For decades, thousands of unmarried mothers in the UK were forced to give up their newborns after being denied pain relief in labour so they would ‘not be a bad girl again’. This harrowing documentary hears their stories
The scale of the suffering at first threatens to make you numb to it. The 90-minute documentary Stolen Babies is as unsparing as it is unsentimental and opens with a bald statement of verified fact: “Between 1949 and 1976 over 250,000 unmarried mothers in the UK were forced into handing their newborn babies over for adoption.” State apparatus facilitated this every step of the way, supported by religious institutions. These institutions ran, or were involved with running, the mother and baby homes to which the girls and young women were banished (“They do not quickly acknowledge themselves as sinners,” notes one report on its inmates), along with self-proclaimed moral welfare societies and the NHS.
The statistics are appalling. The details are worse. Some of the women whose stories are told in the film became pregnant by boyfriends. Some were victims of rape. Joan Chambers was 14 when a teacher took her for a walk in the woods. “I trusted him, I really did … All I remember was the pain. I honestly didn’t know what was happening.”
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