Apology for Adoption Practices

My denomination, The United Church of Canada, has been struggling for 10 years with the legacy of the maternity facilities we operated for what were then called "unwed mothers." During the period from the 1940s to 1980, a high demand for babies to adopt and cultural attitudes (partially shaped by our and other churches) about the "shame" of pregnancy outside marriage shifted these facilities from having most mothers leave with their infants to coercing them into giving their babies up for adoption. The demand for adoptable babies decreased in the late 1960s and by 1980 most of these facilities had closed or were in transition again to working with mothers who would keep their children. This was not unique to Canada; the same conditions prevailed in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. The Australian federal government apologized in 2013 for forced adoptions in that country.

After a researcher reported on the history of United Church-run maternity facilities and the experiences of women who stayed there, the church's Theology and Inter-Church Inter-Faith Committee (which I chair) produced a report on Theologies of Adoption in 2018, which looked at this issue as well as the "Sixties Scoop" of Indigenous children from their communities to be adopted by non-Indigenous families, international adoptions, and the secrecy that restricts adoptees from finding out their history. I testified on the church's behalf to a committee of the Canadian Senate examining forced adoptions during this period (which produced an excellent report) and met some of the mothers who have been working for years to have their pain acknowledged. I then wrote the draft of an apology for the church's past adoption practices, which was extensively reworked and refined by a group from the Theology and Inter-Church Inter-Faith Committee. I was pleased to present that apology today to our denomination's General Council Executive, the national decision-making body which is in place between the General Councils which are held at three-year intervals. The Executive adopted the apology and is communicating it to mothers and adoptees, media, other denominations and the United Church.

Here is the news release summarizing the apology:
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