Yesterday the Church of England apologised for the part it played in forced adoptions in the past. Some years ago the Catholic Church issued a similar apology.

Earlier this week we heard that the Government is also planning to issue an apology, when the Education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, told the Education Select Committee:

The prime minister will have more to say on this shameful period in our history, reflecting the gravity of what has happened. But here and now, let me say to all of those affected, you will get the apology that you so profoundly deserve.

It is quite right that these three institutions should recognise the distress and harm caused by their actions.

However I want to bring a more nuanced understanding to the issue. We are talking about the time from the end of World War II to the mid 70s – the period that I grew up in. I can remember clearly how different the attitudes of society were then from today.

For context, in the 40s and 50s reliable contraception was not available. When the contraceptive pill was offered by the NHS in the mid 60s it was only prescribed to married women – I asked my doctor for it and he reluctantly prescribed it exactly three months before my wedding, so I could “get used to it”.

Until the Abortion Act in 1967 abortion was always a crime. I can remember a girl in my class at school having a back street abortion, and how I reacted in horror at the way this was carried out.

There was no social service support for unmarried mothers (the term always carried judgemental overtones), and it was not uncommon for parents to throw their daughter out if she became pregnant.  She would not be able to just go and live with her boyfriend, even if he wanted to, mainly because couples never lived openly together if they were not married. No landlord would rent them a room.

A hurried shotgun wedding was one solution, but only if both were over 16, and then only if their parents gave permission (up to the age of 21). And this would only work if he was old enough to bring in enough money for the young family to survive.

Occasionally the grandmother would agree to bring up the child as her own, but this was by no means universal and required some subterfuge.

So perhaps it is understandable that the broad attitude of society was to discourage girls from having sex outside marriage, given the serious impact of pregnancy. Of course, it was always the girls who bore the consequences, so they were always blamed.  However, what is not clear from a modern perspective is the level of shame involved.  Shame which made it often impossible for a pregnant girl to attend school, shame which settled on the girl’s family, shame which labelled the child as illegitimate.

My younger self absorbed all this.  It was these rather amorphous attitudes and social constraints which left a young woman with no option but to give her baby for adoption. It was society at large that forced it, rather than any particular institution.

Mother and Baby homes, whether run by church or state, offered one solution to the problem. Young women could be “hidden” away to reduce the shame, helped through pregnancy and then return to normal life – education or work – with some invented story to explain being away for some months.

Now I am not for one moment ignoring some of the horror stories that have emerged from these homes – stories that range from indifference to downright cruelty and criminal actions. But I do know that they were not all like that. Many treated the residents with compassion, although always tinged with the notion that the young women had been stupid and must learn not to do it again.

It was taken for granted that children born to mothers from Mother and Baby homes would be adopted – that was the expected progression. There was also the (mistaken) belief that the best way to do that was to take the child away quickly and without ceremony so the mother could quickly return to her previous life. We now know that it didn’t work like that, and much psychological damage was done.

I am not trying to justify what happened all those years ago, but I do want people to understand that the world was not being run by wicked people who delighted in hurting others. Those running the homes and arranging the adoptions did so, for the most part, from good intentions.

I did see changes happen. In the 70s I was teaching in a secondary school and I was giving pastoral support to one of the pupils who was pregnant. She stayed in a Mother and Baby home and decided to keep the baby, with her parents’ support. I was invited to the Christening.

One thing that gives me great hope is recognising that public attitudes can change for the better. It often feels as though the values accepted currently by society are immutable, but that is far from the truth. I have witnessed massive changes in my lifetime in the way we view and talk about many things: homosexuality, child abuse and women’s rights, for example.  But the transition depends on brave campaigners who are prepared to face mockery as they make out the case for change, and who are in it for the long game.  Liberal Democrats are good at doing that.

* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.