“It is time to begin the healing process for unwed mothers and the children they were pressured into giving up in the decades after the Second World War,” the Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology said in a report on Canada’s forced adoption practices released last Thursday.
Between the end of the war and the early 1970s, Canada remained harshly judgemental of unmarried mothers, who faced enormous social and institutional pressure to give up their babies to “traditional” couples looking to establish their own nuclear families.
This treatment of unmarried pregnant women was not unique to Canada. Allied countries including Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the United States shared similar ideologies of what made a family.
In Canada, unmarried women who had become pregnant were sometimes forced to go to maternity homes — supported by federal funds — to deliver their babies in relative secrecy. Many women had difficult experiences in these homes even before their newborns were taken from them.
It is difficult to know exactly how many people were affected by these forced adoption practices, but nearly 600,000 so-called “illegitimate births” were recorded between 1945 and 1971.
As many as 95 percent of unwed mothers in maternity homes surrendered their babies to adoption, compared to two per cent today.
The Honourable Senator Art Eggleton, P.C., chair of the committee, said, “This unfortunate part of Canada’s history needs to be addressed. We cannot reverse the harms that have taken place, but we can provide support for those who were wronged.”
Committee members heard the tragic accounts of women who, at the most vulnerable points in their young lives,were abandoned by family, banished from society, and mistreated during pregnancy and labour. The women were then dispatched without regard and with the sole instruction to never say a word about the babies they had just surrendered for adoption.
Recommendations
The committee’s report makes four recommendations, including that the federal government deliver a formal apology in Parliament within a year, that it make reparations that would include professional counselling for survivors of Canada’s forced adoption practices, and that the federal, provincial and territorial governments discuss uniform legislation about access to adoption files.
Access to adoption files varies across the country
The committee recommends the Government of Canada in collaboration with its provincial and territorial counterparts develop a consensus position on a uniform policy in regard to accessibility of adoption files across the country that acknowledges a person’s right to know their identity.
It was also noted that individuals searching for biological families can face additional obstacles if their adoption occurred in a different province than the one in which they
were born.
Finally, committee members were surprised to learn that, despite the trend in Canada of opening up provincial adoption records, none are fully open, but rather only semi-open such that either the birth parent or child can place a veto on information disclosure to the other.
Australia had similar post-war adoption practices — but after an Australian Senate committee inquiry, the government issued a formal apology in Parliament House in Canberra on March 21, 2013. It also offered counselling and support services.
The report, The Shame is Ours: Forced Adoptions of the Babies of Unmarried Mothers in Post-war Canada, is available here. It is also available in French.
Yes, we ought to hang our heads in shame! I remember visiting the Crèche on Côte de Liesse. where children were awaiting adoption.
I am an adoptee. My mother had me in 1951 as a result of what might be called a “date rape” but the police refused to arrest the man because my mother wouldn’t tell her father (she was about 26 at the time). She went to court for a year to try to keep me but was eventually told that she didn’t make enough money and the courts put me in foster care from my birth until I was almost 2 years old when I was finally adopted.
My daughter suffers from a genetic disorder that has robbed her of her sight and causes learning problems. She is 45 now, and I am 67, but the government expects me to care for her, with no financial help from them. And I still don’t know who my father was and what medical concerns might be very important to my daughter’s health. Am I angry? That is an understatement.