at fault? The authors of the study concluded:
“The profile of the adopted group is thus paradoxical to the extent that they had a relatively advantaged childhood but had rates of disorder that were higher than those of children reared in biological two parent families of equivalent social backgrounds.”
“These results suggest that the rates of disorder in adoptive children may have been more closely related to the social characteristics of their biological parents than to the background of the adoptive parents.”
The researchers continue:
“These results support the conclusion that adoption is a process which results in some degree of upward social mobility and that adoptees are children who come from relatively disadvantaged biological family backgrounds and enter relatively advantaged adoptive family situations.”
A disadvantaged biological family background included maternal age, education, smoking during pregnancy, church attendance, and ethnicity.
Adoptive mothers were also assessed for age and education. But not for ethnicity or churchgoing practices. Instead, the researchers appear to assume adopters were non-Māori, non-Pasifika Christians, thus embedding a quiet presumption of whiteness and cultural superiority in the framework of social “advantage.”
The socio-economic status of the mother’s family of origin was assessed using the Elley-Irving scale of socio-economic status for New Zealand. The socio-economic status of the adoptive mother was also evaluated, but applied only to the current adoptive household, not their family of origin.
This biologically deterministic setup ensured the “paradoxical” behaviours would only reflect supposedly inherited risk factors. By pathologising the adopted teens’ actions, the researchers turned their behaviour into evidence of an innate deficiency.
There is no evidence in this study that they attempted to understand the psychosocial experience of being raised under legal and genealogical erasure.
The researcher’s speculations on the cause of the behaviour deviations settled on genetic inheritance.
This old eugenic logic completely ignores biological fathers. They are not mentioned in the methods, results, or discussion sections.
The entire analysis of “biological background” focuses exclusively on mothers. Only mothers.
As if adoption were a treatment for being born to the wrong kind of woman.
The Adolescent Outcomes of Adoption Study reveals adoption as a form of soft eugenics, a system still embedded in the legal and economic structure of New Zealand.
By removing selected infants from their mothers and later measuring them for compliance, the state was engaged in a social experiment to test the underlying belief that genes determine social outcomes.
After all, the researchers explicitly rejected the role and dynamics of the adopters and their families:
“There was no evidence of such pathology... adoptees appeared to experience advantaged patterns of child rearing... family stability... material wellbeing.”
In addition, no matter their data showing elevated psychological distress in adopted teens, the ideological heart of The Adolescent Outcomes of Adoption Study is clear: adoption persists not because it works, but because it affirms the state’s right to transfer children based on social value.
The study endorses the continued utility of adoption as a child welfare mechanism, even in the complete absence of ongoing welfare support or oversight of adoptive placements.
In reality, the system the study affirms is not designed to safeguard children, but to supply them to resolve the infertility problems of adopters.
Of course, this 1995 study could be passed off as a document of its time and ideology, but it’s worth noting that it continues to be widely cited in adoption research. Though citation counts vary by database, it has appeared in the reference lists of numerous academic studies, most recently in 2023.
Last year, under the Official Information Act, Oranga Tamariki, the Ministry for Children, directed me to this study as evidence of adoption outcome research.
Its enduring presence in the literature provides an outsized influence on how adoption outcomes are interpreted and policy is shaped. That makes it all the more urgent to interrogate not just the data, but the story the data is made to tell.
The Adolescent Outcomes of Adoption uses data to uphold the fiction that adoption saves children from their origins, while quietly advancing eugenic assumptions about the intelligence and worth of single mothers and their offspring.
If an adopted person stays out of trouble, it’s credited to the adopters’ care. If they don’t, the blame reverts to their mother’s genes. Either way, the system protects itself.
Here’s a handy chart to view the “paradoxical” adolescent outcomes of forced stranger adoption.
And this...more of my critical analysis re: the language of Adoption and the failure of the INDUSTRY to acknowledge the harm done to millions - millions of mothers and babies - worldwide. This woman (Clothier) has much for which to answer.
'In 1943, American child psychiatrist Florence Clothier was the first in her field to claim trauma
is common to all “adoptees”. She argues those who grow up without knowing their parents or
any of their blood-kin have ‘lost the thread of family continuity’ (p. 222). She asserts our ‘deep
identification...with our forebears’ is originally experienced ‘in the mother-child relationship’
and it is our relationship to our mothers which provides us with ‘our most fundamental
security’. Clothier writes...
... every adopted child at some point in his development, has been deprived of
this primitive relationship with his mother. This trauma and the severing of
the individual from his racial antecedents lie at the core of what is peculiar to
the psychology of the adopted child. The adopted child presents all the
complications in social and emotional development seen in the own child. But
the ego of the adopted child, in addition to all the normal demands made upon
it, is called upon to compensate for the wound left by the loss of the biological
[sic] mother. Later on this appears as an unknown void, separating the adopted
child from his fellows whose blood ties bind them to the past as well as to the
future (pp. 222 - 223).
At first Clothier seems to empathise with the adopted child’s loss of ‘his mother’ but then,
according to her training and profession, she diagnoses the “adoptee” with a wounded ego and
turns to what her readers need to know about their patients. At one fell swoop, after
identifying the lifelong impact of separation trauma, the adopted child is defined as needing
assistance to compensate for the loss of ‘the biological mother’.
Clothier was influential in the training of mid-twentieth century adoption industry workers. She played a significant role in the development of the twentieth century adoption system – that is, implementation of the“clean-break” theory as maternity hospital policy and practice. Adoption industry workers’ training was ‘aimed at making it possible for mothers ‘to give up her baby’ and to “help” single mothers better ‘understand their neurosis’, even if that involved ‘suffering for the patient or the risk of untoward results’ (Clothier, 1941, p. 584, as cited by Cole, 2008, p. 16).'
So, the trauma and damage done has been known - from the beginning of modern Adoption legislation which developed and allowed the systemic theft of millions of new-born human beings from their mothers and families.
The mistake all f their poor research makes is they still believe an infant is tabula rasa. The fact is infants can make long term memory and will record a trauma when separated from the mother. This trauma drives the behavior and emotional problems we see later in life.