One of the objectives of International Family Remembrance Week is to bring back the sanctity of motherhood by drawing on the experience of those who can never be mothers yet who understand through witness why its praises have been sung in every age and time. The words of Chief Justice Sir Edmund Herring in 1955, to the Full Court of the State of Victoria in the case of A. v. CS (1955) V.L.R.340 (p. 340-77) have been exemplified for that reason:
And it has to be borne in mind that adoptive parents may not prove as long suffering as natural parents might be, nor as the years go by as ready to put up with the frailties of the children they adopt. The Legislature in sec. 8 has recognized the need in some cases for a probationary period of two years, presumably because it was realized that the early enthusiasm of would-be adopters for a child does on occasion cool...in general an adoptive home is rarely as satisfactory for a child as a home with its real mother, even though superficial circumstances appear superior in the adoptive home.
The main objective of the legislation is to enable kindly-disposed persons to adopt children who, by reason of neglect by their parents or guardians or because they have neither parent nor guardian, or for some other good reason, are condemned to live in an institution or with a person or persons who have no legal obligation to them or who may use a de facto guardianship to exploit them…But the Legislature has also recognized that the chief claim to bring up a child rests with the parents and that the relationship of the parent and child prima facie renders the parent the most suitable of all persons to rear the child…
Indeed, I should like to express my misgivings as to whether the secrecy with which the Courts have been at such pains to surround adoption proceedings…is in many cases either necessary or wise…
The broad policy of the Act is to provide the lot of children who are unfortunate and lack a happy home. But it is a mistake, as this case in my opinion shows, to suppose that all adopters are actuated entirely by pure altruism. In many cases, perhaps in most cases, they are actuated by a substantial measure of self-interest, and it is important that the balance be justly maintained between their interests and those of the natural parents. Experience in the courts shows that prospective adopters will not consult the interests of the natural parents; the Legislature and the courts must do so. There are, I believe, always many more prospective adopters than children available for adoption, so that there is always likely to be some pressure for the relaxation of just and proper safeguards…For the plain truth is that this appellant, who has lost her child while she was ill, and without her own knowledge or consent, ought in any common sense community to have got it back at once, independently of any preponderance of advantage to the child…Nothing which may affect the infant’s future, moral, spiritual, intellectual, and material, can by any a priori reasoning be said to be relevant…
Most definitely (the Court) is not prevented from considering, in the light of the particular facts of the case, the possible advantages of retaining the natural ties created at birth, the chances of those more enduring affections which humanity from long experience has come to believe those ties in a majority of cases to ensure, and the possible effect of their destruction. Certainly the fictional status conferred on the child by sec. 7 (as amended) does not forbid the court to use its common sense knowledge or to have regard to human experience…The impressions gained by the learned Judge of the litigants by personal observation of their appearance and demeanour cannot be set out in an appeal book, and so cannot be weighed by us – though I should like to record my protest against any notion that eccentricities in the mother’s character, or mere naiveté, or immaturity or judgment, even within wide limits, should be regarded as necessarily disadvantageous to her child.
