Excerpt:
The New South Wales Law Reform Commission (LRC)... noted “The intercountry adoptee endures enormous change and dislocation in the process of being adopted overseas. The child is uprooted from all that is familiar, including relationships and language. The child’s name is one of the few remaining links with his or her birth culture. More importantly, though, the child’s name is an integral part of his or her identity”.

Keeping a child’s name is a sign of respect to the birth family and to the overseas country from which the child is adopted and allows the child’s racial and cultural identity to be valued and preserved.

Most children arriving from overseas know their name-even young babies respond to their name. This is the most compelling reason to keep this name.

Some reasons given to explain why parents want to change their child’s name:

* They wish to give the child a name to make them part of their family and give them the context of their Australian family.
While this is a reasonable desire, every adopted child gets the surname of their Australian family so the family is giving their name to their child.

*They feel changing an intercountry adoptee’s name to an Anglo name makes it easier for the child and they say other migrants coming to Australia do the same.
It is understandable that a parent wants to protect their child from difficulties. Still a migrant retains their surname so their cultural/racial heritage can be identified. So for example most people would realise that “a Peter Wong” is Chinese by his surname. The child lives with their parents/family members and maintains their native language and cultural/religious practices. An intercountry adoptee whose forename is changed to an Anglo one loses this part of their cultural/racial identity that would have been preserved if their forename were kept.

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