We apologised for forced adoption, but not to adoptees

By Jennifer Pont

Last month, on 21 March, was the thirteenth anniversary of the National Apology for Forced Adoption delivered by then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard. I’m sure a lot of people took no notice. I missed it, and I’m an adoptee, but adoptee stuff tends to go under the wire.

The apology was a landmark for relinquishing mothers and their trauma, with mention in passing of adoptees, generally referred to as children as if we never grew up. By keeping us as children, the lifelong experience of adoptees is not being acknowledged. The experience of adoptees should no longer be seen as an adjunct of the experience of the relinquishing mother. That cord needs to be cut.

My ‘trauma’ growing up, and when I had my own children, and when unknown medical history was requested, and when ‘reunions’ didn’t go brilliantly – uncountable moments – wasn’t about my mother’s experience of giving me up. It was about my experience beyond her. My pre-adoption identity is a ghost that has haunted me.

I’m writing as an adoptee, now living in Victoria. Born in the ACT, fostered and adopted in NSW, and living elsewhere – it’s a tricky patchwork across jurisdictions of different legislation, application processes and bureaucratic attitudes. It’s time there was some uniformity across the states and territories because it’s unjust that location determines what information and support adoptees can access.

On 25 October 2012 the then-premier of Victoria, Ted Baillieu, leader of the Nationals and Deputy Premier, Peter Ryan, and opposition-leader, Daniel Andrews, apologised in Victoria’s parliament to those who were affected by ‘forced adoption.’ You can find partial apology videos and partial transcripts but I’ve been able to watch a recording supplied by VANISH, a not-for-profit organisation providing support to adults affected by past adoption practices, with in-person and online support groups and other resources.

The content of the Victorian apology is worth examining because it highlights the impassioned focus on mothers. Though I was relieved to also hear an attempt to illustrate how an adoptee might experience distress as part of their everyday activity growing up.

Ted Baillieu was the first to speak. He focused on mothers but also offered factors that negatively impact adoptees: ‘continual anxiety, uncertainty, and deprivation of natural family connections;’ a ‘lifetime of unknowns.’ I embody all of these. No genetic mirroring for adoptees.

Baillieu was careful to add a coda, saying that ‘not all past adoptions were forced and not all of the outcomes for adopted people were poor.’ None of this was unpacked. Your adoption doesn’t have to be illegal and brutal for ‘poor’ outcomes to result. Being re-branded to live a lie is a poor outcome.

I loved, revered and enjoyed the company of my adopting parents. But all my 60-plus years, I’ve felt different, alone, and angry. I remember homework, to record your parent’s traits to illustrate Mendel’s work with peas and the predictability of inherited traits. Awkward for me if the teacher called on my results. ‘[C]ontinual anxiety, uncertainty, and deprivation of natural family connections;’ a ‘lifetime of unknowns.’

Sadly, some adoptees found themselves with awful adopting parents, but no one was checking after it became official. I was not so unlucky. My adoption would be considered ‘good.’ But it was a ‘closed adoption,’ designed around secrecy, with identifying information unobtainable in NSW until 1990 legislation. I had my ‘state ward file’ in 2003 but it took a commercial DNA test in 2024 to lever access to the ‘affiliation file’ that had always hidden my actual father’s name.

Daniel Andrews spoke in confronting terms, also emphasising young mothers. He outlined ‘the systematic tragedy’ of mothers in ‘medicated delirium,’ given sleeping pills by doctors, secluded in secure institutions for unwed mothers, ‘ushered into closets,’ ‘drugged and pressured’ into consent, or ‘tied to a bed with a pillow on their face’ to prevent them seeing their baby. They were ‘broken in anguish.’

In the years since these apologies, there has been some movement towards reparations for mothers who relinquished children under the pressures of social stigma, family shame, and a vacuum in social services. Rather than supporting mothers who wanted to keep their babies, closed adoption rescued fertility-diverse strangers – it fixed the problems of two families. Not all states are on board with reparations for mothers yet.

