Forced adoption in Australia is often treated as a closed chapter, but the record tells a different story. Behind the Apology lies a system that punished mothers, erased children and continues to bury its own evidence. Michael Costello writes.
FORCED ADOPTION in Australia was never a welfare failure or a tragic misunderstanding. It was a State‑Church project built on a moral logic that treated unmarried mothers and their babies as impurities to be removed from the social body.
The Seven Deadly Sins are not a metaphor here — they are a map of the institutional appetites and punishments that powered the system. This is not history. It is a live audit of power.
Forced adoption was never simply the transfer of a child. It was a State‑engineered rupture of biology and identity. The separation of mother and infant created a dual trauma: a mother left with a grief she was forbidden to express, and a child left with a deprivation too early to name. Newborns were taken from the only voice, scent and heartbeat their bodies recognised, while mothers endured the clinical removal of their own flesh and blood.
To call these outcomes “unfortunate” is to repeat the language of a State intent on sanitising its own violence. This was wrath — the moral violence of a system that punished women for stepping outside its script.
For mothers, the loss was not a moment but a life sentence. They were told to marry and “have children of your own,” as if the child taken from them were interchangeable. But the body does not forget. The loss is not a memory but an amputation — a phantom limb that aches in the chest. Birthdays became secret vigils; crowds became search parties.
For adoptees, identities were not discovered; they were assigned. Many lived with a persistent, unspoken anxiety — a physiological echo of a separation they had never escaped. To survive, many constructed a version of themselves designed to please, to avoid a second abandonment.
To understand the original removals, we must move beyond the clinical language of social policy and confront the anatomy of a machine. The archives reveal not “well‑meaning” individuals but a system that was cold, organised and deliberate. Files for unmarried mothers were often pre‑stamped with adoption outcomes long before birth.
As the Senate Inquiry into Former Forced Adoption Policies and Practices recorded:
'... the hospital files of single pregnant girls were often marked ‘BFA’… assuming that the child of an unmarried mother would be adopted long before consent was taken.'
The maternity wards were the system’s front line. Young women were stripped of their names, isolated from support and forced into physical labour to “work off their keep”. Consent forms were signed while women were drugged, restrained or lied to in the hazy aftermath of traumatic deliveries. Religious orders supplied the moral cover; the State supplied the administrative teeth. Together they disappeared children at scale.
The appetite for babies was framed as virtue. Adoption was promoted as the only acceptable outcome for unmarried mothers. Social workers and policy documents routinely described them as “unfit”, “immature”, or “incapable”, not as assessments but as pretexts for removal. This was lust — not sexual, but institutional hunger; the desire to take what was never theirs.
The State did not merely oversee adoptions; it managed a human supply chain calibrated to meet the demands of “deserving” middle‑class infertile couples. Vulnerable mothers were treated not as citizens in need of protection, but as a resource to be harvested. This was gluttony — a system consuming the lives of the vulnerable to satisfy the demands of the powerful.
Economics sharpened the blade. Adoption became a financial instrument — a way to reduce welfare liabilities while reshaping society according to a narrow moral script. Unmarried mothers were routinely denied financial assistance that would have enabled them to keep their babies. Many were never told they were legally entitled to the Maternity Allowance. Poverty was not an accident of circumstance; it was engineered to ensure compliance.
In the official ledger, the removal of a child was a “win‑win”: a reduction in welfare expenditure and the transfer of a baby from a “liability” to an “asset”.
Beneath these engines lay the State’s resentment of women who exercised autonomy outside its moral script. Unmarried mothers were treated as social problems to be managed rather than as citizens with rights. Many were sent to maternity homes not for support but for containment. Families, clergy and welfare workers acted to remove them from sight, often under the language of “saving face.”
Their pregnancies were framed as moral failures; their independence as deviance requiring correction. This was envy — the State’s resentment of women who exercised independence outside its command.
After the National Apology for Forced Adoptions in 2013, the system did not reform; it retreated. Sloth became policy. Sloth here was not idleness but design — the State discovered that doing nothing was the most effective way to bury the past. The public accepted the theatre of remorse as a finale rather than a beginning. Projects documenting the history of forced adoption were quietly decommissioned. Exhibitions were dismantled.
Government websites removed references to the Apology, redirecting the public to archival dead ends. Silence was no longer the drift of time; it was an administrative strategy.
Greed in the modern system is not about money taken but money withheld. After the Apology, the State replaced physical coercion with bureaucratic obstruction. Missing files, destroyed documents and inconsistent record‑keeping became a tactic. By delaying access to records, delaying recognition and delaying redress, the State benefits from the passage of time.
As survivors age, the financial cost of justice decreases. As witnesses die, the evidentiary burden becomes impossible to meet. Greed is the calculation that exhaustion will succeed where coercion once did.
And finally, pride — the phantom crime. “Forced adoption” sounds like recognition; it feels like the beginning of an accounting. But in the cold reality of the law, it is a trap. You will not find “forced adoption” in any criminal code, any retrospective statute, or any federal compensation scheme. It is a social label — a “sorry” engineered to carry no bill of costs.
By encouraging survivors to use this language, the State has steered them away from words that carry legal weight: kidnapping, aggravated fraud, deprivation of liberty and human trafficking. The Government apologises for “forced adoption” for the very reason it cannot be sued for it.
When survivors seek justice, they discover they are fighting a ghost. They are forced to contort the systematic theft of a human being into the petty language of civil torts – negligence, trespass – categories designed for broken fences, not the destruction of a family. When the evidence of fraud becomes too loud to ignore, the State retreats to its most brazen defence: the standard of the time. Cruelty is reframed as legality simply because it was popular.
The National Apology was not a new beginning; it was camouflage. While the public was reassured that the nation had finally “moved on”, the bureaucracy was quietly dismantling the evidence. The Forced Adoptions History Project has been decommissioned. The Without Consent exhibition has been dismantled. The physical evidence – the photographs, the pleading letters, the hospital files – has been boxed, taped shut and buried in the basement of the national memory.
Perhaps the most telling act is the quiet removal of the State’s own confession. The Attorney‑General’s website has scrubbed the National Apology, replacing it with a cold redirection to Trove — the archive of the dead. This is not a technical update; it is a political act of silencing. The State has decided when the story ends, regardless of the lives left in wreckage.
The Australian system did not fail — it worked exactly as intended. What we are seeing is not a “sad chapter” of history but a live audit of power. The ledger is still open. If the State, with the Church beside it, can erase a family without consequence, then no right you hold is secure.
The scandal now is not what was done, but what is still being done to keep it buried. A nation that congratulates itself on fairness has spent decades perfecting the art of disappearance — of babies, of records, of responsibility. The Apology was the performance; the bureaucracy is the truth. And in that truth sits a simple, devastating fact: a State that can steal a child and walk away untouched is a State that can do anything.
The institutions that built this machinery believe they have outlasted the witnesses, outwaited the grief and outmanoeuvred the law. But history is not theirs to curate. Memory is not theirs to extinguish. And no matter how deep they bury the evidence, no matter how carefully they script the silence, the truth will overtake the story.
A national class action for post‑Apology harm is beginning to take shape. Its early steps are visible at https://secretsliesandshame.com.
Michael Costello’s life and work are shaped by a deep commitment to truth — not just what it is, but how we experience it, retell it and preserve it.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
Support independent journalism Subscribe to IA.
