UK PM Starmer apologises for forced adoptions of 185,000 babies, calling the scandal a stain on British history
LONDON: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday formally apologised for the forced adoption of an estimated 185,000 babies born to unmarried mothers in England and Wales between 1949 and 1976, calling it “a stain on our history”.
The scandal saw the mothers, including many who were teenagers, coerced into giving up their children with social, institutional and family pressures used to persuade them that adoption was their only option.
“We are deeply and profoundly sorry to the mothers who were told they were unfit, who were prevented from caring for the children they desperately wanted … and who have carried this loss for decades,” Starmer told parliament.
“The shame is not yours. The shame was never yours. The shame is ours,” he insisted.
The premier paid tribute to survivors who had campaigned for the apology and the “extraordinary courage with which they have shared their harrowing testimonies and fought for the truth time and time again”.
The apology comes four years after a parliamentary committee recommended an official apology.
Australia’s government issued a landmark apology in 2013 for forced adoptions, and Ireland’s did so in 2021.
“What happened to them, and to tens of thousands of mothers, children, and families, should never have happened,” Starmer told lawmakers following a meeting a group of the survivors at his Downing Street office.
“It is a stain on our history, mothers, many young, vulnerable, and without support were coerced, bullied, or misled into feeling that they had no choice but to have their children taken away from them.”
He said the removal of the children had been systemic with the practice “embedded within systems across local authorities, across voluntary and faith-based institutions, and in health and social care services”.
‘Punishment’
“Young mothers were told that they were immoral, that their babies would be better off without them and again, as they told me this morning, that lasts a lifetime and has a huge impact,” he said.
“The state bears responsibility for the systems it funded and legitimised, which enabled these practices to occur… for this systemic failure. I am truly sorry,” he added.
The parliamentary committee that probed the scandal found that the mothers involved were abused in multiple ways.
Painkillers would be deliberately denied as “punishment” in hospital during childbirth and afterward, babies were sometimes pulled from their sobbing mother’s arms to be taken away for adoption, its report found.
“Have you learnt your lesson now?” one woman recalled a doctor telling her while she was in labour.
Another told parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights: “A doctor told me that I should be sterilised as I must be a nymphomaniac.”
The apology comes after the Church of England last month said sorry for its role in the forced adoptions.
Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally apologised for the “pain, trauma and stigma” caused to those affected, adding that there was a deep shame that the practice had happened to people “in the care of Christian communities”.
Abortion was legalised in England, Scotland and Wales in 1967. But even after then, women faced practical barriers such as objections by their doctors.
Apologies were also made in 2023 by the devolved administrations in Cardiff and Edinburgh to people impacted in Wales and Scotland.
An apology is also expected in Northern Ireland but not until after a public inquiry has been carried out, following a recommendation from a 2021 report on mother and baby institutions, Magdalene laundries and workhouses.
