Names in adoption law and policy: representations of family, rights and identities

Abstract

Names have heightened importance in adoption, affecting the identities of individuals who are adopted and adoptive family making. In this article, we use critical discourse analysis to gauge how names, and especially children’s forenames, are addressed in the specificities of legal and policy texts governing and guiding the milieu of people affected by adoption in England. We argue that the inclusions, omissions and opacity of content on names we uncover are outcomes of underlying representations of ‘family’ within the texts, whereby ‘family surnaming’ is constructed as the pre-eminent naming issue in adoption, above children’s forename-based identity rights. Our focus on names in adoption advances sociological understandings of the power of names in representing family relationships and individual identities, and of how official discourses of law and policy can privilege some types of relationships over others, and the rights of some family members over others.

Surnames in Adoption: (Re)creating Identities of Belonging

“…Adoption is a set of legal processes through which parental responsibility for a child is legally transferred from, most often, birth parent(s) to adoptive parent(s), resulting in a 'new' family. Current adoption law and social policy in England and Wales clearly portrays the changing of children's surnames, post-adoption, as a normative and routine practice that marks children's legal transfer from one set of parents to another (Pilcher and Coffey 2022). Especially since the post-1970s shift from 'closed', secretive adoptions to a culture of 'openness' (Kornitzer 1968;O'Halloran 2015), adoptions are a 'version of kinship that includes both adoptive relatives and birth relatives' (Jones and Hackett 2011, p. 45), and, we add, adoptive names and birth names.…”

“…This is not an unexpected finding: as we evidenced earlier, the normative family practice of surname sharing remains common in most types of families with children. Moreover, the taken-for-grantedness about surname change for children, so as to align with the surname of adoptive parents, predominates in adoption legislation, guidance and procedures (Pilcher and Coffey 2022). Our discussion of how, given this context, surnames feature in adoptees' accounts of familial belonging is organised around two recurrent and related themes that emerged from our data analysis: (i) 'family-making and unmaking', where surname change due to adoption is recognised as important for the 'We' identities of families formed through adoption and/or as having detrimental consequences for birth family belongings; and (ii) 'flexibility of choices and uses', where the multiplicity of surnames experienced by adoptees in their lives can empower some to make situational or permanent adjustments in how surnames display their meaningful family belongings.…”