For survivors of forced adoption, the trauma can last a lifetime | Letters

Letters: Readers respond to an article by David Batty about the postwar removal of babies from unmarried mothers, and his call for proper redress for survivors like him

I gave up my child for adoption in the late 1960s. I was just 20. It was my choice, but no choice at all (Britain’s apology for the scandal of forced adoption won’t – on its own – heal the wounds of survivors like me, 2 July). The circumstances were such that unless you had parental or a partner’s support, or a trust fund, it was practically impossible to keep your child. I have discovered through coverage of the government’s apology that some state funding was available. It was never mentioned to me.

I had planned to give up my child because I believed the propaganda: as an unmarried mother I could not give her a proper home. What I had not expected was the love I felt. When her father offered to marry me, I jumped at the chance and took the child away from prospective adopted parents. Three days before our wedding, the child’s father left me. My mother had not let me into the house once my pregnancy became obvious, so going home was not an option. I called the adoption agency and said goodbye to her in a small room somewhere near Baker Street.

After I signed the adoption papers, I had a breakdown. Lots of medication, but no counselling. My child traced me 22 years later. We have built a relationship, but it has been difficult for both of us. I am now in my late 70s, but have never recovered from that experience. My relationship with my subsequent children has suffered as a result of my trauma. Something fundamental in me left with my child.

My child was not ripped from my arms – but I was forced. The fallout from that cruelty has been with me all my life and will never leave.
Name and address supplied

• My birth mother did not live to hear the prime minister’s apology for the state’s role in the forced adoptions of at least 185,000 children in England and Wales, but she remembered the pressure she was put under to sign me away to a family that would, allegedly, give me a better life.

I was given to a “good Catholic family” who did not know how to love me and I left when I was 15. I was referred to child and adolescent psychiatry because I was “the devil in the house”. I had a disrupted education, was suicidal, lived on and off the streets and was fortunate not to end up in jail. I eventually shaped a family and professional life, but was always waiting for things to fall apart, as they sometimes did.

Therapy, I learned, could not eradicate the feeling of injustice that somehow kept me alive. I found my birth mother and I was in my 60s before I experienced her unconditional love and began to heal. I am 80 now and have known for a while that the shame was not mine, but I paid dearly for that lesson. Now I want to know, for my mother and myself, what the state is going to do, beyond therapy, helplines and testimonials, to expiate the shame it has now owned.
Name and address supplied

• There can be absolutely no excuse for the forced adoption of many thousands of babies as recently as the mid-1970s. What I have seen no mention of, however, is the impact that this had on the many, though not exclusively, kind and caring families who adopted children in good faith, providing loving homes to them.
Helen Ryan
Blandford Forum, Dorset

• David Batty and others (Letters, 22 June) make the important point that while we no longer take children away from unmarried mothers, we continue to fail families and children. Alongside increased poverty and the evisceration of public services, there is a huge increase in numbers of children being taken into care. Adoptive parents and kinship carers, like parents of children with special needs, are on their knees and crying out for support.

I am an adoptive parent and kinship carer, with several grandchildren with special needs now in the care system. Siblings are separated and children divorced from their histories and wider family. My daughter was let down as a child and her children are being let down now. The pain is immense for all of us and goes on and on. The government’s apology to people who were forcibly adopted decades ago is welcome, but rings hollow in my ears without changes to better support vulnerable children now. We could do better.
Name and address supplied

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org