Rejecting the legacy of shame - Part 1
How first mothers reframed the 1970s debate about adoptees' birth records
In July this year,, the UK Parliament Human Rights Committee called for an official apology for the forced adoptions that were widespread in England and Wales between 1949 and 1976. 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.
This post will review the almost forgotten story of how some, at least, of the harshest aspects of the forced adoption regime were eased in the mid-1970s. It will celebrate in particular the part played by Angela and Jigsaw, the organisation she founded, in making the change happen.
Whether or not forced adoptions are totally a thing of the past is something I will explore in a later post.
1926 - Adoption as a solution to the problem of illegitimacy
The 1926 Adoption of Children Act, which legalised adoption in England and Wales, had at its heart a fiction to erase the stigma of illegitimacy. Adoptees were to be treated “as though the adopted child was a child born to the adopter in lawful wedlock.” To facilitate this, the Act removed the right of adopted children to see their original birth certificate, although at this stage a mother would know who was adopting her child. Before long, adopters and the agencies that arranged adoptions insisted that the law was revised in 1949 to enforce secrecy and ensure a complete break between the mother and her child.
“Adopted children were encouraged to behave as if they had no existence prior to their adoption, while their mothers were encouraged to behave as if they never had an illegitimate child. The solution to the problem of illegitimacy was to pretend that it had never happened”
(Angela Hamblin, Then and Now, in Jigsaw, The Other Side of Adoption, 1977).
Adoptees and the right to know their origin
By the 1960s, adoptees were starting to object to the secrecy around their origins, and to assert their right to see their original birth certificate and know who gave them life. They were accused of selfishness, and being ungrateful to the adoptive parents who had brought them up. Later the arguments against greater openness turned to the natural mother, and her right to secrecy. (Natural mother was the term generally used at the time for mothers whose children were taken for adoption. Adoption agencies and adopters soon began to insist on the more reductive term birth mother. Angela herself later preferred the term first mother.)
“A picture was painted of the natural mother cringing behind her front door, living in terror lest her adopted child turned up on the doorstep and exposed her wicked secret to the world.”
(Angela Hamblin, Then and Now, in Jigsaw, The Other side of Adoption, 1977).
These arguments came to a head in debates about a suggested law change in 1975, to be incorporated in a new Children Act. If accepted, this would give adult adoptees the right to see their original birth certificate. There was determined opposition, led by Conservative MP Jill Knight (who would later achieve notoriety as the instigator of Clause 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, which barred local authorities from promoting homosexuality). Jill Knight’s argument was that natural mothers who had relinquished a child for adoption had been promised anonymity, and that this anonymity should be continued, to protect them from a shame that they had been allowed to put behind them.
1975 - Mothers enter the debate
Angela was a mother who not only would not have minded being contacted by the son taken from her for adoption, but would have actively welcomed it. She came out publicly in a letter to the Guardian in February 1975, and suggested that a register could be created “where natural mothers or adopted persons could register their desire and willingness to be contacted by the other.” Encouraging contact through such a register, she suggested, would both make contact easier and address Jill Knight’s objection.
“The condition for inclusion on the proposed register would be willingness to be traced. This would automatically protect those persons, whether natural mother or adopted son or daughter who did not wish to be traced, and their privacy would be respected.”
(Angela Hamblin, Tracing a son, Guardian 21 February, 1975)
Angela ended that letter with an appeal for anyone interested in the idea to get in touch. The first responses were immediate, from the media. The morning the letter appeared she was asked to go into Central London to be interviewed for the BBC radio news programme World at One. No sooner had she returned to her North London home from that interview than she was asked to go to another BBC studio to appear on their flagship early evening television programme, Nationwide. Responding to the publicity, natural mothers and adoptees soon got in touch with her, eager to take up her contact register suggestion.
“The lies that have kept us apart and inactive”
The responses were revealing, as Angela pointed out in in another Guardian letter, on 27 March 1975. Natural mothers explained to her that they had been told they would disrupt the lives of their children if they tried to make contact. Adoptees explained that they had been told that contacting their natural mother would cause irreparable damage. “Each side has no way of knowing if this is true, and can become eaten-up with doubts and fears about selfishness.,” Angela wrote. ”It is only as we begin to communicate with each other that we discover the lies which have kept us apart and inactive for so long.” Responding to arguments that counselling would be needed to avoid insensitive tracing, Angela suggested that what was needed was supportive guidance, of the kind that was best provided not by social workers but by natural mothers or other adoptees,.
Jigsaw
Following those Guardian letters and the subsequent media publicity, Angela formed Jigsaw, a self-help group of natural mothers and adoptees aimed at setting up its own contact register, and providing counselling support. At its first meeting in April 1975 a dozen or so natural mothers and adoptees met together for the first time. It was an intensely emotional and consciousness-raising experience.
“Each person present had until then been alone with their problems. Now they tried tentatively to reach out each other and share their most intense experiences. For some of the mothers in particular this was the first time in twenty or thirty years they had had the opportunity to speak of their illegitimate pregnancies and the pain of losing their babies in adoption. For the first time in their lives adoptees heard what it was like to be an unmarried mother of their own mother’s age. And for the first time the mothers could hear the care and concern which these adopted people felt for their natural mothers. It was a very moving occasion and it became very clear to us then that this expression of pent-up feeling, which came to be known as unburdening, would be a very important part of Jigsaw’s work.”
(Jigsaw, The Other Side of Adoption, 1977)
Further media publicity led to a flood of enquiries. It became clear that new members wanted not just to be added to a contact register - they wanted to be able to ‘unburden’, and they appreciated the opportunity to do so. So when the Department of Health and Social Security asked Jigsaw to comment on a proposal to offer counselling to adoptees when they apply for their birth certificate, Jigsaw’s response suggested that the counselling should provide adoptees with unbiassed and supportive help and information. Crucially, it should not be a mechanism to dissuade the adoptee from seeking contact with his or her natural mother. Adoptees wanting to make contact, the response advised, should be referred to Jigsaw for inclusion on its contact register.
“We think it is very important that the right balance should be struck between protecting the interests of natural mothers, both those who wish to be traced and those who do not wish to be traced, and at the same time safeguarding the statutory right conferred upon adopted persons for access to their birth records”.
(Jigsaw response to DHSS consultation paper on Access to birth records, 1975)
A prime focus of Jigsaw in 1975 was ensuring that parliament would vote to give adult adoptees the right to access their birth certificates, which would make it possible for them to trace their mothers. Part 2 will record how Jigsaw went about influencing the parliamentary debate.
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