Forced Adoption Australia: A State‑System of Coercion and Erasure

The Foundation of the Crime

For anyone who still doesn’t know—and there are many who don’t, because this silence, this erasure, has been slowly and methodically engineered—“forced adoption” refers to a calculated, state‑sanctioned system of coercion, deceit, and institutional violence. This wasn’t a welfare system. It was a punishment regime—a cold, bureaucratic alliance between governments, churches, hospitals, and welfare agencies designed to conduct a social purge of women the state branded “unfit”. Their goal was simple and devastating: to erase the “shame” of illegitimacy by ripping babies from their mothers and erasing them both from history.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, the state targeted newborn babies who were very much wanted, stealing them under the guise of morality and care. There was no choice; there was only psychological warfare. Pregnant girls and young women were hidden away in maternity homes run by religious institutions—out of sight, out of mind. From the moment they arrived, they were bombarded with shame. Social workers and matrons drilled them daily, telling them they were selfish, sinful, and broken. They weaponised a mother’s love against her, using the twisted mantra: “Giving your baby away is the only loving thing to do.”

The birth itself was a staged act of clinical violence. Mothers were denied pain relief, physically restrained, and treated with open contempt. In a final, sadistic attempt to sever the maternal bond before it could even form, sheets were held up so they couldn’t see their child. They were denied the right to touch, hold, or even look at the life they had just brought into the world. This was the so‑called “clean break”—a clinical euphemism for emotional mutilation.

The “signature of consent” was a legal farce. It was extracted from mothers who were drugged, grieving, and systematically coerced. They were lied to—told the forms were for foster care, medical procedures, or birth certificates. Some were held hostage, told they couldn’t leave the hospital until they signed; others were threatened with medical bills they could never afford. The state deliberately hid legal cooling‑off periods from them, insisting their consent was final even when it wasn’t.

Once the extraction was complete, the state sealed the child’s original birth certificate forever. A new, false certificate was issued, listing the adoptive parents as the birth parents. In one stroke of a pen, a child’s identity, history, and medical background were erased by the state. The mother was sent home with empty arms and a command to forget—but you cannot forget a part of yourself.

The Lifetime of Damage: Primal Wounds and Genealogical Bewilderment

This is not a “chapter” of Australia’s past; it is a state‑engineered biological rupture that continues to bleed today. The forced separation of mother and child created a dual trauma: the primal wound for the mother and maternal deprivation for the child. This was never theory — it was a violent, state‑mandated severing of a bond formed in the womb. Infants were stripped of the only voice, scent, and heartbeat their nervous systems were wired to recognise, while mothers were subjected to the clinical removal of their own flesh and blood. These were not “unfortunate outcomes.” They were the predictable consequences of a system built on coercion, secrecy, and silence.

For mothers, forced adoption became a lifelong sentence of unresolved grief. They were ordered to forget, to move on, to pretend the child they birthed had never existed. But the body remembers what the state tried to erase. Today, these women still carry suffocating sorrow and a shame that was never theirs — wounds that have shaped every relationship and every breath since. This is not “historic” pain; it is a present‑tense burden that has pushed many into years of emotional struggle. They were punished for becoming mothers, and they are still being punished by a state that denies them the right to mourn what was taken.

For adoptees, the damage is a permanent state of genealogical bewilderment. Their identities were not discovered — they were assigned. They grew up inside narratives manufactured by the state, with their origins sealed away and replaced with a fiction. A birthday — a day meant to honour life — became a reminder of everything stolen: lineage, truth, belonging. Many grew up sensing a void they could not name, carrying emotional distress the state refuses to acknowledge. These are not personal failings; they are the inevitable consequences of being raised inside a life built on state‑engineered erasure.

And the most chilling truth is this: even now, many adoptees still do not know who they are. They live inside identities constructed by the state — unaware they were adopted, unaware their adoption was forced, unaware that their true history sits locked behind bureaucratic doors. Adoption files remain sealed; records are withheld, altered, or manipulated to preserve the state’s preferred narrative. The state continues to protect the lie and shield the institutions responsible, while those it harmed are left to navigate a life they are still denied the right to fully own.

The False Hope of 2013: The National Apology — A Pivot, Not a Finish Line

Years of enforced silence were finally shattered by the raw fury of survivors who refused to stay quiet any longer. In the 1980s and 1990s, their voices forced the first cracks in the wall of state denial. This wasn’t a shift born of government compassion; truth was dragged from the state, inch by agonising inch.

On 21 March 2013, the nation was forced to confront the wreckage it had created. Prime Minister Julia Gillard delivered the National Apology for Forced Adoptions, naming the pain of mothers, fathers, adoptees, and extended families. She acknowledged what survivors had screamed for decades: the practices were “shameful”, “unethical”, and “illegal”. For a brief moment, the silence was broken, and the Forced Adoptions History Project was launched to ensure this history would never again be buried.

But the National Apology was not a finish line; it was a pivot. The state merely traded physical chains for bureaucratic ones. The apology was a debt acknowledged, yet the promises it carried — counselling, access to records, and redress — were delivered as the bare minimum. True healing requires acknowledgement without minimisation, and justice that extends beyond symbolic gestures.

