The complicated truth about adoption reunions

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, the complicated truth behind adoption reunions.

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1:03One morning in September 2023, David Batty was scrolling through his work emails looking for a lost message. Searching through his spam box, he found something that turned this mundane, everyday moment into something monumental.

1:19David Batty:So I had set up a Google alert on her name, and it was an alert for a probate notice. And I rang the solicitor, who told me, yes, she'd been killed in this, well, I think they called it a car accident. His birth mother had died. I heard from my birth mother's sister, that's my maternal aunt, she told me more details. And really just painted this picture of a very sad and lonely end to my birth mother's life. So, yeah, that was numbing. David was one of hundreds of thousands of babies forcibly adopted in the UK between the 1940s and the 1970s and for years after learning he was adopted he had dreamt of being reunited with Susan his birth mother but the reality proved very different from the dream the part of her that had been missing for all those years was that baby not the adult that that baby became and that's the challenge of our reunion and I think a lot of other reunions.

2:44By the time she died he hadn't seen her for almost 15 years and for David her lonely death shows the lasting damage done by forced adoption.

2:55David Batty:It's very shocking to realise that this very sort of private, personal, traumatic thing that you've been through is something that is the result of a huge social injustice.

3:17Before I go on, I know that you and the committee will want to hear that this government will very soon be making a full apology on behalf of the state to all of those affected by historic forced adoption in England. I'd want to say how profoundly sorry we are for those who have been affected by the practices at homes that are affiliated to the Church of England. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, the painful legacy of forced adoption in the UK.

3:55So David Batty, you are an editor and senior news writer at The Guardian. You have just recently written an incredibly personal and really powerful piece about your search for your birth parents and the aftermath. so could we start with the moment when you found out that you were adopted

4:17David Batty:so I was seven years old and I don't really remember very much about it I remember the aftermath being in the garden shed with my sister who's four years older than me and crying and I spoke to my dad about this my adoptive dad about this and asked him you know what happened when And they told me and he said, well, you didn't really have any reaction. And I obviously looking back now, I just think that's incredibly telling that I just completely sort of blanked it or just couldn't take it in. And did he explain to you how he told you? Did he give you any reference points about their decisions leading up to that moment where they told you as a seven year old?

5:03David Batty:All he told me was that they'd been advised, that's him, my adoptive mum had been advised by the adoption agency that they should tell me at some point between, I think, the age of five and ten and just choose the right moment. And it really didn't sound like they'd had any more advice than that. And was it talked about afterwards? No, it wasn't something that was discussed. It wasn't like it was actively discouraged. It was just like there was no opportunity to sort of raise it or talk about it. I think my adoptive parents were sort of being led to believe that, you know, you say this and that's it.

5:48David Batty:And it wasn't the case because it's something that very much occupied my mind. Did you know anything at all about your origin story, about your past? I did because when I was in my mid-teens, I think around 14 or 15, I began to search through my adopted parents' bedroom cupboards, trying to find my adoption records. And I did find this partial record, which included my birth mother's name and my birth father's name. And so, sorry, was this the first time you knew what their names were? Yes. So you were alone, kind of rifling through your parents' paperwork. Yes. And you came across this certificate.

6:30That was the first time you'd seen your parents' names.

6:33David Batty:Yes. Wow. I mean, what was that like? It really sort of took me aback, largely because of my birth father's identity, because he was Iranian. It was a very deliberate choice that I wasn't told that. They had this conversation with my adopted dad last October, and I asked him about this. And he said, well, you know, the advice was that it just didn't matter. It was in this partial record that there was this letter that they had been sent by the adoption agency, which described me. and it said you will know the child's father comes from a Persian family was the way they worded it but the child is I think it was very fair and shows no sign of any color so that was it it was like I passed as white so it just was a non-issue I think it had a much more profound impact in a way than than learning I was uh adopted but I do remember just sort of looking in the mirror and just thinking, who on earth am I?

7:41David Batty:You know, like whose face is this? You know, whose life am I living? And a really vulnerable time of life to find that out when you're a teenager and you're already going through so much self-exploration and around identity. You write really powerfully around this idea of ghost worlds. Is that what you meant about finding that part of yourself that you had never imagined? Yes. It's, you know, this idea that you're suddenly haunted by these people and haunted by this other life and this life that you might have lived if you weren't adopted. And, you know, the fact that you had this other name, these other parents, these two other families.

8:30So confusing.

