Adoption in Britain has changed dramatically in the past few decades.

In the 1950s and 1960s, adoption was much more common: the number of adopted children peaked at 28,000 in 1968; last year there were just 3,300.  Adoption is now seen as a last resort and every effort is made to keep a baby with its birth mother.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, social pressure on ‘un-married mothers’ was high. Young women who became pregnant were sent away to “mother-and-baby homes”,  where they would give birth before being pressured into handing their baby over to an adoption agency.  Most of these young mothers did not want to give their baby away, but felt they had no choice.

Today, those women are part of another dramatic social change, as legal reforms allow them to make contact with the children they handed over in such wretched circumstances. Pressure from campaigners - including many of the former ‘un-married  mothers’ - has led to adopted children and birth parents being given the right to be reunited, through approved intermediaries, if that is the wish of both parties.

The first significant legal change came in 1975, when adopted children were given the right to have copies of their birth certificates, so they could trace their parents. But it was not until December 2005, after nearly 30 years of campaigning, that birth parents won the right to make contact with children who had been adopted.

adoption