Ms. Robertson’s biological mother became pregnant at 17 with a U.S. Air Force airman and was forced to give her up for adoption. When she was in her 50s, Ms. Robertson underwent chemotherapy for Stage 4 ovarian cancer and felt the need to find her biological mother.
“The chemo made me pretty sick, and most people shout for their mums when they’re sick, and I was no different,” she said. “I yelled out for mine. But which one? I had my pick of three mums. I wasn’t sure which one I was shouting for.”
Ms. Robertson, now 62, documented her search for her biological mother in a podcast called “Looking for Esther.”
The practice of forced adoption was also common elsewhere in Britain. In England and Wales, about 185,000 babies of unmarried mothers were adopted between 1949 and 1976, according to a parliamentary report published last year. Once the babies were born, contact was often minimized, and some mothers were only able to bottle feed their babies because breastfeeding was thought to create too strong a bond, the report found. In a written response this month, the British government acknowledged repeatedly that what had happened was wrong.
By the mid-1970s, the practice became less commonplace, as the role of the British government in adoptions became more formalized, as birth control become more widely available and as single motherhood became more widely accepted, said Jatinder Sandhu, a social researcher and an expert witness who testified to the British government’s parliamentary inquiry into forced adoptions.
“The laws and the legislation and the lack of options that were evident at the time pushed them into giving up their children for adoption,” Dr. Sandhu said. “For some, I suspect the apology will be pretty significant because of the recognition that they didn’t have options at the time.”
Scotland’s apology follows apologies from other countries, beginning with Australia in 2013; the government in Flanders, Belgium, in 2015; and Ireland in 2021. A Canadian Senate committee in 2018 carried out an inquiry into the practice of requiring unwed mothers to give up their babies for adoption, but the Canadian government has not made a formal apology, according to the British parliamentary report last year. The report also noted that, while the Church of England had not issued a formal apology for its involvement in the practice, a spokesperson had expressed “great regret” for the pain caused. The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales apologized in 2016 for its role in the practice.