Instead, the community was met with a new, more insidious form of gaslighting. The apology became camouflage — a performance designed to reassure the public while systemic harm continued quietly behind closed doors. The Forced Adoptions History Project has now been shut down and its website decommissioned, coinciding with the end of the Without Consent national exhibition. The very platforms created to preserve this truth have been dismantled. What was promised as permanent recognition has been reduced to a digital afterthought, buried in the archives of Trove — a faint echo of voices the state would still prefer the public forget.

We have been denied accountability, justice, and closure for the original harm — and our fight now is against the betrayal of post‑Apology Forced Adoption harm.

The Second Betrayal: Rations, Red Tape, and the Postcode Lottery

The National Apology dangled hope in front of survivors, promising a reckoning that went beyond mere words. But in the years since, a bitter truth has emerged: the Apology was a debt the state never intended to pay. What was promised as justice arrived as red tape, and what was framed as compassion was delivered as control.

The Federal Government allocated $23.3 million for Forced Adoption Support Services — a figure that sounds significant until you realise it must cover a lifetime of state‑sanctioned trauma for thousands. These are not “services”; they are rations. Even more disturbing is the quiet, tactical shift now underway: as survivors age and pass away, these specialised services are being absorbed into generic adoption support. By dropping the word Forced, the state sanitises the crime. It is a calculated attempt to reclaim the narrative and recast a history of state‑engineered violence as mere “administrative support.” It is a final act of gaslighting — offering “help” only on the condition that we stop calling it what it was.

In Australia today, access to justice depends entirely on where your trauma occurred. It is a postcode lottery for human rights.

• Victoria has led with a $138 million redress scheme, offering mothers $30,000, psychological support, and formal apologies.

• Tasmania is only now, in 2026, inching toward action with an “interim scheme” for urgent cases — a tacit admission that for many, time has already run out.

• Western Australia remains in a state of perpetual “consideration,” offering no concrete timeline for repair.

• Everywhere else, there is silence.

Survivors of institutional child sexual abuse, the Stolen Generations, and Thalidomide survivors have all — rightfully — been granted federal redress. Forced adoption survivors remain shut out. This is not an oversight; it is a deliberate exclusion. The message is unmistakable: your suffering isn’t worth the cost. Your truth is easier to ignore than to repay.

Access to support and counselling remains tightly controlled by the very institutions that caused the harm. Survivors must navigate a system that treats their trauma as an administrative inconvenience rather than a state‑created injury. The promised “support services” are rationed, inconsistent, and often delivered through agencies with direct ties to the original perpetrators — a closed loop of state‑managed gatekeeping disguised as care.

Personal adoption files, family histories, and records naming those responsible remain locked behind bureaucratic walls. Survivors are forced to beg for fragments of their own identities, only to receive redacted pages, missing documents, or outright refusals. The state still decides who is allowed to know the truth of their own life. It still decides what is “appropriate” for a survivor to see. It still decides whose history is worth protecting — and whose is worth erasing.

And despite the scale of the harm, there is still no national redress. No compensation. No accountability. No meaningful justice. The apology acknowledged the crime, but the system that enabled it remains largely intact — a structure built to protect institutions, not the people they violated. In the post‑apology world, survivors are expected to accept symbolic gestures while being denied the very tools required to heal.

Make no mistake: we hold clear documentary evidence of serious obstruction and systemic misuse of authority — evidence that shows how harm has continued for forced‑adoption survivors in the post‑Apology era.

The Wall of Secrecy: Weaponised Privacy and Legal Attrition

The culture of secrecy that enabled forced adoptions has not disappeared; it has evolved. The state that once made it terrifyingly easy to take a child now makes it agonisingly hard to find them—and has deliberately blocked all pathways to accountability.

Accessing records remains a minefield of “missing” hospital files and weaponised privacy laws. Institutions hide behind the very legislation meant to protect citizens, using it instead as a legal fortress to shield themselves from consequences. Survivors are left to reconstruct their lives from scraps while the legal clock—the Statute of Limitations—ticks down. This isn’t a lapse in the system; it is a wall. The system looks at a victim of state‑sanctioned trauma and coldly declares, “Too late,” as though human suffering has an expiry date.

The most clinical betrayal is the refusal to legally define “forced adoption”. In the eyes of the court, the very harm the Prime Minister apologised for does not exist as a legal injury. Without a legal definition, there is no unified victim group—and without a group, there is no liability.

Governments can acknowledge the harm in speeches, yet deny responsibility in court. This is calculated erasure. It is a strategy of attrition: delay, deflect, and deny until the survivor community is too diminished by age and grief to demand change. They are waiting for the voices that survived their cruelty to finally fall silent.

Join us in class actions across every state and territory, working toward a unified national Forced Adoption Harm Class Action.

The Mandate for Action: Turning the State’s Weapons Against It

The Forced Adoption Post‑Apology Action Alliance (FA‑PAAA) is no longer asking for permission. We have had a brutal education in how power really works in Australia. We were taught to believe in accountability, to believe that government protected the vulnerable—but that was a lie. We know the weapons the state wields: delay, deflect, deny. Now, we are turning those same weapons back on the state.

