What if there was a way to solve one person’s problem - by solving someone else’s problem at the same time?
Debates about abortion tend to focus on the gestational age at which abortion is legal. These are important debates. I wrote before about the vote to effectively allow abortion up to birth, which I think is totally wrong.
But if there is a missing dimension to the debate about abortion I think it is this:
There are people who do not really want to have an abortion, but do not feel they are in a position to bring up a child.
There are are another group of people who would like children and cannot have them - and specifically there are people who would like to adopt a baby but will not adopt older children.
These people could help each other (and the baby), but it doesn’t happen. Why?
The adoption of babies has dwindled to almost nothing
There is a feeling in the system that the priority should be to try and persuade people to adopt hard-to-place older children
There is no support made available to people to keep their baby and then give it up for adoption.
I will come back to why this might be - but first, let’s have a look at the numbers.
The end of baby adoption
Here’s the number of babies (children under a year old) who were adopted every year, and the number of abortions, both for England and Wales.
Baby adoption has gone massively down as abortion has gone up. It is hard to believe that the one hasn’t played any role in displacing the other. Having been on the increase, baby adoptions fell rapidly after as soon as abortion was legalised, and are now close to zero.
Those are different scales but you can see that in the 1960s about 12,000 babies were being adopted every year, and last year it was just over 100.
There are about a thousand babies a year who go into kinship care with relatives - something which has always been there, but has been formalised over recent decades.
And it’s true also that adoption of older children has also declined - but not to the same extent. Adoption of older children actually went up before it went down, and about 4,000 older children are still adopted each year, even has baby adoption has effectively ended. Compared to 1962 number of older children adopted is down 50%, but the number of babies adopted is down 99%.
And of course, the end of baby adoptions has come despite a population which is about a quarter bigger than in 1968.
Much higher rates of abortions are seen in poorer places. I made a Freedom of Information request to the ONS about this. The proportion of conceptions ending up in abortion is now over a third in the poorest 10% of neighbourhoods, compared to 26% in the richest tenth:
And because all neighbourhoods contain a mix of people, the correlation would likely be stronger, and the curve even steeper, if we looked at the individual circumstances of the mother, not just their neighbourhood. It seems clear that material factors matter in the decision to have an abortion or not.
What we could do
Seeing these numbers it is hard not to think there must be some opportunity to help both those do not want to have an abortion, but do not feel they are in a position to bring up a child and also help those who want to adopt a baby.
Let me start by being super clear. I am not proposing that we force or pressure people into doing anything. In the past there were people who could have been good parents and wanted to keep their baby, but were forced to give it up. That was awful and the last thing I would want.
My focus here is squarely on those who are making a choice. As an aside, it is worth saying that for those children who do sadly have to be taken into care, the evidence is now that this is done too late not too early: a 2014 survey by the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) found that social workers thought only 5% children they had dealt with had been taken into care too early, compared to 39% too late.
But as I say, my focus is on those making a choice. There are some women who don’t really want to have an abortion, and don’t feel they have a good alternative to abortion. Given the higher rates in poorer places, it seems likely that material and practical factors play a role in this feeling.
Let me also be clear: I am not dissing people who adopt older children or damning the prospects of those children. Far from it: these people are total heroes. We know so people who adopted older children and were warned they would never develop properly - maybe never speak properly. But despite this, they have actually caught up and bloomed with new parents who love them.
And yet, as Jigsaw adoption note: “Many people come to adoption hoping to welcome a newborn, and it's a natural hope — particularly for people who have been through fertility treatment. But the reality of UK adoption is that babies are uncommon”.
There are a potentially large group of people who would adopt a newborn, but not older children. But they don’t get that chance any more.
The idea
Isn’t it time that we gave women considering abortion another option? More choice? At the moment we have a system that doesn’t really even ask people what they want or present them with any option to get help and support to have a baby.
It is no small thing to be pregnant and then give birth. But it is no small thing to have an abortion either. Shouldn’t we find a way to give another option to women who might not want an abortion, but can’t look after a child? The practical help and emotional support to get through a difficult time?
At the moment the debate seems lopsided. For example, the Commons voted to allow abortion up to birth without sanction. Those babies will need to be delivered anyway if aborted. In light of this, it seems mad that we haven’t haven’t had any discussion about helping women in that position keep their baby to term and then have him or her adopted.
The offer of another choice would need the most sensitive handling. And there would be a cost of course. And lots of people wouldn’t want to do it - but some would.
Shouldn’t we find a way to give them an extra choice?
NB
This is a personal post - it’s my view rather than a Conservative policy.
There is so much wrong with this, but let’s start with the commodification of children, ie as a resource for childless couples to ease the trauma that they experience through infertility.
As an adult adoptee, I find the framing of this article profoundly troubling.
