Australia urged to apologise for forced adoptions

“Acknowledgement. I want the Australian public to know what happened to
us,” she told The Associated Press.

Ms Turner said she was 17 when her baby was taken without her consent while
she was drugged. Weeks later, she was told he had died. They were reunited
in 2008.

She has a copy of the adoption release form which she said is a fraud, with
both her typed name and supposed signature misspelt “Robyn.”

“No matter how many sleeping pills they gave me, I would never forget how
to spell my own name,” she said.

The seven-member Senate committee began investigating the federal government’s
role in forced adoption in 2010 after the Western Australian state
parliament apologised to mothers and children for the flawed practices in
that state from the 1940s until the 1980s.

Roman Catholic hospitals in Australia apologised in July for forcing unmarried
mothers to give up babies for adoption and urged state governments to accept
financial responsibility.

Catholic Health Australia, the largest nongovernment hospital operator in
Australia and which provides 10 per cent of the nation’s hospital beds, said
the practice of adopting out illegitimate children to married couples was “regrettably
common” from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Adoption in Australia is mostly controlled by state laws, but the report found
that the federal government had contributed to forced adoption by failing to
provide unwed mothers with full welfare benefits to which a widow or
deserted wife would have been entitled until 1973.

Australian adoptions peaked at almost 10,000 a year in 1972, before rapidly
declining. The report found that decline could reflect the availability of
welfare, the growing popularity of oral contraceptives and the legalisation
of abortion.

Among unwed mothers, adoption rates were as high as 60 per cent in the late
1960s, the report said.

The committee could not estimate how many adoptions were forced but said they
numbered in the thousands.

The committee recommended that the federal government make an apology that
identifies the actions and policies that resulted in forced adoptions, and
that state governments and nongovernment institutions that administered
adoptions should issue formal statements of apology.

The report also recommended that the federal government initiate discussions
with the states on compensating the separated mothers and children for the
harm caused. Siewert said the committee had no advice on how much
compensation should be paid.

The government had yet to respond by late on Wednesday.

Source: AP

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