BBC2: Stolen Babies 02/09/2026

I watched it. It is appalling what these women and their children were put through. It was throughout the UK and Ireland. An enormous amount of damage was done to both mothers and their children. The effects are still very much in evidence today.

Indeed, my understanding is that the last of these dreadful mother and baby homes closed as recently as the early 1980s.

The idea was that unmarried, pregnant women and girls would go into the homes, have their babies, give them up for adoption and then return to their previous lives to carry on as if nothing had happened. As if you could ever just forget you had had a baby! How anyone could ever have thought that possible is beyond comprehension.

I think the state should go further than just an apology. They should fund a good tracing service for those who wish to use it, plus proper counselling and compensation too.

It’s just the same old medical misogyny, isn’t it? The girls were regarded as sinners, but the rapists and perverts who impregnated them got off scott free. I mean, why punish someone for being pregnant when they hardly conceived alone, did they?! It’s beyond any form of logic. And then the women who were complicit, absolutely evil. No pain relief?! It was essentially torture. Way more needs to be done and hefty compensation paid to the children who were stolen from their rightful mothers.

We do and we don't. We have different scandals now. Different normalisation of brutality. A friend works with teenage refugees, separated from all their family and friends from very early adolescence, whose lives were torn apart by war, who have travelled alone, in treacherous conditions, at the hands of brutal gangers and suffered real physical and emotional hardship and torture. They finally get to UK and we have no compassion for them. They are wicked, spongers, illegal etc. People campaign to send them back. Froth that they have hotel rooms to live in.

I also think the number of troubled teenage girls who had their breasts removed, supported by medics, charities, family members before they even understood what they really wanted from life or who they were... that will come back to bite our oh so enlightened society in decades to come.

It happened throughout the Uk, and in Eire. Of course it was cruel. Thankfully, we all deal with life better now.