Human Rights and Forced Adoption

 At the end of BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning, there was a piece about the way in which single women who became pregnant were, as recently as the 1970's,  pressured and shamed into giving up there babies for adoption. You can listen to the clip on BBC Sounds for the next 29 days - the item starts at 2:44:00.

The interview is with Harriet Harman, the longest serving female MP in the House of Commons, and chair of the Parliamentary select committee on Human Rights. The committee is launching an enquiry into the forced adoptions, on the basis that the birth mothers involved may have been deprived of their right to a family life (cf both the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 12 and the European Convention on Human Rights Article 8) by the persuasion/coercion applied to them to give up their babies for adoption.

Ms Harman makes a number of remarks in her interview that gave me reason to pause for thought.

Firstly, she is already clear that women who found themselves in the situation of pregnancy were effectively forced into giving up their babies for adoption, even though there was a perception at the time that they were making a choice to give up their babies. The clip before her interview certainly seems to bear out Ms Harman's suggestion, but, from the point of view of the person who is going to lead on an enquiry into the matter, one might expect this to be something that she says at the end of the enquiry after hearing the evidence rather than being a  position adopted before the committee has heard its evidence. I think this does indicate something about the nature of select committee enquiries and reports, namely, that they have an element of political direction in their initiation rather than being intentionally neutral. (I recall feeling something the same with regard to Robert Halfon and the Education Select committee when they launched an enquiry into home schooling with an intention of considering that education needing to be subject to registration and inspection.)

In referring to the shame, indeed stigma, attaching to pregnancy outside marriage at the time, Ms Harman adds that this was a time when there was "no sex education, no contraception and no abortion". Ms Harman clearly feels that this is something of relevance to the situation of these women, though it is difficult to be exactly sure what relevance she intends. If nowadays a young girl presents with a pregnancy outside marriage or a fixed relationship, how far do sexual health professionals act with a different shaming that asks why the girl was not "taking precautions" when, in an earlier time, that shaming might have been instead on the basis of her not being married? And might there not now be a presumption on the part of professionals in favour of abortion that parallels the earlier presumption in favour of adoption? And does this latter possibility not also raise the question of whether or not there has been a violation of the right to a family life, which would bring it within the remit of Ms Harman's enquiry?

When she articulates the meaning of the right to family life, Ms Harman speaks of "the right of a mother to keep her child and the right of a child to be brought up by her mother". Whilst this is straightforward in the immediate context, it raises an interesting question for such different contexts as  a surrogate mother acting for a male same sex couple; and, if the similar right is recognised for the father of a child, for a sperm donor acting with respect to a female same sex couple or a single lady. Whilst these two contexts do have the major difference of a genuine consent to the giving up of the child, I suspect that Ms Harman did not intend her remark to suggest that what was happening in these situations is a voluntary renunciation of a right to a family life.

And finally, I noted Ms Harman's suggestion of the need for an official record that would allow these  voices of women about their motherhood to be heard, in a way that those voices were not heard in an earlier time. This seemed to me to be a laudable aim of her committee's enquiry.