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Articles / 'You've got my chin': That was the moment BRIAN VINER knew this woman was ....

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on March 03, 2026, 03:37:54 PM »

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/family-parenting/article-15607431/moment-BRIAN-VINER-knew-birth-mother.html

'You've got my chin': That was the moment BRIAN VINER knew this woman was the birth mother who gave him away as a baby. Hearing about her bohemian life of poets, jail and a smitten Soviet colonel, perhaps life had dealt him a lucky break...

By BRIAN VINER, FILM CRITIC

Published: 01:27, 3 March 2026 | Updated: 09:38, 3 March 2026

A woman I'd never met, or even heard of, wrote me a letter in November 1997 that actually made my knees buckle.  I'd never before received news that had a physical impact like that, like being hit by a car. And that even included the evening in 1976 when two police officers arrived at the front door to tell my mum and me that my father had been carried lifeless off a train earlier that day, after suffering a massive heart attack.  This woman's name was Monica Bradley. She worked for an agency that helped people find the children they had given up for adoption years before. And, in collaboration with my birth mother, she had found me.  'This letter will probably cause you some surprise,' is how it began.

Some surprise?

Probably?

She must have known how understated those words were but she was trying to gently break it to me that my understanding of my own life, of who I was and where I'd come from, was about to change.  Monica's letter filled me in on further details of the woman who had given birth to me on October 25, 1961. 'She subsequently married and had two sons, who have both known of your existence from an early age.'

We all experience life-changing moments, but I suppose some more than others. A few weeks ago, on February 4, I wrote in these pages about the seismic loss of my father, Allen, 50 years earlier to the day.  He and my mum, Miriam, had adopted me when I was three weeks old. They couldn't have children 'of their own' (I have always hated that expression), so they went down the adoption route and, after collecting me in London, whisked me north to live in Southport, a seaside town firmly in Lancashire until the 1974 municipal boundary changes rudely shunted it into Merseyside.  Our contented little family was just them and me. I would have liked a brother or even a sister, but at the age of nine, frankly, not as much as I would have liked battery-powered Subbuteo floodlights.  That was how old I was when I found out I was adopted. My mum broke the news. We were in the car, which was parked outside our local Post Office. My dad had nipped in to buy some stamps and that's when she told me.  It was a prosaic backdrop to such a moment, but they must have engineered it so that he wasn't there for the big revelation. He was always uncomfortable with deeply personal stuff like that.  I don't recall being upset, just intrigued. My mum was able to give me only the tantalising nugget of information that at birth I'd been named Robin, almost an anagram of Brian.  Soon after that bombshell outside the Post Office, however, all life's certainties returned. I asked no more questions and, even after my dad died when I was 14, I never wanted to know who had fathered me biologically.  In my mid-teens when, both floundering in our grief, my mum and I had some proper screaming bust-ups, it didn't remotely occur to me to detonate my nuclear option. Far from passing my lips, the terrible line, 'You're not even my real mother' never so much as crossed my mind.  I duly grew into adulthood assuming that I would never know my birth story and, despite becoming a journalist, a profession powered by curiosity, that suited me fine. I felt entirely secure about myself without needing to dig up my roots.  That might have changed in late 1992 when my girlfriend Jane, soon to become my wife, became pregnant. There were medical questions about the family history of this condition or that, and we only had her side of the equation.  She exerted some gentle pressure on me to start investigating, but I was resolute. It would have felt utterly disloyal to my mother, still very much alive, and my late father. And for all I knew, it might have opened a can of worms better left untouched.  By November 1997 we had two children, four-year-old Eleanor and Joseph, aged two. The following August we would add a third, Jacob.  I got Monica's letter on a Saturday morning. We lived in Crouch End, north London, and I was home alone. Jane had taken the children to the park, a ten-minute walk with a pushchair and a dawdling toddler, but a two-minute sprint with a letter from an adoption agency. Jane was as thunderstruck as I was.  Explaining that my birth mother was called Doris Rau, Monica wrote that she 'simply wishes you to know something of her circumstances and that there is the possibility of making contact with her should you ever wish to do so'.

After recovering from the initial shock, I did wish to do so.  Remarkably, Doris or Pip, as she preferred to be known lived only three miles away from Crouch End.  A week or so later we set eyes on each other for the first time in 36 years. We met in a restaurant called Odette's, where her memorable opening gambit was: 'You have my chin.'

Over dinner, as we filled each other in on our respective lives, I recall her saying what rich pickings there would have been for an eavesdropper.  She'd been 22 when she inconveniently got pregnant by her then-boyfriend, Robin Welch. She was Jewish and he wasn't, but that wasn't her reason for choosing to have me adopted. She was a restless and relentless traveller and a baby would have cramped her style.  Rebelling against her middle-class upbringing, she had lived in the late 1950s at the notorious Beat Hotel in Paris (where the poet Gregory Corso, the 'bad boy' of the Beat generation, introduced her to pot).  The word 'colourful' hardly sums up her early adult life. In 1960 she was thrown into jail in New York City for her part in a nuclear disarmament rally. Later that year, after driving from London to Russia, she was involved in a near-fatal car crash and spent six weeks in a Russian hospital where a Soviet army colonel fell in love with her and proposed marriage. Usefully for me, I suppose, she turned him down.  Robin proposed to her too when, back in London, she got pregnant early the following year. He was an up-and-coming potter who would become one of the most acclaimed of his generation. He wanted to marry her and keep me, but again she declined.  Eventually, he gave the adoption his blessing on condition that she would never look for me. He disapproved fiercely when later she did. But once she'd found me, his strength of feeling dissolved just as mine had.  He and Pip had split up not long after I was born but they had always stayed friends. Which is how, a few weeks after I'd met her, another highly eavesdroppable dinner took place, this time at a random Cafe Rouge: her, Robin and me. Without explaining its mighty significance, we asked a passing waiter to take our photograph.  Robin had gone on to have three more children two daughters and a son so the next stop in this rather overwhelming journey of discovery was meeting the five half-siblings that I'd known nothing about until a month or so earlier. Joyously, as I write this almost 30 years later, I can report a fulfilling, loving relationship with all of them.  But I still vividly remember my faintly apprehensive knock on the front door of a house in a village near Cambridge, early in 1998. It was my half-sister Polly's home.  We had written to each other but still hadn't met, and here I was, with Jane and the children, about to join her, her husband and their two children (who were almost exactly the same age as ours) for Sunday lunch. Weird as the situation was, it somehow felt life-affirming when the door was opened by a woman who looked very much like me.  Neither Pip nor Robin are with us now. When he died in 2019, aged 83, I gave the eulogy at his funeral.  Later, as a sort of personal homage, I went to see the gigantic ceramic candle holders he'd made for Lincoln Cathedral, said by those in the know to have been at 'the very outer limits' of what can be achieved on the potter's wheel.  I always correct people who call him my dad, because my dad was Allen. But seeing those amazing candlesticks, taller than the average man, I nonetheless felt genuine filial pride.  Pip was 85 when she died the summer before last, having long since parlayed her love of travel into a world-renowned collection of central Asian textiles and costumes, which she would sometimes rent out to filmmakers. Gladiator (2000) and Troy (2004) looked as authentic as they did thanks partly to her incredible eye.  To suggest that she embarked on the quest to find me with the tenacity of Russell Crowe in Gladiator or Brad Pitt in Troy might be stretching a point. But it really did take her years.  The law used to make it off-puttingly difficult for people who'd given up children for adoption to find them again it was much easier the other way round. But the 1989 Children's Act removed some of the obstacles.  Eventually she found out my name, not a common one, though there are a handful of us. The challenge was to find the right Brian Viner, which is where the Mail on Sunday enters the story. In 1997 I won a What The Papers Say Award for my work as the newspaper's television critic. At the time those awards were prestigious enough, I can immodestly add, to be reported elsewhere in the Press.  When Pip's son Alexander saw my name in The Guardian, it didn't take much sleuthing to buy that weekend's Mail on Sunday. He assumed there would be a picture of me, which there was. And as soon as Pip saw it, recognising not so much her chin as my striking resemblance to Robin, she knew she'd found her first born.  By then she had expert Monica Bradley on her side, so once they'd unearthed my address, Monica became the intermediary.  She knew better than anyone that it can be a fraught business, connecting an adopted child with its birth parents. Indeed, Pip had attended some counselling sessions, chaired by Monica, with other women looking for their long-adopted babies.  Pip would often say, with a mixture of sadness and smugness, but mostly smugness, that of all the powerful stories aired in those meetings, hers was the only one with a happy ending.  The main reason it was a happy ending, as I think she understood, is because of my mum and dad, who gave me such a solid start in life.  My mum, incidentally, died in 2017, at the great age of 92. It wasn't easy to tell her about that 1997 bombshell letter but, with some trepidation, I did. She responded with typical matter-of-factness. 'Are you OK with it?' she asked.

