After my adoptive father died in November last year, my adoptive siblings found a short story by Enid Blyton among his possessions. The Child Who Was Chosen was read to us as children to explain the circumstances of my adoption. It follows a nice middle-class couple whose domestic bliss is marred by childlessness, prompting them to go to a “very kind lady” who helps them to find a “chosen baby” instead. In its foreword, Blyton advises adoptive parents to tell the tale to their adopted child “again and again … so that to him ‘adoption’ means something lovely”.

The “chosen child” narrative, where parents tell adoptees they were specially picked, helped to shape the still widespread public perception of adoption as unambiguously altruistic. But it has also long been criticised by adult adoptees for masking the trauma of separation from their original parents. Reading Blyton’s saccharine story, I was struck by its glaring omissions. There is no mention of how the boy, who is unnamed until he is adopted, came to be put up for adoption; nor any suggestion that he once had another family and identity. There is no recognition of his first mother or her loss, only the loneliness of the prospective adoptive mother. The woman from the adoption agency also tells the couple that if this child isn’t the one they really want, she will find another one – as though she’s running a baby market.

Indeed, Blyton’s tale, published in 1955, now reads like propaganda for an era of forced adoption. Between 1949 and 1976, an estimated 185,000 babies, myself included, were taken from unmarried mothers in England and Wales. These women were coerced into signing adoption consent forms due to a culture of shame surrounding pregnancy outside marriage. The reverend who oversaw my own adoption at a north London Baptist children’s home in 1974 described my first mother (the term many affected women prefer to “birth mother”), then 20 years old, as a “rebellious daughter” and “a determined but probably disturbed girl”.

On Thursday, the UK government formally apologised to mothers and adoptees in England........

© The Guardian