Choice, consent and coercion: understanding the supply and demand of infants for adoption during Britain’s baby scoop era

Abstract

Adoption peaked across the Anglophone world during a 30-year period after 1945. Widespread desire for social stability after decades of disruption fuelled a demand for children and to start families. This nurtured conservative attitudes towards family life despite social permissiveness and progressive welfare policies. The supply of children followed this demand, with those of young women pregnant outside marriage increasingly taken and adopted by married couples. Secrecy was integral to these adoptions. It allowed natural mothers to begin again, adoptive parents to pass off babies as their own, and children to live without the stigma of illegitimacy. Sanctioned by church and state and enacted by social workers, the period has been characterised by critics as the ‘baby scoop era’ because of this scope and scale. Policies and practices surrounding the supply of infants from unmarried mothers in Britain were engendered to meet an inexorable demand both for children and for an idealised normal family life. National, regional and local archival records of statutory and voluntary organisations provide the source material by which we may understand choice and consent in policy and practice. Ultimately, coercion in post-war adoption was widespread and normalised, shaped by rigid understandings of maternal capacity and child welfare.