Whether you’ve known your baby for 50 years or 50 seconds, a parent suffering the loss of a child is in practically an inconceivable amount of pain. But to be told your child is dead at birth and then find out he was secretly whisked away? That’s a pain all of its own, and one that Diane Sheehan, of New Zealand, knows all too much about.
According to an essay Sheehan wrote for The Daily Mail, it was 1976 when she found herself pregnant and unwed at the age of 21. When she gave birth at a hospital in Australia, nurses took away her baby without so much as telling her the gender. In fact, they told her that her baby had died.
“To everyone at the hospital, I was nothing short of a disgrace and my baby’s death just punishment for my terrible sin,” she told the newspaper.
Over 40 years later, Sheehan received an email out of the blue from a stranger who claimed to be her son and sent her pictures of himself and his daughter, who was reportedly a spitting image of Sheehan, according to Metro UK.
It was the first thread to give in the unraveling of the truth behind that fateful day in the hospital. She discovered she was actually a victim of forced adoption. The young woman was coerced into signing adoption papers she was told were release papers, and hers is sadly just one case of hundreds from World War II to the late ’70s. For decades, women that hospitals deemed “unfit” mothers were lied to and even threatened to give up their children.
Sheehan claimed she was “so ashamed” that she never told anyone in her family or even the father of the child that she was pregnant, and her “ringless left finger” made her the perfect victim of the crime of forced adoption.
“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,” Sheehan claimed in her essay. “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.”
The mom tried pushing past her grief and was eventually married in 1987, going on to have three children with her husband. When she received the email in 2018, she learned her son Simon and his adoptive parents had no idea he was put up for forced adoption. The two were able to meet for the first time, and Sheehan described it as bewildering.
“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 shared. “‘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 realized the true weight of what I’d been carrying all these years.”
After meeting, she told her family about Simon and his daughter, and they were all able to meet and form new memories.
The hospital that inflicted this horror on the family has since been torn down.