I said I was. 'Then that's all that matters,' she said.

We never talked about it again.  Fundamentally, I never resented Pip for giving me away because I felt she did me a favour, and I have another letter to prove it. Dated January 12, 1962, it was from the National Children Adoption Association.  'Dear Miss Rau, We are pleased to tell you that we have the happiest news of Robin; he has completely settled downhe is in excellent health and spirits and is much loved by his adopting parents who are anxious to legalise his adoption so that they can make provision for his future security...'

The letter went on to rebuke her for not turning up to a previous appointment for legal documents to be signed. It urged her to attend the next one 'in the interests of Robin'.

I loved and admired Pip, but it was characteristic of her, certainly at that time in her life, not to show up. That's why I know, without any doubt, that even as an obstreperous, fatherless teenager re-named Brian, Robin's interests were served.

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Articles / After the Apology: Why forced adoption Is not settled history

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on February 28, 2026, 04:39:18 PM »

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/after-the-apology-why-forced-adoption-is-not-settled-history,20726

After the Apology: Why forced adoption Is not settled history
By Michael Costello | 25 February 2026, 4:30pm

Forced adoption in Australia is often treated as a closed chapter, but the record tells a different story. Behind the Apology lies a system that punished mothers, erased children and continues to bury its own evidence. Michael Costello writes.

FORCED ADOPTION in Australia was never a welfare failure or a tragic misunderstanding. It was a State‑Church project built on a moral logic that treated unmarried mothers and their babies as impurities to be removed from the social body.

The Seven Deadly Sins are not a metaphor here they are a map of the institutional appetites and punishments that powered the system. This is not history. It is a live audit of power.

Forced adoption was never simply the transfer of a child. It was a State‑engineered rupture of biology and identity. The separation of mother and infant created a dual trauma: a mother left with a grief she was forbidden to express, and a child left with a deprivation too early to name. Newborns were taken from the only voice, scent and heartbeat their bodies recognised, while mothers endured the clinical removal of their own flesh and blood.

To call these outcomes “unfortunate” is to repeat the language of a State intent on sanitising its own violence. This was wrath the moral violence of a system that punished women for stepping outside its script.

For mothers, the loss was not a moment but a life sentence. They were told to marry and “have children of your own,” as if the child taken from them were interchangeable. But the body does not forget. The loss is not a memory but an amputation a phantom limb that aches in the chest. Birthdays became secret vigils; crowds became search parties.

For adoptees, identities were not discovered; they were assigned. Many lived with a persistent, unspoken anxiety a physiological echo of a separation they had never escaped. To survive, many constructed a version of themselves designed to please, to avoid a second abandonment.

To understand the original removals, we must move beyond the clinical language of social policy and confront the anatomy of a machine. The archives reveal not “well‑meaning” individuals but a system that was cold, organised and deliberate. Files for unmarried mothers were often pre‑stamped with adoption outcomes long before birth.

As the Senate Inquiry into Former Forced Adoption Policies and Practices recorded:

    '... the hospital files of single pregnant girls were often marked ‘BFA’… assuming that the child of an unmarried mother would be adopted long before consent was taken.'

The maternity wards were the system’s front line. Young women were stripped of their names, isolated from support and forced into physical labour to “work off their keep”. Consent forms were signed while women were drugged, restrained or lied to in the hazy aftermath of traumatic deliveries. Religious orders supplied the moral cover; the State supplied the administrative teeth. Together they disappeared children at scale.

The appetite for babies was framed as virtue. Adoption was promoted as the only acceptable outcome for unmarried mothers. Social workers and policy documents routinely described them as “unfit”, “immature”, or “incapable”, not as assessments but as pretexts for removal. This was lust not sexual, but institutional hunger; the desire to take what was never theirs.

The State did not merely oversee adoptions; it managed a human supply chain calibrated to meet the demands of “deserving” middle‑class infertile couples. Vulnerable mothers were treated not as citizens in need of protection, but as a resource to be harvested. This was gluttony a system consuming the lives of the vulnerable to satisfy the demands of the powerful.

Economics sharpened the blade. Adoption became a financial instrument a way to reduce welfare liabilities while reshaping society according to a narrow moral script. Unmarried mothers were routinely denied financial assistance that would have enabled them to keep their babies. Many were never told they were legally entitled to the Maternity Allowance. Poverty was not an accident of circumstance; it was engineered to ensure compliance.

In the official ledger, the removal of a child was a “win‑win”: a reduction in welfare expenditure and the transfer of a baby from a “liability” to an “asset”.

Beneath these engines lay the State’s resentment of women who exercised autonomy outside its moral script. Unmarried mothers were treated as social problems to be managed rather than as citizens with rights. Many were sent to maternity homes not for support but for containment. Families, clergy and welfare workers acted to remove them from sight, often under the language of “saving face.”

Their pregnancies were framed as moral failures; their independence as deviance requiring correction. This was envy the State’s resentment of women who exercised independence outside its command.

After the National Apology for Forced Adoptions in 2013, the system did not reform; it retreated. Sloth became policy. Sloth here was not idleness but design the State discovered that doing nothing was the most effective way to bury the past. The public accepted the theatre of remorse as a finale rather than a beginning. Projects documenting the history of forced adoption were quietly decommissioned. Exhibitions were dismantled.

Government websites removed references to the Apology, redirecting the public to archival dead ends. Silence was no longer the drift of time; it was an administrative strategy.

Greed in the modern system is not about money taken but money withheld. After the Apology, the State replaced physical coercion with bureaucratic obstruction. Missing files, destroyed documents and inconsistent record‑keeping became a tactic. By delaying access to records, delaying recognition and delaying redress, the State benefits from the passage of time.

