UK Government apologises for historic forced adoption practices (at last)

[IwantToRetire]

People affected by the injustice of forced adoption have today received the formal apology they deserve, as the government acknowledged the role of the state in the appalling practice and unveiled a package of practical support worth £4 million over three years.

In a speech, the Prime Minister reflected on the harm caused to an estimated 185,000 mothers, adopted people and their wider families by practices that took place primarily between 1949 and 1976.
The apology recognises that many women were denied genuine choice, made to feel ashamed or unworthy, and that children were taken from their birth families, their identity and their history. Fathers and wider families were also affected, with harm lasting across lifetimes and, in some cases, generations.

The £4 million support fund will go towards helping people access their adoption records via the Coram BAAF charity, fund intermediary services like Family Connect that helps people reconnect with family members, and research and testimonial projects to document the long-term impact on people’s lives. ...

The apology relates to historical adoption practices in England. Scotland and Wales have each issued their own formal apologies, which the UK Government supports, while in Northern Ireland work is underway to establish a statutory public inquiry into Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries and Workhouses, led by the Northern Ireland Executive.

The Government recognises that some people’s experiences extend beyond the 1949 to 1976 period, and that it is deeply upsetting to hear examples where coercive practices continued. ...

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-apologises-for-historic-forced-adoption-practices

I want to know in all these apologies by politicians for failing these mothers why nobody ever mentions the fact that they were almost all given up on by their own parents.

I am always ambivalent about these apologies as though the past was the same as now. My father was abandoned by his mother with (afaik) distant relatives in what was soon to be a different country. Soon after leaving him she married the man who was obviously the father of her child (DNA brings him up as my likely grandfather) but she could not retrieve my father because of the social stigma at the time, Catholic Ireland in 1918.
The young mothers in question, whose boyfriends presumably either refused to marry them (conventionally the proper thing to do if you got a girl 'in trouble') or could not because the girl was underage, would have had great difficulty in bringing up their children. Their parents would not have accepted an illegitimate grandchild, and the stigma (however wrong in retrospect) stuck. I remember well the ostracism dealt out to the young woman with an illegitimate baby (in a day nursery so she could work) by the respectable married women living in the house of multiple occupation where my parents brought two of us up for about 18 mths in one room before finding a 2 bed flat. I now know my mother was a complete hypocrite in this ostracism since she did not marry my father (reasons unknown but I suspect he was married) until just before my youngest brother was born after we moved to the flat (which had a bathroom shared with the flat downstairs but it's own toilet). However, I also realise she could not give any sympathy for fear of outing her own unmarried status. Respectability was all many people had and they wanted to hang on to it.
My father never forgave his mother, but I forgive her. She had no choice. Forced adoptions were no choice either and I don't see why we should apologise for what was normal and accepted as best for mother and child, so that both could have a life untainted by stigma. Perhaps the fathers of these children should apologise to the mothers for putting them in this invidious situation, however (if still alive). They are certainly to blame.

I was born in 1965 in a CofE Mother and Baby home in England. My mother conceived at 16, delivered at 17. Her parents were working class but 'proper' and gave her no choice but to go to the home. Her younger brother and sister were not told where she went or that she was pregnant. The father did offer marriage, but they had split up by the time she knew she was pregnant and she said no as she knew it would not work. She never contacted him again. She was largely ignorant about sex and did not know that pregnancy could result from their sexual activity.

The home was a cruel place where the emphasis was on shame and punishment. The girls were made to work, scrubbing and polishing, until they gave birth. Every Sunday they walked in crocodile through the village to the church, feeling the shame of people's eyes on them, where they were seated in a rear pew away from the main congregation. They were not told what giving birth entailed, but as each girl delivered, the others moved rooms nearer to the delivery room so that when they were almost due, they could hear the screams of the girl delivering in the next room. There was no pain relief, or encouragement, or sympathy, during labour. It was terrifying.

After my mother gave birth, she did not want to give me up and would not sign the adoption papers. Social workers visited regularly to persuade her. Her mother visited to persuade her. They told her she couldn't bring up a child alone, financially or practically. After four months, she was ground down and signed.

Her father came with a car to the home and drove my mother and I to a children's home. Her father chatted and chatted to the children's home staff while my mother was silently screaming. Eventually they said goodbye and left me to drive home.

There our stories diverged - my mother went back home, but could not talk about what had happened to her at home, her siblings still had no idea, and she went back to work. But it was too difficult and after a few months she left home and got small jobs with accommodation around the country. She married three times, but had no further children.

