Page 3068 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 14 August 2012
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To those ACT families, past and present, separated by an adoption that was forced upon them, the Assembly expresses its heartfelt sympathy and is sorry.
We are committed to providing support, counselling and assistance to ACT families who are parties to an adoption, and to ensuring that the flawed adoption practices of our community’s past are not repeated.
Today the government moves to apologise, on behalf of the Assembly and the community, to ACT residents, past and present, who have been affected by practices of forced adoption.
We acknowledge, with deep regret, that past practices of forced removal and adoption have caused great pain and suffering to mothers, fathers, the babies who were adopted and families.
Mothers who experienced forced adoption practices were not properly informed of their rights, nor provided with the support that mothers need. Fathers were excluded from the decision-making process.
People who were adopted may carry a burden, in the recent knowledge that their adoption process may have been marked by injustice.
To the adopted children, who are now adults, and who were denied the opportunity to know, or grow up with, or be cared for by, their birth parents and families, we offer you our sincere and unreserved apology.
Mr Speaker, in the period from the 1940s to the 1980s, Australian women who bore children out of wedlock were subject to society’s condemnation—to an ostracism that seems impossible to understand for us here today.
These policies affected Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian women, often young, sometimes barely adults themselves. These women were made to feel unwarranted shame. They were hidden away. They were forced to incriminate the fathers of their unborn babies. And then, when their much-loved babies were finally born, often they were taken away, against the mother’s wishes, and given up for adoption.
All this was done in pursuit of the mantra of the time—that a child born to an unmarried mother would not receive the best possible chance in life.
Today’s apology is about acknowledging the truth of this history of ours, and resolving to learn from the past.
Mr Speaker, the legacy of society’s actions during those decades of enforced adoption has been damaging, and enduring—indeed, for those affected it has been life-long.
Mothers were made to give up their babies for adoption in an atmosphere of silence and shame, to which was then added a deep, though undeserved feeling of guilt.
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