We are launching the Queensland Pilot Program as the first strike in a national campaign. If politicians refuse to act, we will force the courts to do what they will not. We will initiate class actions in every state and territory, culminating in a unified national post‑Apology Forced Adoption harm Federal Class Action. We will compel the courts to confront the truth that politicians acknowledge in speeches but deny in law: forced adoption has no legal definition in Australia. This refusal is not an oversight; it is a strategy designed to ensure no unified victim group exists—and therefore no liability for the state.

To deliver true justice, the state must move beyond symbolic gestures and into the realm of material restoration. We demand the following pillars of immediate action:

• Mandatory Formal Classification: The state must formally and permanently reclassify all related records from “Standard Adoption” to “Forced Adoption”.

• Full, Unredacted Disclosure: Every record associated with a file—from hospital admission to the final adoption order—must be released without exception, omission, or redaction. We reject the “privacy” of state actors as a justification for hiding the truth.

• Emergency Legislative Amendment: Immediate amendments to the Adoption Act 2009 (Qld), and equivalent legislation nationwide, must formally include, define, and codify the category of “Forced Adoption”. This will end the procedural entrapment that renders survivors legally homeless.

• Acknowledge Vitiated Consent: Any reliance on “signed forms” as evidence of legality must be rejected. Consent obtained through institutional duress, physical restraint, or medication is void ab initio—void from the beginning.

• Justification of Denial: The Queensland Government must provide a formal, written justification for its continued refusal to establish a dedicated financial redress scheme comparable to those in Victoria and Tasmania.

We are shifting the legal argument from historic abuse to ongoing administrative injustice—post‑Apology Forced Adoption harm and retraumatisation for which the state remains liable. The state can delay, deflect, and deny, but it cannot escape.

Final Warning: To the Media, the Politicians, and the Public

This is not an anti‑government sentiment — though many would be justified in feeling that way. What we are expressing is something deeper, heavier, and far more confronting: a profound sense of disappointment, disillusionment, and shock at the political and judicial systems that govern Australia. These systems did not simply fail us; they created the conditions that allowed forced adoption to thrive, and they continue to shape the conditions that allow its consequences to be ignored.

And here is the hardest truth of all: we did this together. We allowed it. We voted for it. We trusted institutions that misled us. We believed in systems that were never designed to protect the vulnerable.

Accountability has evaporated. The term public servant has drifted far from its original meaning. The machinery of governance has grown bold not through strength, but through the absence of scrutiny. Silence has become permission. Delay, Deflect, and Deny have become routine administrative tools. The oversight bodies presented as avenues for justice cannot overturn decisions, and survivors seeking legal representation often find doors closing the moment they mention forced adoption. These pathways form a loop — one that frustrates, deters, and exhausts people into giving up. This is not accidental. This is structural. And those harmed are left to navigate the aftermath alone.

To the media, the politicians, and the public: this is your reckoning.

This is an indictment of the systems that watched this horror unfold and then turned their backs once the cameras stopped rolling. We are no longer asking for visibility; we are exposing the complicity of those who stood by.

We deserve depth over spectacle and justice over sentiment. In 2013, the media helped deliver a moment of reckoning — and then walked away, packaging the National Apology as “closure” while survivors were left in the wreckage. Since then, you have clung to the easy version: tearful reunions, soft‑focus sentiment, and feel‑good narratives that cost you nothing. But forced adoption isn’t over — it has simply been repackaged into an insidious bureaucracy buried under red tape.

You don’t inform; you perform. You mined our pain for ratings, turned our trauma into content, and then moved on to the next trend.

Your silence is complicity. Every day you choose not to report on the post‑Apology harm and the state’s strategy to “Delay, Deflect, and Deny,” you are not standing aside — you are standing in the way of justice.

We are not a snapshot. If you want to be more than a mouthpiece for sentiment, start naming names, follow the paper trails, and expose the systems we are still fighting to dismantle.

To every Australian: understand that we are being erased. The National Apology wasn’t closure — it was camouflage, a performance designed to distract while the harm continued quietly through legal and bureaucratic means. We were taught to believe in accountability and the protection of the vulnerable, but we found only obstruction and containment.

Accountability is not missing — it has been dismantled. Abuses aren’t being ignored; they are being protected, shielded by law, and sanitised by process.

This is a system, not a failure — a system that rewards silence, punishes truth, and thrives on the suffering of those it was meant to protect.

You could be next. If the state can do this slowly, methodically, and unchallenged to us, it can do it to any vulnerable Australian it deems irrelevant or disposable.

We are the Forced Adoption Post‑Apology Action Alliance (FA‑PAAA). We are the shameful past and the uncomfortable present that Australia refuses to face. We are no longer asking; we are demanding.

We will expose the secrets, confront the lies, and break the shame that has suffocated our lives for far too long. The secrets, the lies, and the shame did not end with an apology. This is the ongoing betrayal of the Australian forced‑adoption community — and it ends now.

Use the form below to ask questions or to get involved. If you would like a copy of our template letter for contacting Queensland government offices, you can request it through the form.