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I note from the minister’s statement that some of the women are now beyond the eligibility age for screening, which I think is 64. Given that life expectancy for women in Scotland is over 80, is there any scope for extending automatic screening eligibility to at least age 70, for not just those but for other women?

Mr Sweeney should really listen to me. I said that this is a bill to amend existing legislation, not introduce something new. That is the end of the debate.

I think that I am intervening—what am I doing? Oh yes, Mr Sweeney can intervene. I forgot why I was here. I thought that I was intervening, but I am not.

Will the member take an intervention?

I note that free lateral flow home testing kits can be made available online, but not everyone is online. The statement says that tests can be collected from community pharmacies, but I have a constituent who is unable to do that. Is it possible to provide a list of the community pharmacies where people can uplift those tests for themselves, rather than having to go online?

I noted the Deputy First Minister’s response to Mr Marra’s question about the eligibility criteria. I will press on with that issue.

I have a constituent who was abused when he attended school as a weekday boarder. Because he returned home at weekends, he does not meet the eligibility criteria. It is my view that, during those weekdays—I am paraphrasing the legislation—the institution took decisions about his care and upbringing and was morally responsible for his physical, social and emotional needs in place of the parents, in which it totally failed.

Are the eligibility criteria completely closed to any extension of the definition of “residential care”?

I congratulate Monica Lennon on securing this evening’s debate on an extremely important, sensitive and, indeed, heartbreaking issue.

I want to contribute to the debate as one of the few female members of the Parliament who was around as a teenager and a young woman in the 1960s and 1970s. I want to put the issue in the context of the time. Contraception was top secret. Young men would go to the barber’s to be offered “something for the weekend”. Contraception for women was not publicised or available except in the context of marriage and, even then, it was difficult to access. Parents—mine, at least—told their children nothing about sex. Indeed, it was almost a taboo subject. In my day at school, there was no sex education. We had to pick up bits of information from magazines, science textbooks and friends, and much of what friends said was often simply wrong.

“Good girls” did not have sex out of wedlock but, for boys, it could be put down to “sowing their wild oats”. Those terms were much in currency then, but how odd they sound now. The consequences of becoming pregnant for an unmarried girl were drastic, particularly for those for whom there was adoption under duress, of which I knew nothing then. The girl was labelled cruelly as “a slag” and her child as “a bastard”. Those are not terms that I endorse, but they were common and accepted parlance at the time.

In most cases, the girl’s options—the boy was not usually held to blame—were limited. If the family was supportive—some were—there could be a shotgun wedding to the father, who was usually young, too. Alternatively, as others have said, the child, once born, could be presented as the child of the grandmother and the child’s mother as a sibling. The other options were adoption, often under family pressure or what later became known as institutional duress, and, of course, illegal abortion and all the ensuing dangers.

That was the culture of the day, to which I, like my peers, subscribed. The contraception that was used by most girls and young women then was fear of pregnancy and that alone. It was only with the introduction of the contraceptive pill that women were able to take control of their sex lives and relationships, and when and if they had children. That had a huge liberating impact on them. As I look back on those days through the prism of retrospect, I say now that it was so wrong and so unfair to women, who often paid a huge price: entering too young into marriages that were unhappy for both parties; masquerading as a sister of the baby; abortion; or forced adoption.

This is more controversial. Do I think that current Governments should apologise? The wrongs that were committed were not wrongs against the pervading culture but wrongs that were in tune with it. In general terms, the question is whether it is relevant to ask those who are in power today to apologise for historical actions that society willingly accepted at the time. That is why I hesitate to support what are known as official apologies. I recognise why women seek them, but I sometimes wonder what their value is in real terms.

As I said, I want us to examine how far back we should go and who else will come along, but by no means am I diminishing what happened to those women. I want to separate the pain and anguish caused by institutions and individuals from the general question of official apologies, where we are going with them, what they mean, how far back we have to go, which cases we take up, and so on. This is an important matter to explore, and I have threaded it into this debate because I feel a certain discomfort when we say that we will just badge everything with an official apology. I think that that is worth discussing.

We should seek apologies from those individuals and institutions that were to blame. Thankfully, today we have different values. Women and their rights have come a long way, although there is still much to do. Adoption laws have moved on; I remember it happening when I was a lawyer. The biological parents in an adoption can retain rights to contact with their child. They used just to be wiped away, and that was bad.

We must recognise the awful pain and guilt that these mothers, who were often young, endured then and endure to this day. As a mother of two, I cannot begin to understand how awful it must feel for them. We need to help them to reconnect—if they wish, and if it is appropriate, to do so—through the various agencies with their children, who are now grown-ups. That is what Governments today should do, while recognising so much that was wrong all those decades ago by initiating an inquiry, supporting and helping those mothers when such support and help are needed and requested, and calling to account those who are to blame.

That is an interesting debating point, but we would then have to decide how far back to go and what particular wrongs that we now recognise as wrongs should be apologised for. Do we rank them? There is a big philosophical debate to be had here and I had to say what I have said because I have always had issues with us taking this route without proper consideration.

This is a personal view and nothing to do with the Government. Even in that case, I thought, “What is this about an official apology?” What we need to do is right the wrongs of today. In my view, if we go back through history, where do we stop? What things do we apologise officially for, and what do we not apologise for?

Do not think for one minute that I am diminishing the position of the women. I knew that it would be a difficult point, but I felt that it is necessary to say it. Sometimes we use an official apology as a solution when it is not.

I will come to Monica Lennon’s point about homosexuals. Just as homosexuals were once pilloried, even criminalised, the blame does not lie on those today or even on those in the past—not if society willingly accepted those moral rules, wrong and cruel as we now correctly say they are. We cannot apologise for everything in the past that is rightly seen as wrong today, even though it was very wrong. Each generation must be responsible for the mores by which it lives and regulates its citizens, if it is done by the consent of the citizens.

However, when historical actions breach the laws and morals of that society, there must be accountability. Forced adoption, by its very terms, was morally and legally wrong. That is why I support a UK-wide inquiry into which institutions are responsible for those actions. It is they who should be held to account and from whom apologies, at the very least, are due. I am talking about continuing institutions.