Episode 24 - Unfolding the Self: Jo’s Path Through Forced Adoption & Healing

Jo is an adopted person, born in Adelaide in 1969. She lives with her family in Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Creativity has been a constant in her life and she worked in advertising, marketing and design for many years, but is now quietly forging a new path as a yoga teacher after feeling its transformative effects in her own life. I first met Jo at a yoga training retreat in Bali earlier this year.

 Jo was forcibly removed from her mother immediately after her birth at Queen Victoria Hospital in SA whose adoption agency enforced a policy based on the ‘clean break theory’ where no contact or attachment was permitted between mother and child. Jo says that for many adoptees the affect of this inhumane practice is a profound loss of self and a lifetime of trauma. Today she is an advocate for truth telling around forced adoptions and for redress schemes.  

 There were about 150,000 adoptions in Australia from the 1950s to the early 1980s when unmarried women were routinely shamed and coerced into surrendering their babies. Ten years on from the historic apology made by then Prime Minister Julia Gillard to those affected by the forced adoptions era, survivors like Jo are still pushing for support. “Little has been done to help us overcome the significant challenges we face.” In addition to redress schemes she also believes there should be appropriate memorials in locations where forced adoptions occurred to commemorate and acknowledge the injustices. “No good will come of sweeping this under the carpet,” she says.

Here is Jo's story.