Forced adoption apology
Rejecting the legacy of shame
t seems that the UK government may, at long last, finally apologise for the abusive practices that, in the early post-war period, took babies away from their mothers and kept them apart for the rest of their lives. The harm these practices caused, both for the mothers and their children, has been magnified by the delay in issuing an apology.
I began my Substack in Autumn 2022, soon after the death of my wife Angela. My first posts were an attempt to honour her memory, and particularly her role, back in the 1970s, in winning for adoptees the right to access their birth records. Ending adoption secrecy had been seen by some of Angela’s radical feminist sisters as a diversion. For her, though, it was important both personally, as a mother who wanted the son taken from her as a baby to be able to find her when he became adult, and politically, as a first step towards restoring the mother/child bond and ending the shame that unmarried mothers were made to endure,.
At the start of these posts, titled Rejecting the legacy of shame, I referred to the UK Parliament Human Rights Committee’s call, in July 2022, for survivors of the forced adoptions that took place in England and Wales between 1949 and 1976 to receive an official apology. I wrote that “My wife, Angela, sadly died before she was able to hear the apology that she, 185,000 other mothers, and the children taken from them, deserved to hear. A government response has been much delayed, and it is not clear whether or not there will actually be an official apology for this massive human rights abuse”.
Mothers, and the children that were taken from them, have still not received that apology. Another UK parliament committee looked this month into forced adoption, and took yet more witness statements from survivors. One of those survivors, Ann Keen, a Trustee of the Movement for Adoption Apology and a former Labour MP, explained that “a Government apology would help set the record straight, and would help me to stop blaming myself and to heal, because I have not - I still feel shame.”
The Education Committee’s report noted that “Historical forced adoption practices involved systematic coercion, the removal of parental choice and often resulted in deep trauma and lifelong consequences for mental and physical health.” It concluded that “A formal apology is necessary to acknowledge these harms and to recognise the state’s role in permitting them.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer responded on itvNews, saying “I want to get this right … The case for saying we’re sorry, an appropriate apology, is very strong to my mind.” His response does not inspire confidence. ‘Wanting to get it right’ is a phrase that has been used by his Government to justify its delay in proceeding with a promised and much needed public Inquiry into gang-based child sexual exploitation. There’s an important difference, too, between repeating the word sorry (which the previous Government did three years ago) and issuing a formal apology which wouldn’t just change our understanding of the past, but could in addition provide redress in the present to help survivors to heal.
One of the problems with the previous government’s response in 2023 to the Human Rights Committee’s recommendation was that it diverted attention away from the state’s role in promoting forced adoption and onto “society’s attitudes to unmarried mothers.” Another problem was that it ignored how adoptive parents and their organisations had influenced social attitudes to ’illegitimacy’, by stressing that parenting is their right, one that might only be achieved by breaking the mother/child bond and denying the rights of both mother and child. How current debates about surrogacy echo past debates about forced adoption was something that Angela was very aware of. Based on her experience with Jigsaw (the organisation she founded in the 1970s to campaign for an end to adoption secrecy), she argued, here, against the further liberalisation of surrogacy and its erosion of the mother/child bond.
Both adoption and surrogacy are based on a corrosive ‘right to parent’, something that has been noted by Renee Gerlich in New Zealand. She acknowledges that “it seems harsh to speak of adoption and surrogacy as degrading”. Yet, she argues, when parenting is seen as a right:
“Practices, services and industries develop that see children not as gifts from life, but commodities produced to meet adult ‘needs’. The cost is the very mother/child bond we claim to value when trying to support adults into parenthood. Over time, the ultimate cost of routinely severing the mother/child bond is our cultural wellbeing.”
(Renee Gerlich, Undermining Motherhood, The First Task Substack, 4 Feb 2026)
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Hopefully a formal government apology, if one is issued, will acknowledge the state’s role in forced adoption, recognise that it did not completely disappear in 1976, and provide some redress and comfort for survivors. Whether or not it acknowledges the harm of breaking the mother/child bond is another matter, as this could influence the future of surrogacy as well as clarify the past of adoption. We shall see, in the wording of its apology and in its response to the surrogacy lobby’s demands that mothers’ rights are further eroded, what lessons, if any, Starmer’s government has learnt from the squalid history of forced adoption.