Australia's Adoption Shame Our World

adoption in court -- industry. In this we's Our World, we look back at

the chilling story of Australia's shameful practice of forced

adoptions. I always felt worse than murder. I

believed for 30 years... I always knew that he was stolen

from me. All through the years. was tied up to the side of the bed.

My face was pushed into the mattress. They pushed my shoulder

down. Imagine having your baby forcibly

removed from you at birth. That is what happened to around 300,000

women in Australia. But after 50 years and a landmark move, they

finally received an apology from the government for this national

scandal. They took all our babies. The incomparable bond between a

mother and her newborn baby. Amanda Graziano is enjoying the pleasures

of nurturing macro one. But what if Raya was forcibly taken, given to a

number couple and never seen again by a man do? When they do come out

and you get to see them, and hold them, some of them and cuddle them,

it is really quite special. Being taken away, it would be

heartbreaking. They are your child. Decades ago, childbirth was a very

different experience in Australia. Especially for unmarried women. What

the cameras do not show is a secret world of coercion and lawbreaking by

hospitals, against unwed women, in a practice known as forced adoptions.

Natural emission -- emotions conflict with pangs of doubt, guilt

and the practical problems confronting her. Monica Jones is one

of hundreds of thousands of women who lived through the nightmare of

forced adoptions. She lost a son and a daughter, in an adoption she never

wanted, and which has traumatised her ever since. I went to Crown

Street on the 25th of April. 1966. I remember writing at the hospital. I

do not remember anything else until about a month later. I remember

waking up in a corridor. Blood was on my legs. That is the only part of

Crown Street that I remember. 1960s, she had been young and free

and your she became pregnant. She travelled to Sydney to give birth.

She arrived at the Crown Street Womens Hospital. For thousands of

women, it is now a daemonic place of anguished memories. Crown Street was

at the centre of the forced to adopt should world. -- forced adoption.

was punished because I had sex before I was married and got caught.

They told me that if I had my baby I would do the right thing by it and

give it up for adoption. That was drilled into me. But I was not fit

to mother it. She remembers being drugged but unaware of signing an

adoption consent form. You can't let go of people looking at you as if

you were a bit of dirt. Monica Posner hospital records hint at her

treatment. On one page, and unknown to her, the chilling initials, UB-,

were stamped. That was hospital shorthand for unmarried mother, baby

for adoption. I always felt worse than a murderer. Because I believed

for 30 years, that I had to my babies. That was the way I felt.

What sort of person would let someone take their baby? I've never

read -- forget begging to see her and not being allowed. Walking away

from the hospital knowing that your baby was still there and bringing

them up, and what I found from my records, what they did to me.

was no official policy, but in postwar conservative Australia,

hospitals came to routinely coerce young, pregnant, unmarried women,

into supplying the growing demand for adoptions. The women's shameful

be turned into an adoption game. For the thousands and thousands of

pregnant teenagers who were brought into hospitals like this one in

Sydney, long since closed, experience was terrifying. To be

brought into small room site this by a social worker and a nurse, who

spent hours persuading the gale of the awful consequences of giving

birth outside wedlock. Feeling tearful, coerced and bewildered, put

a signature on a consent form. hospital acts as one of Victoria's

adoption agencies. It arranged 355 adoptions last year. The moment a

teenager was led into an office to sign was recorded by the cameras.

This was a sanitised version of reality. How do you feel giving the

baby up for adoption? I know it will be hard but I will try my best.

think you will regret it later? hope not. It is something I will

have to find out. Hospitals wanted to give the appearance of

cooperation and consent, but the truth was that women were drugged,

had signatures forged, and were intimidated on a systematic scale.