As survivors age, the financial cost of justice decreases. As witnesses die, the evidentiary burden becomes impossible to meet. Greed is the calculation that exhaustion will succeed where coercion once did.

And finally, pride the phantom crime. “Forced adoption” sounds like recognition; it feels like the beginning of an accounting. But in the cold reality of the law, it is a trap. You will not find “forced adoption” in any criminal code, any retrospective statute, or any federal compensation scheme. It is a social label a “sorry” engineered to carry no bill of costs.

By encouraging survivors to use this language, the State has steered them away from words that carry legal weight: kidnapping, aggravated fraud, deprivation of liberty and human trafficking. The Government apologises for “forced adoption” for the very reason it cannot be sued for it.

When survivors seek justice, they discover they are fighting a ghost. They are forced to contort the systematic theft of a human being into the petty language of civil torts negligence, trespass categories designed for broken fences, not the destruction of a family. When the evidence of fraud becomes too loud to ignore, the State retreats to its most brazen defence: the standard of the time. Cruelty is reframed as legality simply because it was popular.

The National Apology was not a new beginning; it was camouflage. While the public was reassured that the nation had finally “moved on”, the bureaucracy was quietly dismantling the evidence. The Forced Adoptions History Project has been decommissioned. The Without Consent exhibition has been dismantled. The physical evidence the photographs, the pleading letters, the hospital files has been boxed, taped shut and buried in the basement of the national memory.

Perhaps the most telling act is the quiet removal of the State’s own confession. The Attorney‑General’s website has scrubbed the National Apology, replacing it with a cold redirection to Trove the archive of the dead. This is not a technical update; it is a political act of silencing. The State has decided when the story ends, regardless of the lives left in wreckage.

The Australian system did not fail it worked exactly as intended. What we are seeing is not a “sad chapter” of history but a live audit of power. The ledger is still open. If the State, with the Church beside it, can erase a family without consequence, then no right you hold is secure.

The scandal now is not what was done, but what is still being done to keep it buried. A nation that congratulates itself on fairness has spent decades perfecting the art of disappearance of babies, of records, of responsibility. The Apology was the performance; the bureaucracy is the truth. And in that truth sits a simple, devastating fact: a State that can steal a child and walk away untouched is a State that can do anything.

The institutions that built this machinery believe they have outlasted the witnesses, outwaited the grief and outmanoeuvred the law. But history is not theirs to curate. Memory is not theirs to extinguish. And no matter how deep they bury the evidence, no matter how carefully they script the silence, the truth will overtake the story.

A national class action for post‑Apology harm is beginning to take shape. Its early steps are visible at https://secretsliesandshame.com.

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Articles / You must have had a bad experience...

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on February 25, 2026, 04:00:58 PM »

https://drbarbarasumner.substack.com/p/you-must-have-had-a-bad-experience?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwY2xjawQL-1lleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEewXqohP1N95ODcxzJZqQBusdEA-Nzg33uLJ-W6kmES7i0C3ds-q--XxpmW-A_aem_biMfMprs5zwvLcp6GQMvUg&triedRedirect=true

You must have had a bad experience...
...it's time you got over it, it could have been worse, you should be grateful and other negations.
Dr Barbara Sumner
Feb 24, 2026

These phrases follow adopted people around like shadows.

Last week alone, on my public Facebook page, people threw this at me, and other adopted people at least five or six times.

Mostly, this phrase is delivered as a correction. As if the only legitimate reason to question adoption is personal damage.

These words act as a containment strategy.

Imagine saying this to someone describing the long-term impact of growing up in poverty, evacuated from their homeland as a child, speaking up against institutional racism, domestic violence, or any ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience).

We just don’t. Because we understand, instinctively, that one person’s survival story does not cancel an alternative story.

No one tells me that because I walked away from one fatal car crash and barely survived another, I am not entitled to be critical of driver standards. My survival did not erase the impact.

Yet in adoption discourse, we all live inside a range of social beliefs designed to minimise the impacts of human adoption.

    Adoption is inherently good
    If you are critical, something must have gone wrong
    If nothing visibly went wrong, you have no standing
    If others report happiness, your analysis collapses

This way, the focus is shifted from structure to sentiment.

When an adopted adult speaks about falsified birth records, legal erasure, severed kinship, identity confusion, and genealogical dislocation, the response is not to examine the system. It is to examine the speaker.

And we become anecdotes, we become a story, one of those ‘if it bleeds it leads’ headlines that serve as entertainment.

    What happened to you?
    Were your adopters unkind?
    Did something go wrong?

The implication is that only mistreatment counts. Only overt abuse or visible dysfunction qualifies as injury or legitimate grief.

We saw this in the NZ Royal Commission on Abuse in Care’s late inclusion of adoption in its remit.

The flaw at the heart of this inclusion was that there had to be a prerequisite of abuse in an adoptive home. This reduced adoption discourse to good or bad adoption, bad-apple adopters, and/or disgruntled, non-compliant, reactive adoptees.

It silenced those who experienced a reasonable or happy childhood but who still sought to end the inequalities embedded in their adoptive status.

This flaw could only have been by design. While apologies and reparations were part of the Royal Commission's mandate for those abused in state care, none of this was available to adopted people abused in the home that the state allocated to them. This sifted the focus (for adopted people only) to a listening service alone, as though being heard were a sufficient remedy.

I cover this and other flaws in the Royal Commissions in On Human Adoption.

Really, why do we need to have been abused inside our adoptive home to be justified in asking questions about the structures, functions and purpose of human adoption?

Adoption causes the loss of genetic mirroring and alienation from family and identity; it causes a lifetime inside a false identity and a state-mandated fiction that you were born to someone else.

Even in the most loving adoptive household, those elements sit like stones in the centre of a domestic life built on lies.

To tell an adopted person “you must have had a bad experience” is to refuse to see that structural trauma exists independently of individual goodwill.

Is there any other state-authorised social arrangement where structural rupture is reframed as rescue, and where the people who question it are branded as bitter?

If adoption can be traumatising even when there was no overt abuse, then what happens to the moral simplicity of ‘you must have had a bad experience’?

Easy answer - it is turned back onto the adopted person to avoid causing moral complexity.

In other trauma areas, society is careful not to rank one person's suffering against another’s happiness.

Only in adoption do we expect the person most affected to defend their right to feel what they feel.

Until all the negative issues inherent in human adoption are taken seriously, all adopted people who question the system will continue to be pathologised for recognising what and what was done to them.

There is a whole lexicon of repetitive minimisation that circles all adopted people. So much so, you could be forgiven for thinking it is ritualistic.

You should be grateful:
Gratitude is weaponised to override grief. No other trauma survivor is told that material provision cancels emotional rupture. If you’ve survived a famine, does anyone say you can’t speak of hunger because you now have food?

It could have been worse:
Comparative silencing shifts the conversation from what happened to a ranking exercise. Trauma does not disappear because a hypothetical alternative might have been harsher.

At least you were chosen:
Acquisition as flattery. It ignores the fact that no infant consents to being selected. We do not tell abducted children that they were lucky to be chosen carefully.