The fundamental problem is that it treats adoption as a way of reconciling the problems and desires of adults: a woman who feels unable to raise her child on one side, and people who desperately want a baby on the other. The baby becomes the means by which those two adult problems are solved. That comes dangerously close to treating children as commodities.
The sentence that prospective adopters “don’t get that chance any more” is particularly revealing. Nobody is entitled to the chance to acquire somebody else’s newborn child. Infertility can be devastating and deserves compassion and support, but adoption does not exist to cure infertility trauma. The first question should be what is in the interests of the child, not how to satisfy adults who want one.
Nor can adoption simply be inserted into the abortion debate as though abortion and relinquishing a living child were interchangeable alternatives. They are completely different experiences, with consequences for different people. An adopted baby becomes an adopted child and eventually an adult adoptee, carrying their ancestry, genetics, identity and the consequences of separation throughout their life.
There is an extraordinary historical blindness here.
In 2022, Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights published The Violation of Family Life, following extensive evidence from mothers and adoptees affected by the mass adoption of babies between 1949 and 1976. It found that many mothers had desperately wanted to keep their children but were presented with adoption as effectively their only realistic option. Parliament subsequently examined the lifelong consequences for adopted people, including identity, access to records, medical information and psychological wellbeing.
That work culminated this year in the Government’s formal apology for historical forced adoption. On 2 July, Keir Starmer acknowledged an injustice affecting an estimated 185,000 mothers, adopted people and their families. The Government explicitly recognised that children had been separated not merely from their mothers, but from their families, identity and history.
Six weeks later, we are apparently discussing whether we should “bring back baby adoptions”.
Nobody is suggesting that Neil O’Brien wants to recreate the coercive practices of the 1950s and 60s; he explicitly says that he does not. But that does not make the history he invokes irrelevant. In fact, it makes it more important.
Coercion is not confined to physically forcing a woman to surrender her baby.
If a woman wants to keep her child but believes she cannot because she is poor, inadequately housed, unsupported or frightened about her financial future, the first obligation of a decent society should be to ask what support would allow that family to remain together.
It should not be to notice that another, wealthier family desperately wants a newborn and then present the situation as an elegant matching problem.
That is where adoption starts to look less like child protection and more like a system designed to meet adult demand.
None of this means pretending that children should remain with parents where they are unsafe. Children sometimes need to be removed, and some will need permanent alternative families. But protecting a child from harm is not the same as deliberately increasing the supply of newborn babies for adoption.
We should also be willing to ask whether permanent care always requires the extraordinary legal mechanism of adoption: severing one legal family relationship and constructing another, often accompanied historically by replacement birth certificates, restricted records and the effective rewriting of a person’s origins. Long-term guardianship and other forms of permanent care deserve much more serious consideration where they can provide security without requiring that degree of identity erasure.
Most strikingly, the adoptee is almost entirely absent as a person from this argument.
We appear as babies who need homes. Then the discussion moves on to the adults who want us.
But babies grow up.
Adult adoptees have been telling governments, researchers and adoption organisations for decades about loss, identity, belonging, genetic bewilderment, fractured family relationships and the difficulty of discovering information about our own origins. Loving adoptive parents do not magically make those questions disappear. Acknowledging that reality is not an attack on adoptive families. It is a refusal to centre adoption exclusively around the adults who wanted to become parents.
The lesson of Britain’s adoption history should not be that we once had a plentiful supply of adoptable babies and ought to find a more acceptable way of recreating it.
The lesson should be that children are not a solution to adult problems.
Wherever safely possible, policy should support children to remain within their families and retain their relationships, history and identity. Where that genuinely cannot happen, alternative care should be organised around the rights and needs of the child, not around satisfying a demand for newborn babies.
After everything adoptees and mothers have spent decades telling Parliament, and only weeks after the British state finally apologised for failing them, it is astonishing that this is even being proposed as a solution.
That distinction ought to matter. More than that, it ought to be the starting point.
As an adoptee from the baby scoop era whose whole life has been damaged by the impact of adoption this is an appalling suggestion. The suicide rates amongst adoptees are significantly higher than those of the rest of the population. There are significant mental health challenges for adoptees not helped by the fairy tales of adoption being so amazing. There is no guarantee of a happy family life and increasing evidence of adoptive parents struggling with maintaining a positive relationship with their child from adolescence. There is significant scientific evidence of the biological and psychological impact on the brain, body and psychology of adoptees. The in vitro bonding and effect of an unwanted pregnancy is now understood. This creates lifelong issues with relationships for adoptees. There was a reason the government issued an apology to both mothers and adoptees from the baby scoop era. Having been adopted I am very pro choice as abortion is the kinder option. Please do your research and listen to those with lived experience.