Once the hospital had the name on the adoption consent form, the

chances of a mother keeping her baby were all but over. Maureen Melville

was another pregnant teenagers subject to our bearable by her

social worker. -- unbearable. Her idea was to wear me down. Made me

feel that I was inadequate being a mother. She had her agenda. That was

to get my baby from me. I looked over and I saw the nurse taking this

crying baby out of the room. Of course, I was thinking, my baby,

where's my baby? I was crying out to my baby but nobody was listening. It

was as if I was not there. To them, I was not there. What they need it

was done. They got the baby they wanted. I just remember standing

under the shower and crying and crying. Because... My babe -- my

body is telling me that I just had a baby, but I have no baby.

records were also secretly stamped with life changing initials for

adoption. I will never ever forget what they did to me until the day I

die. I hold them responsible. For all the illness and the pain and

suffering that I have suffered from the loss of my baby. They took all

our babies. How dare they. Take our babies. And just say, they are borne

on two adopted parents. Social workers were the ones usually

employed to intimidate pregnant teenagers into signing. This woman

was one of them. She does not want her face or name shown, but says

every kind of coercion was applied. The phrasing was along the lines of,

you are being selfish if you keep your child, you are being selfish to

yourself because you will not get a job, you will not get married, life

will be harder, you are being selfish to the baby because it will

not have as good a lifestyle, and you are also being selfish to these

adoptive parents, who cannot have a baby off their own and they will

love your child, love this child. You are bringing shame on your

family, in embarrassment in town. That sort of thing. She says that

she is now remorseful and regrets what she did. But she says no-one,

no matter how distressed they were, were allowed to leave her office

until they signed a consent form. They were seen as a nuisance,

troublemakers, Time wasters. Just signed the paper, have your baby and

go. Let's get the system rolling. The decision to have the baby

adopted is a ready-made for her. it was not just social workers,

there is, nurses and administrators are systematically and illegally

forced the teenagers to hand over their babies. These medical staff

give glimpses into the hardened attitudes of the time. I do like to

let the Goellner, if she particularly wants to know, most of

them do, the type of work the adopting father would do. The two

never meet. This nurse was also questioned about how adoption work,

especially when it came to young, unmarried women. Do you exert any

pressure at or on the gals? I know you have a list of people waiting

for babies. Don't you have pressure put upon you to persuade them to

give up their babies? Not really. If there is any buyers, and I do not

think there is a bias, but it would be in the opposite direction.

Because we are all young enough to be able to identify with the gals.

Lilly Arthur remembers it differently. She recalled the cold

nature of treatment by hospital staff. Nobody spoke to you. You are

basically locked up in the ward. With other young ladies all young

mothers. They just came and shoved medication at you. That was it. And

then just before I gave birth, I was tied up to the side of the bed. My

face was pushed into the mattress. I pushed my shoulder down. I delivered

my son, they took him straight out and hit him. She says that her

innocence was robbed, not by pregnancy, but by the brutal removal

of her newborn son. I was in a state of madness, thinking that this

child... Realising that he was gone forever. The shame was not with me.

It was with society. That could not bring itself to look after young

people like myself. It is where the shame belongs. The 1960s brought

sexual liberation, and invigorating decade, where the oppressiveness of

conformity was submerged by and are providing new sense of freedom. --

and electrifying new sense. At least for some. For a less privileged

majority, the existing constraints of obligation, duty and now,

especially in marriage, persisted. Pregnancy outside the structure of

wedlock remained a suffocating Tabou. But is -- I always knew my

son was stolen. I always knew that he was stolen from me. I carried the

resentment with me. One day I'm going to find him and tell him.

Everyone? Yes. Adoption surpasses losing a child through death.

their decision to give up a baby, many single mothers overlook the

reaction upon them. Psychiatrists believe that single women often

grieve for the loss of their babies. Some fall pregnant a second

time to compensate. The medical world knew the facts that mother and

child separation could bring. But in adoption industry has -- had

emerged. In one year alone, 10,000 adoptions were arranged. Including

one for this married couple. They were unaware that people like them

were getting babies from traumatised and armed wet mothers. Happy with

him? Yes.Couldn't you have children of your own? The doctors did not

give us too much hope. We had two miscarriages. Possibly a third. They

didn't give us too much hope so we applied for a adoption. We are sorry

we didn't do it earlier. Will you have more children? Yes. Definitely.

