U.K. government to apologize for the state’s role in decades of forced adoptions

Ralph Goodale, Canada’s former representative to the United Kingdom, talks about Keir Starmer’s resignation.

LONDON — The British government will make a formal apology on Thursday for separating tens of thousands of unmarried mothers from their babies, a practice that lasted for decades until the 1970s.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, in the final weeks of his premiership, will make a statement in the House of Commons acknowledging the state’s role in forced adoptions and apologizing to survivors.

Britain is one of several countries reckoning with the legacy of social norms, religious practices and government policies that heaped shame on unwed mothers, hid them away in institutions while pregnant and took their children to be adopted by married couples.

An estimated 185,000 babies of unmarried mothers were adopted in England and Wales between 1949 and 1976. Campaigners have fought for years for acknowledgment that women were pressured, deceived and threatened into giving up their babies.

Ann Keen, a former U.K. health minister whose baby was taken for adoption in 1966 when she was 17, said she was looking forward to “being released from my shame.”

“We need this apology, because we have always been accused of giving up our babies, and we didn’t give them up,” she told the BBC. “We’ve now got the opportunity to really put this wrong right.”

In 2022, Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights said the British state should apologize for “the pain and suffering caused by public institutions and state employees that railroaded mothers into unwanted adoptions.”

The semiautonomous governments in Scotland and Wales issued apologies the following year, but the Conservative U.K. government at the time declined to follow suit.

The apology from Starmer’s Labour Party government comes two weeks after the Church of England said sorry for its role in forced adoptions.

Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally said that “we are profoundly sorry for the pain, trauma and stigma experienced — and still carried — by many people because of historical adoption practices in homes affiliated to the Church of England.”

Other countries have been facing up to a similar history.

In 2013, Australia’s then-prime minister, Julia Gillard, delivered a landmark national apology for the country’s history of forced adoptions and the “lifelong legacy of pain and suffering” it had caused.

Ireland has been reckoning with the legacy of mother-and-baby homes run by the Catholic Church, in which tens of thousands of women were housed in often degrading conditions. An inquiry found in 2021 that 9,000 children had died in 18 mother-and-baby homes during the 20th century.

Prime Minister Micheál Martin apologized for the “profound and generational wrong” visited upon mothers and their babies who ended up in the institutions.

Jill Lawless, The Associated Press