There was a moving and unusual display of unity in the Commons on Thursday when the Prime Minister apologised on behalf of the nation to the mothers – some of whom were in the public gallery – who had been forced to give up their children for adoption on account of not being married. Reform MP, Sarah Pochin, spoke movingly about how her own mother was obliged to put her half brother up for adoption. Unity and sympathy all round.
Our solution to the problem of unwelcome pregnancies is abortion
In fact, none of this should come as a surprise. In the Family Way, Jane Robinson’s account of the children sent to the Coram hospitals last century included stories of those women who were obliged to give up illegitimate offspring for adoption; the mother and baby homes weren’t just an Irish thing.
I know a bit about it. My father was born out of marriage to a young Protestant girl in County Wexford; his aunt put him up for adoption when he was a day old, though the expression doesn’t quite do justice to the informal fashion in which he was handed over in short order to a complete stranger. As it happened, it turned out brilliantly.
My aunt, his sister, also adopted, became pregnant without being married. She was dreading being sent to the mother and baby home, but my English mother took her to London and insisted that a Catholic institution for unmarried mothers should take her in until the baby was born. My excellent cousin was the first baby, so far as I can work out, who was actually kept by her family in my home town, and was accepted after my grandmother took her out by herself in her pram up the main street. This was the Sixties; it was a big thing at the time. Now about four in ten children are born outside marriage in Ireland.
The past keeps on surfacing. My hairdresser’s mother was Irish; just before she died recently, a strange woman turned up at the family home to announce that she was the mother’s daughter, given up for adoption unbeknown to her half siblings who had absolutely no idea of their mother’s past.
The mother, alas, was dying at the time but seemed to recognise her; the other children welcomed her into the family. A happy ending, sort of.
In the Family Way ended in the Sixties with the advent of the Abortion Act, and the destigmatisation of illegitimacy. This should give us pause. Some of the babies given up for adoption were wanted; many more were unwelcome, like my father. But because there was no legal alternative at the time, the children got to be born and, in many cases, adopted. Many, perhaps most, went on to have happy lives.
Our solution to the problem of unwelcome pregnancies is abortion. Well over a quarter of a million were carried out last year – there were nearly 278,000 in England and Wales alone in 2023.
If we’re congratulating ourselves on how much nicer and kinder we all are by comparison with the dark days when anguished young women gave up their children to strangers, just reflect that the babies at least lived. Our unwanted offspring don’t. And it’s very much our loss
Comments