I was adopted from that same children's home by a couple from Middlesex with a seven year old son. The social workers' notes my adoptive mother was a housewife who liked knitting and baking and had a little boy who was polite and had good manners.

What they didn't know, because they didn't really try and find out in those days, was that my adoptive father had a vicious temper and simply couldn't cope with children. My first memory is when I was very small and had vomited in bed in the night. My adoptive father got up and stood me at the top of the stairs and slapped me and slapped me, and said 'It was a mistake to get you, we should send you back to where you came from'. I didn't know where I'd come from at that time, but the words terrified me. It was a refrain I was to hear many more times over my childhood. There were many more beatings too, and as I grew up I got to understand the story - my adoptive mother had a late miscarriage and could not have any more children, but she wanted a sibling for her son, and somehow my adoptive father had agreed, although I was under no illusion it wasn't what he wanted.

There were other, darker abuses too when I was very young, but I was too young to process or understand what was happening and the memories are dark but vague, too vague to process even now.

As I grew into my teens I started to have suicidal ideation and depression but there was no signposted support available directly to teenagers so I just suffered in silence. I was a quite clearly vulnerable teenager which led to me being sexually abused by a teacher at school at age 14. It all erupted when I was 17 and away at university and I was admitted as an inpatient at a psychiatric hospital, but even then, I don't remember ever explaining to anyone what had happened to me, it was all medication and a daily group relaxation session.

I made my way through life, often badly, I sabotaged every good relationship I had, but I had four children. Things got better as I got past middle age, I became more stable and able to hold down jobs and relationships for longer.

When I was fifty, I made contact with my mother, via an internet database of people looking for adopted relatives which my mother's brother had subscribed to. She was unsure at first, but we met after a few months and have developed a good relationship over the last eleven years. I have not told her about my upbringing, or my struggles. She supplied the information about the mother and baby home and her home life at the time, although some I knew from the social workers' notes I asked for when it became legal to do so in the 90s.

So yes, I think there's a lot to apologise for. My mother's guilt. The abuse of the mother and baby home. My abusive adoptive family. We're both older now, I'm retiring soon, but her life and my life could have both been very different.

Your story is horrendous. Did her parents ever apologise to you for what their treatment of their daughter put you through?

Can you explain a bit more about what an apology by politicians who had nothing to do with what happened to you means to you? I don't mean to be confrontational, I am genuinely perplexed how it helps you.

Surely the apology should be from those politicians and lawmakers of the time who conceived and carried out such reprehensible policy. Also second @Imdunfer essentially many of the parents simply gave up on their children, how families can turn their backs on a child so easily in such vast numbers needs to be studied.

They really had incredibly skewed perceptions when it came to morality.

My bio mother is a member of a group that has been campaigning for an apology for years, and she's ecstatic. That's great, but I can't get so excited about it. My (very elderly) adoptive mother heard about it on the news and doesn't understand what it's about. I think if I were to explain to her that it applies to me and my brother, she would be horrified. That's not fair on her.

The apology is of value if we learn from it as a society. If it helps my brother get some therapy for attachment disorder, then great. If it prevents children currently in care being alienated from bio family, then even better.

Her parents were long dead by the time I knew her. I don't think she really blamed them, she saw that they were a product of their time and the narrative was that by sending a girl away with an excuse and her returning later, she could resume her old life in a way that she couldn't if she had the stigma of everyone knowing that she had had a baby out of wedlock. Of course it rarely worked out like that. Apparently in his last years, my grandfather had a stroke which of course can change people afterwards, and it changed him; he was physically very affected but also became a more emotional man. Towards his death, and after decades of never mentioning what happened, he said to my mother, "We should have let you keep your baby, all those years ago". So it was on his mind, and he regretted it.

As for the apology - the Church of England bears more responsibility and did apologise a few months ago, but the state was also responsible as the culture that the social services worked in was at least tacitly endorsed by the state. Social services manipulated, deceived and cajoled mothers into giving up their babies, the only justification being that these women were morally inferior to adoptive parents and these moral shortcomings were somehow going to be passed on to their children if they kept them. I know my adoptive parents absolutely believed that I had inherited some kind of sexual licentiousness when I became a teenager and interested in boys - they physically prevented me socialising with other teenagers in case I 'followed in my mother's footsteps' (their words).

History has a habit of going round in circles and the apology I think helps prevent this or anything similar happening again. The current right wing fervour, together with the rise of misogyny - a Britain of "Christian values", anti-LGBT, subsidised childcare so women need to stay home, might it not proceed to being anti-single parent once again and then it's a short hop to encouraging single parents to give their babies to two-parent "Christian values" families.