Your real mother gave you up because she loved you.
Not only does recasting love as rejection often damage future adult relationships, it also blocks inquiry into the social conditions that made separation inevitable.

Love is enough.
If that were true, there would be no need to falsify birth records.

You are lucky you were not aborted.
My favourite hate messaging. This is existential blackmail. It frames survival as debt and implies that the adopted person must remain silent as the price to pay for being alive.

But all families are messy.
True. But not all families begin with legal erasure and state-mandated identity substitution. This phrase flattens a specific structural rupture into ordinary relational difficulty.

That was a long time ago.
Time does not dissolve identity alteration. New legislation is always springing up to expand the wall of control around adopted people.

You are focusing on the negative.
Naming loss is reframed as negativity. while in any other trauma context, we call it processing.

Plenty of adoptees are happy.
Happiness elsewhere does not invalidate pain here.

You are hurting your adoptive parents by talking like this.
Another of my favourites. It shifts the focus from the affected person to others' comfort. Adopted people are conditioned to manage everyone else’s feelings.

You were saved.
Saved from what? Poverty. Stigma. Geography. The language of rescue conceals the fact that someone had to be separated so that someone else could parent.

Why can’t you just move on?
Identity theft is not an event you “get over.” It is an ongoing condition.

Notice the one thing all these statements do?

    They relocate the problem from the system to the speaker.
    They convert structural critique into personal complaint.
    They protect the moral narrative of adoption.

Once you accept that adoption can contain trauma even in the presence of a form of love, the simplicity collapses.

And complexity is harder to live with than denial.

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Articles / My Primal Wound: How Adoption Trauma Has Shown Up for Me

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on February 18, 2026, 05:01:45 PM »

https://adoptionsupport.org/resource/blog/my-primal-wound-how-adoption-trauma-has-shown-up-for-me/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQCzrxleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETBVdzNnWXFRaUtFOWZrOUFmc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHksrd0FDTXFaef7dn62ZQdhm7l-y-TxPxOCONZclamaTKvttwzRsBtCJkrql_aem_V5R6-nFgS4GqM_-9O2yuxQ

My Primal Wound: How Adoption Trauma Has Shown Up for Me

Adoption Trauma: The Primal Wound

In her book on understanding adopted children, Nancy Verrier describes adoption as a "primal wound." This is the core idea that separation from the birth mother creates a fundamental internal "wound." The sense of loss and grief is said to affect the adoptee throughout life.

But how? What does that look like?!?

When I hear the word "trauma," I automatically associate it with something awful. Brain trauma, violent crime, something causing permanent, ever-lasting damage. Adoption trauma, while not something we can visibly see, carries its own weight of forever effects. A quick google search defines adoption trauma as "the profound emotional and psychological distress resulting from the inherent separation and loss experienced by an adoptee from their birth family, even in ideal situations." It goes on to say that adoption trauma can lead to issues like attachment problems, identity confusion, anxiety, depression, and difficulties formulating relationships.

MY primal wound aches with all of those issues listed.

As a young girl growing up, my adoption trauma showed its anxious face each time my mother dropped me off at school. It felt impossible to separate from her. I'd wrap around her leg like a tiny sloth, sobbing, often so hard that I would gag and eventually vomit. I quickly noticed you couldn't stay at school when you threw up because the school couldn't differentiate between one being sick with nerves vs one being sick with germs. Cry, puke, go home, repeat. This became my daily routine.

I outgrew my morning meltdowns in elementary school, but middle school brought new challenges. New people had new questions, like why didn't I speak Spanish? Was that my "real" mom? And they had new insults, like calling me "goyim", meaning I wasn't a real Jew. I remember arguing to defend my Jewish identity, reciting portions of my Torah readings from my Bat Mitzvah. I remember that I had no defense for my Chilean identity. I knew nothing about my birth country or birth family, nothing about Chilean cuisine and traditions. The tallies in my "difference" column were adding up during a time where I desperately wanted to be the same.


I started stealing alcohol from my parent's liquor cabinet when I was in the 7th grade. The following year I was smoking weed in the woods behind my middle school. I entered high school at age 14 and soared through the hallways high as a kite. I was trading my prescription Adderall pills for pain killers and then washing them down with 40 ozs of St. Ides malt liquor. I was sneaking out of my suburban home to attend mid-week raves an hour away, in downtown Washington, DC. I'd eat ecstasy and dance until I was so dehydrated that I couldn't even stand. In high school, I lived to make memories I could barely remember while running from a life I wanted to forget. Nobody in my friend group cared about my attachment issues, my identity confusion, or my inability to form solid connections. All they cared about was nourishing their addictions, and so did I. Finally, I found a place where I wasn't different, I fit right in.

Growing up I didn't understand the complexities of adoption. Not only did I not have access to adoption competent mental health care but nobody in my family had any understanding of "adoption competency" as a concept. Being aware that I grew up in the 80's, a time when there was very little known about the effects of adoption, I recognize resources in general were limited, but my family still has little understanding of adoption competency to this very day (42 years after I was adopted and the traumas still keep seeping through various cracks in my life).

I often wonder if perhaps I'm not talking about adoption enough. Do people think this has all healed?!? That it just went away? I quickly realize that as I age, my primal wound becomes less apparent. It's bandaged up, well contained and it doesn't "bleed" as much. I've learned to take good care of it over the years, but that doesn't mean my adoption trauma has dissipated. It may no longer show up as tears as I hang onto my mother and it definitely doesn't show up in drunken nights at the bar, but it's still there.

For me, adoption trauma now shows up in quieter moments that people can't correlate to an "outburst." I now navigate a known personal need for extra reassurance in relationships. It took a ruined relationship to understand why it hurt so bad when my husband would threaten to "leave" our marriage. My tears at the births of my four children weren't all happy. Some were tears of intense confusion. I sat alone in my sadness with my newborns as I held their itsy-bitsy hands and thought about how my biological mother said goodbye to that fresh finger "grip" before I was 24 hours old.

If this adventure of adoption has taught me one thing, it's that this primal wound doesn't seem to go away. It changes, requiring new attention, new care and new "cleaning up" as life passes by, but it never really lets you forget it's there. Our experiences often erupt what we thought was dormant and the nursing of this primal wound begins again.

The journey continues...

5

Articles / Parents' 'laughter and tears' at adopting siblings

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on February 14, 2026, 05:03:28 PM »

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexlx52nxvo

Parents' 'laughter and tears' at adopting siblings

Emma Glasbey
Home and social affairs correspondent, Yorkshire
Published 13 November 2025

A couple who adopted two children earlier this year have urged others to consider adoption too, amid concerns over the falling number of people coming forward to do so.

The Adoption Matters charity said it believed the cost of living may have contributed to a 12% drop in adoption registrations in England in 2025 compared to 2024.

Emma and Mike, from North Yorkshire, adopted their children - a brother and sister - in January after they had previously been in foster care for two and a half years.  Emma said: "There's so much loveliness in them being together and knowing they will always have each other - and we've just got the joy of being able to join in with that dynamic."

"It feels slightly heartbreaking that they had waited so long to find that forever family," Emma said.

"Adoption is intimidating. It can be overwhelming but so is parenting generally."

Emma and Mike said they were passionate about sharing the message that adoption was not a secondary option.  "We don't want people to think that because we're an adoptive family it must be because it's biologically not possible," Emma explained.

