Adoption: true stories

Against all odds, Gill's natural parents managed to trace her

Parents and siblings of adopted children could be allowed to trace them, once they're adults.

The proposal forms a key part of a government consultation beginning today, ahead of new adoption laws which come into force in 2005.

It would mean giving extra help to parents to trace children who they may have felt pressurised to put up for adoption because of the different social climate in the 1950s and 1960s.

At Breakfsat, we had dozens of emails on adoption.

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We talked to Pam Hodgkins, the Chief Executive of the National Organisation for Counselling Adoptees and Parents, or NORCAP, which offers support for adults involved in adoption.

Norcap's website

Pam herself was adopted and has been in contact with her birth mother.

"Siblings are one of the most important beneficiaries of the new proposals," she told us. "We have worked with some poeple who were separated at the end of the war - or who were born after their brothers and sisters had been adopted."

Many adults who were adopted simply don't understand the stigma which used to come with being an unmarried mother, right up until the 1970s:

"It's difficult to appreciate just how vindictive society's attitude was to unmarried parents, even 30 years ago," she said.

We heard from one woman, Gill Ragsdale, whose birth mother managed to trace her, against all odds, when they made enquiries at St Catherine's House a few years after she'd done the same thing.

Gill discovered that her parents had married six years after they had her - and she has siblings she had never known about.

"I feel quite strongly about the opportunities for siblings to be re-united," she told us.

But she also accepts that not all meetings between birth families will work out well:

"I ends in tears occasionally. You don't know whether it'll work out when you meet someone. Sometimes you don't know until you have met them a few times."