THOUGHTS OF ONE GIVEN AWAY AT BIRTH

I was born to an unmarried mother in an emergency nursing home in 1946. She, like others in her situation, had served in the Second World War and, after what must have been a brief affair with a soldier (or, possibly, having been raped – no father's name appears on my Birth Certificate), gave me up for adoption shortly afterwards. 

It appears she came from an ordinary family but there was little, if any, support for unmarried mothers in 1946 and she was persuaded to have me adopted.  I know she wanted to keep me but social conditions and family morality, combined with the economics of the pre-Welfare State, meant there was insufficient money to raise a child.  There was also the social stigma attached to being an unmarried mother and, therefore, she was sent to a place away from her home in order to give birth. Whilst I have letters showing she had a struggle to give me up, she did not talk about my birth which remained hidden from common knowledge, and although she married soon afterwards my very existence was never spoken of.  

At a time when many are reporting historical abuse towards unmarried mothers I count myself fortunate.  Until the advent of orphanages, usually run by Religious Orders as local authorities didn’t have to pay salaries to Sisters, babies born ‘out of wedlock’ or born to women with a large number of children, might have been ‘disposed’ of because the mothers could not afford to keep them.  Some would have been given away (and Charles Dickens writes of the conditions many faced in David Copperfield) but others would be allowed to die or be killed.

It’s easy, simplistic, and dangerous to judge a previous era by the standards of our own. Two years after I was born the Children Act 1948 set out new support measures for children across the UK. Until then, local authorities had no duty to provide care for any child whose parents were unable to do so - that was the responsibility of others.  The notion that children had ‘rights’ is fairly recent; it was not until 1990 that the UK signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which sets out the rights of every child ‘to survive, grow, participate and fulfil their potential’.

Married women, of course, shared the lot of children in that it is only recently they were regarded as not being the property of their husbands.  Unmarried mothers fared even worse – ‘fallen’ women who had no place in decent society.  Much of the blame for this is traceable to the ancient notion that women needed controlling by men, an understanding that is still common in many places.  The fear behind this is that, without domination, women were a threat because they were the givers and takers of life; every religion has added a gloss to this by declaring, in one way or another, that woman can be either ‘saints or sinners.’

I am deeply and forever grateful to my adoptive parents for the wonderful upbringing I received, and I also recognise the pain that my birth mother must have experienced.  But we must not judge the mores of previous generations in the simplistic way that many in the media are now doing - and encouraging others to do the same.  It’s easy to point a finger, but we should be slow to judge, ready to listen and explore - and only then discern the right response.