How to be Invisible

The high-stakes social experiment we call adoption.

Adoption does not happen in a vacuum. It is health politics at its most brutal. It is a state-sanctioned operation with a vast supporting cast.

Part two in the Adoption and Statistics series; read part one here.

Behind every adopted person is a network of social workers, maternity staff, child welfare officers, doctors, lawyers, record-keepers, politicians, bureaucrats, legislators and adopters — all facilitating the quiet erasure of kinship.

To justify the vast state machinery behind adoption, you'd expect at least one government agency to hold outcome data and statistical analysis on this seven-decades-long social experiment. But in Aotearoa New Zealand, no such evidence base exists.

Instead, the Ministry of Justice solicited public opinion on adoption law reform via two consultation documents in 2021 and 2022.

You can listen to this column here:

For many adopted people, the ministry's engagement felt performative, and there was no accountability. The discussion documents were masterclasses in positive adoption language, minimisation, conflation, strategic ambiguity, and intentional obfuscation. That’s a mouthful, I know, but I can think of no other way to describe them. (More on the discussion documents in a future essay)

In response to my queries about what would inform future law reform, the Ministry pledged to take a “life-course approach.”

What that means in practice – or for the lives already shaped by adoption – remains entirely unclear.

The Ministry’s language borrows from academia, but dumbs it down and strips it of context.

The term “life-course approach” emerged in the 1960s and is explored in The Handbook of the Life Course, which traces the concept back to German sociologist Karl Mannheim.

Writing in the 1920s, Mannheim argued that people shaped by the same formative events develop a shared worldview — a generational lens that influences how they experience life, systems, and power.

A proper life-course approach would centre the experiences of those adopted under New Zealand’s severance model, not just as children or adolescents, but as adults navigating fractured identities, inaccessible records, and legal fictions that persist into old age.

Life-course theory is not window dressing.

• It is the pre-eminent sociological tool for understanding how structural forces shape individual lives over time.

• It asks how early interventions, including state-imposed identity erasure, ripple through adulthood in health, relationships, behaviour, and belonging patterns.

• It’s used to track how childhood trauma affects adult disease, how poverty shapes criminalisation and how systemic forces embed disadvantage across a lifespan.

Applied properly, a life-course approach to adoption would, at a minimum, demand hard evidence such as longitudinal studies, health data, psychological outcomes, and legal barriers to equality.

While it’s been 70 years since the first crop of babies was forcibly or coercively

removed from their mothers and transferred to “good married couples,” all that lived experience of adoption does not equate to empirical, quantitative, longitudinal research on the lifetime outcomes of human adoption.

Devoid of data, a “life-course approach” is entirely inappropriate for creating legislation. The Ministry of Justice’s adoption law-reform team appears to have no plan or intention for how empirical evidence might be extracted from the life-course experiences of adopted adults.

What is relevant when making any new legislation is empirical data that can be examined to create statistics to support or refute the proposals.

However, the Ministry of Justice clearly accords data considerable value, as evident in a job description from 2023 when seeking applications for an analyst position:

We are looking for people as passionate about data as we are. We are united in a common goal of using data to drive insights to inform decision-making by justice sector leaders. We support justice agencies to work together to deliver ambitious results for a fair and safe Aotearoa. Your role as a Senior Analyst or an Analyst is as a catalyst for change and improvement based on empirical data. Not just hunches or maybes but well-researched, robust data which tells a clear and engaging story.

Just in case I was missing something, I asked under the Official Information Act (OIA) where the ministry was sourcing its New Zealand-based data in the adoption law reform discussion documents.

They replied that it came from the Department of Internal Affairs (data relating to citizenship), the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (data relating to Dependent Child Category Residence Visas), Oranga Tamariki, and from their own resources.[6] The Ministry of Justice refused access to the documents due to substantial collaboration and research.

A further query elicited a list of ten local publications, all without links:

Please note that in undertaking any policy process, the Ministry also refers to a wide range of international research, data, and other sources and these have not been provided in response to your request.

