Stolen Babies (BBC Iplayer)

No, but I’ll probably watch it.

I quite enjoy (perhaps wrong expression) these documentaries.

DH is Irish and we’ve watched a few things about those poor unmarried mums and mums to be, specifically in Ireland.

Such a travesty. So many many worse “crimes” than having sex before marriage and having a baby.

Shocking behaviour towards these young women.

The young or not so young men involved in making these babies often seem to “get off” scott free 😕😕

It wasn,t just Ireland or Catholic institutions it was UK wide .I know several people who were told to”get rid or get out” and they were from so called Christian families.
One girl whose parents threw her out at just 14!The father was in his 20s yet they blamed the girl.
She ended up giving her baby to a neighbour to raise and he was grown up before he knew his story .
I knew getting pregnant in my family was a no chance,my sister did aged 19 .
My mother went ballistic ,my sister left home and lived with a friend until her wedding that none of us were invited to.It took a long time to heal the rift though sadly she had a still birth at 30 weeks.
I remember my mother saying the neighbours would be counting the weeks between the wedding and the birth.
When people ,mainly older people moan about single mothers nowadays I ask if they,d prefer going back to the days when young women were vilified?
There are also many again older people who say there’s no excuse for unplanned pregnancies nowadays but no contraceptive is 100% reliable.Maybe we should remember those mother and baby homes before condemning single mothers.

Yes very moving programme. These young women were treated abysmally.
Why were the unmarried girls always blamed and not the men?

My other half and I watched it, how horrible for them ,how could anyone treat these young women like that, thank goodness no young girls have to go through that now,and that was right up till 1976.their parents just abandoned them.
well thank god things have changed

I don’t think single mothers are condemned at all. Certainly not in Australia. However, going back to the 1950s and 1960s they certainly were, frequently. Many women have children with no male around at all via surrogacy or IVF now. Times have changed.

Very moving, and rarely enough records for tracing.

When people go on about how much better things were "Back in the day" I think they should be reminded that all sorts of unacceptable things went on and this is just one example.

I found the piece about the man who made an underage girl pregnant and was found not guilty of any wrong doing, because she was seen to be a liar, particularly shocking.

The other men who made these women pregnant hardly got a mention in the programme and it is probable that in many cases they neither knew nor cared that they had fathered a child. I still shudder when I hear people say "She got herself pregnant."

Yes - a lot of things are worse now but a helluva lot are a whole stack better. Not in every country,though. You still have female oppression and child brides in some places and things like grooming gangs in parts of the UK .But that is swept under the carpet in much the same way as stealing babies used to be.

nanna8

Yes - a lot of things are worse now but a helluva lot are a whole stack better. Not in every country,though. You still have female oppression and child brides in some places and things like grooming gangs in parts of the UK .But that is swept under the carpet in much the same way as stealing babies used to be.

Grooming gangs across the whole of Europe, it’s not just “peculiar” to the UK.

Have absolutely no doubt that there are “paedophile rings” across the entire Western world.

I have watched now and was so sad.
Our culture, luckily has changed a great deal.
David Steel's abortion act of 1967 after which babies for adoption became much rarer must have been a factor.

I too was angry at the way fathers were hardly mentioned and rape was somehow the girl's fault!
Adoption was a term of abuse and babies being chosen almost from a catalogue. All shocking facts.

In my family history there are instances of babies being brought up by grandparents or other relatives unofficially without records kept, just gossip and legend.

After the 2nd world War there were even more so-called unwanted babies to adopt and a relative wanted a sister for their only son so adopted a baby girl. All she knows is her DF was Polish.

My DS and DBiL adopted 2 DC in the 1970s when married couples were encouraged to adopt mixed race children from care homes to blend with their own birth children. This came with its own difficulties and a lot of these adoptions broke down.

My daughter, now 28, had a boy in her class whose mother gave birth to him at 15.

When her parents discovered she was pregnant, too late to terminate, they literally threw her out of the family home. This was 1997.

I was utterly horrified and befriended her.

She didn’t work, had a string of very unsuitable partners, then gave birth to an another boy in 2002, and he was in our younger son’s class.

She was totally off the rails, but not on drugs.

At this time I was working evenings and had 3 young children. I encouraged (she said “made”) her to come to mother and baby groups, then mother and toddler as her second child grew older. Once our youngest started school together I started working days at our local jobcentre.

She was claiming income support.

I “encouraged” her to look for work, got her “interview” clothes courtesy of the jobcentre and she got part time work in our local Sainsbury. She met and married on of the deputy managers. She’s still at Sainsbury, she is now the shop manager and working full time, her husband moved to a different job. Three years ago they managed to purchase their own property.

I’ll never forget the horror of hearing her story and how casually her parents threw her out and cut her off without a penny to her name!

Shocking. I watched with DH & DS (50). Unusually we watched this in almost total silence. DH said he had no idea that sore of thing went on.
So pleased to see that some of the women were reunited with their children later but of course it should never have happened in the first place. Really felt for the girl who was raped by her teacher, and the girl (I think it might have been in the 80’s) whose father pushed her away when she told her parents. I do think those parents should take some of the blame as well as all the authorities

I too was angry at the way fathers were hardly mentioned and rape was somehow the girl's fault!
Adoption was a term of abuse and babies being chosen almost from a catalogue. All shocking.

