The Handmaid’s Tale talked to a reality – and Stolen Babies documentary shows just that
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. It sounds like a scene from The Handmaid’s Tale. Between 1949 and 1976, over 250,000 young pregnant women were forced to give up their babies for adoption. Their newborn children were taken from them and given to childless, usually middle-class, couples regarded as more deserving parents. But this wasn’t a fictional dystopia; it happened here in the United Kingdom, where secretive mother and baby homes proliferated after the Second World War to deal with what was then seen as the problem of unmarried mothers – mainly working-class teenage girls, who’d often had little sex education. One of Sir Keir Starmer’s final acts as Prime Minister was to apologise on behalf of the British state to this scandal’s victims, women who are often now approaching the last years of their lives. There is much to apologise for. In making our documentary Stolen Babies, we spoke to many women and heard almost unbearably tragic stories of loss and lasting psychological damage. A protester holding up a placard outside Downing …
