Ms Maree Ryan-O'Brien:

More than 468 respondents participated in our primary research. On terminology, the clear preference from the 200 people who replied to this question regarding preferred terms was for "birth mother" or "birth father", followed by "mother" or "father" and then an amalgamation of terms, such as "birth mother" or "biological father". It will be appreciated that the issue around terms is sensitive. Looking at this issue from an adoptee advocate perspective, the reason that the term "birth mother" is used is that for every other term there is an opposite that impacts negatively on our families, our adoptive families, who are recognised as our families in legislation.

The difficulty in this regard lies with balancing needs adequately. I refer to the needs of birth parents and everyone else. A point that came through strongly related to the stigma and shame. Marginalisation also came across very clearly in respect of the feelings of adoptees. We must understand how language feeds into that and how questioning the reality and naturalness of someone's family can impact negatively on adoptees. I doubt if any members have been told that their father or mother is not their real mother or father, but it is not a pleasant position to be put in. I do not think we should be continuing this practice in proposed legislation.

Turning to the term "natural", there is nothing progressive about it. This term has been used in correspondence from the Adoption Board dating back to the 1980s. Therefore, when we are looking at a transformative Bill that we hope will allow adoptees access to long-needed information, we also hope that it will look more constructively at the use of terms and the impact they have in this context. We must understand and realise that adoptees and birth parents are all victims of this system and, consequently, we must have terms that are respectful of both.

Moving to the issue of the agency, perhaps Mr. O'Brien could answer that point more successfully, but there are issues concerning trust. We felt that this would become a barrier to participation in respect of adoptees interacting with a new agency. The model used when adoptees were spoken to regarding files was alarming and concerning. This seemed to be a model of interaction rather than an isolated incident. Given all these circumstances, we felt that it would be best to incorporate all the different facets of this one issue into one agency. That would make far more sense than having it distributed on a piecemeal basis, as it is now. Mr. O'Brien may wish to take the question regarding the balancing of rights.