Now they must wait patiently for the fulfilment of the 30 day consent

period. This couple left with the dreams fulfilled. Dreams like this

often hit the ghastly reality that many babies were priced from their

mothers. Adopting parents rarely knew what was going on in their

moment of innocent euphoria. adoption, this child will escape the

handicap of its birth. The real mother will never set eyes on him,

and with all the love from the new Paris, he may never feel the loss.

In this case, one woman's loss could turn out to be someone else's gain.

The forced adoption scandal in Australia became the subject of a

year-long Senate enquiry. Hundreds of women testified regarding their

appalling experiences. The head of the enquiry concluded that there had

been systematic abuse of women's rights over several decades. Forced

adoptions had become an institutionalised practice that

exploited the social conditions of the day to supply a childless

married couples with babies. Every kind of excessive pressure was

documented. There was forgery of signatures on consent forms. There

were forms that were not signed. Women were being pressured under the

influence of drugs that they had been given during and after the

birth. They did not have a capacity, they were not legally

competent at that time to sign forms. Every form of coercion and

dodgy practice you could think of, we heard about it. In recent years,

some of the women had tried to bring prosecutions against the doctors and

social workers involved. Too much time has gone by. They could not

find witnesses, there has not been the evidence. At the end of all

this, there have been convictions and no one has been held to

account. The anguish inflicted on the mothers, fathers and children at

the centre of the story. -- for the. The sorrow and suffering of

forced adoption. In place of legal accountability, there has come

something else. An official and national apology. Today, this

parliament, on behalf of the Australian people, takes

responsibility and apologises for the policies and practices that

forced the separation of mothers from their babies which created a

lifelong legacy of pain and suffering. The former prime minister

said tens of thousands of women had been profoundly wrong. You were

given false assurances. You are forced to endure the coercion and

brutality of practices that were unethical, dishonest and in many

cases yearly cold. -- many cases, illegal. To those who have fought

for the truth to be heard, we hear respite from the horror of forced

adoptions, at least for some. Carolyn Brown had her son taken, and

is one of those who spent a lifetime finding him. Now she and Mark have

been reunited. Catching up on a lifetime of absences, experiences

and losses has not been easy. For both, it has left an unyielding

legacy of regret. I have grieved for the last 38 years. It is anger. It

is regret. I have never regretted anything in my life, except for not

fighting. That is the regret. He did not fight. I gave up. That has

haunted me all of my life. No. That is the biggest regret that. I did

not fight hard enough. For Mark, meeting his real mother has brought

joy, but also an erasable confusion. I find that today, people ask me,

how does it feel? I am still screwed. In my mind. My birth

certificate says different things. I am Mark Douglas Hartley. Eventually,

by the 1970s, laws, culture and attitude evolved. Single mothers

were granted financial rights, giving them greater independence.

Grand scale it -- adoptions dwindled, as IVF became more of an

option. Those changes have continued to this day. The controls on modern

adoptions, both strict are now unavoidable. Unmarried women now no

longer subject to barbaric and insensitive treatment by unethical

health professionals. For those whose youth and childbearing years

coincided with the cruel decades of forced adoptions, the memories

remain searing and indeed -- enduring. Many went on to have other

families in and out of wedlock. For generations of women, finally

getting an apology rings only limited relief in a lifetime spent

recoiling from a penetrating sense of injustice, and the loss of the

child. I will probably find some satisfaction in it, but I cannot

find healing. Just some satisfaction that it has been at watched --

acknowledged. They treated me with contempt. Apologies mean nothing,

because they had the opportunity to give them to me at the time. I could

have taken them on board, but not any more. It is too late for me. I

am to chronic in my situation. funny thing is, most of us mothers

thought it was just me. I had no idea there were hundreds of

thousands of other women like me. I always felt that I was the strange

one. I was the one who had this horrible secret, and if it ever got

out, --... I could have been a good mother to them. I have been a good