Lost adoption records stymie mothers Mother secretly drugged daughter
Mothers forced to give up their babies for adoption have hit a bureaucratic stumbling block in their efforts to force a national inquiry into past abuses.
Officials from the Ministry for Vulnerable Children, Oranga Tamariki, have told them they need to provide written evidence to show their babies were stolen from them in the 1950s and 1960s.
But the mothers say many of the records they need have been lost by churches and courts.
Three ministry representatives gave evidence at Parliament yesterday in answer to a petition from Maggie Wilkinson, demanding an inquiry into forced adoption.
They told a social services select committee hearing they were not denying social attitudes at the time, and that ‘‘reluctant adoptions’’ would have occurred.
But while officials could find records of how many adoptions there were – more than 3000 in 1969, for instance – they did not know how many were reluctant.
National MP Jono Naylor asked the representatives whether it was possible to prove which adoptions were illegal. They said proof would require an examination of historical adoption documents.
But Green MP Jan Logie questioned how that would occur, given women had already told the committee of trying to get adoption records from religious groups, state services and courts, ’’without satisfactory outcomes’’.
‘‘For these women and their children, there is no functional redress in our system at the moment, is there?’’
The next stage is for the com- mittee to consider its response to the petition.
Ultimately, Wilkinson and her supporters are hoping for a formal apology for forced adoptions, along the lines of the one given to Australian women by then-prime minister Julia Gillard in 2013. A nurse who secretly gave her daughter anti-psychotic drugs that were not prescribed for her had a warped sense of doing the right thing, a judge has said.
The woman, who cannot be named, was sentenced in the Wellington District Court yesterday, after pleading guilty to charges of mistreating a child.
She took home risperidone, an anti-psychotic drug with potentially serious side-effects, from her work at a district health board, and hid them in her daughter’s yoghurt in mid-2015.
The drugs, which had not been prescribed for the girl, caused her to fall asleep in class, and led to her being in the sick bay three to five times a week.
In July 2015 the girl was admitted to hospital in what was described as a ‘‘very abnormal state’’. She was confused, and had slurred speech.
During her stay, her mother, 37, was in her room with her, and continued to give her risperidone without telling doctors.
The girl’s condition worsened and she was taken to hospital in Christchurch, where she was monitored, and soon got better.
But as soon as she went back to her local hospital, her mother again started giving her the antipsychotic drug. The drugs were detected in toxicology tests, and the woman admitted she had been giving the girl risperidone for six to eight weeks.
She told doctors she had been frustrated with the medical help given to the girl, and thought the drug had appeared to help her stress and reduced seizures.
Judge Denys Barry noted she had a clean criminal record, and had suffered underlying mental health illness.
He sentenced her to six months’ home detention, and 150 hours’ community work.
The judge said the woman would be given arranged access to her children.