The scandal of forced adoptions in the UK was branded “a stain on history” by Sir Keir Starmer. Still serving as Prime Minister when he issued an official apology for the outrage on July 2 this year, he told those affected: “The shame is not yours. The shame was never yours. The shame is ours.”
Now a groundbreaking BBC documentary, Stolen Babies, is telling the real story of what happened to more than 250,000 unmarried UK mothers between 1949 and 1976, who were coerced, bullied or misled into handing their newborn babies over for adoption.
Many were sent to mother and baby homes – isolated from their families. Babies were routinely removed from their mothers shortly after birth without proper, informed consent, in a scandal involving local authorities, health services (including early NHS hospitals) and faith-based or voluntary organisations, such as church-run homes.
And successive governments funded and supported the infrastructure enabling these disgraceful practices. Investigative journalist Marion Scott says: “This was state-sanctioned human rights abuse on a massive scale. Some mothers weren’t even allowed to look upon their baby’s face. These professional people – the nurses, the doctors – they all participated. I can only describe it as dystopian.”
Central London-based retired MP Ann Keen, 77, was 17 when she fell pregnant in 1966, and was forced into having her baby boy adopted. She says: “Working class unmarried girls were having babies that were being adopted by middle class women. I didn’t give him up for adoption… he was taken by the state.”
Working in a toilet roll factory in her teens, Ann was sexually assaulted by a salesman, horrifying her parents when she fell pregnant. Ann says: ‘They said, ‘how could you do this to us? This is dreadful’. I was sent away to a mum and baby home. I didn’t blame them. I blamed myself.”
During her labour at an NHS hospital in Swansea, Ann was refused pain relief. She says: “I was told I wouldn’t have anything for pain because I would remember it, and I wouldn’t be a bad girl again. They saw me as a woman that didn’t have any morality and therefore I wasn’t worthy of any help. I don’t believe, had I been married, that would have happened.”
Ann gave birth to a healthy baby boy. She recalls: “I loved being a mum. I was completely in love with my baby. Then, on the eighth day, when I woke up and went to see him, he wasn’t there. I was told by a cruel midwife, ‘oh, you won’t see him again. We told you not to get close. We’ve been watching you. He’s in that building over there. He’s waiting for his new mummy. You’ll never see him again. And you come with me’.
“She took me into this bathroom, put me in the bath, grabbed my breast, and said, ‘I’m getting rid of this milk, you won’t be needing it’. That was when I knew I’d lost everything. I grieved for him throughout my life. I still grieve for the baby.”
In 1995, Ann’s son, Mark, now 59, tracked her down and they were reunited after 27 years. She says: “A grown man walked into my house. It was the most incredible moment – emotional, frightening, wonderful. Here he was – my baby, real, and in my arms after all these years. We now have a brilliant relationship and I feel incredibly lucky. But my heart still breaks for all those lost years.”
Having campaigned for years for a government apology, she adds: “When it came, it was life changing. It was time for the shame to change sides.”
Annie Hair was a student nurse from 1973 in Edinburgh, going on to train as a midwife. She says: “As student nurses, we would be changing the baby, wrapping the baby and taking the baby out to feed.
“But these babies remained in the nursery. These unmarried mums were in the rooms without their babies. That separation made me sad. It seemed so final. These babies were being given up for a better life. That was the rhetoric. And it was nonsense. That’s the saddest bit.”
Wes Cuell, who was a social worker from 1971 to 2024, also remembers forced adoptions. He recalls the same rhetoric, saying: “You’re pregnant, you’re unmarried, there’s only one way out of this – adoption. Once we had the baby removed, the problem was solved.
“As a social worker, you weren’t actually taking the baby away from the mother. You never saw the mother cry, you never saw that last moment. You would remove the challenge and the burden from this poor mother and you’d magically hand it over to this always childless couple.”
Judy Baker, 77, of Ash, Surrey, who worked in HR, fell pregnant in 1967, aged 18 and unmarried, and her daughter was adopted at seven weeks. She says: “It was a machine that gathered vulnerable young women and left us broken. It’s wicked.”
As a pregnant teenager, Judy was quickly told by healthcare professionals about adoption. She says: “The hospital social worker came and said ‘don’t worry, dear, we can make this go away.’ It was cruelty wrapped up as kindness. It was just taken out of my hands and handed over to social workers, who would decide my future.”
Judy’s parents were supportive, but thought life would be hard for her as an unmarried mother, so the local moral welfare worker arranged for her to live in a mother and baby home as her pregnancy progressed.
After giving birth to her daughter, Judy spent seven weeks bonding with her. Then a letter arrived. Judy says: “It read, ‘I’m sure you will be pleased to hear that we have found a couple who seem to be the ideal parents for your daughter’. I had to be at their office, just behind John Lewis on Oxford Street in London, at 12.30 in two days’ time, a Wednesday. Can you believe that? Like she was a stuffed toy.”
Judy handed her baby over to a woman who took her away through a door. She says: “I went back down to where my mother was waiting for me feeling empty. We tried to go shopping, but neither of us could do it. Later that night we watched a film, and when a baby came on screen I broke down. The tears fell all night long.”
Judy never forgot her daughter, saying: “I had a good life. I lived abroad, I married a great man – and although I never had other children, I doted on other people’s.”
Judy met her daughter in 2000, thanks to them both entering their names on a database. She says: “We met on the Southbank in London. She was 32, but when I held her in my arms I knew she was mine.”
But their relationship’s been complicated, despite loving each other. She says: “There is so much trauma there. I’m a mother who was forced to part with her baby and she is a woman whose mother ‘gave her away’. It’s incredibly hard to heal from that.”
Judy says: “I loved my baby. Before she was born, when she was born, after she was born, and now. It’s so sad that I couldn’t celebrate that, because I wasn’t married and it was shameful not to be married and to be pregnant.”
Of Sir Keir’s apology, accompanied by a £4 million government support package over three years to help affected individuals access adoption records and counselling, Judy says: “It lifted the shame. I hold my head high now.”
*Stolen Babies is available on iPlayer from 6am on Monday 31 August and will be broadcast on BBC Two on Wednesday 2 September at 9pm.