UK PM apologizes over forced adoptions,decries a 'stain on our history'

The UK’s caretaker Prime Minister Keir Starmer formally apologised for the British state’s role in separating tens of thousands of unmarried mothers from their babies, a practice that lasted for decades until the 1970s. Speaking in the Parliament, Prime Minister Starmer on Thursday said they are deeply and profoundly sorry for what he called a stain on their history. An estimated one lakh eighty five thousand babies of unmarried mothers were adopted in England and Wales between 1949 and 1976. Campaigners have fought for years for acknowledgement that women were pressured, deceived and threatened into giving up their babies. Starmer, who is in the final weeks of his premiership, said women were coerced, bullied or misled into feeling that they had no choice but to have their children taken away from them. He stated that children grew up believing they were unwanted and mothers were told their babies would be better off without them.  

To all those affected by the appalling injustice of forced adoption, we are deeply and profoundly sorry.

The shame is not yours. The shame was never yours. pic.twitter.com/TiWTumO7TN

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) July 2, 2026

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. In 2022, UK Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights called on the government to issue a formal apology, concluding that it bore "ultimate responsibility for the pain and suffering caused by public institutions and state employees that railroaded mothers into unwanted adoptions."