Marion McMillan was 17, pregnant and unmarried, when she made her first trip to England from her home in the south-west of Scotland. <\/p>\n
It was 1966 and she was sent by her family to a maternity home run by the Salvation Army more than 150 miles away, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.<\/p>\n
The young mum spent nine months with her baby – a beautiful boy with “gorgeous wee black hair” – before he was taken from her. <\/p>\n
She begged staff to let her keep him. “I said ‘please help me keep my baby, don’t let them take my baby, please’ and he was gone,” she told a new BBC documentary, Stolen Babies.<\/p>\n
Warning: This story contains racist language and descriptions of sexual abuse and violence<\/p>\n
It tells the stories of some of the 250,000 women who were forced to hand over their newborns for adoption between 1949 and 1976.<\/p>\n
They were powerless against the will of the state, social workers and religious organisations, and the system which supplied infants to adoptive families. <\/p>\n
“Let’s face it, we were working class unmarried girls having babies that were being adopted by middle class women,” another victim, Ann Keen, told the programme. <\/p>\n
For years many of the women kept their ordeal – their shame – secret. <\/p>\n
In July, outgoing prime minister Sir Keir Starmer issued a formal apology to those mothers, telling them: “The shame is not yours… the shame is ours.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marion McMillan was 17, pregnant and unmarried, when she made her first trip to England from her home…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":754198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-754197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=754197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/754198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=754197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=754197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=754197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}