Within minutes of giving birth in 1969 at the Crown Street Women’s Hospital in Sydney, Christine Cole’s newborn daughter was taken away from her by staff.
“I was pushed back onto the bed by three nurses. The pillow was placed back on my chest and the midwife at the end of the bed said, ‘This has got nothing to do with you,’” recalls Cole, now a prominent human-rights activist and scholar.
In the days leading up to the birth, Cole—then aged 16—had been dosed with barbiturate drugs and other sedatives and then induced into labor. Afterwards, she was given milk-drying hormones and carted off to a facility miles from the hospital to prevent any contact with her newborn.
“I had not signed any adoption consent,” she says, “this was presuming that my baby was going to be taken for adoption, irrespective of what I wanted.”
The removal of Cole’s daughter was part of a record boom in the adoption industry in Australia at the time, which saw an up to an estimated 150,000 babies adopted between 1950 and 1985.
Read more on Broadly
The Painful Legacy of Australia’s Forced Adoption Policy
