OUR MAYBE BABY

A couple share their story of falling in love with an adopted baby they knew they might have to hand back

Holding tiny newborn Eve to her chest, Sarah Wilson whispered the truest words she could into her ear. ‘I love you, but you’re not mine. And it’s going to be quite a while before we know whether you ever will belong to me.’

Like most parents, Sarah and her husband Thomas had fallen in love with their child the moment they set eyes on her. But, unlike most parents, that encounter didn’t take place in a hospital delivery ward when Eve was born; instead it was ten days after her birth, when social workers brought her to live with them. And Sarah and Thomas knew from the start that they were going to have to cope with an uncertainty many couples couldn’t contemplate. Because, although they longed to adopt Eve, it would be several months before they knew whether they would be able to keep her, or whether they would have to hand her back to her birth parents.

In the past, most adoptions happened because unmarried mothers gave up babies they would have been stigmatised for bringing up alone. These days that’s extremely rare: far fewer babies are adopted, and those who are tend to be taken into care by social workers because their birth parents are unable to look after them.

Usually in these cases, babies are removed from their birth mother and father in the early days or weeks of life and placed with foster parents while attempts are made at supporting the birth parents so they can have them back. Only when social workers are certain it’s not possible to help them to become ‘good enough’ parents is their baby put forward for adoption – and at this stage the child sometimes moves to another foster family before,