Thursday, March 10, 2011

In this day and age

I found this story astonishing. In the year of my birth,  about a mile from where I lived, a teenage girl was being sectioned under the mental health act for the crime of having a baby. That boy, a few months older than me, was adopted, and has never known his mother.  I thought this kind of barbarity had stopped before the war - it's a shock to know it was still going on in my lifetime. There's a happy end, of a kind - but as the woman's second-born son says, she's the victim here.

2 comments:

Dawn Robinson-Walsh said...

Oddly, for me, many years ago I worked a summer vacation in an old people's home, where I encountered a lady who had spent her entire life institutionalised because she had become pregnant outside marriage. I suspect George the Butcher (the father) was able to go on and live a normal life, while she was sectioned and spent all her life in a psychiatric hospital until she moved on to geriatric care. Awful.

Rob said...

Unbelievable. It's appalling that this was allowed to go on, and until relatively recently.