Guest blog by Dr. Michael Lambert (Lancaster University)
The apology from the Church of England made on 18 June 2026 for its role in historic forced adoption, alongside the imminent one from the UK Government, still leave important questions of institutional liability, accountability and responsibility unanswered. Comments about the shame of the past being that of the Church, rather than mothers or adoptees, mark an important step forward in reshaping public understanding of this past. They recognise forces larger than respectability, the immediate family and the community in seeing adoption as a solution in the best interests of the mother and child. This is particularly significant given the prevailing narratives around adoption, positioned as a difficult but conscious choice by the mother to give up her child and a benevolent choice by the adoptive family to ‘save’ the child.
See Nothing, Hear Nothing, Say Nothing?
Regrettably, the Church of England chose to take one step forward and two steps backwards. The manner of their apology through a stage-managed corporate video which excluded campaigners served to very publicly, and visibly, contradict their claims about listening. Claims which did not withstand cursory scrutiny during an interview by Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, and Lead Bishop for Safeguarding within the Church of England, Joanne Grenfell. Whilst some bishops and dioceses have, through statements and other activities of their own, offered more conciliatory words and actions, the substance of the apology has for the most part, in the words of AAM member Vik Fielder, been ‘poor’. As the Vicar of St Mary’s Kilburn and St James’ West Hampstead Robert Thompson argues, ‘The Church now condemns a culture that prioritised institutional reputation over vulnerable people. But that is precisely the criticism many survivors make of the Church today’.
The devil of the apology was very much in the detail. A glossy video narrative punctuated by an emphasis on respectability, on secrecy, on social attitudes and laws of the time, on organisations ‘affiliated’ to the Church of England operating under a decentralised system, all serve to create distance between the evident wrongs of systematic forced adoption and their involvement. Which all sound remarkably familiar to the UK Government’s 2023 response to the 2022 Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry report and its recommendations for a response: what happened was undoubtedly bad, but it was a local issue, and we were not actively involved. As the video, and accompanying document purporting to be a research report make clear, the policy of the Moral Welfare Council in 1954 was to ‘keep mother and babies together where possible’, recognising that sometimes adoption was the ‘best solution’. There is a public performance acknowledging that adoptions were, in fact, forced and produced deep, lifelong traumas and harms for those concerned, but that although the Church of England was present in adoption at that time, what happened was not intentional.
Along with members of AAM and MAA, I have heard this same position put forward by other organisations firsthand at the Education Committee back in February 2026. Having spoken with other academics about the scope, scale and systemic basis of forced adoptions over a period of three decades, we then heard from adoption organisations. The Salvation Army were quick to acknowledge what occurred was undeniably bad, but that—much like the Church of England—their archives clearly showed children were not adopted from mother and baby homes run by their organisation, that they encouraged mother and child to be together, and that social pressures and stigma were of greater consequence. Barnardo’s then said much the same thing about their role as an adoption agency, that what occurred was, obviously, undeniably bad, but that mothers and children passing through their organisation fulfilled due processes of informed consent, as shown by their archives.
Which begs the question: if historic forced adoptions of the postwar ‘baby scoop’ are demonstrably bad to all concerned, and many of the principal organisations can show they saw, heard and did nothing wrong, how did it happen?
Cleaning Complicity
Despite working in a medical school on health policy and the National Health Service (NHS), I am a historian by background, and am rooted academically and intellectually in key historiographical debates. Among them is the myth of the clean Wehrmacht. Its basic outline is that during the Second World War the German army—the Wehrmacht—fulfilled military objectives against combatant nations, but it was not an active protagonist in war crimes, genocide, or the Holocaust. This was, senior figures within the Wehrmacht argued, the product of Hitler and the Nazi Party, with ideologically driven units such as the SS being responsible, and conducted without their knowledge or involvement. The honourable, gentlemanly traditions of the Prussian military dictated that such reprehensible actions were not allowed within the rules of war and could not be enacted by soldiers under their command given strict chains of command. They were present, and during the famous Nuremburg trials acknowledge that unimaginable horrors occurred, but they were not involved.
This myth obtained significant traction during the early years of the Cold War, where Western nations previously deeply critical of German wartime actions having only recently won the Second World War looked to rehabilitate its military to act as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. It also spoke to nationalist concerns of a postwar population deeply complicit in the horrors of Nazism through their support for the regime, with a delineation between combatants and war crimes allowing some moral cleansing of their involvement. Generals previously indicted or convicted for a range of offences under the Nuremburg trials were freed, moving into positions within the West German Government and military. The myth remained embedded in German culture and national identity, with war crimes, genocide and the Holocaust existing in splendid isolation from the actions of the Wehrmacht in the public imagination. It was not until growing academic criticism during the 1980s and a public reckoning in the 1990s that the fallacies of the myth collapsed on their foundations following the end of the Cold War.
