An unwed mother shackled to a bed.MOV

A film that was submitted as evidence to the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into Past Adoption Practices, which was commissioned in 1998. It depicts an unwed mother who has just given birth, shackled to a bed with a pillow up to her face. The film made in 1967, depicts the scene in Australian labour wards during a period of Australian history known as the 'bumper adoption era' when the offspring of the unwed mother was removed without her authority at birth for adoption by married couples.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• The
• theft
• of
• babies
• in
• Australia
• during
• the
• 'bumper
• adoption
• era'

[LizzyBrew]

The Australian Association of Social Workers created a demand for 'illegitimate' babies after WWII, promoting the idea that the unmarried mother who kept her baby was psychologically disturbed.

[LizzyBrew]

Really! No, only unmarried mothers were shackled here, so as they could not get to their baby when it was born. The baby would then be removed to a locked adoption nursery and the mother, refused discharge from hospital until she signed adoption consent papers. Her file would then be marked 'socially cleared'. This was the practice at Crown Street.

[asynkronos]

I was tied down in the hospital bed and so was my roommate. It was at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. in 1967. I was 17 and my roommate was 16. No one told us anything. It is still agonizing to remember. I am an RN now. They induced labor and left us alone. They ignored us when we began screaming. My roommate hemorrhaged. We were not treated like mothers. Separating babies from their loving mothers is brutally abusive. Nothing and no one can justify it.

[karenwb]

We were shackled here in the USA, too. BUT when I had my first baby (in marriage) I was shackled then also! So single mothers in the UK were only shackled during the BSE? I'm confused. Were married mothers not shackled? I remember when my daughter was born (in marriag6, 1969e)... reaching my hand to touch the nurse with the shackles on. She yelled at me... said she was "sterile." Yeah, right...