Forced Adoption and the Children and Families Truth Commission

There is a line that runs from 1949 to the present day. It does not run straight. It bends. The terminology changes. The legal framework is modernised. The stated justification shifts from moral transgression to welfare concern. But the underlying institutional logic, the logic that decides a mother's protective concern is the problem, that a child is better served by separation from that mother, and that professional assessment outweighs the mother's knowledge of her own child, that logic has not changed.

The evidence that it has not changed comes from two sources published more than seven decades apart.

What the JCHR found in 2022

The Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry into the forced adoption of children of unmarried women between 1949 and 1976 found that around 185,000 babies were adopted in England and Wales during this period. These women did not give their children away.

The inquiry found that young women were sent away from home to conceal their pregnancies, placed in mother and baby homes, subjected to abuse, and in some cases physically prevented from holding their newborns. Their treatment was described by those who experienced it as deliberate punishment.

The JCHR was unambiguous: the government bore responsibility for this. Public authorities were responsible for the conduct of their employees. The government was responsible for the policies and laws of the time, and for the omissions of policy and law that allowed these practices to continue for nearly three decades.

The most important word in the JCHR report is not adoption or separation or harm. It is responsibility. The inquiry established that the state was responsible. Not individuals acting outside their remit. The state, acting within it.

What the children experienced

The Australian Adoptees Network submission documented what the children of forced separation grew into as adults. Adults without identity. Without the means to discover who they were. Left disenfranchised by the deliberate actions of institutions that had prioritised a moral framework over a human one.

The submission describes a particular aloneness that adoptees carry. Other people find it difficult to understand. The only people who truly understand the adoptee experience are other adoptees. That isolation is itself a consequence of the original separation. It does not end with childhood.

What the Children and Families Truth Commission found in 2024

In November 2024, the Children and Families Truth Commission published its report Eroding the Right to Family Life, drawing on submissions from over 600 families who had experienced the current family court system. It was launched in the House of Lords, chaired by Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson.

The commission's survey findings are the most comprehensive documented account of what UK families are currently experiencing inside the children's social care system. The findings are not anecdotal. They are systematic.

93% of families did not receive the support requested from local authorities or services. 90% were not offered help for the underlying issues leading to child removal. 94% reported inaccuracies in child welfare assessments. 69% found their legal representation unsatisfactory or biased. 67% experienced their mental health being unfairly used against them in proceedings. 94% were unjustly denied contact with their children.

These figures are not from a historical inquiry. They are from families engaged with the current system, reported in 2024.

The line between then and now

The JCHR inquiry covered 1949 to 1976. The Children and Families Truth Commission covers the present. The specific practices are different. The stated rationale is different. The legal framework has been modernised at least twice.

But the structure of what is being described is the same. Mothers who raised concerns were not believed. Children's voices were dismissed or filtered. Institutions protected themselves rather than the families before them. And the mothers left holding the evidence of what had been done found that the system responsible for causing the harm was also responsible for adjudicating their account of it.

The JCHR called it a violation of family life. The Children and Families Truth Commission calls it an erosion of the right to family life. Parliament called it causing harm to families.

The mothers who experienced it called it something else. Something they could not name for decades because the institution that had the most power over their story was the same institution that had written it.

Source references

UK Joint Committee on Human Rights (2022) 'The Violation of Family Life: Adoption of Children of Unmarried Women 1949–1976.' 15 July 2022.

Children and Families Truth Commission (2024) Eroding the Right to Family Life. Launched House of Lords, November 2024.

Australian Adoptees Network (2012) Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Former Forced Adoption Policies and Practices. Sub 257v2.