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It is estimated that up to 250,000 teenage mothers, mostly unmarried, were co-erced into giving up their babies for adoption between 1949 and 1976 in the UK.

Unbelievably, with no human rights, girls were told that they were not considered suitable to be a parent, they had brought shame on their families, no man would ever accept another man’s child and that a baby needed to be part of a traditional home with two parents in a loving environment.

Many families were reluctant to accept their daughters ‘little mistake’ into their homes and went along with the forced adoption believing that it was the best thing, rather than endure the social ostracization that went with having a daughter who was an unmarried mother.

Sometimes the girl’s mother agreed to pass the baby off as her own with the child growing up never knowing that their sister was, in fact, really their mother!

A dormitory in a Mother and Baby Home run by the Salvation Army in 1962. PIC: Contributed

One of the ‘Mother and Baby’ homes in Sheffield was St. Agatha’s on Broomsgrove Road. Operational between 1960 and 1979, this home was run by the Sheffield Diocesan Moral Welfare Council and was interdenominational.

It was usual for girls to enter the home, often known as ‘Homes for fallen women’ when they were seven months pregnant and stay for six weeks after the birth.

Conditions in the home were not comfortable and it could involve hard work like scrubbing floors.

For the birth they would usually be admitted to the Hallamshire, later Chapeltown Maternity Hospital where they were not always treated kindly by the staff, often elderly and unmarried who often viewed the girls as having low moral standards and unsympathetic to the pain they were enduring through the birth.

Around four weeks after the birth, they could be told one morning to get their baby ready for an inspection. The prospective parents would come to view the baby chosen for them. The child could be handed over with its mother having no chance to say goodbye.

Mixed-race babies or ones with obvious disabilities would not get chosen for adoption very easily. In any case there were plenty of white or so called ‘normal’ babies to adopt.

There are mothers today still trying to trace their children taken from them at that time.

Looking Back: The scandal of babies taken from their mothers in Sheffield