Scottish Adult Adoptee Movement
A community for adult adoptees, built by adult adoptees.
SAAM connects adopted adults across Scotland and the UK with peer support, straight answers, and a campaign for the rights every adoptee deserves.
Who we are
The Scottish Adult Adoptee Movement (SAAM) was formed by adults who were adopted in childhood. Through adoption, our legal identities were altered and replaced with a legal fiction that continues into adulthood — in law, adoptees are required to live as if born to another family, often without recognition of the lifelong legal consequences this creates.
Our work challenges that fiction. We campaign for adoptees to be recognised as a distinct legal identity, with rights of our own. SAAM leads Adoptee Rights UK — a UK-wide rights campaign rooted in lived experience, evidence, and collective action.
"Adoption is not a one-time childhood intervention. It's lifelong." — SAAM
"Adoption can cause harm. We say this carefully and responsibly — not as an attack on families, but as a recognition that permanence in law does not always mean safety, stability, or justice in life." — SAAM
A lifelong status, not a single event
Adoption is not a single event in childhood. It is a lifelong legal status that alters identity, family, and legal position. For adoptees, the effects do not end at eighteen — harm can continue into adulthood, often without meaningful routes to review, remedy, or accountability.
But the impact of adoption law doesn't sit with adoptees alone. Children on the outskirts of care — and those moving between family support, kinship care, foster care, and adoption — are frequently channelled toward permanent legal solutions that reduce flexibility and statutory protection, even when long-term needs remain uncertain. Adoptive families and carers, meanwhile, are often expected to meet complex and enduring needs without the legal authority, status, or guaranteed support required to do so.
This creates a system in which children lose protection, families carry responsibility without authority, and adoptees bear lifelong consequences without corresponding rights. Our work exists because these outcomes are not inevitable — they are the result of legal and policy choices that can, and must, be challenged.
Let's start a movement
For much of our lives, adoptees were largely absent from formal justice and accountability processes — not because harm had not occurred, but because adoption itself was treated as resolution. Over time, that began to change.
As reviews and inquiries into care, abuse, and state responsibility emerged across Scotland and the UK, adoptees started reaching out to one another. Some engaged with the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, where adoption-related harm sat uneasily at the edges of a system designed around institutions rather than lifelong legal severance. Others engaged with UK processes that followed the UK Apology for Child Migration, where forced separation was acknowledged as a historic wrong, yet adoption — another form of permanent separation — remained largely unexamined.
In Scotland, adoptees engaged with the Independent Care Review and the commitments that followed through The Promise, sharing lived experience, evidence, and insight in the hope that adoption would finally be understood as a lifelong legal status, not simply a childhood outcome. At a UK level, adoptees also intersected with parliamentary and human rights processes, including work connected to the Joint Committee on Human Rights — again without a clear place for adopted adults as autonomous rights-holders.
Across these different reviews, inquiries and processes, a pattern became increasingly clear. Adoptees were present. Adoptees contributed evidence. But adoptees were not recognised as rights-holders in their own right — not as a single omission, but repeatedly, structurally, and consistently.
In response, adoptees began working collectively. Lived experience, research, documentation and legal understanding were brought together to produce a set of formal recommendations for government — the SAAM 2023 Recommendations and Core Circumstances, setting out the rights adoptees should have over identity, history, and lifelong legal status. Shared with both the Scottish and UK Governments, they became the foundation of what is now the Adoptee Rights UK campaign.
Our lives did not end with adoption, and our rights should not either.
The Three Rights, and the Adoptee Rights UK campaign
This lived experience shaped SAAM's Three Rights Framework — Truth, Identity and Justice — and led directly to the moment, at the Scottish Government's 2023 apology, when adoptees stood together publicly for the first time. That moment marked the start of the Adoptee Rights UK campaign.
Support where you are
Three straightforward ways in — come to one, or all three.
Peer groups
Regular, facilitated meet-ups — in person and online — for adult adoptees to talk openly and be heard.
Records & search guidance
Plain-language help with adoption records, birth certificates and tracing next steps in Scotland.
Community events
Seasonal gatherings and workshops that bring the wider SAAM community together throughout the year.
Your story has a place here.
Whether you're just starting to explore your adoption or have been at this for decades, there's a seat for you.
Publications
Submissions, reports and research grounding SAAM's work in evidence and lived experience.
From our founding Recommendations paper to formal submissions to UK and Scottish Government consultations, our publications page brings together the documents behind our campaign — free to read, download and share.
Browse publications