05-03-2024, 03:47 PM
Most of our generation will have known women forced to give up their babies because they were unmarried. And it wasn't only here but in most UK countries & Oz.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/35018159...ogy-we-die
"National Women’s Hospital, Auckland, March 1972.
Unmarried 27-year-old Barbara Docherty gives birth to a healthy 9lb 9oz (4.3 kg) baby boy she names Jason. As the nurse takes him away, Barbara glimpses the top of his head, his dark hair. She asks the nurse to hand him to her: the nurse refuses.
That night, with only a few staff on duty, Barbara makes her way to the nursery, planning to pick up her son, feed him, see the colour of his eyes, his skin. Anything.
Again, a nurse refuses. “You’ve given him up for adoption.”
And in the section marked “Reasons for desiring adoption,” in bold capitals, “NO DESIRE.”
That’s because, as Barbara Docherty explains, there was never any such conversation. When the social worker briefly visited, contractions had already begun. “We didn’t discuss adoption at any point. I wanted to take my baby home.”
No matter. The report (contradictorily) records, “wants baby to have benefits of [indecipherable] home with two parents”.
Barbara Docherty is given pills — vitamins, she’s told — and discharged the next day, sent home with more pills to take.
Jason goes to his new family, with a new birth certificate and a new name.
Barbara doesn’t even get to say goodbye.
New Zealand wasn’t alone in this cruel practice: From the late 1940s until the early 1970s forced adoptions were widespread here and overseas.
Nobody knows the numbers affected in Aotearoa; there is no official record nor count.
But judging by figures in other countries, Barbara Docherty estimates as many as 100,000 families were impacted here: children stolen from their mothers under a state-knows-best policy that assumed they would be better off in the homes of married couples unable to conceive.
Elsewhere, governments have investigated and delivered apologies acknowledging how wrong it was.
“You know the sorrow and suffering of forced adoption,” then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard told affected Australian families in 2013, after an inquiry had found as many as 250,000 mothers had their babies taken.
“You were forced to endure the coercion and brutality of practices that were unethical, dishonest and in many cases illegal.”
In 2023, Wales and Scotland also apologised.
But international pressure for a separate, related inquiry remains: Those pills Barbara and other unmarried mothers were prescribed the world over were not vitamins at all.
It was DES (diethylstilboestrol, known as stilboestrol in New Zealand), a synthetic oestrogen given to birth mothers to suppress their lactation — dry up their milk — when their babies were snatched away.
In the decades since, DES has been linked to cancers and life-changing conditions not only in the mothers, but their children too: breast and vaginal cancers, gynaecological abnormalities and infertility for three generations, so far.
For New Zealand women given DES without consent, the issue is complicated by secrecy: birth mothers’ medical records “disappeared,” so they struggle to prove they were prescribed stilboestrol.There has been no systematic effort to establish exposure levels.
“Complicit in the cruel forced adoptions experiment were not just the government and churches, but also the medical and nursing professions,” says Barbara Docherty (herself a nurse who went on to have a long career in the health profession).
In 1996, the Commerce Committee (considering an Adoption Amendment Bill) strongly recommended an urgent inquiry be undertaken into practices over the previous 50 years. None happened.
In 2016, Maggie Wilkinson, whose daughter was taken from her against her will in 1964, petitioned Parliament for an inquiry. None happened.
Instead, the ultimate invalidation of an historical human rights violation: “Although we do not agree with many adoption practices from the 1950s to the 1980s, we note that these practices reflected the social values and attitudes of the time.”
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/35018159...ogy-we-die
"National Women’s Hospital, Auckland, March 1972.
Unmarried 27-year-old Barbara Docherty gives birth to a healthy 9lb 9oz (4.3 kg) baby boy she names Jason. As the nurse takes him away, Barbara glimpses the top of his head, his dark hair. She asks the nurse to hand him to her: the nurse refuses.
That night, with only a few staff on duty, Barbara makes her way to the nursery, planning to pick up her son, feed him, see the colour of his eyes, his skin. Anything.
Again, a nurse refuses. “You’ve given him up for adoption.”
And in the section marked “Reasons for desiring adoption,” in bold capitals, “NO DESIRE.”
That’s because, as Barbara Docherty explains, there was never any such conversation. When the social worker briefly visited, contractions had already begun. “We didn’t discuss adoption at any point. I wanted to take my baby home.”
No matter. The report (contradictorily) records, “wants baby to have benefits of [indecipherable] home with two parents”.
Barbara Docherty is given pills — vitamins, she’s told — and discharged the next day, sent home with more pills to take.
Jason goes to his new family, with a new birth certificate and a new name.
Barbara doesn’t even get to say goodbye.
New Zealand wasn’t alone in this cruel practice: From the late 1940s until the early 1970s forced adoptions were widespread here and overseas.
Nobody knows the numbers affected in Aotearoa; there is no official record nor count.
But judging by figures in other countries, Barbara Docherty estimates as many as 100,000 families were impacted here: children stolen from their mothers under a state-knows-best policy that assumed they would be better off in the homes of married couples unable to conceive.
Elsewhere, governments have investigated and delivered apologies acknowledging how wrong it was.
“You know the sorrow and suffering of forced adoption,” then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard told affected Australian families in 2013, after an inquiry had found as many as 250,000 mothers had their babies taken.
“You were forced to endure the coercion and brutality of practices that were unethical, dishonest and in many cases illegal.”
In 2023, Wales and Scotland also apologised.
But international pressure for a separate, related inquiry remains: Those pills Barbara and other unmarried mothers were prescribed the world over were not vitamins at all.
It was DES (diethylstilboestrol, known as stilboestrol in New Zealand), a synthetic oestrogen given to birth mothers to suppress their lactation — dry up their milk — when their babies were snatched away.
In the decades since, DES has been linked to cancers and life-changing conditions not only in the mothers, but their children too: breast and vaginal cancers, gynaecological abnormalities and infertility for three generations, so far.
For New Zealand women given DES without consent, the issue is complicated by secrecy: birth mothers’ medical records “disappeared,” so they struggle to prove they were prescribed stilboestrol.There has been no systematic effort to establish exposure levels.
“Complicit in the cruel forced adoptions experiment were not just the government and churches, but also the medical and nursing professions,” says Barbara Docherty (herself a nurse who went on to have a long career in the health profession).
In 1996, the Commerce Committee (considering an Adoption Amendment Bill) strongly recommended an urgent inquiry be undertaken into practices over the previous 50 years. None happened.
In 2016, Maggie Wilkinson, whose daughter was taken from her against her will in 1964, petitioned Parliament for an inquiry. None happened.
Instead, the ultimate invalidation of an historical human rights violation: “Although we do not agree with many adoption practices from the 1950s to the 1980s, we note that these practices reflected the social values and attitudes of the time.”
in order to be old & wise, you must first be young & stupid. (I'm still working on that.)
