Sorry Is Not Enough

Reparations, Adoption, and the Children the Apology Still Struggles to See

Reparations are essential.

Not because money heals the wound. It doesn’t. No payment can return the first mother’s smell to the infant body. No government scheme can restore the breast, the heartbeat, the name, the kinship map, the lost language of belonging. No cheque can lift a grown adoptee out of the fog and place them back at the beginning, whole and unsevered, before the paperwork, before the handover, before the state and church and charity and family court conspired with the moral weather of the age. But reparations matter because an apology without material consequence is only a confession spoken from a safe distance.

On 2 July 2026, Keir Starmer issued a formal state apology for historic forced adoption in England, acknowledging that mothers and adult adoptees were harmed by systems embedded across local authorities, voluntary and faith-based institutions, health and social care services, and parts of what is now the NHS. The government recognised that these practices were especially prevalent between 1949 and 1976, while also acknowledging that some experiences extended beyond those years.

That matters. It really does. For decades, adoptees and first mothers were asked to carry not only the wound, but the shame of the wound. Mothers were told they were immoral. Children grew up believing they were unwanted. Records were sealed, altered, misplaced, withheld, or rendered so difficult to access that the search itself became another small bureaucracy of abandonment. The Prime Minister’s statement recognised that sons and daughters were taken from their families and denied identity, history, and sometimes safety. It also acknowledged lifelong uncertainty, loss, questions around identity and belonging, and the effect on mental and physical health, relationships, and sense of self.

Those words matter. But words do not pay for therapy. Words do not retrieve a medical history before the diagnosis comes. Words do not restore decades of lost kinship. Words do not compensate the adoptee who has spent a lifetime building a self out of fragments, whispers, redacted pages, family resemblance, and the terrible arithmetic of absence.

The government has announced a £4 million support package over three years, aimed at improving access to adoption records, helping people reconnect with family, improving health support, developing peer support, creating a lived experience reference group, and documenting testimony. Again, that is not nothing. But it is also nowhere near enough.

It is the difference between acknowledging a house has burned down and offering the survivors a leaflet on smoke inhalation.

The lifelong impact of adoption is not sentimental speculation. A 2020 meta-analysis found that adopted people had at least twice the risk of suicide attempts compared with the general population, with cohort studies showing a relative risk of 2.99. (Brieflands⁠) A national sample study on substance use disorders found adoptees had a 1.87-fold increase in the odds of any lifetime substance use disorder compared with non-adoptees. (PMC⁠) These figures do not mean every adoptee is broken. They do not mean every adoption was abusive. They do not erase those who had loving adoptive families. But they do demolish the fairytale that love is enough.

They make clear that the wound was not merely historical. It did not end when the adoption order was signed. It did not end when the child was renamed. It did not end when the adoptive parents took the baby home and the neighbours sent cards. It lived on in nervous systems, in relationships, in fear of abandonment, in addiction, in suicidality, in dissociation, in rage, in overachievement, in people-pleasing, in lifelong searches for faces that looked like ours.

The state did not simply move children from one home to another. It participated in a system that re-authored human beings. This is the part that still feels under-said. Most apologies for forced adoption quite rightly centre the mothers. Their suffering is immense. Many were young, frightened, shamed, institutionalised, coerced, punished in labour, denied choice, denied dignity, and then expected to go home empty-handed and silent. Their grief deserves witness. Their pain should not be softened or footnoted.

But neither should ours. The mothers lost their children. The children lost their mothers, their names, their kin, their medical histories, their mirrors, their origin stories, and often the right to know that any of this had happened at all. This is not a competition of wounds. It is not a hierarchy of suffering. It is an insistence that the child’s wound is not simply the echo of the mother’s wound. It is its own original injury.

A mother, however young and brutalised, had a self before the wound. She had language. Memory. A body that had already begun to understand itself as separate from the world. She could, in theory, return to a pre-wound self, even if changed forever by what happened. The infant cannot. The infant is wounded at the threshold of selfhood. Before language. Before narrative. Before the mind can say, “This is grief.” Before the body can say, “This is abandonment.” Before the child can know there was a before.

That is why the adoptee wound is so difficult to explain. It is not remembered in the ordinary sense. It is lived as weather. As atmosphere. As a hairline crack in the foundations. As the strange suspicion that one arrived in the world already interrupted. And then, to make the private rupture official, the law steps in.

The state does not merely observe the severing. It validates it. It records it. It files it. It creates new paperwork around the wound and calls it family. It does not say, “A child has lost one world and entered another.” It says, “This is now the child’s world.” The old world becomes something to be applied for later, perhaps through forms, counselling requirements, intermediaries, fees, delays, and the emotional obstacle course of proving one’s right to oneself.

That is why reparations matter. Because the harm was not only emotional. It was civic. Legal. Medical. Relational. Financial. Spiritual. If the state could fund, legitimise, and allow the machinery of removal, it can fund the machinery of repair. Reparations should include direct financial redress for mothers and adoptees. Not as charity. Not as a benevolent gesture. As recognition that survivors have already paid, over and over again, from their own pockets and nervous systems.

They should include lifelong, specialist, trauma-informed therapy for adoptees and first mothers, not a few sessions with someone who has never understood relinquishment trauma. They should include properly funded intermediary services, because reunion is not a romantic ending. It is often a second earthquake. They should include full, unredacted access to records wherever possible, with a presumption that information about a person’s own life belongs first to that person.

They should include medical-history pathways, genetic screening where records are absent, and practical support for those whose lack of family health information has placed them at risk. They should include the right to restore original identity for adoptees who want it. They should include a serious public education project to dismantle the old mythology of adoption: the chosen child, the lucky child, the rescued child, the blank slate, the baby who will not remember, the grateful adoptee, the tidy ending. Because we did remember. Not in words, perhaps. Not in pictures. Not always in conscious thought. But the body kept the score long before we had a language for the wound.

So yes, I welcome the apology. I am glad the words were finally spoken. “The shame was never yours. The shame is ours.” That sentence matters. It may give some people breath. It may open a door. It may let a few old ghosts finally sit down. But the measure of an apology is not the tremble in the voice that gives it. The measure of an apology is what follows. A state that says sorry but will not repair is asking survivors to perform forgiveness while continuing to invoice them for the damage.

And adoptees have been paying that bill for long enough.

Jonathan