04/07/2026
As an English adoptee born in the late 1960s, I was impacted by the news this week, and I wanted to share my own experience.
I made a point of watching the story on the news, and I was surprised by how upset I was. It made me cry. Not just for the birth mothers, though I was moved by that too. It felt personal.
If I'm honest, part of it was wishing my own birth mother had been one of them. That feels like an awful thing to admit when I only have a tiny idea of just how much those mothers struggled. But I think, as an adoptee, you want the reason you were given up to have been out of your birth mother's hands. Not a choice she made among options. Something that was done to her, not by her.
At the time of my birth, my birth mother (J) was a homeless 28-year-old he**in addict. J had left home years previously and become estranged from her family. She already had a baby (P) who was in care whilst she was pregnant with me.
When I met J at the age of 20, she explained that social services had told her that if she placed me for adoption, they would help her to have P back in her care and also help her get a flat.
Years later, after J had died, I received my file from social services. The story was different. J did not feel she could manage with a newborn baby and a toddler; there is only 16 months between P and me.
The truth probably lies somewhere in between.
While I do not doubt J was very happy that we were reunited, I never got the feeling that she had desperately wanted to keep me.
When J told me about my birth father, who wasn't named on my birth certificate, she made it clear that one definite advantage of my adoption had been that he hadn't been able to get to me.
Hearing the apology from the government last week would have been a long-overdue and moving moment for birth mothers and their adopted children.
As an adoptee, you already feel as though you're not the "chosen one." Hearing that she had chosen my older half-brother over me was just another version of that same old story.
She'd known him. Bonded with him. In a way she hadn't yet had the chance to with me.
I will never know the whole truth of those months before I was born, and for a long time, that not-knowing was hard to carry. I used to turn it over and over, looking for the version that would finally make sense of it. I don't do that any more.
There is absolutely no doubt about that. And that has to be ok.
What I've landed on isn't an answer. It's more that both things can be true at once: that J was doing the best she could with very little, and that being the child who wasn't kept leaves its own quiet mark, whatever the reasons. The apology doesn't need to resolve that for me. It just needed to be said.
If you watched the news story, whether you're an adoptee, a birth parent, or just someone who felt something watching it, I'd genuinely like to know how it landed for you.