"That was a factor, but actually, for us, that felt like it was confirming that adopting siblings is how our family is meant to be."

The couple said they had been shown videos of the children before meeting them at an "adoption activity day" where prospective parents were introduced to children.  We hadn't spotted them yet, but Emma heard our son's giggle from across the room and it was really special getting to spend time with them," explained Mike.

"Emma turned to me and said, 'they have my heart', and it was just that moment where we thought, 'we're all in now, this is it'."

Emma and Mike said they wanted to share their story in the hope it would encourage more prospective parents to find out about adoption.  "The graph is going the wrong way," said Emma.

"The number of children needing a safe and forever family is increasing, while the number of people even willing to consider adoption is decreasing."

The most recent figures showed that in the Yorkshire and Humber region there were 390 children waiting for an adoptive family.  Jacqui Shore, from Adoption Matters, told the BBC that more families were "desperately needed".  "Traditionally in adoption we've seen peaks and troughs, but I don't think we've ever seen the cost of living quite as it is at the moment," she said.

"Local authorities are struggling for money, so in the past some older children or sibling groups might have attracted an adoption allowance from the local authority, but that's not always there anymore."

Emma and Mike said their experience of adoption had been very positive, with Emma saying they had not looked back since adopting their children 10 months ago.  "It's been absolutely wild, we've done so much learning," Emma said.

"We had a trickier start than was expected, but actually we've just really cemented ourselves as that safe place and that we're a forever family we're not going anywhere.  There's just been a whole lot of laughter. Lots of tears, too, but that's what makes us feel like a regular family."

6

Articles / 29 Things I Wish I Knew Before Adoption Entered my Life

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on February 05, 2026, 05:35:27 PM »

https://celiacenter.org/tag/birth-mother-stories/

29 Things I Wish I Knew Before Adoption Entered my Life

by Celia Center Voices | Sep 25, 2023 | Blog, Featured

Written by First Mother, Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy on SEPTEMBER 18, 2009. Claudia has been online and involved in the adoption community since early in 2001. She originally began independently researching adoption issues in preparation of the successful search and reunion with her own son, Max, whom was placed for adoption in 1987.

This Grown in My Heart Adoption Carnival Topic was supposed to be “10 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Was Touched By Adoption”, but I can’t use the feel good wording of “touched”.  I was not touched by adoption, it’s more like torched, trampled, traumatized, terrorized, tortured, and torn apart by adoption.  Overall, I feel like I allowed the destructive force of adoption into my life.  Adoption was almost more like a crack that happened in my soul. A crack that I thought and was encouraged to believe would be temporary or always below the surface. Over time, the rest of life worked its way in, like water in cement, and caused the  So that gives me number one on my list; the rest is really really easy and I can, also quite easily go on and on, but this carnival only called for the ten things we wish we could have known.. I think I just have to go over it.

1.  I wish I knew that relinquishing my child to adoption was not a one-time event that I would recover from by the most major life-altering “decision” that would alter the very course of my existence for the rest of my life.

2.  I wish I knew that adoption would not be a decision made entirely by me and affect only me, but would have life-altering implications across the entire berth of my family. I thought nothing of how it would affect my mother, my brother, and of course my children, both the one that I relinquished and the children I had later on.
   
3.  I wish I had known what I really was giving up when I relinquished my Max. I understood the concept of a baby, but I had no clue what it really meant to be a mother. I could decide to give up something that I never had to begin with or something that I never let myself have a chance to really experience.
   
4.  I wish I had known that public assistance, social services, paternity, child support, and all manners of help in general was nothing to be ashamed of, to be afraid of asking for or receiving or something that made me less of a person. I still think about my adoption counselor explaining to me rather briefly how I “could” keep my baby and go on welfare and how very horrified I was of that thought and I never even attempted to consider it.
 
5.  I wish I had known how it would feel to know for the rest of my life that I had assisted in denying a man the right to have a relationship with his only child. Had I thought through the ethical complications and moral obligation to the truth and this man’s rights, then I would not have to live with the knowledge of how I horribly and inexcusable wronged another human being.
 
6.  I wish I had known that I was strong and capable and worthy of being the mother that I was meant to be. The normal self-doubts of a young person basically untried by life were not bolstered in the face of adversity, but rather exasperated and exploited.

7.  I wish I had known that it was not my job, nor obligation to make another couple’s “dreams of a family” come true. I wish I had known that I should not have taken pride nor comfort or some sick sense of self-satisfaction by allowing other people’s needs to go before my own, not that I have an issue about giving of one’s self. I donate my knowledge, I give my time, I volunteer; but a child is not giving of oneself, an adoption is giving of another.. a child. I had no right to do that.

8.  I wish I had known that my son’s parents would not be quite as grateful and thankful to me as I had expected, hoped or been lead to believe. I wish I was not quite as disappointed that they just won’t speak to me and I have the distinct feeling that they really would just like me to go back away. I wish that didn’t hurt.

9.  I wish I had known that children really aren’t interchangeable. Just because one party wants something and another party isn’t so sure, doesn’t mean that we can switch things about and pretend we are God and it will work out OK.

10.  I wish I had known that my son had basic rights to his family, his truth, his heritage, his father, his siblings, and me; more than I ever gave us credit for. To think that I could have thought so little of myself, my family, and all the individual traits and histories that make us unique and THAT could have been replaced with a one-paragraph bio and a few pictures is so insulting to every ancestor that breathed before me.

11.  I wish I had known that you cannot re-write life as it comes to you. That we can’t cheat it and pretend that things happened differently than we would have liked. And sometimes, most times, given time time what seemed to be a disaster is actually part of making things work out exactly as they should, but we just don’t know it yet. I wish I had learned to just accept things as they come and live the hand that was dealt to me even if it meant being a mother at 19 because I was a mother at 19!
   
12.  I wish I had known that it was possible to love most fiercely and deeply someone that you haven’t ever really met. I wish I had known that I would know my son before I got to meet him again. That I would know his face and it would be so familiar to me. I would know his smell and I would need it to breathe. That I would know and understand how he felt, thought, and would react just because I knew way before I ever knew.

13.  I wish I had known how much it would suck to hear my other kids say things like” I forget what Max looks like”, or “I don’t feel like I have another brother,” or “If we got real poor would you have to give us away, too?”

14.  I wish I had known that adoption, which was supposed to preserve my teenage way of life, turned out to be something that completely changed my entire life and here I am, over 20 years later and adoption is still a major factor in my daily existence, my thoughts, my dreams and, even worse, is also a factor in my whole family’s lives as well.

15.  I wish I had known that genetics really play a huge portion of who we are and that things like our mutual love of pirates, combat boots, Mohawksand died hair, alternative music, god in the woods, being buried in plain pine boxes, Dr. Pepper, Boston cream donuts, thunderstorms, reading, and writing with these dern dots was all part of who he was before he was born. I wish I knew that my genes had carried more than the color of his skin and the familiar look of our feet and it was something that irreplaceable.

16.  I wish I had known that not every adoptee thinks that being placed for adoption was the best thing since sliced bread, are not grateful, are not happier to have a bigger house, and sometimes, can be quite adversely affected by the whole experience. It was really hard to accept that the thing that I thought was “best” could have actually been much worse.