8:30David Batty:So, you know, lots of really, you know, incredibly confusing. And yes, as I say, this sense of being haunted by these people and this person who you might have been. and when did you decide to start looking for your birth mother I had really thought about searching for my birth parents from the time I was in my mid to late teens, sort of realised that I wanted to feel really secure in my life before I did this. I just had this gut feeling that I'm going to know when it feels like the right time. And that wasn't for another 15 years. So what was the process of looking for them like? so because I was adopted prior to 1975 I had to go through a mediator so people who were adopted prior to that the birth parents were often led to believe that the adoptions were closed so that there wasn't any way for the children to find them so we agreed a wording of a letter that was sent to my birth mother.

10:04David Batty:It's quite vague. Right. And she replied, didn't she? What was in that first letter that she sent to you? It was brief. I think it was only like about one and a half sides of A4. So she said a little bit about her parents and her brother and sister and what she did for a living and where she lived. So she lived in Guildford. She was married. She was a teacher. She'd studied English literature, undergraduate, postgraduate, and then PhD, which was interesting because I'd done my first degree in English literature. She didn't really say anything about my birth father in that first letter, but I asked her and she did in the second.

10:43And did she talk at all about the circumstances of your adoption and why or how she gave you up for adoption?

10:50David Batty:No, not in those two letters. But she did say, I want you to know that not a day has gone by when I haven't thought of you. It's just so sad, isn't it? And what did your mother tell you about her relationship with your birth father? In the second letter that she sent me, she gave me this description of him. He was an Iranian student, I think, but they were both at Luton Polytechnic. the picture that was painted from the adoption file was that they'd had this brief relationship he'd then moved to the US to continue his studies my birth mother hadn't found out she was pregnant until I think almost six months into her pregnancy and you know in her in this second letter to me she she'd sort of described him as being quite serious and religious and And then she said, I don't know where he is and I don't care.

12:08You did eventually meet your mother. Could you tell us about that first time that you met her face to face?

12:15David Batty:we met for the first time in the Tate Modern this was in I think it was the summer of 2005 maybe May or June but that first meeting yeah I mean obviously I was incredibly nervous and it was in the the turbine hall so it was on you know that huge space so there's loads of other people there and I'm just sort of scanning the crowd um and eventually yes I sort of settled on this figure and sort of our eyes met and I realized though it's her. One of my first reactions was, don't let it be her. And the reason why I thought that was because I just got this sense from her that there was something amiss, that there was something wrong.

13:06David Batty:It was like there was this kind of aura of unhappiness around her. But then we met and it was fine. It seemed good. And we went around and looked at the exhibits. She was on very good form. She was very chatty. And then she brought out all these photos of her family. All of a sudden, I'm just confronted with all these people who I can recognise like a feature or something there. What was that like kind of sitting opposite this stranger who you know is your birth mother in the middle of the Tate Modern on an afternoon? Was it? Sounds surreal. It is surreal because, you know, this is somebody who you've got the most intimate connection with.

14:00David Batty:This is the person who gave you life. But they're also a stranger and they have not been in your life for over 30 years. She remembered me and obviously I didn't remember her.

14:16What do you know now about the circumstances that led to your adoption? Have you pieced it all together?

14:21David Batty:Well, we're talking about a period of time from post-Second World War to probably the mid-1970s, but the practice is believed to have continued into the early or mid-80s, where if a teenage girl or young woman got pregnant and she wasn't married, she was deemed to be unfit to keep that child. and any kind of attempt by her to keep that child was seen as a moral failing in itself. So yes, it was very much from this very particular kind of judgmental Christian approach of moral welfare. So the concept was that it was in the best interest of both the child and the mother for the child to be given up because what a child needed was a nice normal nuclear family My birth mother had said on a number of occasions that effectively she'd been pressured and coerced.

15:26David Batty:So having that additional understanding of what had gone on, and this was a systemic thing that has affected tens of thousands of women over several decades, and tens of thousands of women and tens of thousands of babies. In that period of time, it's estimated that there were around 180, 185 ,000 babies, I think just in England, who were forcibly removed from their mothers. an expert called Professor Michael Lambert has done a lot of research on this and I think he's put estimates for the whole of the UK to be I think somewhere between around sort of 215 and maybe even 500 ,000. I mean that's staggering.

16:15David Batty:So in the adoption records there is mention of my maternal grandparents wanting to adopt me. And the reverend tells them, well, you know, this would be a terrible thing because that would not be a normal family. It would be an artificial setup. And the child would probably end up becoming a juvenile delinquent. Wow. Right. That's on record. That's in the note. So it sounds like you managed through these scattered conversations with your mother and the piecing together through your own adoption records to get this sense of what might have gone on. There was a lot of unprocessed trauma there that your mother suffered.

