In the heart of a whole different era, hundreds of thousands of British women were forced to give up their babies because they were not married. Several decades later, they ask their country to apologize.
It is estimated that there were nearly 250,000. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of thousands of British women were forced to give up babies. The cause ? The latter had become pregnant without being married, the ultimate sin for the time. Now aged 70 or 80, they want to make their voice heard and ask for a government apology, as reported by the BBC in a poignant short report.
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These mothers forced to give up their babies bear witness, with trembling voices, to all that this event has caused in their life as young women. “It was the most shameful thing that could happen”, says Jill Killington of Leeds. Became pregnant in 1967, at the age of 16, she says that being a single mother at that time “was described as a fate worse than death”. Relegated to the second floor of her house, she spent her entire pregnancy there and had to hide when visitors came to her house. “My mother would ask me to wear a wedding ring when I went out. It was a deeply humiliating time.”, she says.
A real trauma
Beyond the immense pain of having to forcefully abandon their babies, these women painfully remember the humiliation they had to face. Ann Keen became pregnant at age 17 in 1966 and remembers a particularly cruel episode during the birth of her son. “I was not given any pain reliever, she says. The midwife said to me: “You will remember this and you will never be mean again”. The arguments put forward were that this adoption was “What is best for the baby and for the mother”.
Analyzing the data between 1945 and 1975, before an amendment to the adoption law, we observe that nearly 500,000 babies were adopted in Great Britain. Lawyers in charge of these cases concluded that many of them had mothers under the age of 24 and unmarried. Their research goes further, indicating that about half of these women experienced persistent pressure to abandon their babies from professionals, including doctors, midwives, mother and baby home workers and staff. responsible for adoption in religious and municipal homes.
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For the adopted children, the trauma was also very real, since they were not allowed to talk about their origins. They therefore wondered about the real basis of separation from their mother, what life would have been the worst?
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While some of these women who were forced to give up their babies were able to build families afterwards, others never had any other children. A real tragedy for them. Eternally traumatized, they want their country to follow Australia’s example, which in 2013 became the first country to publicly apologize for forced adoptions.