17.  I wish I had known that there is no real “ready” to become a mother and that the mythology of motherhood as our society has crafted is a vicious losing situation. I wish I had known how easy it is for us to turn on each other and judge our fellow sisters because we are all so concerned about getting it wrong and not being the best supermom on the block.

18.  I wish I had known that it was going to be crazy hard this way, being a birthmother, and that all the pain and sacrifices and sleeplessness would be coming to me anyway, but without the joys and pleasures of being with my child. I wish I had known that I would have wanted to make it work, that it would have been worth it to give up the fun.

19.  I wish I had known that Fear is never a good basis for making a decision.

20.  I wish I had known that the “scandal” was all in my head and that within six months no one would have cared much less remembered. I wish I had realized that my family would not have thought that I was a piece of poop for ver but would have loved and adored my baby as I would have.

21.  I wish I had known that having a baby at 19 would not have “ruined my life”, that being a mother at 19 would not have “ruined my life” and that adoption, well it pretty much ruined my life .. or at least got closer to ruining my life s anything else ever did.

22.  I wish I had known that school could have been put off a few years, but my motherhood was happening now.

23.  I wish I had known that I was being exploited and enabled and I walked right into it.

24.  I wish I had known that adoption was not glamorous or romantic, but that life being a birthmother pretty much sucks.

25.  I wish I had known that the adoption agency really didn’t have my best interest at heart and they weren’t my best friends and I shouldn’t have worried about making them proud by being the “best darn birthmother” and following all the rules.

26.  I wish I had known that putting everyone else’s wants and needs before mine for almost 20 years did not make me better, nor stronger, nor noble, nor brave and didn’t get me a key to heaven.

27.  I wish I had known that a piece of paper would not make me an un-mother.

28.  I wish I had known how much it would really really hurt and how, really, even after reunion, there is no normal and it is never over.

29.  And then one final wish that I still have now; of all the things in my life and all the mistakes and bad decisions I have made, with all the missteps and situations that came to me, whether by my own hand or been done by wrong by someone else; I wish there was a way to change the past and make just this one thing all go away.

I wish I had never let adoption into my life.

7

Articles / Hundreds tell BBC of adopted children's struggles amid calls for lifelong ....

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on February 03, 2026, 05:53:23 PM »

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjrj0vxnxqjo

Hundreds tell BBC of adopted children's struggles amid calls for lifelong support

Claire Kendall and Judith Moritz, special correspondent

Published 12 December 2025

Hundreds of parents have contacted the BBC about their struggles with getting support for adopted children - as charities call for a government review.  The response came after we reported last month that more than 1,000 adopted children had been returned to care over five years. Dozens of adoptive parents told us they had been blamed for the difficulties of often traumatised young people.  Mina, who contacted BBC Your Voice about her son who died last year from alcoholism, said: "You're just a lone person battling, trying to battle the system."

The charity Adoption UK said it had raised the issue with England's children's minister this week, calling for permanent funding for therapy and a wider review of the support available.  Mina was one of 700 people who contacted the BBC in response to the story, many of whom said they were adoptive parents who had struggled to get help for their children or had been blamed for their emotional and behavioural difficulties.  She and her husband adopted their son Leighton at the age of three, after he was removed from his birth mother when he was 18 months old. He struggled all his life with his mental health and addiction, she says.  "He turned all this pain inside, like I'm not worthy, I'm not lovable," says Mina.

She believes his distress over his adoption led to his heavy drinking and death from liver failure at the age of 26. "He couldn't understand why."

Even as a four-year-old, Leighton would have periods of "deep depression" but his parents' concerns were brushed off by social workers, Mina says. When he was older, she adds, he would self-harm and began taking drugs and abusing alcohol.  She says social workers blamed her and her husband for Leighton's struggles, insisting "it must be something happening at home".

"There's a perception that once a child's adopted, they'll live happily ever after, and there is no platform to complain or to even have your voice," Mina says.

The local authority which placed Leighton for adoption did not respond to a request for comment.  Children's charity Coram one of several organisations to call for greater support for adoptive families or to raise concerns about the blaming of parents in response to our story says the adoption system is "under exceptional strain".

"It's shocking to discover again that adoptive parents, are experiencing blame as the first response when they seek help. That should never be the case," said CEO Dr Carol Homden.

She says "adoption remains an extremely important part of our care system and highly successful for the majority of children" but when children have been removed from their birth families for their own protection, "we need to recognise that they will need potential support for life and ensure that our services are there in a timely and sufficient way".

Coram also runs the largest body representing children's social workers, CoramBAAF, which has joined the call for a review of adoption support, saying: "We must get this right for the children at the heart of this."

James not his real name told us he was reassured to learn he was not the only parent to have gone through something like this and now feels he "owes it to our adopted son" to speak out himself.

He says he adopted a child who had severe foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) - a condition caused by drinking in pregnancy that can lead to physical and mental problems.  As he grew older, James says, his adopted son's behaviour was sometimes violent because of his condition.

'Heavily blamed'

One social worker suggested they should live in separate homes, says James, with one parent living with their adopted son and their other children staying with the other parent in the family home. A social worker also admitted, he adds, that social services staff had not been trained to deal with FASD.  "We took on a child knowing there'd be issues. We didn't expect everything to go perfectly because it doesn't. But when you ask for help, they need to help," he says.

Eventually, he felt his adopted son was no longer safe to live with the other children James told us and he arranged for him to be accommodated in care again.  James says they struggled to remain in contact with him.  "It was almost like, me and my children, that we weren't to exist anymore because we'd been heavily blamed," James says. "We were literally removed from from his life. They were more bothered on him seeing family pets than step-siblings."

His local authority said it could not comment on individual cases, but pointed to research which it says shows that outcomes for adopted children are "overwhelmingly successful".  The government says adoptive parents do "an incredible job providing a loving and supportive home" to vulnerable children, and while those arrangements do sometimes break down, support is in place to keep them together where possible.  We also heard from some parents who did receive good support and who say it made a huge difference.  Emma and her husband Geoff says they adopted their daughter, who needed extensive help, when she was nearly six. The local authority had an established relationship with a family therapy provider which specialises in adoption, Family Futures.  "They understood that adoption and therapy need to go together," she says. "When we asked for some help they were very keen to give it. They realised if they don't do it now, things get worse, children go back to care and it all falls apart."

Adopted children who have been moved first into foster care, and then into an adoptive family, struggle to feel safe, says Emma, and the family therapy was aimed at addressing that.  "If you imagine being a small child and being put from pillar to post with different people and then you arrive virtually into a stranger's house, you are going to be very scared," she adds.

Geoff said it took about 10 years of seeing a therapist, on and off, before their daughter trusted them.  Without that support, he says he can't see how she would have been able to achieve as much as she has now that she is 21, having moved into supported living accommodation and still keeping in touch with her parents.  "We used to think that we couldn't imagine how she could ever leave home," says Geoff. "Now she's able to live away from us. She's got a place where she feels she belongs."

8

Articles / Inquiry (Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries and Workhouses) ....

