Five people are in a hideous Hobson's Choice situation, all four parents and a three year old. My heart goes out to all five.
But people advocating 'serving justice' by removing a three year old from the only parents he or she knows and sending him or her to live with the parents he hasn't lived with since early infancy are making very big claims for the emotional resilience of three year olds, apparently purely because they don't themselves remember being three. And this is a child who has lost at least two sets of parent-figures already - his/her biological parents and presumably one or more sets of foster carers.
Anyone who has become a parent by adoption, or is close to a family that includes an adopted child, knows how those losses, even if they're long before conscious memory, can manifest themselves.
I do agree that this child needs to know the truth of what happened as he/she grows up - to do otherwise would be desperately unfair to all concerned. But to label the removal of a three year old from the only parents he knows to virtual strangers -even though those virtual strangers are his biological parents who were deprived of him through an appalling injustice - a 'short term problem' to 'right a bigger wrong' or deal out a more longterm justice is misguided at best. Yet another loss is no 'short term pain for longterm gain', it's dicing with a small child's life, and the life of the adolescent and adult that child becomes.
One hopes the parents will manage to work out something that is in the child's best interests between themselves, with help and support, though I can't imagine what. But I don't think that overturning an adoption order is the answer.
And for those saying that people who feel that overturning an adoption order isn't the right answer are worried about messing up the 'adoption system', shame on you. Have you seen an adoptive parent having to reassure their child for years that, yes, they were moved around and lost people in the past, but it will never happen again, we are your forever mummy and daddy? Saying that several times a day for years? Being unable to take your adopted three year old on holiday or even away for the weekend, because when he sees clothes being packed, he thinks mummy and daddy are going to disappear, like the last set of carers, and shuts down completely? Not being able to use ordinary child disciplines like time out or the naughty step because the experience of being excluded in the tiniest of ways, puts them right back in the middle of losses they can not consciously remember? Being hysterical with joy when your adopted child finally starts being naughty, because he's been too afraid for months or years to do anything slightly naughty because he think he'll be sent away again as a punishment?
That's why adoption orders should be very carefully arrived at, but absolute.