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More Reason for Adoption Disclosure

January 11, 2008 permalink

A British married couple found they had more in common than they thought. They were twins, separated at birth and adopted into different families. Maybe it is time to recognize that every person ought to know his parents, without any reservations or restrictions.

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Marriage of twins fuels adoption row

Twins who were separated at birth have married each other, unaware that they were brother and sister.

Each had been adopted by a different family, with neither being told they had a twin.

A High Court judge annulled the marriage after the couple discovered they were siblings, the House of Lords has been told.

The judge ruled that the marriage had never validly existed.

The couple's identities, along with details of how they met and fell in love, remain a closely-guarded secret.

But the cross-bench peer Lord Alton, who told the Lords the case had been revealed to him by the judge involved, said the pair had felt an "inevitable attraction".

He raised the case to illustrate the need for adopted children to be given full access to their birth records during a debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill last month.

Lord Alton said: "They were never told they were twins. They met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of their marriage that they entered into, and all the issues of their separation.

"The right for children to know the identity of their biological parents is a human right.

"There will be more cases like this if children are not given access to the truth. The needs of the child must always be paramount.

"If you start trying to conceal someone's identity, sooner or later the truth will out.

"And if you don't know you are biologically related someone, you may become attracted to them and tragedies like this may occur."

The Government has faced stiff opposition over changes to fertility laws in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

The changes, which are being debated in the House of Lords, would relax rules on who can have fertility treatment, with fertility clinics unable to bar single women and same-sex couples from having treatment.

Critics say the Bill removes the need for fathers and will make it more difficult for children to find out about their biological parents.

Ministers have already been forced to rewrite the bill following objections by peers to the original wording.

It had said children born through fertility treatment needed a "social network", not a father and mother.

The Lords will vote on the revised bill on Tuesday.

Source: Daily Telegraph

Addendum: Barbara Bryan comments on the case of the married twins, pointing out that is was the foreseeable result of family destruction policies.

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Twins Marry? No Surprise. Congress Warned Years Ago

News anchors, talks shows, man on the street queries all reveal unspeakable discomfort at the idea that siblings could marry, unaware that they were related at all.

For years this writer has warned what happens when loose and false allegations of child abuse or neglect are exploited to take infants and children from any natural relative. A judge’s immunizing signature makes relative caretakers “legal strangers” to the children and pronounces that they now belong to former strangers.

The story last week from UK’s Sky News appears, for the deliberately clueless, to be an isolated incident from a nation “across the pond;” but the US and every country removing and reallocating newborns is complicit in the predictable and preventable consequences.

Among more recent cautions from this pen are two written submissions to House Ways and Means Committee hearings on child protection and foster care. They summarize the plight of parents and others subject to “family” courts operating outside the liberty safeguards assured in all State and the US Constitution/s.

This one is most germane to the topic of siblings dating and marrying: link to US House Ways and Means Committee.

As the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Article to its Constitution puts it—that disconnect between current state law and what that state’s esteemed liberty lovers thought they had achieved in Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, inspiration for our Bill of Rights—“…all laws are presumed to be Constitutional.”

Presuming one is thin and rich is equally in vain. The consequences to children separated (at birth or later and reassigned without knowledge of their natural origins) is monumental. Maturing and adult children and others are finding out what child protectors, courts, artificial insemination donors hoped they never would learn.

Excuses to Remove

Whether there are adverse results of medications given to babies or too many shots at one time in vulnerable systems, or unchecked problems with inherited disorders, or reaction to household mold or myriad reasons, some babies show up at emergency rooms and doctors’ offices with unexplained health problems.

What better way to feed the press, public and to give prosecutors a platform for attention than to claim the “mother must have done it” re unexplained deaths, repeat “suffocation” and the like, all of which may have a simple but unsought objective explanation?

When the bogus motivation theory of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy met ASFA (Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997) it was a marriage made in some unheavenly place. Federal legislation that trumped state laws declared that newborns of a mother whose prior child had been removed were instant bounty for the state.

It further stated that any child in foster care for 15 of a prior 22 months also belonged to the State for disposition often with generous adoption incentives. They were originally intended for those hard-to-place older and disabled children “languishing in foster care.”

Frequently there are long-term post-adoption subsidies. What if natural families had even one tenth of the help with keeping children with handicaps within the family?

Whether arrogant or angry doctors, inspired insurance carriers, concerned numbers crunchers in Medicaid offices, vindictive spouses, nosey neighbors, professionals refusing to consider vaccine overload or to look at DNA problems, it was and is simple to start a child abuse/neglect claim with an anonymous report. It can conclude (sometimes before parents and often traumatized never abused children realize what is happening) in separation of siblings.

Why would those children with similar genetic heritage not have some kind of natural attraction (as news magazine reports have shown) even if adopted out around the city and state? What about the triplets who found each other in college? Lucky for them they were all men.

Who Takes Responsibility?

For so many years, and to silent ridicule I suspect, this writer has warned Congress, legislatures and the public that separated siblings would/could marry. This information has long been shared with networks and publishing offices of the same entities now broadcasting their squirming show hosts who think the married twins in UK must be the only case in the universe and it just can’t happen here.

It has taken the determination of artificially inseminated children as well as those in foster care—as well as UK’s forward-thinking House of Lords’ very recent debate on human fertility—to bring to the world this seeming unique and horrendous event of Incest Unaware.

Over and over the courts of our nation, the child protectors, the prosecutors, professionals are paid (with immunity or zero liability) to label parents as unfit to have their children. They back each other, “under color of law,” in separating siblings and multiples, in sealing records, in daring press or the children’s own parents to publicly tell the story they declined to hear themselves. It is what I have described for years:

…that removing children from any association with their most natural protectors means they are fair game as guinea pigs for drug testing, detachment problems, emotional health issues as they wrestle with beliefs they must have been abandoned or that their parents truly must have been monsters or “they wouldn’t have taken me from them”…

Has the ultimate consequence of letting them mix and match in the ways that love and marriage gets messy finally turned the spotlight on those who have made the obvious pathway possible? Will the purveyors of this too frequent result accept responsibility?

The judge who signed the order and immunized everyone else? The risk management advisor and liability insurance carrier? The taxpayers who’ve supported the practice for years and still? The child protection workers cloaked in immunity as state agents and with no less than the State’s Attorney General for their attorney against falsely accused parents simply trying to tell the whole truth so their family will not be dis-membered.

Thank you, UK House of Lords, for beginning to open eyes of mute media on this side of the pond.

Barbara Bryan (BHBryan@aol.com)
Communications Director
National Child Abuse Defense & Resource Center
P.O. Box 638
Holland, OH 43528
Phone : 419-865-0513
Fax : 419-865-0526

Source: news release by Barbara Bryan

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