Stolen Babies (BBC Iplayer)

No, but I’ll probably watch it.

I quite enjoy (perhaps wrong expression) these documentaries.

DH is Irish and we’ve watched a few things about those poor unmarried mums and mums to be, specifically in Ireland.

Such a travesty. So many many worse “crimes” than having sex before marriage and having a baby.

Shocking behaviour towards these young women.

The young or not so young men involved in making these babies often seem to “get off” scott free 😕😕

It wasn,t just Ireland or Catholic institutions it was UK wide .I know several people who were told to”get rid or get out” and they were from so called Christian families.
One girl whose parents threw her out at just 14!The father was in his 20s yet they blamed the girl.
She ended up giving her baby to a neighbour to raise and he was grown up before he knew his story .
I knew getting pregnant in my family was a no chance,my sister did aged 19 .
My mother went ballistic ,my sister left home and lived with a friend until her wedding that none of us were invited to.It took a long time to heal the rift though sadly she had a still birth at 30 weeks.
I remember my mother saying the neighbours would be counting the weeks between the wedding and the birth.
When people ,mainly older people moan about single mothers nowadays I ask if they,d prefer going back to the days when young women were vilified?
There are also many again older people who say there’s no excuse for unplanned pregnancies nowadays but no contraceptive is 100% reliable.Maybe we should remember those mother and baby homes before condemning single mothers.

Yes very moving programme. These young women were treated abysmally.
Why were the unmarried girls always blamed and not the men?

My other half and I watched it, how horrible for them ,how could anyone treat these young women like that, thank goodness no young girls have to go through that now,and that was right up till 1976.their parents just abandoned them.
well thank god things have changed

I don’t think single mothers are condemned at all. Certainly not in Australia. However, going back to the 1950s and 1960s they certainly were, frequently. Many women have children with no male around at all via surrogacy or IVF now. Times have changed.

Very moving, and rarely enough records for tracing.

When people go on about how much better things were "Back in the day" I think they should be reminded that all sorts of unacceptable things went on and this is just one example.

I found the piece about the man who made an underage girl pregnant and was found not guilty of any wrong doing, because she was seen to be a liar, particularly shocking.

The other men who made these women pregnant hardly got a mention in the programme and it is probable that in many cases they neither knew nor cared that they had fathered a child. I still shudder when I hear people say "She got herself pregnant."

Yes - a lot of things are worse now but a helluva lot are a whole stack better. Not in every country,though. You still have female oppression and child brides in some places and things like grooming gangs in parts of the UK .But that is swept under the carpet in much the same way as stealing babies used to be.