The myth was always a comfortable lie, a cleansing balm which served the useful purpose of laundering the reputations of senior German military figures and notionally professional soldiers who served under them in the cause of anti-communist remilitarisation. Both, of course, being wholly complicit in war crimes, genocide and the Holocaust. Despite widespread claims of innocence being published through hundreds of memoirs by German senior generals and military figures, and their emphasis on a lack of documentary evidence implicating involvement, the basis of the myth was impossible to uphold. The mass murder of civilians, undesirables, and Jews was deeply ingrained, shrouded in euphemism about the ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question and opaque, suggestive orders which were unquestioningly followed.
The myth was precisely that, because how could any organisation or institution so deeply involved in violent conquest as the German Army not be implicated given the scope and scale of atrocities committed which were, for the most part not perpetrated by isolated ideologues, but by ordinary men serving as soldiers. The truth being far more unpalatable than the comfortable myth of clean separation, in understanding how and why such violence could be wholly normalised and perpetrated in an unthinking, routine fashion.
Shrinking the Distance
I am not for one moment suggesting any kind of analogy between the horrors of the Nazi regime, the Holocaust and its ideological edifice and the Church of England or historic forced adoption. What I am suggesting is a similar, recognisable logic by those involved to acknowledge what happened, recognise that it was wrong, but abnegate and deny their complicity to uphold institutional reputations. Given the harrowing, but consistent testimony of mothers around blank consent forms, the lack of alternatives, power imbalances with church social workers, and feeling powerless, along with the way adoptees were treated as a desirable commodity for religiously adherent families, my point is that for apologies to be meaningful, they must recognise that these harms were ingrained and institutionalised.
The distance between innocent institutional centres and their peripheries implementing their actions—just following orders—needs to be condensed. I have been through many of the same papers and materials held at Lambeth Palace that the Church of England have used to construct their brief. The papers I have seen recognise the ‘corporate responsibility’ for homes run and moral welfare work undertaken in their name. They also recognise how routine adoption was, and what should be done. The same Church of England Moral Welfare Council papers mentioned in their ‘research report’ state in full that:
‘Although it is our policy to encourage the mother to keep her child whenever it is possible, when it is agreed that adoption is the best solution it should not be regarded as failure but as a normal part of moral welfare work’.
Context is significant, and contemporaries recognising adoption was ‘a normal part of moral welfare work’ seems important when putting forward claims about stated policy.
Within the same discussion, the Moral Welfare Council continue with guidance on how dioceses should, or should not, register as adoption agencies, with the Chairman noting that ‘dioceses should be warned of the danger of registering as an adoption agency without necessary staff and the financial resources to cover consequent expenses’. Whilst warned, dioceses did not heed this advice, and donations from adoptive couples to meet the shortfall in medical inspections, legal fees and the employment of social workers were widely recognised as keeping Church of England and other agencies afloat by the 1972 Houghton Report.
Never mind that as far back as 1951 the Standing Conference of Societies Registered for Adoption, of which more than half of the original 36 founding bodies professed Anglican adherence, recognised that: ‘She’—the unmarried mother as their object of moral welfare— ‘is forced to part from the baby, whether she wishes it or not, and regardless of her innate capacity as a mother’. It should be emphasised that adoption agencies were not wishing to stop or reduce the number of adoptions in this letter to the Government. Far from it – in fact the reverse, they wanted to increase them. But they also wanted informed, willing consent to fulfil what they saw best practice at the time. This was not occurring because, they said and knew all too well, choice was meaningless. Despite the Government also insisting that adoption was a last resort, despite the number of orders beginning to climb.
This brief examination of the Church of England documents only scratches the surface of a significant volume of archival material which recognises the mundane, everyday basis of adoption as part of moral welfare work across virtually every diocese and deanery. To their credit, I am able to make these points from the same archives having been permitted access. The same cannot be said of other institutions involved, particularly the Catholic Church. Who, it should be reminded, formally apologised first but appear to have done the least in turning words into action. I also made this point about the hollowness of this version of an apology at the 2026 Education Committee, which they saw fit to include in their final report.
The Myth of Clean Adoption
Ultimately, the Standing Conference and the adoption agencies they represented wanted to maintain the myth of clean adoption, of an informed unmarried mother willingly surrendering their child in their best interests to an adoptive couple to whom they had been matched, as young as possible to develop formative attachments. Free from the stigma of illegitimacy, and a blank slate on which a new, ‘normal’ life could be imprinted. That even contemporaries recognised actions spoke louder than words and that the system could not deliver on its ideals, leading to force and a lack of choice as routine, should—I sincerely hope—offer food for thought to institutions looking to recognise systemic harms in historic forced adoption policies and practices without centring their active involvement. Any institution involved in adoption through running mother and baby homes, adoption agencies, or employing church social work or moral welfare workers at that time cannot claim to be innocent bystanders upholding hollow rhetoric about due process and social values. They should, can and must recognise their roles as participants and instigators in a deeply harmful system by design.