LONDON (AP) — The British government will make a formal apology on Thursday for separating tens of thousands of unmarried mothers from their babies, a practice that lasted for decades until the 1970s.Prime Minister Keir Starmer, in the final weeks of his premiership, will make a statement in the House of Commons acknowledging the state’s role in forced adoptions and apologizing to survivors.Britain is one of several countries reckoning with the legacy of social norms, religious practices and government policies that heaped shame on unwed mothers, hid them away in institutions while pregnant and took their children to be adopted by married couples.An estimated 185,000 babies of unmarried mothers were adopted in England and Wales between 1949 and 1976. Campaigners have fought for years for acknowledgment that women were pressured, deceived and threatened into giving up their babies.
Ann Keen, a former U.K. 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.”
