A young mother was told by nurses that her baby died at birth, only to receive an email from her son more than 40 years later.
Diane Sheehan, from New Zealand, was an unmarried 21-year-old when she had a baby in September 1976 at an Australian hospital.
Midwives almost immediately whisked her newborn away, however, without even letting her hold it or telling Diane the gender.
Her child, they insisted to Diane as she lay bleeding on the hospital trolley, was dead.
Diane recounted to MailOnline: ‘To everyone at the hospital, I was nothing short of a disgrace and my baby’s death just punishment for my terrible sin.’
But the discharge papers she was asked to sign were actually adoption papers – her baby boy was alive.
She discovered the truth 42 years later when her son, Simon, emailed her to say he believed Diane was his mother in 2018.
He included photographs of himself and his daughter, who was the spitting image of Diane.
‘It honestly felt like I was looking at a picture of myself as a child,’ Diane said.
‘In that moment, my whole world turned upside down. Forty-two years after leaving hospital with nothing but a broken heart and buried trauma, I was finally on my way to learning the shocking truth.’
Diane realised she had been a victim of a forced adoption, where thousands of children of ‘unfit parents’ were given to married couples in Australia.
Unwed mothers were deceived and threatened into giving up their babies from the Second World War until the 1970s.
Some medical officials and religious leaders believed it was better for the child’s welfare. In the 1960s, adoption rates for unwanted mothers – consented or otherwise – were as high as 60%.
The separation was often traumatic for the mother, father and the baby, leaving both with an increased risk of developing mental health conditions.
Some officials even forged consent documents to take the child of an unwed mum away, according to the support group for victims of forced adoptions, Wattle Place.
Diane said: ‘In my case, the authorities went one step further by lying to me that my baby had died, so I didn’t even get a chance to object.
‘Of course, no statistics exist citing how many poor young girls were victims of this particularly cruel crime.
‘If, like me, they’d kept their pregnancy secret, possibly hundreds went to their graves never knowing their child had lived.’
Diane, who was 63 when her son contacted her, said she moved to Canada to work as an au pair when she was 20. There, she met a farmer, Jason.
‘Of course, when we began having sex, we didn’t use contraception. Utterly naïve and hopelessly in love, it just didn’t occur to me,’ Diane said.
She later lost her job while visiting Jason, who was 30 at the time, so she moved to Sydney to work at a horse farm.
Diane began to feel nauseous and realised she was pregnant, saying: ‘My feelings of shame were so intense I didn’t consider telling anyone – not my family, or even Jason.’
When her contractions started one night, she asked her employer, Alice, to drive her to a local doctor as she was suffering from a ‘stomach-ache’.
Diane said: ‘I heard [the doctor] say, “Oh my God,” as he removed my overalls, and I saw the shock – and anger – on Alice’s face when the truth hit her.
‘She refused to even go with me to the hospital. The same attitude greeted me on the labour ward, where one glance at my ringless left hand told the medical staff everything they needed to know.’
Diane never even heard her baby boy cry after giving birth, instead watching her son be bundled into a stranger’s arms before being told he was dead.
She added: ‘The next thing I remember, some paperwork was thrust into my hand, and a cold voice told me I couldn’t leave until I’d signed the discharge papers. Like a robot, I did what I was told.’
Diane, who later married in 1987 and had three children, said she received an email from Simon while out for dinner in 2018.
He told her that he had been adopted at birth from the same hospital she attended, with a DNA test and a quick Google search sending him to his birth mother.
Simon sought Diane out after becoming a father, with both him and his adoptive parents having no idea he was put up for a forced adoption.
Many children went decades without knowing the truth as they were ‘closed adoptions’, which meant the original birth certificate, if one was issued, was sealed, Wattle Place says.
Diane flew from her Brisbane home to meet and hold in her arms her son for the first time in 42 years.
‘I couldn’t stop staring at him, unable to believe I could reach across the table and touch him. It felt impossible, yet wonderful,’ she said.
She told her family the news two days later, with her son, Daniel, saying he was excited to meet his new half-brother.
Diane added: ‘My relief was indescribable; I fell asleep with a smile on my face for the first time in decades. It was only after it lifted that I realised the true weight of what I’d been carrying all these years.’
The hospital had been torn down and its records destroyed years ago, Diane later discovered, so she decided not to pursue legal action.
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