IdentityRites – Adelaide

Visit the new website of IdentityRites: a peer support and advocacy group which gives a voice to people who were adopted, at: https://identityritesblog.wordpress.com

“We have been deprived of knowledge of identity, heritage, and medical information; issued with false birth certificates; and denied public acknowledgement and awareness of the lifelong impact of separating us from our blood families.

IdentityRites seeks to quench the yearning for the dignity of ancestral connection.

We are an Adelaide based Group of Adoptees with a common purpose to initiate respectful and non-traumatising ways to tell our stories.”

Contact: identityrites.org[@]gmail.com

The Space Between

The Memorial Artwork in Adelaide

The Adoption Act was reviewed in South Australia.  Adoptees petitioned the Act be changed to legislate and uphold the right of people who were adopted, to have their birth information recorded on their Original Birth Certificate.

The rights of people who were adopted challenges the rights of adopting adults and their reasons for wanting to be listed as the ‘parents’, rather than the infant’s biological parents.  Adopted infants grow into adults who experience lifelong “grief and pain” having “lost their identity, heritage and family”.

These words are etched in stone on one of two large blocks of granite, an artwork to acknowledge that “lives have been profoundly affected by adoption separation practices”, and can be viewed in Grundy Gardens, in Adelaide, just east of the University footbridge.