With a sweep of broad brushstrokes, a television documentary last week created such a damning picture of the treatment of young, unmarried mothers between 1946 and 1976 by the Catholic Church and other religious institutions that the end credits carried an apology by Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster and president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, for the “hurt” caused and the lack of “care and sensitivity”.
His was not the only apology, with regrets expressed for past insensitivities from the Salvation Army, the Methodist Church and the Church of England. This was undoubtedly a humiliating confession to make for bodies that have reformed their methods in so many ways. But were religious organisations the only scapegoats in this blame game?
The strong impression given by the documentary, ITV’s Britain’s Adoption Scandal: Breaking the Silence, was that some of the religious organisations that mainly ran the country’s unmarried mother and baby homes during those three decades, together with some GPs and nurses, effectively coerced teenage mothers into signing consent forms for adoption by not advising them that the government was legally obliged to offer them provision to keep their babies.
In other words, according to the solicitor interviewed in the programme, it was not informed consent. Carolynn Gallwey, of Bhatt Murphy solicitors, is calling on Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, to launch a public inquiry into the role of churches as well as the state in the adoption practices uncovered by the film.
Yet among the facts not covered by the programme was the hard truth that the 1948 National Assistance Act, which purported to provide a safety net for unmarried mothers and other vulnerable groups, would not have provided enough benefit for young mothers of modest means to support themselves and their babies without the help of their families – who were often a central part of the problem (of which more later).
Eighteen years on, the Supplementary Benefits Act of 1966 did make things easier for unmarried mothers. Yet the scope, operating principles and generosity of the new system varied enormously between local authorities, which were given a lot of discretion in interpreting their duties.
The biggest practical problem was the difficulty in acquiring a council home for a single mother whose scandalised parents had rejected her. She was at the back of the queue because, as a single person with a baby, she couldn’t amass as many “points” as a couple with a baby. It wasn’t until the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act under the then Labour government that housing provision was given to those unintentionally homeless, or threatened with homelessness, and in priority need.
This brings me to the other crucial factor making it so hard during those times for unsupported single mothers to hold on to their babies. As the documentary admitted, according to several of the now elderly mothers who were interviewed, much of the disapproval came from the girls’ own families.
I am no apologist for the Catholic Church or any other religious institution; I classify myself as an atheist. We all now know about the abominable historic treatment of unmarried mothers by such orders as the Magdalen Sisters and the Sisters of Mercy, who have apologised for their cruelty in the past.
Yet I consider it unjust as well as impractical to expect churches and medical professionals acting for the state at the time to be held completely responsible for what the documentary alleged were enforced adoptions. During those post-war decades there was such widespread societal disapproval of babies being born out of wedlock that adoption was generally seen as the preferred option, especially for the very young mothers.
My own mother was too ashamed to talk about her experiences in three unmarried mother-and-baby homes in 1951, where she had felt obliged to hide herself from public view. People internalised their “shame” in those days and had none of the sense of entitlement around our basic human rights that we have now. The programme’s makers were viewing the past mainly through the prism of our present standards and not exploring in balanced detail these historic obstacles in the path of a woman wanting to keep her child, many of them very close indeed to home.
Of course we now feel a righteous indignation on behalf of “shamed” women like my late mother – who managed to keep me only because her favourite foster sister took pity on her and offered us a home with her and her new husband. Such an arrangement would have been highly unusual in the case of a young mother, whose parents were more likely to have felt that whisking the baby away for adoption was more desirable for their daughter’s future, as well as better for the family’s honour in the long run. But my mother was all of 40 when she gave birth to me, her first and only child.
There is no doubt that many of those tragically bereft women who gave up their children are haunted by a sense of what might have been, and our hearts must go out to them. Yet if an inquiry is to be a completely thorough investigation, we must put the whole of society during those three decades in the dock. As it is, I question the benefit of an inquiry that stokes old griefs and risks demonising families for doing what they felt at the time was the right thing.
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