Review: 'Stolen Babies' Exposes Systematic Cruelty Against Unmarried Mothers in the UK

Stolen Babies review – the scale of this cruelty is almost impossible to fathom

For decades, thousands of unmarried mothers in the UK were forced to give up their newborns after being denied pain relief in labour so they would ‘not be a bad girl again’. This harrowing documentary hears their stories The scale of the suffering at first threatens to make you numb to it. The 90-minute documentary Stolen Babies is as unsparing as it is unsentimental and opens with a bald statement of verified fact: “Between 1949 and 1976 over 250,000 unmarried mothers in the UK were forced i...

By Lucy Mangan