The Dutch and British governments apologized on Thursday for their separate roles in forcing thousands of women and girls to give up their babies for adoption for nearly three decades in the second half of the 20th century.
The Dutch apology was issued in response to a government-commissioned report published in June 2025 that described the “significant and long-lasting harm” inflicted on an estimated 13,000 to 14,000 mothers and more than 15,000 children from 1956 to 1984.
Claudia van Bruggen, the country’s state secretary for justice, made the formal apology to a gathering of affected parents and their children, at an event in The Hague.
“At what was probably the most vulnerable moment of your lives, you were stripped of control over your lives and your child was taken away from you,” Ms. van Bruggen said.
“We now know that the government, too, paid far too little attention to your extremely vulnerable and dire situation,” she said. “In doing so, the government failed you. On behalf of the entire cabinet, I offer you my sincere apologies for this.”
The report, drawn up by an independent committee of inquiry, described how unmarried pregnant women and girls were pressured by parents, doctors, social workers and psychiatrists to give up their children at a time when pregnancies out of wedlock were considered deeply shameful. Adoption was legalized in the Netherlands in 1956.
Women interviewed by the committee said their traumatic experiences were compounded by “years of silence resulting from the taboo surrounding their pregnancies.”
Some women recalled being sent to facilities far from home and having their babies taken away immediately after birth. Others described being pressured to sign documents that led them to believe the separation was permanent, even though they had the legal right to rescind the decision for several years.
The practice “caused great sorrow and anger” and “often resulted in lifelong damage” for both parents and children, the report stated.
The report examined the practice until 1984, the year abortion was fully legalized in the Netherlands. By then, the number of national adoptions had declined sharply as contraception became more widely available and the stigma surrounding extramarital pregnancies had softened.
Forcing unmarried mothers to give up their children for adoption was widespread in Western countries starting in the mid-1940s, and several governments have apologized for their involvement, including Australia in 2013 and Ireland in 2018.
The British government also issued a formal apology for the practice on Thursday, after the Church of England did so last month. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who earlier in the day met with survivors of institutions where these practices were common, commended the courage of the women who had fought for an apology for years.
“What happened to them and to tens of thousands of mothers, children and families should never have happened,” Mr. Starmer said. “It is a stain on our history.”
He said the acts “were not isolated or accidental acts, they were practices embedded within systems” of local government and church institutions.
“The shame is not yours, the shame was never yours, the shame is ours,” he said. “And I say that on behalf of the whole country, and I say that to every single person impacted. We are deeply and profoundly sorry.”
In the Netherlands, Frans Haven, 60, attended the ceremony on Thursday. Mr. Haven was separated from his biological mother shortly after birth.
“At least she was able to see me for a moment,” he said.
At the time, some mothers were blindfolded during childbirth so they would be unable to see their newborns, Mr. Haven said.
He said that it was “very important” that the government apologize for the suffering it caused, even if it was “much too late.”
Mr. Haven is board member of Verleden in Zicht, an organization that advocates for people who were relinquished by their biological mothers, to adoption or institutional care. The group has called for further remedial measures, including “full, unimpeded, and electronic access” to relevant records, the immediate halt to all adoptions in the Netherlands and free, lifelong psychosocial support for affected mothers and children.
The government is working on a set of measures that “try to accommodate the very diverse wishes and needs of those involved as much as possible,” Birgit de Bruin, a spokesperson for the ministry of justice, said in an email.
The measures will be proposed in a letter to the House of Representatives, the lower house of Parliament, before July 11, she said.
Megan Specia contributed reporting from London.
