That way she would remember
When Ann Keen gave birth, the midwives refused to give her anything for the pain. That way, they told her, she would remember it and learn not to be so wicked again. To be treated like an animal in labour, denied the most basic compassion and respect, was simply part of the punishment she had supposedly earned for getting pregnant out of wedlock aged 17. The hospital discharged her without any follow-up care, as if the birth had never happened. But the most grievous part of the story is that she also went home without her baby.
For Keen is one of a still unknown number of unmarried British women coerced into handing over their newborns for adoption between the 1950s and the late 1970s, who are now seeking an apology from Boris Johnson on behalf of the governments of the day. But perhaps just as importantly, they want it acknowledged that they didn’t give their children up willingly. Some were told that if they loved their babies they would want them raised by respectable married couples, not under the shadow of illegitimacy.
It’s not ideal for a 17-year-old, married or not, to be raising a baby. Human puberty happens way before human maturity. But the mitigation for that is social assistance (and adoption if the mother wants it), not bullying the mother into abandoning the baby.
Instead of being briefed about the financial support to which they might be entitled, they were warned that keeping the baby would bring great hardship on their families. And while some consented to adoption under this kind of duress, others say forms were simply signed on their behalf by parents or so-called “moral welfare workers” supervising adoptions…
Oppressive morality, cloaked in religion, is the obvious explanation for how such unthinkable things could have happened. Pregnant teenagers such as Keen would be shipped off by their mortified parents to church-run mother-and-baby homes to hide them from the neighbours, and adoptions were often arranged through church-run agencies
Funny how the god-bothering agencies punished the girls but not the boys or men who got them pregnant.
At the heart of almost every account of a public scandal I have read are people who have somehow become dehumanised in the eyes of officialdom; whose feelings were deemed not to matter.
This particular, often unthinking breed of contempt is there in accounts of how police officers yawned through interviews with Girl A, the gang-raped victim of child sexual exploitation in Rochdale, whose case was initially dropped because they considered her trouble: promiscuous, damaged, not a credible witness. It’s there in the shocking stories of the Windrush generation’s treatment at the hands of the Home Office, and in accounts tumbling out in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire about how residents’ safety fears were dismissed.
Sorry, we’re all busy attending $5000 dinner parties to discuss how racist we are.
This is so upsetting. :-(
I have had Christian friends tell me women should not get any sort of pain relief during labor. They were supposed to bring forth babies in pain because Eve ate a piece of fruit 10,000 years ago.
It’s a sick worldview.
“the midwives refused to give her anything for the pain. That way, they told her, she would remember it and learn not to be so wicked again.”
The original article is restricted by neo-paywall, maybe there are nuances I’m missing, but this is the BBC . . .
If “midwives” weren’t involved, would the mothers have been offered pain relief?
In the UK and in Ireland, midwives are fully-trained and qualified nurses who have taken further training and qualifications in birth management. A team of midwives, from junior to senior, are overseen by an obstetrician at each hospital. They do all the attendance at births. The obstetrician is only called in if there is a complication.
Sadly, they aren’t immune to falling for midwifery fads, and unfortunately it’s rarely possible for a labouring woman to be able to choose who attends them. I had no pain relief whatsoever for my second (UK); who was an emergency forceps delivery because the midwife refused to believe me that he had turned around overnight and was breech, until his legs came out first. Compared to that pain, a heart attack is merely uncomfortable.
My mother was upper-middle-class and 21. The only reason I was adopted was that she had to be punished.
Ouch. That’s horrifying, Laurel.