Adoption policy: Ottawa urged to apologize
Thousands of mothers forced to give up babies
TORONTO — Their stories would not seem out of place in an episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale” — pregnant women shuttered away, violently restrained during childbirth, banned from looking at their babies — and, finally, coerced by social workers into signing adoption papers.
More than a half-century after unmarried and largely non-consenting Canadian women were sent to maternity homes to give birth in relative secrecy, a report released Thursday by a Senate committee acknowledges a “disturbing chapter” in Canadian history, when the country’s adoption policies led to hundreds of thousands of unwed mothers being forced to give up their babies for adoption.
The report calls on the federal government to issue a formal apology for what it characterizes as a “common practice” from
1945 to the 1970s that has been “shrouded in secrecy.”
“There is another Scoop that needs to be acknowledged,” Art Eggleton, the senator who chaired the committee, told reporters. (He was referring to the “Sixties Scoop,” a 1960s government program that separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families and put them up for adoption by nonIndigenous parents.)
While adoption policies fell under the jurisdiction of provinces and territories, the federal government provided them with social assistance grants, which were often used to address the needs of pregnant women. Those funds “specifically contributed to the maintenance of maternity homes for unwed mothers, the provision of adoption and counselling services and supporting the casework of social workers.”
The report says that the “unethical” policy was in part rooted in the societal mores of the postwar period, when the social stigma of unwed women having “illegitimate” children and raising them in a nontraditional “nuclear family” was so significant that many women were sent to wait out their pregnancies at maternity homes, often run by religious groups or the Salvation Army. An estimated 95 per cent of women who gave birth at maternity homes gave their children up for adoption, according to the report.
According to Origins Canada, a nonprofit that helps people who have been separated from family by adoption, it was thought women who gave birth at maternity homes could be “made marriageable” again or “rehabilitated.”
Aside from the apology, the report recommends the federal and provincial governments set up a fund to provide counselling for mothers and adoptees and for the country to set up a universal policy on access to adoption files.