The government must apologise to women who were pressured into handing over babies for adoption half a century ago, MPs will demand in a three-hour debate in the Commons on Thursday.



A motion tabled by a group of cross-party backbench MPs calls for recognition for the “pain and suffering that the practice of forced adoption caused many women from the 1960s onwards”. It says the government must issue an apology for the policies and practices behind it.

MPs demand apology for unmarried mothers who gave up children Read more

More than half a million children were given up for adoption at a time when unmarried mothers were often rejected by their families and ostracised by society. Adoptions were generally handled through agencies run by the Church of England, the Roman Catholic church and the Salvation Army.

Many of the women who have gone public with their stories say they were pressured to give away their babies. The churches have since apologised or expressed regret for their part in “causing hurt” to women and their children.

Alison McGovern, the Labour MP for Wirral South who has led the demand for a government apology, said some women had given birth in NHS hospitals or had their adoptions handled by “moral welfare officers”, the forerunner to social workers.



“If there are any historic papers that shed light on this, then the state needs to be open and transparent,” she said. “At the time, it was hidden, seen as a dirty secret.”



A government apology would be a way of acknowledging that “a serious and great wrong was done” to the mothers. “Young women were made to feel ashamed. They were robbed of their dignity and self-respect when they had done nothing wrong, and were forced into horrific separations from their children,” McGovern said. “This is relatively recent history, not something that happened centuries ago.”

Last August, the government rejected a call for a public inquiry into forced adoptions, saying there was insufficient justification for it.



Felicity Davies, 64, who became pregnant aged 15 and whose baby was taken for adoption, said her feelings of loss “persisted and caused me pain and unresolved deep anger for many years”.



She told the Observer last month: “I’d like an acknowledgement of the suffering these women have been through … Nothing can compensate for the loss, but an acknowledgement is what we need.”

