06/19/2026
From a family constellations perspective, these forced adoptions, deaths, and religious traumas carry through to future generations. Apologies matter, but the ripple effects linger. I know. I have felt it in my own body as a woman of Irish Catholic descent.
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The Church of England has issued a formal apology for its part in one of postwar Britain's most widespread abuses of women -- the forced adoption of babies taken from unmarried mothers over the three decades from 1949 to 1976. The apology was delivered today by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally -- the first woman to lead the Church, and the spiritual head of the world's 85 million Anglicans -- in the form of a direct video message to the women and girls who had lived through the system. "You have nothing to be ashamed of," she told them. "The shame is ours."
The apology was paired with the release of a two-year internal investigation that put a partial measure on the Church's involvement. More than 200 so-called "mother and baby homes" operated under Church of England affiliation during the period the report covers, though central oversight from the Church varied widely from one institution to the next. The Church said it cannot offer a precise count of how many mothers and children passed through institutions it ran or was tied to, but acknowledged the number likely runs into the tens of thousands. Across England and Wales as a whole, an estimated 185,000 babies were taken from unmarried mothers and placed for adoption during those years.
Mullally was direct about what the Church had been: not a bystander to a national failure but an institution that had helped sustain it. "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," she said.
The forced adoptions, she added, had taken place inside a culture that elevated discretion and propriety above the welfare of the women and children caught up in it -- and the Church, rather than offering refuge from those values, had reinforced them. Separately, the Church confirmed that survivors of forced adoption with a clear connection to Church of England-affiliated homes may be eligible for compensation under a broader redress scheme due to open by the end of 2026.
What unfolded inside the homes is by now well documented. Teenage girls and young women, sent away to keep their pregnancies hidden from family and community, were placed in institutions where the stigma of unmarried pregnancy was the operating logic. They were often required to do manual labor through their pregnancies. Adoptions were arranged with little of what could meaningfully be called consent. The fathers, for the most part, were not pursued, not shamed, not held to anything -- the moral weight of the situation fell entirely on the women, many of whom were still children themselves.
Diana Defries, who chairs the Movement for an Adoption Apology and has spent years campaigning for public accountability, spoke to BBC Breakfast on Thursday morning. Her daughter was taken from her shortly after birth in 1974, when Defries was sixteen years old -- and she has long been pointed about the language she will not accept for what happened. "My baby was taken from me," she has said. "I dislike the term give up."
Like so many of the women who came through the homes, she had spent decades carrying the assumption that what happened had been somehow her doing. That assumption, she said, eventually broke. "I've begun to understand that it wasn't me. I didn't do this. This was done to me, this was done to my daughter," she told the program. "We've been waiting a very long time for an acknowledgment in public that this was an injustice."
The Church of England is not the first religious institution in Britain to apologize for forced adoption, nor is it the first government or church anywhere to reckon with it. The mother and baby homes drew on the model of the Magdalene Hospitals, an institutional template that spread with Protestant churches across the British Isles and into Australia and Canada from the mid-1800s onward, and was adopted by the Catholic Church as well.
In 2016, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, then the head of Catholics in England and Wales, apologized for forced adoptions carried out in the Catholic Church's name. Ireland's reckoning has gone further still: the discovery of an unmarked burial site on the grounds of a former mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway -- holding the remains of hundreds of infants and young children -- prompted a government commission of inquiry whose 2021 final report led to a national apology and a redress scheme for survivors. The physical excavation of the Tuam site itself only began in 2025.
A British government apology is now expected to follow within weeks. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, who told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday that the apology was coming "very soon," has described the broader chapter as a "shameful period" in the country's history; the apology itself is expected to be delivered in the House of Commons. A 2022 report from Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights had already placed the responsibility at the state's door, concluding that the government "bore ultimate responsibility for the pain and suffering caused by public institutions and state employees that railroaded mothers into unwanted adoptions."
For survivors -- many now elderly, many still searching for the children taken from them, many who did not live to hear it -- this reckoning has been a long time coming. "These practices are in the past," Mullally said, "and must never happen again."
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For a powerful novella about a man who discovers what is happening behind the walls of a Church-run mother and baby home in small-town Ireland, we recommend "Small Things Like These" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780802158741 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4tGiKGb (Amazon)
For a landmark oral history of American women who were coerced into surrendering their babies for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade, we recommend "The Girls Who Went Away" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780143038979 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/3bQtYFu (Amazon)
For the true story of an Irish mother whose son was taken from her and sold to an American family for adoption, we highly recommend "Philomena" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780143124726 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/47Ni2hU (Amazon)
For a devastating film about three young women confined in an Irish Magdalene Laundry -- Church-run institutions where "fallen" women were forced into unpaid labor -- we recommend "The Magdalene Sisters," at https://amzn.to/4t1Prhn
For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
To read more about Archbishop Mullally's apology on behalf of the Church of England in The New York Times, visit https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/world/europe/church-england-apology-forced-adoptions-uk.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rFA.iT_d.jqw2w2BsgGev&smid=url-share
