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.
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8 Comments
“There was no social service support for unmarried mothers (the term always carried judgemental overtones),”
I have a vague memory dating back to the early 1960s of a fellow pupil in my class at a girls grammar school not being present and no-one was saying where she was or if she was ill. Eventually it came out that she was in a home for unmarried mothers.
Whether the mother freely consented to her baby being adopted is, quite rightly, an important issue. Qualifying as a social worker in the mid 1970s, the first adoption I was involved was in the early 1980s, and I recall the judge being quite conscientious about checking the status of the mother’s consent before granting the Adoption Order which I think had been sought by a separate worker to ensure independence
>” 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”
Change was slow…
In the mid 1980s my late mother (teacher, then midwife and then returned to teaching) home tutored teenage mothers. Being a family of boys, it was “interesting” coming home to find rugs spread across the lawn and mothers and babies enjoying the sun and being tutored by my mother. My mother enjoyed her position, as at the time there were no teenage pregnancies in Hertfordshire, because they didn’t collect the data… Ever resourceful, she made full use of her sons to chaperone the girls/mums to cinema, rock concerts etc.
Thank you Mary for your wise words. In the past adoption was indeed often in the best interests of the children concerned, given social attitudes to illegitimacy persisting well into the 1970s. Those children are now mature adults and it must be very painful and disturbing for them to hear this anachronistic narrative of “forced adoption” without the sort of corrective you have supplied.
As a “mature” adoptee (b. Perth/Australia; 1945); despatched on a troop plane from Perth to Melbourne when I was four weeks old; not told of my adoptive status…. I can confirm that it was a barbaric practice to separate a newborn from its mother/father and kin.
The intention was to sever all ties/connection between the child and its families of origin.
Those persons who adopted were often unprepared, ill-equipped to manage a child suffering from separation/disconnecton with his/her mother. It was a cruel, barbaric system. Many adoptees experience lifelong grief/trauma which has often been misunderstood… with tragic consequences.
I support recognition/apology of past injustices in adoption; it will hopefully help some of those whose lives have been affected to find peace in their hearts and lives; knowing that past practices of adoption were cruel, causing lifelong sorrow and loss.
It begs the question why social attitudes were so hostile to abortion and lets be honest, sex education, birth control, relationship education etc.
That would be due to the malign influence of the church. The first references to abortion in English law appeared in the 13th Century. The law followed Church teaching that abortion was acceptable until ‘quickening’, which, it was believed, was when the soul entered the fetus. The legal situation remained like this for centuries.
1803: The Ellenborough Act – abortion after ‘quickening’ (i.e. when movement is felt at 16-20 weeks) carried the death penalty. Previously the punishment had been less severe.
As usual, their is nothing in the Bible to support the bans on abortion apart from the endless misogyny where women barely get mentioned and don’t do any begetting.
“1803: The Ellenborough Act – abortion after ‘quickening’ (i.e. when movement is felt at 16-20 weeks) carried the death penalty. Previously the punishment had been less severe.”
This is not completely correct. Prior to the 1803 Act – known at the the time as The Malicious Shootings and Stabbings Act – there was no law against abortion in England and Wales. This was seen to be an issue between a woman and her midwife, and men had been kept out of the picture.
The change began to take place in the middle of the 18th C, when men – politically and socially radicals – decided that they wished to become midwives. George Macaulay the radical was one such. Other radicals too thought that midwifery should be opened up to men, and it was these men who were disturbed at the women coming to them for abortions. This led to the 1803 Act – which was promoted at the time as an act whose primary purpose was to stop dueling. This was necessary as at that time – indeed until 1832 – there were still a sizable number of women who had the right to vote.
The male midwives proved to be unpopular with women in England and ended up being renamed obstetricians. In the US however, they proved to be very popular, and by 1800, every fashionable east coast woman wanted a male midwife present at the birth. This is why today in the US midwives are “not a thing”, whereas here in the UK they very much are.
The rationalist arguments (the main arguments) of the time against abortion were very much framed as being about “life”, in contrast to the opposition which framed things in terms of the 2000+ year old arguments of “ensoulment”. The various different protestant sects all had different ideas as to when ensoulment took place, some saying that it didn’t occur until crowning. Hence why there were no laws against it. England btw took no notice of the pronouncements of Popes.