English Catholics were tricked out of their babies too

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/18/english-catholics-tricked-out-of-babies

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We need to look closer to home (Scandal of Chile's baby-snatching priests, 16 May). Thousands of young unmarried girls in the UK were in a similar position in the 1950s to 70s. I like many others was coerced into giving up my baby in the 1965 by the Catholic church. My only crime was that I was not married. We were never told that we were entitled to free nursery places and that there was help out there to enable us to care for our babies. We were demoralised, browbeaten and humiliated by the church and made to carry out hard physical labour, such as scrubbing floors on our hands and knees until just before our babies were born.

We had pressure put on us by being told our babies would be shunned and called names at school and that they would hate us for keeping them and not giving them a father. We were tricked into allowing our babies to be taken out of the nursery for so-called doctor's examinations or to be checked over by the matron , only to have our babies given to adopters who were told that we didn't want our babies. We were left distraught and crying and just told to get on with it as we no longer had a child.

We were told that we were sinners, whores, bad girls and many more awful things were said to us. It was constant humiliation all day and they wore us down with their nastiness and we had nowhere to turn for help or support, as they made sure that they isolated us as much as possible. The ultimate argument was that we were under 21 years of age and so had to do as we were told. It is not just Chile and Ireland that treated unmarried mothers in this barbaric way and we have never had an apology from the Catholic church.Rosaleen DixonPrenton, Wirral