"Shame is ours": the United Kingdom apologizes for thousands of forced adoptions of children of single mothers

LondonPolitics is also the recognition of truth. After decades of silence, humiliation, and stigmatization, this Thursday the British government has officially apologized to the tens of thousands of women who, between the late 1940s and early 1970s, were forced to give up their children for adoption simply because they were unmarried.

The apology in the House of Commons by Prime Minister Keir Starmer comes a few weeks after the Church of England also said "mea culpa", acknowledging its responsibility in one of the most painful episodes, yet another, in the contemporary social history of the United Kingdom. The governments of Scotland and Wales had already expressed their apologies in 2023.

It is estimated that around 185,000 mothers in England and Wales — some estimates put the figure as high as 250,000 women across the United Kingdom, including Scotland and Northern Ireland — were victims of a system that, with the participation of authorities, religious organizations, and Public Health System (NHS) professionals, pressured them to give up their babies. The vast majority were very young, and there were women from all walks of life. The only thing they had in common was having become pregnant outside of marriage, a situation then considered a family and social shame.

Statement to the Commons

In the solemn declaration to the Commons, Starmer has described those events as "a stain on our history". The prime minister stated that mothers were "coerced, intimidated or deceived" into believing they had no alternative but to separate from their children. "The shame is not yours. It never was. The shame is ours", he stated, assuming for the first time on behalf of the State the institutional responsibility for those practices. Some of the mothers who attended the ceremony at Parliament were seen wiping away tears during the "premier'sintervention.

One of those thousands of women, former Labour MP Ann Keen, stated this morning on the BBC Radio 4 programme "Today", that with the State's apology she hoped to be "freed from shame". The former parliamentarian, who visited Downing Street this morning with a group of mothers before the official apology took place, said about her son's adoption: "I had no voice". Keen was sent to a children's home in Swansea in 1966, when she was seventeen years old. "We all need these apologies, because we have always been accused of giving up our babies and we didn't", she recalled.

Starmer's words have culminated years of campaigning driven by birth mothers, their children, and their families. They also respond to the conclusions of several parliamentary investigations – initiated in 2021, following a BBC report – which determined that the public policies of the time created a climate in which "single mothers were systematically stigmatised and pushed to give up their children for adoption".

"I didn't abandon my son, they took him from me"

The testimonies collected in the journalistic and parliamentary investigation describe a repeated pattern of psychological abuse and coercion. Many young women were secretly sent to institutions that dealt with hiding them, from society and family, while they were pregnant. Some recalled being forced to wear a wedding ring when they went out in public to avoid public scandal. Others explained that, after giving birth, the baby was taken away from them without being allowed to say goodbye. In other cases, they were subjected to intense emotional pressure to sign consent documents, documents that, according to some lawyers, in certain cases would not even have been signed by the mothers.

Many never had children again. Others have lived for decades with a sense of guilt that was not their fault. "I did not abandon my child; they took him from me," the affected women have repeated for years. For many, the official apology represents above all a moral restitution and public recognition that they were victims of an enormous injustice. They will not, however, receive any financial compensation for the damage caused to them.

As has been pointed out, the Church of England recognized its role in this system of coercion on June 18. Between 1949 and 1976, it managed or supervised about a hundred mother and baby homes. After two years of investigation into its archives, it admitted that the women suffered "pain, trauma, fear, and stigmatization" when they should have received "care and compassion." Its highest representative, Sarah Mullally, the Archbishop of Canterbury, also stated to the victims: "You have nothing to be ashamed of. The shame is ours."

The report commissioned by the Church also revealed the extent to which these women were dehumanized. Internal documents from the 1970s described the institutions where they were housed as places "from which adoption agencies obtained their raw material." Some mothers were described as "foolish," "irresponsible," or "inadequate." The same report also acknowledged that many pregnant women were forced to do heavy manual labor as a form of punishment.

Australia and Ireland apologized in 2023 for the same practices. For many of the affected women, now in their seventies or eighties, the expression of regret for the harm caused comes too late.