According to a report by the UK parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, an estimated 185,000 children were forcibly taken away for adoption between 1949 and 1976.
Unmarried mothers were forced to give up their babies in England and Wales, and deserve an apology from Britain, said an official report on Friday, giving harrowing details regarding the anguish these women suffered through.
The committee’s chairwoman, Labour MP Harriet Harman, said the bond between mothers and babies was “brutally ruptured” over the period.
“The mothers’ only ‘crime’ was to have become pregnant while unmarried. Their ‘sentence’ was a lifetime of secrecy and pain,” she said.
Harman said, adding: “It is time for the government to do the same and issue the apology they seek … For decades they have been vilified. Now they need to be vindicated.”
The report cited examples of Australia and Ireland, whose governments issued landmark apologies for forced abortions in 2013 and 2021, respectively.
Abortion was legalised in England, Scotland and Wales in 1967, but even after then, women faced practical barriers such as social stigma and refusal from doctors to perform the abortion.
Schools, churches and social services would present adoption as the only choice, directing young women to adoption agencies, often instructing their parents without consulting the women themselves, stripping away their bodily autonomy.
In hospitals during childbirth, painkillers would be denied as “punishment” and scenes of babies being pulled away from sobbing mothers after birth were painted in shocking detail by the report.
“Have you learnt your lesson now?” one woman recalled a doctor telling her while she was in labour.
Another told the committee: “A doctor told me that I should be sterilised as I must be a nymphomaniac.”
The report recommended the government make it easier for those trying to trace their mother or child, and called for more specialised counselling for the people who suffered through this trauma,
A government spokeswoman responded, “We have the deepest sympathy to all those affected by historic forced adoption.
“While we cannot undo the past, we have strengthened our legislation and practice to be built on empathy,” she said, pointing to the better care given today for vulnerable women.
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