LAST year’s apology by Catholic Health Australia to single mothers, forced to adopt out their children over decades from the 1950s, still stands for all Catholic hospitals in the health care network, in the light of recent publicity on the issue.
It is expected no further apologies will be made.
CHA chief executive officer Martin Laverty in July issued an apology to those “who carry broken hearts as a result of the role that some Catholic organisations played in this widespread, common public policy practice of years past”.
The apology was issued during a Senate inquiry into past adoption practices in government and non-government institutions over three decades.
The inquiry’s report was tabled in the Senate on February 29 this year following an 18-month investigation. Among other things, it called for a national apology to unwed mothers affected by the adoption policies.
It found that between the 1950s and 1970s, about 150,000 Australian unwed mothers had their babies taken against their will by churches and adoption agencies.
Following the report’s tabling, Mr Laverty said the CHA endorsed the inquiry’s 20 key recommendations and called on state and ter-ritory government community services ministers to adopt the Senate’s action plan when they meet on March 30.
He said “it was pleasing” that many of the recommendations his organisation made to the inquiry “had been embraced”.
“We think they are concrete steps that can help those affected by past adoption practices move towards healing,” Mr Laverty said.
CHA recommendations included improved access to medical, birth and social work records; counselling for those affected by past adoption practices; and a national process to enable birth mothers to make their grievances heard at an official level.
Queensland Senator Claire Moore helped initiate the inquiry after three women visited her Brisbane office five years ago.
The senator, in her speech given at the report’s tabling, said “(the women) brought some pictures and a couple of books that they had written, and they brought their pain and their anger and their disgust, because no-one had believed what had happened to them”.
“I personally could not believe that in my country, in places that I knew, to people with whom I had worked, the experiences that they told me about had happened,” she said.
“In some ways, I was a bit fortunate because I live in Brisbane, and the first formal acknowledgement of the work that had happened and the horror that had occurred was made by the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, a hospital I knew well.”
Meanwhile, the Royal Women’s Hospital (RWH) in Melbourne has apologised to mothers who placed their children for adoption, after a report by Australian Catholic University’s Professor Shurlee Swain and doctoral student Christin Quirk outlined the hospital’s role in past practices.
The report was commissioned by the RWH. The study revealed that of the 26,000 babies born to single mothers at the hospital between 1945 and 1975, more than a quarter were given up for adoption.
A recent ABC TV Four Corners program was critical of the hospital and interviewed several women and nurses involved at the time.
The Senate inquiry committee report has recommended a formal Commonwealth Government apology as well as similar statements from state and territory governments and non-government institutions involved.
The Senate inquiry committee in its report said it was aware of two organisational apologies offered by individual Australian hospitals – Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, made in June 2009 and the Sisters of Mercy, St Anne’s Hospital in Perth in March 2010.
Brisbane’s Mater Hospital was established by the Sisters of Mercy in 1906 and the order still has a presence there.
“As a Catholic hospital, Mater Health Ser-vices endorses the public apology given by Catholic Health Australia who apologised on behalf of all Catholic hospitals and health services in the Senate inquiry last year,” a hospital spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said statistics on single mothers impacted by adoption policies of the time were not available.
