Just days after Prime Minister Keir Starmer officially apologised to the tens of thousands of mothers and their children who were separated by historic forced adoptions from the 1950s to the 1970s, Legal Action for Women’s latest research confirms that forced adoptions are NOT just historic, but continue today.

Anne Neale from LAW says:

In 2017 we published our Dossier Suffer the Little Children and their Mothers based on the experiences of just over 50 mothers. Soon after we started having monthly pickets outside the family court in central London and monthly self-help meetings. Since then, hundreds of mothers (and some grannies, aunties, and families) have got in touch. Many have children who were forcibly adopted.

The statistics we’re releasing today are based on the most recent 100 mothers (with 187 children) who have come to us for support in the last two years. They were:  

Single mothers (94%) * Victims of domestic abuse (74%) * Women of colour (34%) & immigrant women (26%) * Disabled women (42% and those with mental health issues (39%) * Domestic abuse victims whose children have been given to perpetrator fathers (18%) * Children taken into foster care (30%) by social workers and family courts who chose to take the children rather than their abusers  out of the family home * Mothers whose children have been forcibly adopted (14%)

The government’s apology was long overdue – Welsh and Scottish governments formally apologised in March and April of 2023 – and is the result of decades of determined campaigning by the Movement for An Adoption Apology and the many mothers and adult adoptees affected who spoke out. We have always supported the demand for an official apology, while at the same time pointing out that forced adoptions are NOT just historic, they are happening today. The apology must ensure that all forced adoptions are stopped and never allowed to happen again.

The UK has the highest level of adoptions without parental consent (over 90% of any European country and among the highest in the world. The fact that they now happen through family courts does not make them any less brutal, arbitrary and traumatic than those in previous decades.

In his speech, Keir Starmer acknowledged that: “To break the bond between a mother and a child is nothing less than dehumanising. It goes to an intense feeling that we all have as human beings. To break that bond is indescribably painful—even to describe, let alone to have gone through—so “dehumanising” is the right word.”Why then are family courts allowed to carry out forced adoptions today?

The government’s own Harm Report 2020 recognised the sexism, racism, classism (and we would add, disability discrimination) that mothers face in family court- They directly contribute to a child removal industry worth billions of pounds in which children’s lives and those of their mothers barely count. Successive governments have promoted adoption as the “gold standard”, as if separating children for life from the mothers and families who love them can ever be justified.

Many of the comments made during the apology debate directly apply to the trauma experienced by mothers and their children who face the most brutal and long-lasting of all separations today.

. . . still today, we too often see. . . a lack of compassion and understanding. . . [A]s everyone has said, this apology is not enough. What more can be done to ensure that the voices of women are taken seriously? We had the maternity statement the other day. A running theme in all these injustices is women not being believed, women being silenced, and women being told that they are the problem . . .  this is not just a historical problem of misogyny in the state; today, women who are having children are ridiculed and not listened to, and are hurt as a result. Dame Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West) (Lab)

 Many [adoptees] have been left scarred by the trauma that they endured—a lifetime of feeling unworthy, unloved, judged and guilty . . . [E]ven modern adoption practices are inadequate, leaving adoptees and their families ill-equipped to deal with trauma, attachment issues and identity struggles . . .

The question that should have been asked was, “What support can we give you to be able to bring up your baby?” not the questions that were asked . . . Too many of those who were adopted were told that they should be grateful for what happened to them, and too many of the mothers were told that they should be grateful that their children would get care they could not provide. That, in itself, was deeply hurtful—deeply, deeply hurtful.” Cat Eccles (Stourbridge) (Lab)

Research has shown that 1000 children have been returned to care as a result  of adoptions breaking down in the last 5 years; adoptees face many obstacles in accessing their medical and other records; and most shockingly, adoptees are four times more likely to try to commit suicide than non-adoptees. And first time mothers who have children forcibly taken from them whose children go through family court care proceedings in England are 21 times more likely to die within 10 years of having their baby compared with other mothers.

We are campaigning to end all adoptions without parental consent; to abolish “foster to adopt” which is based on the assumption that adoption Is best; to abolish the use of “possible future emotional harm” which inflicts the real harm of separation on children who have NEVER been harmed; to end the conflation of poverty with neglect as a reason for taking children; for support for domestic abuse victims to leave violent partners. and for a Care Income for mothers and other primary carers so that children can stay safely with their families.