Scandal: Society or State?

with thanks to Dr. Michael Lambert of Lancaster University for contributing this guest blog

The two-part Long Lost Family: The Mother and Baby Home Scandal represents growing recognition that postwar adoptions were an industry based on coercing unmarried mothers into being severed from their children and placed with unrelated adoptive parents. The industry was powered by the Christian churches and funded by the state, and growing recognition of a scandal is accompanied by calls for an apology, action, and redress.

Whilst its reunion format, typically from the perspective of mothers seeking their children has its critics given the personal, financial and emotional costs involved which are unexplored by the programme, it is a significant influence on public perceptions of adoption. I worked as a special adviser and appeared as on-screen contributor for the two-part special. This blog sets out some of the key dynamics from the programme, and the related responsibilities of church and state.

Society, Shame and Stigma

The UK Government has so far not apologised for its role in historic postwar forced adoptions. Scotland and Wales have, although they did not have responsibility for policies prior to devolution in 1999, which makes an apology unfinished business. The 2022 report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights into them called upon the UK Government to apologise. Despite acknowledging that women did not surrender their children voluntarily and saying ‘sorry’ without meaning it 15 times in 8 pages, they refused to apologise, saying—incorrectly—that ‘the state did not actively support these practices’.

Blame instead, according to the UK Government response, falls on ‘society’s attitudes’ towards unmarried mothers. These were deeply stigmatising. Historian Pat Thane in her book Sinners? Scrounges? Saints? explores the place of unmarried women in twentieth century England, confirming an abiding prejudice and judgment, often linked with fears of social breakdown and welfare costs. These run deep throughout British history, as demonstrated through Kate Gibson’s exploration of them during the seventeenth and eighteenth century until the new poor laws.

But legal adoption is a twentieth century creation, beginning with the 1926 Adoption Act nearly a century ago, although informal and de facto adoptions existed. Jenny Keating’s book A Child for Keeps argues: ‘Adoption supporters saw themselves as part of a modern, rational movement, removing children from unsuitable, immoral or deprived situations’. Yet adoption was not popular, with many prospective parents concerned about the eugenic unsuitability of children and inheritance problems related to adoption orders.

Homes, hostels and shelters for mothers which emerged in the late nineteenth century through the Christian moral welfare movement were focused mostly on keeping mother and child together. This was achieved by teaching them domestic skills and finding them work as servants—typically through connections from the great and good on the committees overseeing homes—allowing them to balance the competing demands of working and caring, along with providing scarce accommodation.

Severance and closed adoptions as the purpose of homes for unmarried mothers only became normalised because of the Second World War. In 1943 the UK Government issued a circular enabling local health and welfare authorities to fund homes and the costs of women staying in them as part of efforts to maximise the war effort. Eugenic ideas became discredited because of their association with Nazism, and new ones about child development—particularly the work of John Bowlby—became influential. Adoption went from a cottage industry to one of mass production as money flowed in and babies flowed out to new adoptive parents given financial security from the state.

State sanction was crucial. Shame, and social stigma predated and continued after the mother and baby home scandal from the 1940s to the 1970s, but adoption as a solution to this ‘problem’ reflected a conscious act of decision-making by the state which expanded with funding and contracted once it declined.

Choice, Coercion and Consent

Before public perception started to change, the dominant view of adoption was of a young, unmarried woman making a difficult decision because of her circumstances. A reluctant but active choice was made.

Unmarried women became pregnant for a variety of reasons, many of which can be seen in evidence submitted by them to the 2022 inquiry. Lori Chambers’ work on Canada—which also had a forced adoption scandal comparable to the UK—shows stereotypes of promiscuity and permissiveness to be hollow, with abuse, coercion and rape also playing a significant role. Janet Fink’s work explores these further, contrasting how many unmarried couples were able to cohabit and appear as if married, some adopted their own children in new relationships given that divorce was beyond the reach of most people, and the influence of deeply gendered assumptions on the structure of the family.

Even the UK Government has recognised that choice was not voluntary. Social security was negligible, with benefits for mothers being decided at the discretion of local welfare officials. Unlike widows or deserted wives, they were seen as undeserving, with poor law principles carrying over into welfare state logics. Virginia Noble’s work shows that officials preferred to pursue fathers and obtain maintenance orders rather than have the state shoulder the cost. Using central government files, Robyn Rowe has forensically shown how officials deciding policy were driven by deeply patriarchal and paternalistic notions which judged women with families outside marriage and did what it could to limit their support. The abiding experience for unmarried women with children from the 1940s to the 1970s was poverty.

