Marion McMillan was 17, pregnant and unmarried, when she made her first trip to England from her home in the south-west of Scotland.
It was 1966 and she was sent by her family to a maternity home run by the Salvation Army more than 150 miles away, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
The young mum spent nine months with her baby – a beautiful boy with “gorgeous wee black hair” – before he was taken from her.
She begged staff to let her keep him. “I said ‘please help me keep my baby, don’t let them take my baby, please’ and he was gone,” she told a new BBC documentary, Stolen Babies.
Warning: This story contains racist language and descriptions of sexual abuse and violence
It tells the stories of some of the 250,000 women who were forced to hand over their newborns for adoption between 1949 and 1976.
They were powerless against the will of the state, social workers and religious organisations, and the system which supplied infants to adoptive families.
“Let’s face it, we were working class unmarried girls having babies that were being adopted by middle class women,” another victim, Ann Keen, told the programme.
For years many of the women kept their ordeal – their shame – secret.
In July, outgoing prime minister Sir Keir Starmer issued a formal apology to those mothers, telling them: “The shame is not yours… the shame is ours.”
