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Keir Starmer will apologise in Parliament for Britain's role in forcing unmarried mothers to lose their babies. The statement formally acknowledges decades of trauma long highlighted by survivors and campaigners.
London,UPDATED: Jul 2, 2026 15:12 IST
Britain will formally apologise on Thursday for a decades-long practice in which tens of thousands of unmarried mothers were separated from their babies and the children were put up for adoption. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, in the final weeks of his premiership, is set to make a statement in the House of Commons acknowledging the state’s role in forced adoptions and apologising to survivors.
The apology follows years of campaigning by women who said they were pressured, deceived and threatened into giving up their babies. Britain is among several countries confronting the legacy of social norms, religious practices and government policies that shamed unmarried mothers, placed them in institutions during pregnancy and arranged for their babies to be adopted by married couples.
An estimated 185,000 babies of unmarried mothers were adopted in England and Wales between 1949 and 1976. In 2022, Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights said the British state should apologise for “the pain and suffering caused by public institutions and state employees that railroaded mothers into unwanted adoptions”.
Ann Keen, a former UK health minister whose baby was taken for adoption in 1966 when she was 17, said she was looking forward to “being released from my shame”. “We need this apology, because we have always been accused of giving up our babies, and we didn’t give them up,” she told the BBC. “We’ve now got the opportunity to really put this wrong right.”
The semi-autonomous governments in Scotland and Wales issued apologies in 2023, but the Conservative UK government at the time declined to do so. The apology from Starmer’s Labour Party government comes two weeks after the Church of England apologised for its role in forced adoptions. Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally said that “we are profoundly sorry for the pain, trauma and stigma experienced - and still carried - by many people because of historical adoption practices in homes affiliated to the Church of England.”
Other countries have also addressed similar histories. In 2013, then Australian prime minister Julia Gillard delivered a national apology for the country’s history of forced adoptions and the “lifelong legacy of pain and suffering” it had caused. In Ireland, an inquiry in 2021 found that 9,000 children had died in 18 mother-and-baby homes during the 20th century, after tens of thousands of women had been housed in often degrading conditions in institutions run by the Catholic Church. Prime Minister Michel Martin apologised for the “profound and generational wrong” done to mothers and their babies. Britain’s apology on Thursday will mark its formal acknowledgement of a practice that campaigners have long said caused lasting pain and trauma.
With PTI Inputs
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Published By:
India Today Web Desk
Published On:
Jul 2, 2026 15:12 IST
