Mothers in ARMS by Meg Hale

Author:Meg Hale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, BT, FAM004000
ISBN: 9781743053324
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2014-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

18

Tears in Parliament House

In the last month of winter 1988, ARMS received news that knocked mothers off their feet. Dr Cornwall was leaving Parliament. An emergency management committee meeting was held. There was a fear of having to start campaigning again or risk losing the battle for mothers to be recognised equally in the new Adoption Act. It had not been easy winning John Cornwall over. He did not suffer fools gladly and it had taken some time for ARMS to earn his serious consideration. But he had come on board and he was sympathetic to ARMS’s view that birth parents and adult adopted people should be given the same rights to receive identifying information about one another. ARMS was extremely worried about who was going to step into his shoes.

Susan Lenehan took over John Cornwall’s portfolio as Minister for Community Welfare. It was one of a number of roles she had in the South Australian Parliament. Lenehan was known as a livewire and described as a professional who saw her femininity as a strength to be celebrated rather than hidden. ARMS had met her when it lobbied women from both the major parties. She was dynamic and gutsy, but little was known about just how far she would go to support mothers in the matter of giving them the right to apply for identifying information about their children.

ARMS did not know that Susan was, in fact, familiar with issues for mothers. Corinne had been the Minister’s assistant at her electorate office for some years and she had lost a baby through adoption when she was young. Corinne had talked with Susan about what it was like to have been a young country girl sent to the city to be shut away in an unmarried mothers’ home during her pregnancy. Susan heard how girls in the home were made to do physically gruelling work to earn their keep—things that would never be expected of a pregnant woman in other circumstance—and that after a thirty-seven-hour labour, and a delivery that remains a blank in Corinne’s memory, her baby was bundled up and taken away. Corinne told Susan about the drive back to the home and how she tried to peek at her baby held tauntingly just out of reach in the Matron’s arms. And that she only saw her child once after that, for a few minutes before she left the home forever.

Corinne was not trying to gain sympathy by telling her story. She was simply stating it as it was. But for Susan it was shocking and unacceptable and she vowed that something must be done to change Australia’s archaic adoption laws.

Susan Lenehan proved to be as committed as her predecessor to changing the legislation to include mothers, and ARMS could not have been given a better advocate to take John Cornwall’s place.

One issue that caused much discussion and debate in Parliament and in the media was the matter of a veto. Dr Cornwall had not pressed for one when

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