Controversial adoption practices
Reform and family preservation efforts have also been strongly associated with the perceived misuse of adoption. In some cases, parents rights have been terminated when their ethnic or socio-economic group has been deemed unfit by society. Some of these practices were generally accepted but have later been considered abusive; others were uncontroversially reprehensible. Forced adoption based on ethnicity occurred during World War II. In German-occupied Poland, it is estimated that 200,000 Polish children with purportedly Aryan traits were removed from their families and given to German or Austrian couples, and only 25,000 returned to their families after the war.The Stolen Generation of Aboriginal people in Australia were affected by similar policies, as were Native Americans in the United States and First Nations of Canada.These practices have become significant social and political issues in recent years, and in many cases the policies have changed. The United States, for example, now has the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which allows the tribe and family of a Native American child to be involved in adoption decisions, with preference being given to adoption within the childs tribe.From the 1950s through the 1970s, a period called the baby scoop era, adoption practices that involved coercion were directed against unwed mothers, as described for the U.S. in The Girls Who Went Away.
It is the deep and consequential feeling of abandonment which the baby adoptee feels after the adoption and which may continue for the rest of his life. "Open records: After a legal adoption in the United States, an adopted persons original birth certificate is usually amended and replaced with a new post-adoption birth certificate. The names of any birth parents listed on the original birth certificate are replaced on an amended certificate with the names of the adoptive parents, making it appear that the child was born to the adoptive parents. Beginning in the late 1930s and continuing through the 1970s, state laws allowed for the sealing of original birth certificates after an adoption and, except in some states, made the original birth certificate unavailable to the adopted person even at the age of majority.Adopted people have long sought to undo these laws so that they can obtain their own original birth certificates. Movements to unseal original birth certificates and other adoption records for adopted people proliferated in the 1970s along with increased acceptance of illegitimacy. In the United States, Jean Paton founded Orphan Voyage in 1954, and Florence Fisher founded the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association (ALMA) in 1971, calling sealed records "an affront to human dignity". While in 1975, Emma May Vilardi created the first mutual-consent registry, the International Soundex Reunion Registry (ISRR), allowing those separated by adoption to locate one another. and Lee Campbell and other birthmothers established CUB (Concerned United Birthparents).