‘Scottish Government’s response has been amateurish and inadequate’

Forced adoption campaigner Marion McMillan, 74, was in parliament last March when the then first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, made her landmark apology.

Afterwards, Sturgeon pushed wheelchair-bound Marion to a special reception for survivors.

Since then, Marion says she has had very little contact from the Scottish Government.

She said: “Despite being Scotland’s foremost campaigner and battling for over 50 years to have the shameful forced adoption abuses acknowledged, I have had little or no positive contact with officials.

She said: “We were sentenced to a living bereavement, never knowing where our children were, or if they were safe and well.

“The shame and fear imposed upon us ensured we kept Scotland’s dirty little secret and never spoke about what was done to us.

“Many women were so traumatised and damaged they found it impossible to talk about the babies taken from them.

“We were silenced, ordered never to try to find our babies or face years in jail.”

Marion says mothers were treated dreadfully, often denied painkillers during birth and refused access to even hold their babies before they were taken.

She said she suffered “traumatic birth injuries when my baby was literally torn from me. I was told that would teach me a lesson not to have sex again until I was married. I spent the rest of my life with physical and psychological injuries which will never heal.”

Scotland’s oldest adoptee, Marjorie White, 73, from Edinburgh, has also struggled to engage officials.

She said: “I have tried my best to speak to officials to impress upon them the very specific and unique victim-centred support we desperately need, and the government response has been nothing short of amateurish and inadequate.

“We have little choice now but to pursue legal action and ensure we get the help we need to come to terms with what was done to us.

“Our lives have been lived in silence and pain. But this was a burden which never should have been placed upon our shoulders.

“When I eventually found out that I had been adopted, I tried to find my natural parents.

“Instead of helping, the authorities who were responsible for what was done to me placed every obstacle possible in my way for so long that it cost me the opportunity to meet my father.

“He died in Australia as we were planning to get together.

“The sense of loss and betrayal will always haunt me.

“People need to understand that the practises which prevented me finding my mother and father continued in the ’90s.

“It was unbelievably cruel. I only got four years with my natural mother, and never got a chance to hug my own father.”