I appreciate the long standing harm done by those who were victims of the "morality" of the time. And clearly what ever process was used in allowing couples to adopt was not fit for purpose. (And sadly may still not be.)

But the purpose of the apology, is not to say an apology will fix it, but to admit that not just the state but the institutions that worked with the state could have behaved differently, ie that they are the cause for the number of forced adoptions.

Many of the mother who lost their children to adoption were tricked into it. And as has been made clear (tv documentaries, films) some of this was for the "benefit" of church run programmes in South Africa, Australia, Canada and probably elsewhere.

These children became slave labour to self proclaimed "virtuous" Christians. Who not only wanted cheap labour, but white babies to increase the white population in parts of the British Empire.

Some babies were left by mothers on the understanding that they would be looked after by which ever charity, whilst they found a job and somewhere to live. Only to organise that but come back to find their baby had been illegally put up for adoption.

Added to which, but admit the change would have been slow, had both the state and the church for instance provided support to single mothers it is just possible that more members of the public would have become less sanctimonious.

Not forgetting of course, that as with rape, it was always talked about as though it was the mother's fault, never that the men responsible had just walked away.

Quote:

the UK Parliament Joint Committee on Human Rights found that an estimated 185,000 unmarried women were pressured or coerced into relinquishing their babies between 1949 and 1976.

A significant number of these women were actively misled by professionals and institutions in mother and baby homes. In many cases:

• Deception over consent: Many young, vulnerable mothers were told they were merely signing "fostering" papers or temporary guardianship documents, often believing they could reclaim their baby once they secured housing and employment.

• Lack of understanding: Mothers were frequently isolated from their own families, given no legal counsel, and pressured to sign adoption forms under extreme duress.

• Altered documents: Some mothers reported being heavily sedated during labor or having adoption papers altered after they had signed them.

Because of these coercive and deceitful practices, following a parliamentary inquiry, the UK government issued a formal public apology acknowledging that many of these mothers were tricked, bullied, or railroaded into unwanted adoptions. You can read more about the full scale of these systemic violations in the UK Parliament Shorthand Story on Family Violations.

Yes they were. As a guardian ad litem our responsibility was to ask the women about whether they really wanted their babies to be placed for adoption. Very few said no. I now think that many of these families could have been covering up sexual abuse by males in the family, which was not really known about at that time (except by the girls it had happened to )The name of the father was often not included in the documentation.

j

Those weren't the parents that I was asking about. I was asking about the majority, the parents of the young women who got pregnant by boyfriends, whose parents turned their backs and let the church do whatever it wanted to punish their daughters and/or forced their daughters to give up their babies to adoption agencies by refusing to stand by them.

There were parents who did stand by their daughters. Nobody ever seems to blame anyone but the state and/or church for these forced adoptions.

As said up thread the apology has nothing whatsoever to do with social attitudes held by many in the UK.

If that is your priority then it needs a whole different thread about how people thought because of their religion, their parents, the tabloid press, films etc.. ie much like today most people go with the herd.

This apology is about the fact that the Government and various religious organisations actively lied and cheated women who wanted to keep their children.

And what is disgusting is that the UK has taken the longest to apologise. Other countries managed to recognise the harm they did some time ago and did apologise.

I heard you up thread. I was responding to a different point made by somebody else.

But in view of the social system at the time they did what they thought was best for mother and child. The individuals involved all have a lot to answer for, both the mother's parents and the adoptive parents and officials at the adoption home - more diligence was required..But not all adoptions had such dreadful outcomes nor were all parents so uncompromising in their reaction to a pregnant daughter. I am not sure how a girl in 1965 - beginning of the sexual revolution - did not realise sex resulted in pregnancy either. I was born in 1950 (to an unmarried mother as it turned out later, but one supported by my father) and by 1965 was 15. I remember sex education films at school (all girls) and biology lessons about human reproduction (it was not all rabbits, certainly) although my actual knowledge came from conversation with a friend when I was twelve - my disbelief almost immediately translated into 'of course', apparently a well-documented reaction! (Thank you Smokey Cat aka Jane - that was a useful conversation.) I well understood that sex resulted in pregnancy and I knew what sex was and avoided it, wanting to go to university and was perfectly aware of the ostracism one was likely to experience if one transgressed.
The dead cannot apologise and the living had nothing to do with these decisions. There is no such think as ancestral guilt. We have come to other decisions in our age - some work, some don't.