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on January 28, 2026, 06:56:46 PM »

https://www.assemblyresearchmatters.org/2025/11/24/inquiry-mother-and-baby-institutions-magdalene-laundries-and-workhouses-and-redress-scheme-bill-a-brief-overview/?fbclid=IwY2xjawPm2zZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEepOClfiBYMmulGT9e6LKabNmy93MkvEnfHR5R_ybT1Sey5k4jv0eEuV-BBvM_aem_momuJNYfswSI7WpBy8iD0Q

Inquiry (Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries and Workhouses) and Redress Scheme Bill: A brief overview

November 24, 2025

Author icon Thomas Lough

The Inquiry (Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries and Workhouses) and Redress Scheme Bill ('the Bill') is currently being considered by the Assembly. This blog article provides a brief outline of some of the main provisions contained in the Bill and what the next steps are in the process.

For more information on the contents of the Bill, you may wish to read the dedicated RaISe Bill Paper, as well as a separate RaISe paper on the Review of the Bill Costs. The Bill itself (as introduced) and the Explanatory and Financial Memorandum (EFM), are both published on the Assembly website.
What would the Bill do?

The Bill was introduced by The Executive Office (TEO) on 16 June 2025. The Bill implements key recommendations of the Truth Recovery Design Panel (TRDP) and subsequent Truth Recovery Programme by establishing:

    a statutory Public Inquiry into the operation of Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries and Workhouses in Northern Ireland between 1922 and 1995; and
    a statutory Redress Scheme to provide financial redress to victims and survivors and their families.

The Bill responds to concerns and evidence presented regarding the treatment within these institutions, including allegations of unlawful deaths, forced labour, arbitrary detention, family separation, and other human rights violations. It also follows ongoing campaigning by victims and survivors and aligns with developments in neighbouring jurisdictions where inquiries and redress schemes have already been established: for example, the Republic of Ireland's Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and the subsequent Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme.

Further information in relation to State responses to historical abuse can be found in related RaISe papers:

A statutory Public Inquiry

Part 1 of the Bill allows for the establishment of a Truth Recovery Public Inquiry ('the Inquiry'). This Inquiry would identify systemic failings of certain institutions and public bodies between 1922 and 1995, including their treatment of "relevant persons" (see definition below). The Inquiry would not examine matters already examined by the Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) Inquiry. While the Inquiry could consider ongoing effects on individuals after 1995, such as ongoing trauma and psychological impacts, it cannot extend the timeframe itself. The exact Terms of Reference for the Inquiry are not contained in the legislation and would instead be prepared by TEO.
What will the Inquiry examine?

The Inquiry would examine 'prescribed institutions'. Clause 3 of the Bill explains that these are:

    institutions known as 'mother and baby institutions';
    institutions known as 'Magdalene Laundries';
    workhouses (within the meaning of the Poor Relief Acts (Northern Ireland) 1838 to 1937), and;
    other institutions (irrespective of whether such institutions are public bodies or not, and whether the activities of such institutions are carried on for, or not for, profit).

These 'other' institutions may be identified in the process of the Inquiry. In order for them to be examined by the Inquiry, they must be provided for in regulations made by TEO. These must be approved by the Assembly before an institution becomes 'prescribed'.

The Bill also provides a definition of 'relevant persons'. In relation to a prescribed mother and baby institution or Magdalene Laundry these are any person admitted to the institution and any person born while their mother was under the care of the institution either at the time or immediately before their birth.

In relation to prescribed workhouses, 'relevant persons' are defined as a pregnant woman or pregnant girl admitted to the workhouse; a woman or girl who had given birth while she was under the care of the workhouse;  and a person born while their mother was under the care of the workhouse either at the time or immediately before their birth.

If 'other institutions' are added by TEO through regulations, 'relevant persons' in relation to that institution can also be added through regulations. Again, these would require the approval of the Assembly.

The EFM makes clear that in this context, the term 'under the care of' is used as a broad term only and encompasses all types of care without a value judgement on the quality of the 'care' given. The Inquiry will investigate the standard of the care that was provided to those relevant persons.
Who will be on the Inquiry panel?

The Inquiry is designed to be inquisitorial rather than adversarial, with no cross examination. It is more of a fact-finding exercise rather than a court case. The Inquiry panel would be appointed by the First Minister and deputy First Minister and must consist of at least one person (the Chair). The Bill otherwise does not legislate for a specific number of Inquiry panel members.

As well as the Inquiry panel, the Bill (at clause 10) allows for an advisory panel that can include victims and survivors, their relatives and those providing support to victims and survivors. Under the Bill, as introduced, this advisory panel would not be mandatory and would be at the discretion of the Inquiry Chair who may appoint such a panel.

The Bill also provides for a number of other areas in relation to the Inquiry. These include powers to require the production of evidence and the payment of expenses to witnesses and others. For further detail on these, please see the RaISe Bill Paper.
A statutory Redress Scheme

Part 2 of the Bill relates to the payment of redress. It is important to note that redress can come in a number of forms, for example: state or institutional apologies (be they private or public), financial payment or memorialisation and these will all have differing levels of importance for individual victims and survivors. TEO have made clear that financial redress in this respect will consist of two parts: a Standardised Payment (SP) and Individually Assessed Payment (IAP). The Bill, as introduced, only makes provision for the SP. The SP is residency-based and set at a standard payment amount. IAP would be harm-based where the payments would relate to the harm caused to each specific individual. TEO have confirmed that it intends to bring forward legislation to introduce this following the Public Inquiry.

The Bill would allow the SP Scheme to accept applications for three years with a potential extension of a further two years. Each application under the Scheme will be decided either by a judicial member of the Redress Service or by a panel. This panel must include at least one judicial member.

How much would a redress payment be and who would be eligible?

Victims and survivors must fulfil several eligibility criteria in order to receive a redress payment. These criteria are set out in the Bill, with the requirement to have attended at least one of the listed institutions (11 mother and baby institutions and Magdalene Laundries) during a time period specified. These are set out in Schedule 2 of the Bill. To be eligible a victim/survivor must have:

    been admitted to a 'relevant institution' within the 'relevant timescale', or;
    have been born to a mother who was in a 'relevant institution' within the 'relevant timescale', or;
    have been born to a mother who was in a 'relevant institution' within the 'relevant timescale' immediately before their birth.

If a victim/survivor is eligible for this payment they would, under the Bill, receive a single £10,000 payment. A victim/survivor would not be eligible under the Bill if their admittance to an institution was paid for privately.

The Bill would also allow for posthumous payments to be made. This is where a person, who would otherwise have been eligible for a £10,000 payment, was alive on or after 29 September 2011 but has since died. In this case, any person who is either a partner or child of the deceased can each apply for a posthumous payment of £2000.

What are the costs of the Inquiry and SP Redress Scheme?

The EFM, which was published alongside the Bill states that the potential costs of the specified Inquiry would be in the region of £12 million to £20 million, but likely to be around £14 million, assuming the Bill is enacted as introduced. For the financial redress covered by the Bill, TEO have estimated a cost of £58 million.

Given the nature of both the Inquiry and Redress Scheme, it is not possible to know the exact cost ahead of time. There are several issues which may impact the cost. For example, the scope of the Inquiry as laid out in Terms of Reference which are yet to be finalised, how many people are involved in the Inquiry, and how long it lasts. The Redress Scheme costs will be impacted by, for example, the number of applications, the length of time it is open for, and any additional institutions that are added to the 'relevant institutions' list.

