Page 3069 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 14 August 2012
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These mothers were often young, powerless and emotionally vulnerable. The coercion used was sometimes subtle and sometimes brutal, but there is no denying it occurred, supported by the very institutions of our society—family, churches, hospitals, police, governments—that we expect to care for the vulnerable, to nurture life, and to do no harm.
Today we acknowledge the lifelong impact of those policies and practices—essentially, the practice of preventing a family from ever forming. Practices that have left a legacy of grief, trauma, loss, disconnection and unwarranted shame, guilt and secrecy.
Partly because of the secrecy and coercion involved, we may never know how many women and their babies were separated by forced adoption. The Senate report into the practice earlier this year could not say what proportion of the 250,000 or so adoptions during the decades in question were forced, but it must have been in the many tens of thousands at least.
Mr Speaker, at the time these forced adoption practices were taking place the territory was under Commonwealth administration. This parliament had not yet been constituted. The ACT government did not exist. But this Assembly is the voice of the people of the ACT in 2012. It is the rightful place therefore in which to recognise and express our sorrow for the past actions of this community. Some of those personally affected by forced adoption have moved away. Some have died. But this apology is to them, too.
Mr Speaker, the feedback from major national inquiries and studies, as well as feedback from affected individuals in our own community, is that no apology from a parliament or a government can heal the pain and loss of forced adoptions.
The report of the Senate community affairs committee, handed down earlier this year, recommended a national apology, but not in any expectation that the trauma could be healed. Quite simply, it recommended an apology because it was the right thing to do, and a way to begin.
As one woman who made a submission to the Senate inquiry said: “We need to be respected in this country’s history as mothers who had their babies taken forcibly from them for no other reason than to satisfy the ideals of others. We need to be respected in this country’s history as mothers who were unjustly abused, betrayed and punished by all governments, hospital staff, welfare workers, religious hierarchies and society because of their inhumane, obscene prejudice towards us.”
The report of the Senate inquiry makes for painful reading. It must have been far more painful—even traumatic—for those who bravely chose to make submissions to that inquiry, reviving hurtful memories and old feelings, in order that their fellow Australians might know the truth about what happened. We owe all of those who speak up a debt of gratitude.
Some women recall the devastation of being rejected and disowned by their own families, once their pregnancies became known.
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