"Extensive damage" caused by forcing single women to place babies up for adoption

Women who had to give up their child because they had become pregnant out of wedlock suffered a great deal of damage as a result. This also applies to the children. Mother and child, and also the father, had “little or no voice, let alone any control,” according to the committee of inquiry led by professor of pedagogy Micha de Winter. “This caused extensive damage.”

Between 1956 and 1984, approximately 15,000 unmarried mothers were forced to place their child up for adoption. This happened, for example, under pressure from family or the church. It often concerned young women, and pregnancy outside of marriage was a great shame. People felt that something had to be done about this, and “in this case, the wishes of the pregnant woman, and the procreator if there was one, were not respected.”

These women sometimes never saw their child again, and others only reconnected after many years. Children sometimes ended up in a children’s home without a stable and loving environment.

According to the report, some mothers still suffer from this today, “even in their later lives, there was guilt and shame, broken family relationships, and pain.” The fathers, who also lost their child, “felt invisible and sidelined.” The children themselves got a “feeling of not being allowed to exist,” and that did not go away, “not even when they understood the reasons for being given up better at a later stage.”

One of the birth mothers tried to hold the State liable for her suffering, with the support of the Bureau Clara Wichmann. The woman was 22 and unmarried when she had a child in 1968. However, the court ruled that the case had expired, and the court of appeal also reached that conclusion in March.

According to De Winter, the birth parents were “wrongly denied a voice,” and the children were “wrongly not heard enough.” The results show “that we should be very cautious about imposing our ideas about what a good life is on others if we do not allow them to have their say,” De Winter said.