Peter Ryan offered a submission to the Senate Inquiry Chapter 4, Section 4.9 from one of his Gippsland constituents, talking about feeling ‘different’ and ‘scared’ with comments by other children in the school playground such as  ‘Your parents aren’t your real parents.’  In spite of the legislated secrecy, truths sometimes came out in unexpected ways.

I’d been told early that I was adopted. It was acknowledged within the home on occasion, mainly stories of the difficulties of adopting and the fear that I’d be taken away. ‘I told your father he was to get his rabbiting gun if anyone ever came to get you,’ my mum shared.

My adoption was never acknowledged in other company. I participated in keeping the secret to show love for Mum and Dad, so I was shocked in upper primary school when this sacred family business became public.

My mum worked and didn’t drive so she didn’t come to events at my school. I was a well-behaved and good student so there wasn’t much need. But one day she came to Tuckshop Day, where mums made things at home – toffees, stickjaw, fairy bread, devon rolls – to sell as a fundraiser.

When I got to school the next morning a posse of girls approached me to announce that I was adopted and to demand my real name. I was very unprepared for being accosted in this way and made up a name that seemed to satisfy them.

It was hard to believe, that on this single occasion of tuckshop duty, my mum had shared such personal information with the other volunteers. When I got home, I questioned my mum, who didn’t have much to say. My sister, 14 years older than me and Mum and Dad’s biological child, took my side on this issue, challenging my mum and comforting me. My indignation quickly turned to tears. I felt betrayed by Mum because I’d been keeping her secret. ‘[C]ontinual anxiety, uncertainty, and deprivation of natural family connections;’ a ‘lifetime of unknowns.’

I’ve recently heard of some legal work to investigate whether a class action of mothers and ‘affected children’ could be started. Eligibility for an adoptee to be involved in this action is proof that the mother was forced to relinquish them. But what is the definition of forced? Does it have to include sleeping pills and restraints? Which mothers in the ‘forced adoption era’ were not ‘forced?’ What if the mother is dead or uncooperative?

There are many scenarios where a woman might have to relinquish her child, but teenage mothers dominate the sympathy narrative. Perhaps there’s some weird comfort in finding out that you had a vulnerable teenage mother; that there was nothing wrong with you. And society now apologises to you, but only via your mother’s trauma status, for that ‘forced’ situation.

In my case, my mother was about 28 — I’m not eligible to get her birth certificate — and conceived me outside of her marriage. It disintegrated the family. My four older half-siblings went into care, three of them adopted. Our mother’s family said she could return to them while pregnant but not with the four children.

Like a teenager, my mother was admitted to hospital in labour with her parents’ home address and her father as the contact person, but her other children were gone. She hesitated to give consent for my adoption, frustrating the social worker for many months, with memos going back and forth about getting her to sign. It’s recorded that she expressed hope of establishing ‘a home for the children.’ But this never came to be.

I was formally adopted, without my consent, after three years in a foster placement. So, was my adoption ‘forced’? Was my mother traumatised? Would I be accepted into the proposed class action?

Treating adoptee trauma only as an adjunct of the mother is flawed. Once adoptees are relinquished, we are forced to navigate the fabricated identity we are given. We can try to adapt but we’re still a different variety of garden pea.

There are now far fewer adoptions in Australia, and they’re generally more ‘open’, so most ‘closed adoption’ adoptees will be adults, and aging. We should cut the conceptual cord now. Don’t keep our experience in a closet.  Consider adoptees in their own right; to have our experiences of ‘closed adoption’ recognised on their own merits before we just die out, having endured ‘continual anxiety, uncertainty, and deprivation of natural family connections;’ ‘a lifetime of unknowns.’

Jennifer Pont lives in Regional Victoria and has a background in education and community work. This article was originally published in Eureka Street on 23 April 2026. Republished with permission.