Woman who had to give up baby urges Ottawa to apologize for forced adoptions

Christine Nayler spent only four hours with her newborn daughter at a hospital north of Newmarket, Ont., in 1982, before her baby was taken away from her.

Then a 15-year-old expectant mother living in Toronto, Nayler was sent to a relative’s home north of the city to give birth. She was expected to return home without the child.

While she was being repeatedly told she couldn’t keep the baby, Nayler was still hopeful that her family would change their mind.

But they didn’t.

“I always say that the day that I left the hospital without her was my death day because I feel like I died that day,” said Nayler, who now lives in Barrie, Ont.

“When your child is alive and she’s just taken from you for no other reason than you’re young and you weren’t even given a chance to be a mother, like, that changes everything that you feel about the world.”

Nayler was among hundreds of thousands of unwed mothers who were coerced and forced to give up their children for adoptions in post-Second World War Canada.

Decades after giving up her child, Nayler has launched a petition, asking the federal government to acknowledge its role and apologize for being part of the unjust system.

Her petition has garnered more than 600 signatures from across Canada and was tabled in the House of Commons last week, giving the government 45 days to provide a written response.

“I want the government to acknowledge the harm that was done to us and the role that they played in it,” she said.

In response to questions about the petition on Saturday, the Office of the Minister of Jobs and Families told The Canadian Press the government is grateful to those who have shared their experiences.

“Canadians have carried this history with them and the profound and lasting impacts that forced adoption practices have had on mothers, adoptees, and families,” it said in a written statement, adding that the government is committed to addressing the legacy of this issue.

“Canada recognizes that this was a systemic issue affecting people across the country. Important legal safeguards, including Charter protections and international human rights commitments, now help ensure that such practices cannot occur today.”

Liberal MP Karina Gould and Sen. Chantal Petitclerc also joined the fight calling on Ottawa to make a formal apology.

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday in Ottawa, Gould said she joined the advocacy to make sure Canadians know that an estimated 300,000 women were forced to give up their babies between the 1940s and 1970s.

“It’s about bringing closure and justice for these women and their children,” she said.

Petitclerc, who introduced a motion in the Senate on Tuesday, said the forced adoptions were enabled by institutions and public policies.

For decades, the country’s federal and provincial governments, religious and medical institutions and families worked together to systematically separate unmarried women from their babies by the means of adoptions, said Valerie Andrews, an advocate whose own child was separated from her at birth.

Andrews said only two institutions, the Catholic archdiocese of Vancouver and the United Church of Canada, have so far issued formal apologies.

It is time for Ottawa to acknowledge “the illegal, unethical and human rights abuses against unmarried mothers,” she said.

“Women are getting older, they’re dying, they are getting dementia, they (are) becoming disabled, and without hearing the acknowledgment that these atrocities happened to them,” she said of the mothers who lost their children.

She said an apology by Ottawa would pave the way for other involved parties to follow suit and admit their own wrongdoings.

Other nations including Australia, Ireland and Scotland have made formal apologies, she said.

Andrews got her PhD in women’s studies when she was 71, a move that she said was solely aimed at researching forced adoptions.

She eventually ended up writing a book titled “White Unwed Mother: The Adoption Mandate in Postwar Canada” that was published in 2018.

“I wanted to … have an academic record of the facts, you know, for others to follow,” she said.

Andrews reunited with her son when he was 32 and got to spend six years with him before he died of cancer.

It isn’t the first time that efforts are being made to pressure the federal government to admit its wrongdoing. The Senate social affairs committee issued a report on the topic in 2018.

In 2019, the government tabled a response to the report. In it, it acknowledged the trauma and outlined legal safeguards that had been put in place to prevent it from happening again.

Former senator Art Eggleton, who was involved in the investigation at the time, spoke at the Tuesday press conference.

It’s “important to relaunch this endeavour, both in the House of Commons and in the Senate, and to bring some closure to the issue,” he said, adding that it would include offering counselling services and helping to reunite those who want to meet their family members.

Nayler said her life was changed forever the moment her child was taken away.

She later married the father of her child, and the couple had three more children over the years but she never got over the pain of separation from her first born child, and dreamed and prayed every day to see her again.

Her prayers were answered, she said.

They were reunited when the child was 21, and have been part of each other lives ever since, Nayler said.

The first meeting between the two happened at a coffee shop.

“I just wanted to run up and hug her, but I was scared, too, because I didn’t want to scare her,” she said about the moment she saw her grown daughter for the first time.

She said she feels they were both robbed of more than two decades.

“She has trauma, I have trauma, there’s separation anxiety, and we had to get to know each other. Like, I got to know my daughter when she was an adult, instead of raising her from the day she was born,” she said.

Despite the horrendous experience, Nayler said she was among the lucky mothers as she got to spend a few hours after birth and was eventually reunited.

“They never got to see their baby’s face, they never get to hold their baby even once in their life,” she said. “Some mothers have died and they never got reunited with their children.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 31, 2026.

Sharif Hassan, The Canadian Press