By Charlotte Webster-
Thousands of British families carried a secret that was rarely discussed in public: young unmarried women had become pregnant, given birth and then lost their babies to adoption, often after being told that they were unsuitable mothers and that their children would be better off with a married couple.
Now, more than half a century later, the British Association of Social Workers has formally apologised for the role played by the profession and its predecessors in a system that Parliament has described as involving systemic coercion, the removal of parental choice and lifelong trauma.
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The apology, announced by BASW on Thursday follows the British government’s own formal apology in July. BASW says an estimated 185,000 unmarried mothers and their children were affected between 1949 and 1976, when pressure from the state, churches, moral welfare workers and other professionals .
The history is not simply one of babies being legally adopted. It is a history of how a young woman could be made to believe that motherhood outside marriage was a moral failure, how families could send daughters away to conceal pregnancies, how mother-and-baby homes could isolate them from ordinary life, and how social workers, doctors, nurses, religious organisations and adoption agencies could become part of a process in which adoption was presented as the inevitable solution.
The parliamentary record makes clear that not every adoption during this period was forced or abusive. Some children were orphaned and some mothers freely chose adoption. But the evidence gathered by Parliament shows that a substantial number of unmarried women were denied a genuine and informed choice.
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The Joint Committee on Human Rights found that approximately 185,000 babies were re-registered between 1949 and 1973 in circumstances that provide the closest available indication of the scale of adoptions involving unmarried mothers, while warning that an exact figure cannot be established.
The system operated within a society where having a child outside marriage could bring intense shame. Young women could be treated as a problem that needed to be hidden rather than as mothers who needed support. Parliament heard evidence that some women were sent away from their homes so that neighbours would not see them pregnant.
Others were placed in mother-and-baby homes operated by religious organisations or charities, while local authorities and welfare agencies were involved in arranging or supervising adoptions.
The experience of former MP and nurse Ann Lloyd Keen illustrates how the process could begin long before a child was formally adopted. Keen became pregnant in North Wales in 1966, aged 17, after an encounter she later described as non-consensual. Her family regarded the pregnancy as a source of shame and arrangements were made for her to stay away from home.
She was eventually moved to Swansea, where she encountered a moral welfare social worker who repeatedly told her that adoption would be best for the baby. Keen told Parliament that there was no meaningful discussion about whether she could keep her son. Instead, she was told that she could not manage a baby alone, that keeping him would be selfish and that adoption was “for the best”. She was not told about financial assistance or other support that might have made keeping her child possible.
She was subsequently sent to a mother-and-baby home. Her account describes an environment in which she was made to scrub stairs and was fearful that giving birth outside the institution might interfere with the adoption arrangements.
When she went into labour, she was terrified that control over the situation was disappearing. After giving birth in hospital, she says she was not allowed to see her son. A midwife told her she would remember the pain because she was a “bad girl”, and she says she was stitched without pain relief. Her baby was treated as destined for adoption before she had been given a meaningful opportunity to decide whether she wanted to keep him.
Her experience also demonstrates an important feature of the historical system: the distinction between legal consent and meaningful consent. Under the Adoption of Children Act 1949, a mother could not formally consent to adoption until at least six weeks after the birth. Yet Parliament heard evidence that babies could be physically separated from their mothers immediately after birth and that mothers commonly signed the final paperwork weeks later, after they had already endured separation, pressure and trauma.
Another survivor, Diana Defries, (pictured)was only 16 when she became pregnant in 1974. She was sent from London to a Roman Catholic mother-and-baby home in Southampton. In evidence to Parliament, she described being told by a woman identifying herself as a social worker that she was too young and unsuitable to raise her baby. She says the message was repeatedly that if she loved her child, she would give her to a family who could provide a better life.
According to Defries’s written evidence, the possibility of keeping her baby was never presented to her as a genuine alternative. Eight days after the birth, a social worker brought consent papers to the home. Defries says she did not understand what to put on the forms and that the social worker dictated the wording. She says she has no memory of signing the documents, although her signature appears alongside that of the woman who witnessed them.
The separation that followed was devastating. Defries has described the journey from the mother-and-baby home to the adoption agency as the longest period she spent holding her daughter. When she arrived at the agency, the baby was taken from her. She was subsequently returned to school and was expected to continue with her life as though she had not given birth.
Decades later, Defries was reunited with her daughter and became one of the leading campaigners for an official apology. She now chairs the Movement for an Adoption Apology, which has campaigned for recognition of what happened to mothers and adopted children.
The story of Veronica Smith provides another window into the system. In 1964, when she was 24 and working as a nurse, she became pregnant while working at Butlin’s in Brighton. Her family did not want her pregnancy known and she was sent to a Catholic hostel for unmarried mothers in London. She was allowed only about a week with her newborn before the child was placed with strangers and formally adopted at six w
Smith eventually reunited with her daughter decades later. She went on to become one of the central figures in the campaign for an official apology, co-founding the Movement for an Adoption Apology in 2010. She died in 2024, aged 83, before hearing the formal apology eventually delivered by the government in 202 For some children, the trauma was compounded by the fact that they grew up believing their mothers had willingly abandoned them.
