Achi news desk-
“For the decades of pain you have endured, I offer today a sincere and sincere and unrelenting apology. We were wrong.” A year ago, on March 22 2023, the then prime minister, Nicola Sturgeon, stood up in Holyrood and said she was sorry for the Scottish government’s role in historic forced adoptions.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, thousands of young, unmarried women – as many as 60,000 – were forced to give up their babies. “It’s a level of injustice,” Sturgeon said, “which is hard for us to understand now.”
Rooted in conservative attitudes towards sex outside of marriage, forced adoption meant that pregnant single women were sent, mainly by local health authorities, to mother and baby homes run by organisations. religious After birth, the babies were adopted and the mothers returned home, prevented from talking about what happened.
This scandal did not only affect Scotland. It was common practice throughout the UK. In 2021 I presented written and oral evidence to an inquiry into historic forced adoption covering England and Wales. My recent research points to the fact that the UK government’s stated position of denying state involvement is completely untenable when faced with the historical record, much of which comes from its own archives.
Tony Henshaw | Alamy
Reckoning with the past
Scotland drew on the past of over a decade of campaigning by birth mothers and adult adopters. They wanted the government to follow the example of Australia, where on March 21 2012 the prime minister at the time, Julia Gillard, issued a formal public apology, following a major investigation. Scotland has not held an investigation. But the government has, until now, been ready to accept the voices of campaigners.
This same adoption economy underpinned the system of mother and baby homes and Magdalene Laundries in Northern Ireland, albeit from a Catholic perspective. Until direct rule by the UK government was implemented in 1972, Northern Ireland had its own national government with administrative and legislative responsibilities.
In 2021, the UK parliamentary joint committee on human rights announced an inquiry into historic forced adoptions in England and Wales. This also followed pressure from campaigners and the media, as well as the apology the Catholic Church issued in 2016 for its role.
The subsequent report estimated that around 185,000 unwed mothers – as many as 215,000 – and their babies were affected between 1949 and 1976 in England and Wales.
The inquiry found that the UK government was ultimately responsible for what it called “the actions and omissions” that caused harm to so many young, vulnerable women and children. The actions involved critical and cruel practices by a range of health, welfare and social services professionals employed by the state. Omissions regarding failure to protect young, unmarried women and ensure their human rights are upheld.
Note actions and omissions
My research into UK government archives shows that forced adoption could not have happened in scope or scale without the state. The UK government transformed adoption from a cottage industry to one of mass production.
Before the second world war, mother and baby homes kept families together. He trained the mothers for domestic service, which, crucially, enabled them to get work and have somewhere to live. Adoptions were less common, with around 50,000 facilitated in 13 years, between 1926 and 1939.
This changed in 1943, when the UK government introduced subsidies for mother and baby homes and registered adoption societies. New homes were opened, old ones were expanded and more workers were appointed to cope with the growing number of adoptions.
He briefly considered nationalizing these institutions when the foundations of the welfare state were being laid in the late 1940s. However, it has been seen that the current system works well. Basically, the matter was judged to be a moral and spiritual one, more suitable for a religious oversight. Ultimately, no changes were made; money flowed in and babies flowed out.
New adoption legislation, in 1949 and 1958, made the legal process easier and faster. Most babies were between ten days and six weeks old when they were given a new identity with adoptive families. The annual figure grew year after year, peaking in England at 16,164 in 1968.
Confidentiality – ensured by families – was essential to make adoption work. The aim of adoptive families was to biologically pass the child on as their own and keep up appearances of respectability. This meant that babies were brought up in a stable, usually rich family environment, idealized by health, welfare and social professionals. For mothers, it meant they could return home and start their lives again, untainted by the stigma of illegitimacy.
The UK government was well aware that mothers were being coerced – that their decision to give up their babies was not just a difficult moral dilemma. As early as 1951, the representative bodies for registered adoption societies highlighted that unwed mothers had little agency to refuse.
The nascent welfare state was designed around men’s financial responsibility for their families. His failure to provide financial support and adequate housing to unwed mothers was deliberate.
Officials judged unmarried mothers to be undeserving compared to married women in conventional families. Their rights to financial support were denied or weakened. Those relating to housing were subject to the discretion of critical local and central government officials.
This would only change in 1974 with the distinguished report of the British judge Morris Finer on single parent families. Women would have to wait another four years for their legal right to housing to be guaranteed, in 1977.
Showing that historic forced adoptions were the product of central government policy, the 2021 inquiry recommended that the UK government should apologise.
The latter’s written response in February 2023 said: “The government agrees that the treatment given to women and their children in adoption practices during this period was wrong and should not have happened. Although we do not think it is appropriate for a formal apology from the government to be given, as the state did not actively support these practices, we wish to say that we are sorry on behalf of society to all those affected .”
This hides the fact that the state is far from powerless. He enabled, funded and continued forced adoption as his preferred policy.
On April 25 2023, as part of an official apology from the Welsh government, deputy social services minister Julie Morgan offered her “deepest sympathy and regret to all those affected” for continuing “such terrible historical practices”.
Importantly, Morgan’s statement acknowledged that forced adoption predated devolution. England had legal, political and administrative responsibility at that time. By not apologizing, the UK government is denying justice to thousands of birth mothers – whose numbers are dwindling tragically every day – and adult adopters who may never know the women who gave birth to them.
