To Search for Self: The Experience of Access to Adoption Information

An insightful and clearly written work on adoption. Contributors are from varied backgrounds - birth parents, adoptees, adoptive parents and social workers. They look at the key issues for today's adoption practice: What access to information should there be? What contact? Why was the process so secret? What effect has openness had? What are the lessons for IVF families? IVF raises the same issues of "where did I come from" and "what happened to my child" as adoption - and IVF programmes are run on the basis of no contact between IVF child and natural parent. Accordingly adoption "experts" anticipate the same problems with IVF children as with adoption and the last two chapters of the book deal with IVF.