The parliamentary inquiry heard from adult adoptees who had spent childhood believing they had been unwanted. Some discovered only decades later that their mothers had not chosen to give them away. One adoptee described the shock of meeting her birth mother and discovering that “she did not give me up, she was made to have me adopted.”
Debbie Iromlou, who was born in London in 1968 and was adopted across racial and national lines, has described another dimension of the scandal. She grew up in Suffolk without knowing that the woman raising her was not her biological mother. She did not discover the truth until she was 16, when her foster mother sought to formally adopt her. Iromlou subsequently spent decades searching for her birth family and eventually found her mother in Egypt.
The system was therefore capable of creating two separate wounds: the mother could lose her child while being told that she had done something wrong, while the child could grow up believing that the mother had rejected them.
The language used against unmarried women was often deeply revealing. Parliament heard evidence from mothers who were described by professionals as “naughty”, “immoral” or a “social menace”. Some were told that they had brought shame upon their families. Others were told that if they truly loved their babies they would surrender them to a married couple. The involvement of social workers and their predecessors is one reason the BASW apology carries particular significance.
BASW was formed in 1970, but its history incorporates several predecessor organisations, including the Moral Welfare Workers Association. Moral welfare workers had played a significant role in working with unmarried mothers and arranging adoption placements. Historian Dr Michael Lambert’s research, cited by BASW, argues that their professional authority, combined with the prevailing religious and social attitudes of the period, gave them considerable power over women who were already isolated and vulnerable.
That does not mean every social worker or moral welfare worker deliberately set out to harm mothers. BASW itself has stressed that the apology is not intended to condemn adoptive parents or every social worker who was operating within the law and policy of the time. Many adoptions were successful, and individual experiences varied. But the parliamentary inquiries concluded that the wider system routinely denied many unmarried mothers a meaningful choice.
The law itself also changed significantly during the period. The 1949 Adoption Act required a mother to wait at least six weeks after birth before giving formal consent, while adoptive parents could not apply for an adoption order until a child had been placed with them for at least three months. In theory, those provisions provided a period during which a mother could reclaim her child. In practice, Parliament heard that many women were alr
The turning point came in the early 1970s. The Houghton Committee’s 1972 report helped lead to reforms concerning parental consent, assessment of adoptive applicants and the welfare of the child. The changes reflected a growing recognition that adoption should not simply be treated as a solution to illegitimacy or social embarrassment, but as a decision carrying profound consequences for children and their birth families. Yet the legacy of the earlier system did not disappear when the laws changed.
Many mothers spent decades believing they had failed their children. Many adoptees grew up without their original identities, family histories or medical information. Records were sometimes difficult to obtain, incomplete or inaccessible, leaving people to reconstruct their own histories late in life.
The 2026 parliamentary inquiry concluded that the state had played a central role in creating and sustaining the environment in which these practices occurred. It said government policy, funding arrangements and legislation helped create circumstances in which unmarried mothers were routinely denied meaningful choice and were shamed or coerced into giving up their children.
In July 2026, Prime Minister Keir Starmer formally apologised on behalf of the British state, acknowledging that mothers had been coerced, bullied or misled into believing they had no choice. The government accompanied the apology with a £4 million package intended to improve access to adoption records, support family reconnection, improve health and mental-health support and preserve survivors’ testimon
Now BASW has added the voice of the social work profession to that reckoning.The organisation says it accepts responsibility for the role played by moral welfare workers and has described the removal of children without informed consent as an injustice that caused “unimaginable pain and trauma”. It has also said that it will work with organisations representing affected mothers and adoptees on further action.
For survivors, however, an apology cannot return the years that were lost. It cannot give a mother back the baby taken from her at a hospital door. It cannot restore the childhood of an adoptee who grew up believing that they had been abandoned. It cannot recover birthdays, family photographs, first words or the ordinary experience of watching a child grow up.
But it can change the historical record. that for decades, the dominant public story was that unmarried mothers had simply “given their babies away”. The evidence now emerging from parliamentary inquiries, survivor testimonies and institutional archives presents a far more complicated and painful picture. Many did not freely give their children away.
They were young. They were frightened. They were isolated from their families. Some were sent to institutions. Some were subjected to humiliating treatment during pregnancy and childbirth. Some were told that keeping their baby was selfish or impossible. And many were confronted with a system in which adoption was presented not as one choice among several, but as the only respectable or realistic future.
The significance of the BASW scheduled formall apology therefore extends beyond the social work profession. It is part of a much larger reassessment of how Britain treated unmarried women and their children in the decades after the Second World War. The final question is no longer simply how many children were adopted. It is how many mothers were ever given a genuine choice. That question for many familiea has remained unanswered for most of their lives.
The apologies now being delivered by the state, the Church and the social work profession cannot undo what happened. But they mark an important admission: the shame did not belong to the young women who became pregnant outside marriage. The shame belonged to a system that decided, often before those women had even given birth, that they were not entitled to keep their own children.
The strongest survivor material here comes from Parliamentary evidence, particularly Ann Lloyd Keen and Diana Defries, rather than relying on secondary retellings. I’ve also kept the article careful about the 185,000 figure: Parliament says this is the closest available estimate, not a definitive count of every forced adoption.
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