Yes, There seemed to be no mention of them being immoral .

A very moving programme. My DH was born 4 months after his parents were married in 1951. His Mum was very lucky at for that time that she /they were supported by both families. Whether they married by choice or were not given the option we don’t know, it’s never spoken about.

I watched 'A House in Our Time' last night and it looked at Edinburgh in the 1930s. What those poor women had to go through who lived in the slum tenements was beyond belief.

One of my granddaughters had a baby in the middle of her final year at school. She returned as a mother the following year, completed her schooling and went on to uni for 4 years. She had lots of help from both sets of parents and 10 years later the couple married and had 2 more children. Very happy together and I am proud to have a great grandson of 15 - one of the many advantages of being a very,very young mother as a granddaughter.
What difference to how it used to be !

These were different times and had more parents supported their daughters thus woukd not have happened, but because of shame and terrible embarrassment most parents threw their daughters out or sent them to mother and baby homes to have the baby, before allowing them to return home with a tale about ‘a long visit with ‘relatives’.

The other option was to allow the baby back but brought up as an older sisters/ cousins child. Some of these fathers took responsibility willingly or took the shotgun wedding option but most carried on without censure. ‘Did they have to get married ‘ was a common question at the time. Judgmental attitudes were to the fore, by all.

There was no financial or any other help for girls who had babies while unwed, the shame was intense so the government and religious organisations took over their ‘care’.

I lived through those pre pill times and know how those who were left pregnant were treated, and no doubt those in authority were also harsh because of the views at the time, but watching the programme very little was mentioned about the majority of parents who were not prepared to support their pregnant daughters. Which led them having to find help elsewhere, certainly dangerous back street abortions were rife.

I am Not sure when financial and housing support for unmarried girls started, but as a social worker in the early 80s, I met a number who admitted they had deliberately become pregnant in order to be given a flat and financial benefits by the council.

Cossy Well done for caring

When I was ar primary school in the ‘50s, I had a friend who lived with her mother and grandparents. She said,when asked where her father was,that he had been killed in the war. No one questioned this I think.

I lost touch with the family but learnt about 15 years ago that my friend from primary school had died. I wrote to her mother who I knew still lived in the same house and she invited me to visit her when I was next in the city visiting my parents.

My husband and I did so and she obviously wanted to talk about J my friend. She said that she had never shared the information about J’s father with anyone but wanted us to know that he was the farmer on whose farm she was working in the war as part of the Land Army.

She said that when she told her parents in 1945 and asked where she should go,her father immediately said where else should she go but home to them.

She did so and J was a much loved granddaughter. Her mother died in her late 80s several years ago and told us that she felt she carried society’s stigma of being an unmarried mother all her life. Although she was a regular church goer,she always felt that she was not entitled to go to church on othering Sunday or join the Mothers’s Union.

It’s lovely that your friends family were so caring but ssad that her mum felt the stigma all her life.

it was awful the way girls were punished. i know i heard of girls being put in asylums for being wayward and promiscuous when in fact it was a case of rape instead. some of these girls were labelled as feeble minded so predators would take advantage of them.
the men were never named or punished for what they did which is wrong. a lot of the men must have a lot of children they did not own up to.
in those days men could also rape their wives as they wished and if it resulted in pregnancy so be it even if that would endanger the life of the woman.
there was a unmarried mums place in the 60s run by nuns at the convent. i am sure that those poor girls suffered

I'm not sure whether it was in this documentary or not , because there was a lot of publicity around these " mother and baby" homes a few months ago , but I noticed the case of one particular lady and the timing of her baby being stolen from her and adopted. It was 1966. In 1966 I was 13 and at an all girls Catholic Convent school and having no brothers, in that era, sex and men were right at the outside edges of my conciousness.I realised how deeply was ingrained in me the rejection of any idea of early pregnancy because of the shame attached to it. So that's where it came from.
Naturally I am on the side of these young mothers and the cruelty in separating a young girl, frightened and alone, just having given birth, from her baby literally beggars belief. I don't know how they got over it. Many I presume, didn't.The State apology was one of the last laudable acts of Keir Starmer.

I can clearly remember when aged about 14 in c1962 that my friend's sister was pregnant. She subsequently brought her child up at home with her parents and later married another man and had more children.

My mother on hearing about the pregnancy, warned my sister and me about casual sex but added no nice man will want to marry you if you already have an illegitimate child.

I questioned that back then and wondered if I would want to marry such a judgemental man!

Can't agree with you there Labradora Keir Starmer was merely playing to the gallery. How on earth is an apology from people who were in no way concerned going to help bio families. I have a vested interest of course.

I don’t know how it helps to get apologies from those who weren’t involved in whatever is being apologised for either, but there were a lot of women who wanted one, and they were in the public gallery when Starmer apologised.

If it helped them, the fact that I don’t understand why is matterless. It took a couple of minutes and cost nothing. How that can be used as yet another way to snipe at Starmer escapes me. Talk about scraping the barrel.