It is a key part of the new cultification of society by liberals to find victims under every stone. Victims need to be “supported”. Victims are docile and easy to manage. Victims are, above all, non-threatening. Middle-class, spineless liberals love victims.
They have found a new victim cause in the case of historical adoptions. There is no doubt that between the 1950s and 1970s there were a significant number of adoptions of babies born to unmarried mothers. These adoptions were often facilitated by Church organisations. (My own adoption was facilitated by something called The Church Adoption Society, which, I think, was a Church of England organisation). I’ve written about this before. I’m covering it again because former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has had some airtime on national TV to promote the narrative. Apparently; there is even a movement of women who say they were coerced into giving up their babies, demanding an apology from the government. It is very trendy these days to demand an apology from the government for historical perceived wrongs. This reflects another aspect of modern liberalism – a babyish understanding of historical specificity, a failure to be able to evaluate situations in their own terms, a sense that they live in some kind of eternal present, where there is only one set of immutable standards and values, true for all times and places. Life is simpler this way, and less challenging for the baby class.
The claim of this narrative, which the Guardian promulgates, (i.e. they are not just reporting what Gordon Brown said, they have fully embraced the false narrative, and taken it upon themselves to push it), is that women “had babies taken from them”, “were coerced into giving up their babies”, “were sent to mother and baby homes”. None of this is true. There were no laws which “forced” anyone to give up their baby. Even the most ardent supporters of this narrative have not produced a single case of a mother being dragged off to one of these homes by the police, or a baby being snatched from a hospital by social workers. The narrative is completely false. It is just good, for liberals, to have another victim narrative.
The reality is that in the time period in question, social attitudes to pregnancy out of wedlock were very different to what they are today. Certainly; it was much harder for an unmarred young woman who had become pregnant to keep the baby, than it is today. Also; I don’t have the statistics to hand, but I imagine that the wide availability of the contraceptive pill together with the legalisation of abortion, from the sixties, also reduced the number of unplanned or unwanted births. In this context, Church organisations stepped in to help, as they would have seen it. Is the government of the day supposed to apologise for that fact that 70 years society as a whole held more conservative attitudes than it does today? It is a bizarre, (and babyish), proposition.
Meanwhile, as I mentioned in my previous article, there is a real problem – up to the present day – with actual forced adoptions. This is when the state, through the social services and family courts system, mandates that a child who has been taken from her parents due to unsatisfactory parenting, or a risk thereof, can be allocated to a new family, (using the liberal conception of family), even against the will of the actual parents. Of course, this scandal, which is a manifestation of extreme state power and the abuse therefore, receives little coverage. [1] Extreme state power is no problem for modern liberals.
There is one other very characteristic aspect of this modern liberal cause. It purports to be driven by compassion. But, in reality, it is heartless. How do they think the mothers, and fathers, who adopted babies in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s feel when they see this story on their TV screens? The story makes them out to be some kind of baby-snatchers. That is obviously hurtful. Even if you wanted to tell a story about “being coerced into giving up my baby” they could manage to recognise the complexities of the situation; that many of the adoptive families were simply fulfilling their dream, believed they were taking unwanted children, and, in many, (most?, hard to say), gave the adopted children a good upbringing. Once again; we see the parallels of modern liberalism with cultism; a claim to be compassionate, while in fact being emotionally unsympathetic and adapting reality to tell any story you want.
Notes