Add Stolen Babies to your watchlist
It sounds like a scene from The Handmaid’s Tale. Between 1949 and 1976, over 250,000 young pregnant women were forced to give up their babies for adoption. Their newborn children were taken from them and given to childless, usually middle-class, couples regarded as more deserving parents.
But this wasn’t a fictional dystopia; it happened here in the United Kingdom, where secretive mother and baby homes proliferated after the Second World War to deal with what was then seen as the problem of unmarried mothers – mainly working-class teenage girls, who’d often had little sex education.
One of Sir Keir Starmer’s final acts as Prime Minister was to apologise on behalf of the British state to this scandal’s victims, women who are often now approaching the last years of their lives. There is much to apologise for. In making our documentary Stolen Babies, we spoke to many women and heard almost unbearably tragic stories of loss and lasting psychological damage.
The regime at mother and baby homes was often based on cruelty rather than care; the girls punished for their perceived immorality. Many talked of demeaning and painful treatment, such as being made to scrub steps repeatedly when they were close to giving birth.
This cruelty continued at the hospitals where the girls had their babies. One mother, Marion, speaks in the documentary about being in heavy labour as a medical professional slapped her across the face because she had spoken. Or there’s Joan, who was 14 and still going through puberty. Her body was barely ready for childbirth, yet she was given no pain relief.
The greatest cruelty, of course, was to steal babies. Most of the births happened at NHS hospitals. These children weren’t always newborns; one mother’s son was taken from her after they had bonded for nine months because he was deemed “undesirable” due to his mixed heritage.
How was all this possible? The victims were girls in a society where people in positions of authority often decided what was best for them. Some genuinely believed they were acting in their best interests. One social worker we interviewed initially thought that by giving their babies to childless couples, while allowing the teenagers to continue their lives, he was doing a double social good.
Over 250,000 young women had their babies taken away from them
There is further darkness. Children with disabilities, those considered harder to place with childless couples, were sometimes denied medical care, allowed to die and buried, unmarked, in mass graves. Records recently revealed the location of one such burial, containing 45 bodies, near a mother and baby home in Kendal in Cumbria. There are likely to be more such sites.
So yes, Keir Starmer’s apology in Parliament for what happened in England and Wales (the devolved governments in Cardiff and Holyrood apologised three years previously) was very welcome. It was a great day for the surviving victims (several died while we made the documentary), and given his background as a human rights lawyer, it was particularly significant.
It shouldn’t end there. The last mother and baby home in England closed in 1985 – in Northern Ireland (where an apology is also expected) it was 1990 – but what happened is indicative more generally of the way women are treated in society, and that continues. Today there are examples of pregnant women whose rights to safe and effective care in the NHS have not been taken seriously.
The Handmaid’s Tale was a fiction that talked to a reality. Across the world, women’s reproductive rights are being challenged and women’s bodies scrutinised. The mother and baby homes are history now, but we must be vigilant to make sure nothing like this could ever happen again.