A similar position existed in relation to housing. There was no legal right to housing until 1977, when it was created by accident by defining homelessness. Private landlords often refused single mothers outright, evicted them when they discovered, or charged exorbitant rents. Public authorities were little better, either excluding them from eligibility to council housing, or placing them in a range of substandard or ‘hard-to-let’ properties which were effectively dumping grounds for the undeserving.

The UK Government knew that young, unmarried women had no real choice. This is because the adoption agencies told them. In 1951 the Standing Conference of Societies Registered for Adoption—later CoramBAAF—wrote to them about it. The Conference was formed just after the 1949 Adoption Act was introduced, which made the process of adoption easier and quicker, with the flow of infants to adoptive parents mostly controlled by voluntary and religious adoption societies. They said that ‘mothers of illegitimate children are driven to adoption, not because they do not wish to remain responsible for their babies, or do not want to keep them’, but because of a lack of accommodation. They also wrote that ‘the mother cannot be said to have a free choice at all. She is forced to part from the baby, whether she wishes it or not, and regardless of her innate capacity as a mother’. Civil servants discussed options, acknowledged the reply, but chose not to do anything. I know, because this is within the relevant archived policy file of the UK Government. There are hundreds of files.

At the time, and not anachronistically with the benefit of hindsight, adoptions were recognised as coercive and forced rather than consensual and a choice.

Mother and Baby Homes

Mother and baby homes are a key part of the scandal, as they provided the secrecy for young women to go towards the end of their pregnancy, away from their homes and neighbours, to give birth and return without their child, able to begin their family life anew.

Most homes were run by Christian churches. The Church of England ran the most homes, based on a standard model of deanery and diocese. This was different for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, where different sectarian divisions and denominations produced a variation on this theme. Others were run by the Catholic Church, Methodists, Baptist Union, and large voluntary organisations, especially the Salvation Army. Some, mostly in large cities, were set up and run by local health authorities. In England and Wales there were just over 170 homes offering around 12,000 beds at their peak in the mid-1960s.

The UK Government briefly considered nationalising homes for unmarried mothers when the National Health Service was being established during the 1940s. Opposition led by the Catholic Church changed their mind, along with bureaucratic resistance by civil servants which centred on upsetting arrangements put in place by the 1943 circular, and the spiritual element of moral welfare work with unmarried mothers.

This should not be understood to mean, as the UK Government response to the 2022 inquiry does, that the mother and baby home scandal was a local affair between councils and churches. This is inaccurate.

A 1952 internal memorandum by a civil servant makes this clear: ‘The great majority of mother and baby homes are provided by voluntary organisations and the various religious bodies. These homes are almost without exception subsidised by local health authorities under Section 22 of the NHS Act’. The NHS Act empowered local health authorities to provide a range of services, including Section 22—the Care of Mothers and Young Children. These functions could only be exercised after the Minister of Health had given his approval to their specific proposals. The costs of such services, like all other services provided by the NHS, came from public funding from the taxpayer. These arrangements are outlined in significant detail in the 1956 Guillebaud Report on the costs of the NHS. The numbers funded by local health authorities can often be found in the published annual reports of medical officers of health. These are digitised and available freely online through the Wellcome Collection.

Because proposals needed to be approved by the Minister, there are abundant files relating to this also held in the UK Government archives. They go into fine detail about how certain authorities gave block grants to homes, others paid per mother for the typical stay of 6 weeks before and 6 weeks after pregnancy, and some had a combination of both. A 1961 internal report which surveyed 40 mother and baby homes tried to understand and impose order on the very different ways that local health authorities subsidised homes. This was not achieved because the issue had such a low priority within government, but the survey shows that mother and baby homes were thought of as essential to the NHS, but usually best provided by religious or voluntary bodies.

The idea that the state ‘did not actively support these practices’ is directly contradicted by the scope and scale of evidence from within the UK Government’s own archived files.

Adoptees and Adopters

One of the more unsettling aspects of adoption that the Long Lost Family special explores is the often invisible role of adopters in driving and shaping the industry. A spokeswoman for the National Children’s Adoption Association in 1971 during a clip used during the programme states that children with physical or mental handicaps, or mixed race were undesirable and unadoptable, whilst also outlining how her waiting list for a child was growing week on week with more adoptive parents. The supply of infants provided through the adoption industry of mother and baby homes was driven by this demand. At its 1968 peak, Barnardo’s said that for every child whose adoption they arranged, there were 12 couples on the waiting list.

