Fact Sheet #23: THE ULTIMATE RAPE

In 1998 Dr.G.A. Rickarby, MB BS FRANZCP Member of the Faculty of Child Psychiatry RANZCP MANZAP: Consultant Psychiatrist and world-renowned adoption specialist defined infant adoption as ‘The ultimate rape of the female human condition'.

• Dr. Rickarby has diagnosed many mothers who lost babies to adoption in the past as now suffering major dissociative disorders directly caused by their minds inability to cope with such a shocking trauma.
• Dr. Rickarby states: ‘the great bulk of damage was due to ‘mind bending’ techniques by those in power that shaped the mothers view of herself, her entitlements and ability to fight for her own and her child’s obvious rights'.
• Dr. Rickarby states: ‘the woman’s helplessness, separation from significant others, being subjected to repeated coercive suggestions, indoctrination and humiliation… she would be in no state to rationally oppose or resist what ‘respected’ and powerful older women were wanting her to do.The notion of ‘informed consent’ under such circumstances is unfit. The features of consent: ‘capacity’, ‘volition’ and ‘information’ were at their lowest point'.
• Dr. Rickarby comments on the psychological impact of women being advised to ‘start life afresh’ and that they would soon get over ‘the loss of their baby and the experience of loss'. ‘The experience of the mothers who lost a child to adoption is so polarised towards the inability to continue with their life and to almost universal Pathological Grief that simplistic advice of this ilk is fatuous'.
• Dr. Rickarby states: ‘they have feelings of hopelessness that what they went through at the time and their present plight will not be recognised by society and that their life as broken by the loss will not be validated...’.
• Dr. Rickarby warns: ‘one salient issue in this respect is the continued control of adoption resources centres, reunion organisations, and other public services for original mothers by ‘professionals’ who push views of this type, indeed the views that were current in the Sixties and Seventies, and are sometimes staffed by the same people who colluded in taking their babies’.
• Dr.Rickarby states: ‘in hearing the experiences of others… there is a continuation of patronisation, invalidation and also a wide-ranging insensitivity to mothers grief and psychiatric morbidity due to adoption, and the distress and despair in their life situation'.
• Dr.Rickarby comments on untenable issues and practices in 1998: ‘the inability of these ‘professionals’ to take any responsibility for the plight of the mothers, to show by any word, empathic gesture or sympathy that their actions as a group caused any distress or damage to mother, baby or adoptive family, or that they were doing anything illegal or unethical'.
• Dr.Rickarby states there is; ‘an underlying ignorance about the damage there women experienced. It is not just that social-workers are not able to assess the psychiatric syndromes or are ignorant in this area, but that they are dabbling in an area of illness for which they are totally untrained. They ignore research about the nature of grief and the connection of Pathological Grief to breakdown in Mental Health which has been known for decades. Their unawareness of their own ignorance when dealing with the severely damaged is like taking lighted tapers into a gunpowder storage'.
• Dr.Rickarby commented on the measures that might assist people experiencing distress as a result of past adoption practices: ‘Many of these mothers are just 'hanging on', they see an Inquiry as the one chance that their position, their circumstances and their broken lives and feelings can be understood by the community at large and particularly by their children…They also require their powerlessness and
  their sense of betrayal by other women understood'.

Acknowledgments; Dr.Rickarby, and ‘Origins Inc’ founded 1995.

Copyright © Patricia Basquill, 2002 - 2008