The Maternal Cost

The question of what state-enforced separation costs a mother is rarely asked in its own right. It is treated as secondary to the question of what it costs the child, as though these are separate questions rather than the same question viewed from different sides of the same relationship.

They are not separate. When you damage a mother, you damage the child's environment. When you damage the child's environment, you damage the child. The evidence is consistent across time, geography, and type of separation.

What the JCHR found about English mothers — fifty years on

In July 2022, the UK Joint Committee on Human Rights published its inquiry into the adoption of children of unmarried women between 1949 and 1976. The inquiry estimated that around 185,000 babies were adopted in England and Wales during this period, not because their mothers chose to relinquish them, but because societal pressure, institutional coercion, and the absence of support made any other outcome impossible.

The JCHR found that these women did not give their children away. They were subjected to secrecy and shame from the earliest stages of pregnancy. They were sent away from home, placed in mother and baby homes, and in some cases abused. Their treatment was experienced and described as deliberate punishment for the transgression of pregnancy outside marriage.

What the inquiry documented fifty years later was the long arc of what that separation produced. Ongoing mental health difficulties reported decades afterwards. Family lives shaped and damaged by the absence. One mother told the inquiry: 53 years later and here I am, a wreck because of what happened to me and my daughter.

The government denied responsibility. The JCHR concluded that public authorities were responsible for the way their employees treated these women. The government bore responsibility for the conduct of NHS employees, for the policies of the time, and for the omissions of policy and law that allowed these practices to continue for nearly three decades.

What the Australian adoptee testimony shows

The Australian Senate Inquiry into Former Forced Adoption Policies and Practices received submissions from individuals and organisations across Australia documenting the impact of state-enforced separation on both adoptees and their birth mothers.

The Australian Adoptees Network submission described adults who had grown up without identity, without knowledge of who they were, and without the means to discover their history and families. They described a sense of aloneness that those who had not experienced enforced separation found difficult to fully understand. The only people who truly understood the adoptee experience, the submission noted, were other adoptees. That isolation is itself a consequence of the original separation. It does not end with childhood. It travels.

The pattern documented in Australia, institutional coercion dressed as welfare, shame used as an instrument of control, mothers who would have kept their children denied the opportunity, is the same pattern the JCHR documented in England. Different countries, different decades, same institutional logic.

What the US border separations showed in real time

In 2018, the United States government forcibly separated more than 5,000 children from their parents under its Zero Tolerance policy. The separations were abrupt, state-enforced, and studied almost in real time.

Hampton and colleagues at Physicians for Human Rights analysed 31 medico-legal affidavits from parents and children who had been forcibly separated. The clinicians who conducted these evaluations included psychologists, psychiatrists, paediatricians, and social workers. All evaluations were conducted after reunification.

The findings were uniform. Almost all individuals met diagnostic criteria for at least one major mental health condition, PTSD, major depressive disorder, or generalised anxiety disorder, even after reunification. Three of the 19 parents experienced suicidal thoughts while separated from their children. Every single clinician evaluation found no signs of malingering. The trauma was real, consistent, and clinically documented.

Children exhibited regression, clinging, nightmares, urinary incontinence, and recurring feelings of fear following reunification. A six-year-old girl met criteria for PTSD one year after reunification. An eight-year-old boy met criteria for PTSD and separation anxiety disorder two years after reunification. Neither had exhibited these symptoms before the separation.

The evaluating clinicians concluded that the US government's treatment of these families constituted cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. Physicians for Human Rights determined the harms were consistent with the legal definition of torture under the UN Convention Against Torture.

What this means across all three contexts

The JCHR inquiry documents the long arc, what state-enforced separation produces across decades in English mothers told they had transgressed.

The Australian adoptee testimony documents the adoptee experience, the lifelong absence of identity and the particular aloneness that comes from having been removed from the person who would have known you from the beginning.

The US border separation research documents the acute phase, what happens to both parents and children in the weeks and months immediately following a state-enforced separation, studied in real time by clinical experts.

Together they produce a consistent picture across three countries, three different types of state-enforced separation, and three different research methodologies. The harm is not incidental. It is not the result of individual bad actors. It is what state-enforced separation produces. Every time. Without exception.

Source references

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

Australian Adoptees Network (2012) Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Forced Adoptions. Sub 257v2.

Hampton, K. et al (2021) 'The psychological effects of forced family separation on asylum-seeking children and parents at the US-Mexico border.' PLOS ONE. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0253201.