Where’s my baby? How Canada confronted the scandal of forced adoption

Between 1945 and 1975, hundreds of thousands of unmarried Canadian women were forced to give up their children to adoptive parents. Andrew Buncombe talks to victims of this bleak chapter and asks why the Trudeau government refuses to apologise

Single mothers were told it was better for their babies to live with married parents (Library and Archives Canada/National Film Board of Canada)

It had been 50 years since Sandra Jarvie was told to sign a form consenting to give up her newborn baby. Yet when she tried to talk about it, all those decades later, her voice faltered, and her words were almost trapped.

“I was totally numb. My baby was gone,” she says. “The social worker stood in front of me. Coldly, she said: ‘You will never see your baby again as long as you live. If you search for the baby, you’ll destroy his life and the lives of the adoptive parents.’”

Jarvie’s words, given as testimony to an official inquiry, have helped to draw attention to one of Canada’s most agonising scandals and one which for decades was covered up – the forced adoption of hundreds of thousands of babies born to unmarried mothers. Between 1945 and the early 1970s, as many as 450,000 babies – some say the figure is higher – were forcibly taken from their mothers amid a climate of church and society-created shame and guilt. Almost 600,000 births were registered as “illegitimate”.