Letters: Post-adoption contact issues

Clearly, appropriate and positive contact arrangements are important to all adoptions and should be approached on an individual basis in the best interests of the child. There may be practical difficulties in making contact arrangements in some adoptions, particularly complex adoptions that have involved serious physical or sexual abuse in the child's early life.

The fact of an adoption being trans-racial, trans-cultural or trans-religious would not of itself raise practical difficulties. On the contrary, it might be argued that there was an even stronger need for good contact arrangements, given the added dimensions of loss likely to be suffered by the child. However, I did say that in relation to overseas adoptions, there may be practical difficulties around contact, caused by the issues of distance, geography and agreements around the adoption itself with either the host country or birth family. It is this latter point that was probably misunderstood.