Abstract
In Ireland the law of adoption, now consisting of seven pieces of legislation,1 has provided the legal framework for a practice that has seen 41,618 children adopted2 since the Adoption Act 1952 first introduced a legal means for making this possible. As elsewhere, this period has seen a steady annual decline in adoption orders—from 1,115 in 1980 down to 263 Irish adoption orders in 2003. It has also been a period in which there has been an uncoupling of the traditional association between unmarried mothers and adoption as the latter has gradually ceased to be used almost exclusively as a means of regulating the non-kinship placements of voluntarily relinquished illegitimate babies. Instead it is increasingly becoming a means of sanctioning the private family arrangements of birth parents, almost always mothers, in respect of their own children. Adoption as a public child care resource, legislatively expedited elsewhere, is not encouraged by government policy in this jurisdiction which partially explains the steady increase in intercountry adoptions.
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© 2006 Springer
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O’Halloran, K. (2006). THE ADOPTION PROCESS IN IRELAND. In: The Politics of Adoption. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4154-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4154-3_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-4153-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-4154-9
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