Government urged to apologise for state's role in 'horrendous' forced adoption scandal | ITV News

Описание: Chrissie Sharp is only now finding out the full truth about her birth and the extent of the "horrendous" suffering her mother faced having a baby as an unmarried woman in post-war Britain.

"My mum remembers she was scrubbing the floors when she went into labour," Chrissie told ITV News.

"She was nine months pregnant and scrubbing floors, and that's not what should have been happening. She wasn't given any pain relief during labour."

Jean Sanderson was sent to a Salvation Army institution in Newcastle by her family after she became pregnant "out of wedlock" in 1965.

Hopedene Maternity Home operated between 1950 and 1973 in the Elswick area of the city and has been described by survivors as a "place of cruelty" and "like a prison".

Chrissie said her adoption had already been arranged for after her birth, but her mother managed to keep her on the condition she worked for the home delivering babies - despite having no medical training.

"Yes, she was able to keep me, which was a miracle in itself, but the conditions of her staying there and what she had to do was horrendous," she said.

"Keeping me would have made her homeless, because she wouldn't have been allowed back to the family home, so to be able to stay at Hopedene she had to deliver babies.

"I like to think she would have been really empathetic, but on the flip-side if something went wrong and to be in that position and not really know what you're doing, it's just horrendous."

"We know things did go wrong for so many of those babies ... it's almost as if those little lives didn't matter as much," she added.

Chrissie contacted ITV News after seeing our report last month that revealed that 67 babies who died at Hopedene are buried in mass unmarked graves in a nearby cemetery.

Official burial records obtained by ITV News through a series of freedom of information requests show the number of deaths at Hopedene increased in the 1960s.

Dr Michael Lambert from Lancaster University has spent a decade examining these institutions and warned the findings could be "the tip of a much larger iceberg of human tragedy within the forced adoption scandal".

“The stories presented about the treatment of young, vulnerable, unmarried women at Hopedene are appalling even by the admittedly low standards of the day," he said.

Successive governments have previously said the state wasn’t directly involved in these practices but we’ve seen evidence in official files that they were funding, through local health authority grants, 171 homes across England, including Hopedene.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, whose department is leading on this issue, described historic forced adoption as a "stain on society", but fell short of confirming if the government will apologise to victims.

When asked by ITV News if she accepts the state's role in the scandal she said: "We're looking carefully at what campaigners are calling for.

"What happened to mothers and those children is a stain on our country. It was an abhorrent practice, and it had devastating impacts."


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