In addition to this, any amendments (proposals for change) made to the Bill as it progresses through the Assembly could change not only the policy in the Bill but may have cost implications as well. For example, if there was to be a different amount of redress paid to victims and survivors than the £10,000 currently in the Bill.

For a detailed analysis on the potential costs arising from the Bill, you may wish to look at the RaISe paper on the Review of the Bill Costs.

What happens next?

The Bill is currently at Committee Stage. This stage involves detailed consideration of the Bill by the appropriate Statutory Committee. In this case, this is the Committee for The Executive Office. Committee Stage began on 25 June 2025 and will last, at most, until 26 January 2026.

The Committee has been taking evidence from interested bodies (including the Executive Office) and individuals. Committee members are now considering the evidence provided and will then scrutinise each clause and schedule of the Bill and discuss possible amendments to it. Committees have no power to amend a Bill, but they prepare a report for the Assembly, including any proposals for amendments to the Bill.

You can find further information on the Committee's work on the Bill and keep up to date via the dedicated Assembly webpage.

You can also find out more about the stages of a Bill on the Assembly's website where there is more information on how laws are made.

9

Articles / New baby graveyard found at home where 796 infants were buried in septic tank

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on January 28, 2026, 06:55:49 PM »

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/new-baby-graveyard-found-at-home-where-796-infants-were-buried-in-septic-tank/news-story/03e6349cbe953ecfffc8a10967023bae

New baby graveyard found at home where 796 infants were buried in septic tank

The lengthy excavation of the area where almost 800 infants were buried at a former mother and baby home has uncovered a new horror.

Rebekah Scanlan
December 26, 2025

A second baby graveyard has been found at the site of a maternity home for unwed mothers run by Catholic nuns in Ireland, where the remains of almost 800 infants were already found buried in a septic tank.  Excavations are currently underway at a seemingly inconspicuous patch of grass next to a children’s playground in a small Irish town after a evidence of a mass grave was uncovered.   The land, attached to a home run by nuns between 1925 and 1961 in the town of Tuam, 220km west of Dublin, was left largely untouched after the institution was knocked down in 1972.  But in 2014, amateur historian Catherine Corless, presented evidence that 796 babies, from newborns to a nine-year-old, had died at Tuam’s mother and baby home, leading to an Irish Commission of Investigation into the so-called mother and baby homes.  During its almost 40-year operation, the facility housed a number of women who had become pregnant outside of marriage and were shunned by their families. They were often separated from their children after giving birth.  A planned two-year excavation of the unmarked mass burial site began in July, conducted by the Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention in Tuam (ODAIT), which has since found evidence of a second burial site at the home.  Daniel MacSweeney, who is leading the excavation, told Irish broadcaster RTE a total of 11 sets of infant remains have been discovered in the new location, around 15 metres away from a memorial ground on the site.  All were buried in coffins, and date from the period between 1925 and 1961, when the home operated.  They were found less than a metre below the old surface, which had been covered by gravel more recently.  “We have indications of further potential graves of infant and child size, and over the coming weeks and months we will excavate them and see what we find there,” he said.

“There is also a historic map that shows a larger burial ground in this part of the site. We will also excavate there and see if there are further burials.”

He added that it was advantageous the bodies were in coffins, from the point of view of identifying the remains.  In contrast, the 796 bodies found nearby in the septic tank had “no burial records” and “no statue, no cross, absolutely nothing,” Corless said.

The septic tank was initially discovered in 1975, after two boys had been playing on the square of lawn and came across a broken concrete slab.  After pulling it up, they found a hole, and inside were bones. However, authorities were told about the grisly discovery, and covered it up, the BBC reports.  Locals reportedly believed the remains were from the Irish Famine in the 1840s. Before the mother-and-baby home, the institution was a famine-era workhouse where many people had died.  However, that didn’t add up to Corless, who looked at old maps of the site and found the area where the bones were found labelled as a “sewage tank”.  Another map, from the 1970s after the home was demolished, had a handwritten note next to that area saying “burial ground”.

The determined local historian later requested the names of all the children who had died at the home from the registration office for births, deaths and marriages in Galway, and was soon presented with a list of 796 names.  Her findings weren’t made public until 2014, and led to a six-year inquiry that found 56,000 unmarried women and 57,000 children passed through 18 such homes over a 76-year period.  It also concluded that 9000 children had died in the various state and Catholic Church-run homes across Ireland.  Excavation was only able to start following the passing of a legislation in 2022 enabling the exhumation, identification, and reburial, with the Bon Secours order, an international Catholic health ministry, contributing financially.  Journalist Alison O’Reilly, who broke the story, described it as “the darkest secret in Irish history”.

“People need to know that it’s black and ugly and rotten and what they did to the children that were born in those homes was an absolute disgrace,” she said.

“You wouldn’t do it to a dog.”

10

Articles / 'Taking kids to a police station led me to foster'

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on January 26, 2026, 12:17:09 PM »

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2gy7pp88mo

'Taking kids to a police station led me to foster'

Bethan Nimmo
Oxfordshire political reporter
Published 5 January 2026

A former police community support officer has said the "heart-breaking" task of taking vulnerable children to a police station opened his eyes to the strain on the care system.  Chris, from West Oxfordshire, said being faced with the lack of placements for young people in care led to his decision to become a foster parent.  With his wife Tabitha, he now has a permanent teenage foster daughter and offers temporary places for babies.  "I could see both sides of it and see that actually there's a big need there," he said.

"These children need to have the same opportunities as any other child their age.  And when children did go into care, sometimes they were taken to a police station because it was the only safe place to go."

Tabitha said since they started fostering, the security the placement had given her foster daughter had been life changing.  "It's having her own space. It's her home," she said. "This is something she hasn't had for quite a while.  It's her own space and that she is settled and that she doesn't need to move anywhere else again.  She doesn't need bags or anything like that. She can just be herself."

Despite Chris and Tabitha's positive experience, Oxfordshire has seen many foster carers leave the system in recent years.  The latest figures show for the past two financial years there has been an overall decrease in the number of placements, with recruitment not keeping up with those deregistering.  Oxfordshire County Council said it did begin to reverse that trend in 2025, but admitted it was unlikely to reach this year's recruitment target of 20 new foster carers.  Nationally, there has been a 10% decline in foster homes in England since 2021.  Tabitha said it was clear the system was under strain.  "Communication is the massive thing," she said. "Sometimes you do feel a little bit left on a limb.  And we do really understand that the amount of work that social workers have within their day-to-day is massive. It really is."

Chris said like many other public services, there was a need for investment.  "Ideally you'd love to be able to throw loads of money at it and get more people involved and more social workers," he said.

"But it's just not possible, you know, and you make the best of what you've got."

Oxfordshire County Council said it was looking at new approaches to improve recruitment and retention, including incentives like council tax relief.  Sean Gaul, the cabinet member for children and young people, said: "There will always be more that we can be doing, but when I walk around the floor with where the social workers work, where the officers work, I'm seeing a bunch of people that really, really care about what they do.  Where there's a will, there's a way."

The government said it planned to tackle the growing shortage of foster carers across the country with a comprehensive package of reforms to be introduced this year.