David Batty

It seemed good.

And we went around and looked at the exhibits.

You know, she was on very good form.

She was very chatty.

And then she brought out all these photos of her family.

All of a sudden, I'm just confronted with all these people who I can recognise like a feature or something there.

Crazy.

It is surreal because, you know, you've got, this is somebody who you've got the most intimate connection with.

This is the person who gave you life.

But they're also a stranger and they have not been in your life for over 30 years.

She remembered me and obviously I didn't remember her.

Well, we're talking about a period of time from post-Second World War to probably the mid-1970s, but the practice is believed to have continued into the early or mid-80s, where if a teenage girl or young woman got pregnant and she wasn't married...

she was deemed to be unfit to keep that child.

And any kind of attempt by her to keep that child was seen as a moral failing in itself.

So yes, it was very much from this very particular kind of judgmental Christian approach of moral welfare.

So the concept was that it was in the best interest of both the child and the mother

for the child to be given up because what a child needed was a nice, normal, nuclear family.

My birth mother had said on a number of occasions that effectively she'd been pressured and coerced.

So having that additional understanding of what had gone on, and this was a systemic process,

thing that has affected tens of thousands of women over several decades and tens of thousands of women and tens of thousands of babies.