Finola Moss asks whether the Adoption Act 2002 is a step too far
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The Adoption Act 1926 was a response to a pressing social need for child protection and the formalisation of adoption. Legislation introducing the concept of transplanting a child for ever into a new family had been stalled for a long time, because of the abhorrence of the common law to the alienation of a parent's right to their children. An adoption still required a mentally competent parent's consent. Fifty years later, the Adoption Act 1976 allowed an adoption if such consent was being unreasonably withheld.
The Adoption and Children Act 2002 (ACA 2002) would provide expeditious adoptions for children in care with forever families. It placed a child's needs at the centre of the adoption process, aligning adoption law with the welfare principle in the Children Act 1989 (ChA 1989), dispensing with a parent's consent if thought necessary in the child's welfare. The once hallowed, inalienable common law right became silently subsumed and overridden by whatever the courts decided was the child's welfare, based
