Berliner Abendpost - UK PM says 'deeply sorry' for decades of forced adoptions

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 expression of regret 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 UK lawmakers after meeting a group of 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.

The practice, he said, was "embedded within systems across local authorities, across voluntary and faith-based institutions, and in health and social care services".

- 'Punishment' -

"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.

Ann Keen, a former Labour health minister, said her newborn son was abruptly taken away after she gave birth in Wales in 1966 when she was 17.

"I went to see my baby on the eighth day because I was told I could have him for 10 (days) and they said: 'Oh no, he's gone now. You were getting far too close'," she told BBC Radio.

Speaking before Starmer's announcement she said she looked forward to being "released from my shame" because "we have always been accused of giving up our babies and we didn't give them up".

The parliamentary committee that investigated the scandal found mothers were abused in multiple ways.

Painkillers would be deliberately denied as "punishment" in hospital during childbirth and afterwards, its report found.

Babies were sometimes pulled from their sobbing mother's arms to be taken away for adoption.

"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".

Last month, 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, saying there was deep shame it 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 affected 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.

J.P.Hoffmann--BlnAP