Marion McMillan says adoption took her baby after nine months at a Salvation Army maternity home in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1966. She said she was 17 when she arrived there, and that she begged staff: "please help me keep my baby, don't let them take my baby, please".
Her case sits inside a wider pattern. The documentary Stolen Babies tells the stories of 250,000 women who were forced to hand over newborns for adoption between 1949 and 1976, in a system that left them powerless against the state, social workers and religious organisations.
Marion McMillan in 1966
McMillan made her first trip to England from the south-west of Scotland in 1966. She said she had fallen in love with a refugee from Pakistan when she was 17, and that she became pregnant out of wedlock at 17. Her boyfriend told her, "Nobody will want you to go with a black man, Marion," and in their last conversation suggested emigrating to Hawaii.
She was sent by her family to a Salvation Army home in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She said she spent nine months with her baby before he was taken from her.
Stolen Babies and Sir Keir Starmer
Ann Keen said on the programme, "Let's face it, we were working class unmarried girls having babies that were being adopted by middle class women." Her remark places McMillan's experience inside the account given by the documentary: unmarried mothers were separated from their newborns and, for many, the loss was kept quiet for years.
In July, Sir Keir Starmer issued a formal apology to the mothers. He said, "The shame is not yours... the shame is ours." That apology did not change McMillan's account of what happened in 1966, but it did put the issue back into the open for women who were pushed through the same system.
After the apology
The immediate next step in the story is not another procedure or hearing. It is whether the mothers named in Stolen Babies can use the renewed attention to ask what happened to the children taken from them, including McMillan's baby. That is the question her account leaves behind.
