A Reform UK MP reduced the House of Commons to tears on Wednesday when she revealed for the first time that her mother had been pressured by the church into giving up a baby for adoption — a secret she carried to her grave — as Sir Keir Starmer issued a formal state apology for one of the most painful chapters in modern British history.
Sarah Pochin, the MP for Runcorn and Helsby, was visibly overcome as she told MPs that she only discovered her mother’s secret after her death, that she had been forced to pay privately to trace her sibling, and that the two had since been reunited. “My own mother was pressurised into giving up a baby for adoption, and this was handled by the church,” she said. “I only found out after her death, she carried her secret to her grave. When I found out, I tried to find my sibling, but drew a blank. I had to pay privately to find him, and we’ve now been united.” She asked the Prime Minister to guarantee that new systems and funding would be put in place to help other families trace one another without having to go through the same painful and costly process.
Starmer, who was making the first formal UK Government apology for the historic forced adoption of babies from unmarried mothers, praised Pochin’s contribution from the floor of the Commons. “She’s shown huge courage in saying that in the chamber today,” he said. “The way she described her mother taking the secret to her grave is very powerful and an example of the way in which some people simply feel they can’t talk about this and didn’t talk about this, and where they’ve passed will never now be able to talk about this, so she shows great courage in speaking on her mother’s behalf as well. I’m glad that there has been that reuniting, but it can’t be the painful journey that she’s just described. We have to do better than that, and we will.” Pochin was comforted by a fellow MP after she sat down.
The apology, long awaited by campaigners who watched proceedings from the public gallery wiping away tears, addressed the estimated 185,000 babies taken from unmarried mothers in England and Wales between 1949 and 1976 — a figure Starmer said he feared “may be more than that.” Both Cardiff and Holyrood had issued formal apologies in 2023, but the UK Government had not done so until Wednesday.
In a meeting with campaigners at Downing Street ahead of his Commons statement, Starmer told the women they had suffered a “double injustice” in having waited so long for the state to say sorry. He said mothers “were coerced, bullied, or misled into feeling that they had no choice but to have their children taken away from them,” adding that this “should never have happened.” The government, he said, was “deeply and profoundly sorry to the mothers who were told they were unfit, who were prevented from caring for the children they desperately wanted to help and to keep, and who have carried this loss for decades.”
Alongside the apology, Starmer announced government funding for a national online resource to help those affected locate adoption records. “We’ll do everything we can to make sure it’s as complete as possible as quickly as possible,” he said.
