The Catholic Church continued to pressure unmarried mothers into giving up their babies for adoption well into the 1980s, despite this practice supposedly being ended by the Adoption Act 1976, The Mail on Sunday has revealed. Julia Macklin, now 60, says her Catholic parents and parish priest forced her to give up her daughter for adoption in 1983 when she was 15, using threats against her father's teaching career to secure compliance. This matters because it extends the known timeline of Britain's forced adoption scandal beyond the period officially recognised by government, and beyond the scope of a recent apology from the outgoing Prime Minister.

Around 250,000 forced adoptions took place before 1976, and Sir Keir Starmer formally apologised in July to women affected up to that year, but this apology did not cover later cases like Macklin's. She gave birth to her daughter, Siobhan, in March 1983 at St Mary's Hospital, Manchester, and the baby was taken for adoption by a Catholic couple through the Catholic Children's Rescue Society two weeks later; the pair were not reunited until 2001, when Siobhan turned 18. Macklin, believed to be the first mother to speak publicly about being forced into adoption in the 1980s, is now seeking her daughter's adoption records, held by Salford City Council, to prove she was coerced, and has shared her story in a BBC documentary called Stolen Babies.