The Second World War and Its Aftermath

Abstract

Dealing with issues arising from the practice of adoption was clearly not a priority in the initial years of the war. Policymakers and practitioners dealing with children had more immediate problems to cope with — organising the successive evacuation programmes and setting up war nurseries. But gradually adoption did again become a topic of concern and the particular problems brought up by wartime will be considered in this chapter. As during the First World War, the number of illegitimate births rose during the war years but this time the general birth rate only declined in the first years of the war, and from 1942 it was higher than it had been from the mid-1930s onwards so the percentage of births that were illegitimate did not go up as much as it might have done. Even so, it reached 9.3 per cent, the highest level it had ever been, in 1945 although then it rapidly started to fall back closer to its pre-war rate.¹ The true rate may have been higher because considerable numbers of married women had babies by men who were not their husbands during the later years of the war. Some were declared as illegitimate births but not all. Accompanying the increase in illegitimacy there was a considerable rise in the number of adoptions, with a peak of over 21,000 in 1946 (most of which would have been babies or children born or conceived during the war).