I return to the Ministry of Justice to ask for the empirical data they extracted from the ten local publications. Again, they refused because of the need for substantial collation.[9]

However, they did acknowledge that policy development is not linear or based solely on empirical data and that they have not conducted or commissioned longitudinal studies on adoption outcomes.

At that point, it made sense to go wider.

The Department of Internal Affairs said they do not hold any information on longitudinal studies that may have been conducted in Aotearoa on life-course outcomes for people adopted under the 1955 Adoption Act:

“We would recommend you contact Oranga Tamariki or the Ministry of Justice, who may have more information about studies relating to the 1955 Adoption Act.”[10] They also suggest contacting the police.

Okay.

Ministerial Services replied on behalf of the police by forwarding my OIA to the Ministry of Justice. (deep sigh)

The Ministry of Social Development said they haven’t conducted longitudinal studies on life-course outcomes for people adopted under the Adoption Act 1955:

“We are also not aware of any relevant studies conducted elsewhere. Therefore, your request is refused.”

The Department of Corrections said they do not request information on or hold records of whether an incarcerated person is adopted.

The Ministry of Justice added that adoption status is not recorded for criminal offences resulting in conviction.

Oranga Tamariki Ministry for Children (OT) also said:

“We have not completed any longitudinal or life-course outcome studies.”
“I am advised that the research that has been carried out in the area of life-course adoption outcomes is limited.”

However, they did point me to the 1995 longitudinal study on adolescent adoption outcomes. The conclusions of this study are so troubling that I wondered if anyone in the ministry had actually read them.

As a segue, OT they also reported that they established that in the year to June 2023, 12,743 individual children were abused or neglected. I ask them how many were in non-biological homes or cared for by a non-biological caregiver. They reply that they do not collect data or hold information or statistics about non-biological homes.

Health New Zealand confirmed hospital admissions do not include adoptive status. Nor do they collate adoptive status concerning suicide statistics.

The question was transferred to the Ministry of Justice, which refused because…well, you know… the information does not exist.

A peer-reviewed study in a 2013 issue of the journal Pediatrics, reveals that adopted people are four times more likely to attempt suicide than people raised in biological families.

New preliminary findings from Dr Lynn Zubov’s research at Winston-Salem University into adoption outcomes have revealed deeply sobering statistics:

• Adoptees may be 35x more likely to attempt suicide than non-adopted peers.
• First Mothers may be 600x more likely to die by suicide, and 37x more likely to attempt.

I asked the Ministry of Health for data on adoptive status in relation to hospital admissions and life expectancy of adopted people compared to the general population. They refused on the usual grounds – the information does not exist.

Instead, they directed me to Statistics New Zealand (StatsNZ) and their life expectancy and “cohort life data tables”.

• “About Aotearoa, for Aotearoa – data that improves lives today and for generations to come.”

• “The data is about life events, like education, income, benefits, migration, justice, and health. It comes from government agencies, StatsNZ surveys, and non-government organisations (NGOs). The data is linked or integrated to form the IDI.”

• “StatsNZ does not collect information about adoptions through the census. A respondent may choose to record to identify an adopted person in their household in response to census questions relating to family relationships; for example, they may record an “adopted child” or an “adopted parent”. However, an “adopted child” would be included in the category “Child (natural, step, adopted, foster)”. Information about adoptions is not collected through any other StatsNZ surveys.

To recap this rather long column.

Human adoption continues today as policy without evidence.

This is health politics at its most brutal: the lifetime reallocation of identity, body, and future under the guise of childhood care.

And the mothers? Even now, many have no grasp of the machinery that turns their children into legal property of strangers, and second-class citizens.

Without data, statistics, or outcome studies, the implications and consequences are unknown.

Statistical erasure = structural violence.

Part one can be found here: Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.

But what about that much lauded, internationally famous Dunedin Study, I hear you ask?

That’s coming up next:

Part three in the Adoption and Erasure series: Adoption and the World-Famous Dunedin Study

Part four in the Adoption and Erasure series: That Problematic Adolescent Outcomes of Adoption Study.