The issues this reflects are highlighted through two stories in the programme.

First, Sian’s story, about becoming disabled during her birth in a Baptist-run mother and baby home in Hampshire. Although she stayed with her adoptive family, once her condition became known the adoption agency offered to swap her for a more desirable child. This echoes my own research into one mother and baby home in Kendal, where children with disabilities which made them ‘unadoptable’ were effectively denied access to modern medical care given the alternatives imagined for the child.

Second is Martin’s story, with his Sri Lankan father making him unsuitable for adoption, as the report which describes him shows using racialised language. Martin died shortly after entering a nursery which served the home where he was born, reflecting the standards of care found both there and in most homes. A letter about his by the religious organisation involved reading that ‘The Lord solved this problem in the best way possible’. Lena Jur has written in more detail about the influence of race and empire on adoption in Britain during this period.

These stories show how the desires of adoptive parents to create an idealised, nuclear family with a young baby which they could effectively pass off as their own were significant drivers of adoption. Such were the stereotypes that one social worker in a semi-autobiographical novel of his experiences wrote about how blonde, blue-eyed girls aged ten days to six weeks old were always asked for as a preference by adoptive parents. These stereotypes shaped how adoption worked, with religious or voluntary adoption agencies placing desirable children, and local authorities—if at all—placing those who did not meet this ideal: black or mixed race, disabled or older children.

Adoptive parents’ contact with social workers was minimal beyond an initial visit by a moral welfare officer to assess their suitability. Unlike their reports on unmarried mothers which, influenced by Bowlby and other fashionable ideas of child development, focused on their emotional immaturity, psychopathology and parental incapacity, those for adoptive parents highlight religious adherence and attendance, the modern decoration of the home, and dress. It provides a stark contrast to the underlying reality that most unmarried mothers came from respectable working class homes, whilst adoptive parents were usually middle or upper class. Respectability was crucial.

This lack of contact shows the perfunctory way that adoptive parents were chosen and screened. Although this did improve over time, there was no ongoing contact from social workers once a child was placed. Local authority children’s services had a permissive power to visit adopted children ‘from time to time’, which was rarely used given their own problems in taking and placing children in care. Adoptive parents were not subjected to police checks or asked to disclose criminal records unlike foster families, which caused much discussion among the Home Office, recorded in detail within archived UK Government files.

Because of the closed nature of adoption which erased the child’s past and enabled the adoptive family to pass them off as their own, there was—and is—no requirement to tell them that they were adopted. This was helped from 1947 with the introduction of short form birth certificates, whose history is intimately tied up with maintaining secrecy in adoption as shown in the research of Nadja Durbach.

In understanding the mother and baby home scandal in England and across the four nations of the United Kingdom, it is important to foreground the choice being exercised by adoptive parents in the families they were trying to make in contrast to the lack of choice from mothers.

Apology

The Joint Committee on Human Rights estimated the number of forcibly children adopted from 1949 to 1976 to be 185,000 in England and Wales. This is a conservative estimate in discounting certain categories of adoption order where couples were trying to secure parental rights in second families or in kinship networks, and I suggest from using the same statistics that it could be 215,000. Once you include Scotland and Northern Ireland, the number exceeds 250,000. All of these assume, erroneously, that forced adoption began in 1949 and ended in 1976. It did not and continues today in a different form through non-consensual adoptions and the family court system rather than mother and baby homes, as Sam Davey’s research shows.

As of September 2025, the UK Government still refuses to recognise its role and apologise for its actions in the forced adoption of thousands of children of unmarried mothers for the three decades following the Second World War. They should, and the longer they wait the fewer people who deserve to hear the words spoken will be around. An apology is not the end, but the beginning. It is important in changing public understanding away from a mother giving her child up under social pressure, to them being taken by a state-funded and sanctioned policy run primarily by the church and voluntary organisations. It is no accident that so many people’s tragic stories of this loss are the same because the system was structured and organised that way.

Above all, I hope that audiences tuning in and watching the two-part Long Lost Family special on mother and baby homes begin to realise the enormity of the scandal, the centrality of church and state, and the lifelong impacts it has had which affect not just mothers and adoptees, but their extended and wider families.