As an adult adoptee, I was deeply moved that Nicola Sturgeon’s final act as first minister was to issue a formal apology to mothers, fathers, children and families affected by the widespread forced adoption policy in Scotland up to 1976.
At least 70,000 unmarried women were shamed into giving up their children – and often endured childbirth without any pain relief, and being told by medical staff that they “didn’t deserve it”.
The UK government, responding recently to a report by the joint parliamentary committee on human rights about forced adoption, simply shrugged, more or less saying “that was what happened in those days”.
As the youngest victims of this scandal are now in their late 40s, the long-overdue apology validates the lifelong trauma experienced by birth parents and their removed children, who have experienced huge discrimination, having grown up with no medical history, in homes where no one who looked or thought like them, and who believed crumbs of information on birth families that often turned out to be fabrications, if not downright lies perpetrated by the authorities that oversaw their adoptions.
I am disappointed that a rare example of a formal apology from any government did not appear to merit any mention in the Guardian until, I hope, now.
Sarah Gee
Birmingham
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