17:05How did her feelings about the past shape your relationship after that reunion?

17:12David Batty:It made it increasingly difficult because I had no idea of how to handle it. The rawness and acuteness of her trauma and her anger and her unhappiness and that really came to dominate our conversations. and she mentioned that she'd sort of written this note that she'd tucked into my baby clothes when she handed me over to the moral welfare officer. And of course that hadn't been given to me because it would have been removed. That's heartbreaking, isn't it? Yes. It was really this outpouring of grief that she had and I just really didn't know what to do I didn't really have a very clear understanding of my own trauma so to then be put in this position of almost feeling responsible for dealing with her trauma was really overwhelming and the the turning point was this dinner that we had a restaurant and I can't really remember the circumstances or the context of me mentioning the term birth mother, she had this really visceral reaction where she just shouted, like, I hate that term.

18:35David Batty:I wasn't a brood mare. But it was like the dam finally broke and all the depth of that trauma came out. And I think I just kind of sat there sort of stunned what she went on to say in that that moment of anger was that of course you know that your birth father wanted me to have an abortion and as I say this was in in the middle of a restaurant said very loudly and that I mean that was the thing that really stunned me because because you know by that point in my life of course I'd considered the fact that abortion is something that would likely have been considered but you know in that moment I was just so taken aback by that and just like where are my feelings in all this because I I had a lot of sympathy with her, but I wasn't the person who caused this.

19:46David Batty:That was the system. When I saw the adoption social worker again after that meeting, I realised what she really wants is she wants her baby back. That's what she's longing for. And this was really the disconnect. What happened next?

20:07David Batty:we didn't see each other again after that we kept in contact and it was sort of cordial contact but I was just incredibly wary of meeting her again after that because I was just like I don't want to have to deal with this this is such a huge

20:29David Batty:raw you know depth of feeling you know gradually it petered out and my responses to her became less and less frequent and i think i just kind of reached that point was just like like have you just not got it that that i'm actually really upset by what happened at that restaurant and i think you know i i wrote that email to her it was very sort of direct and to the point that i can't do this anymore you know I don't want to to continue contact um and I'm sure it must have been absolutely terrible for her to read that on one level I do feel guilt for that but on another level I just feel that that I just didn't really know what to do and I didn't have any support I didn't have any guidance and I just didn't really at that point I hadn't processed my feelings enough

21:47But David, after that relationship broke down, you did, in your 30s, I think, managed to track down your birth father. How did that experience differ from what you went through with Susan, your birth mother?

22:00David Batty:I mean, it was very, very different. I found him through, I think, just a Google search on his name. He'd written about being a journalist, you know, and I didn't know that before. And then there was this picture of this other boy who was a young teenager at the time, who was my half-brother, who I had no idea existed. and given that my half-brother was in his early teens I decided that I wouldn't initiate tracing at that point so I waited and I waited until he was 18 and when he was 18 I found his Facebook profile and sort of went through that and found this post that he'd written years earlier like years and years earlier and it said to my brother who i will never meet and that was to me like the thing that that made me decide right i'm going to do this so i'd gathered all this information about him and found a private investigator who handles adoption tracing in LA and they found him within 24 hours.

23:16David Batty:By bizarre coincidence, this was on the day of Trump's first inauguration. So this is when the travel ban on Iranians comes into the US. And I was at the Women's March with a couple of friends, the anti-Trump march in London. And I get this message on my phone, oh we've found your birth father. When I spoke to my birth father on the phone for the first time he was really happy and he cried. We spent an hour on the phone and he told me everything or he told me his version of events of the relationship with my birth mother which was very different from my birth mother's account and then he told me a bit about his life and he told me a bit about Brian.

24:09David Batty:That's my half-brother.

24:13David Batty:But he was really slurring his words. And I just thought, he's drunk, you know. Right. And I think he's an alcoholic. And my half-brother messaged me a couple of days later on Twitter. And, yeah, one of the first things he tells me is, yes, he's an alcoholic. so another really chaotic situation I think you got to meet your birth father didn't you yes so I went over there in March of 2017 to LA and I remember being absolutely terrified and I just remember just being absolutely kind of frozen just going what the hell am I doing I don't know any of these people and I'm going over there for two weeks being immersed in this this situation when I know that there's a lot of very traumatic things have happened.

25:07Yeah, and when you say a lot of traumatic things had happened, that's really true, isn't it? I mean, you discover that his first wife was killed in a car crash and then also his sister had been murdered in Rome.