Maggie Wilkinson. Photo: Rebecca Wilkinson
A woman whose newborn baby was taken from her while she was sleeping in an Anglican-run home for unwed mothers wants the church to issue a public apology and the country's adoption laws replaced.
Maggie Wilkinson is now 80-years-old but she remembers the distressing day the matron removed her baby against her will like it was yesterday.
She said it was an abduction and other young women experienced similar trauma.
She was among witnesses to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care - the lengthy report will be made public later this month.
It was 1964 in Whakatāne and Wilkinson's parents were devastated their daughter was with child, her boyfriend refusing to take responsibility.
Three months pregnant, aged 19, she went to St Mary's Women's Home in Auckland - a place that from the reception room, looked like a sanctuary.
"Mum and Dad left and the door into the interior was opened and it slammed shut behind me and I was in what I can only describe as a hellhole."
There were around 20 young pregnant women at the home, some of them had intellectual disabilities - all forced to do heavy manual work and given little to eat so they would have small babies.
Wilkinson said the matron, Rhoda Gallagher, ruled the place - she has since died.
"I could write a book about her. She was smiley one minute, yelling and screaming the next. She was giggly around our allotted doctors and any male that came in."
Wilkinson said the matron controlled the young women in her care, institutionalising them.
Maggie Wilkinson fell pregnant at the age of 19. Photo: Supplied
"She was cruel. She was obviously totally into the religion, the Anglican religion. And we were sinners and it was her job to punish us, rehabilitate us before she let us loose on the world again and in the meantime, take our children.
There was much misogyny.
"We were seen as dirty girls. We have some and we were sinners and that was it."
At the time, Wilkinson asked to keep her child, and plunged into depression when she was told her baby would be adopted.
"When Mum and Dad came up and visited, she had got to them first and said that I wanted to keep my child but that I was not the sort to cope," she said.
"I've since learned when talking with other woman who ended up there, she did the same thing, the exact same words to others' parents."
Induced into labour as a punishment, Wilkinson had only moments with her newborn daughter.
"I put my arm over my baby and I said 'please don't take her away'. I don't know whether they gave me sleeping whatever, I don't know but I went to sleep, I woke, she was gone."
Wilkinson said she was devastated - she remembers wanting to flee with her baby but not knowing where to run and feeling frozen by grief.
"My child was abducted from the room she was born in and she was kept concealed from me which was against the law but this matron did it."
She was forced to sign adoption papers.
"They made me sign, place my hand on the Bible and say that I'll never try and find my daughter. That is not in the legislation, but it was really good emotional blackmail."
Given medication to stop lactation and with her breasts tightly bound, she left the home two weeks after giving birth, struggling with physical complications from the difficult labour.
Wilkinson spent years trying to find her daughter but was told medical and other records had been destroyed in a fire when a hot water tank burst.
St Mary's Family Home in Ōtāhuhu, photographed in 1998. Photo: Bruce Madgwick / Auckland Council Libraries
She suffered constant bleeding as a result of birth injuries and struggled with depression. She knew other women with the same trauma who lost their battles with mental illness.
She later married and had two children - and after years of silence, found her voice with other survivors lobbying for change.
Now she wants the Adoption Act repealed and replaced to give mothers and children more rights.
"That Act erased me, it erased mothers totally, we didn't exist on the planet as far as that law was concerned. Our children were treated as blank slates, meaning they could be flicked off to anyone who wanted one and that is so very wrong."
Wilkinson also wants a memorial made as a place for survivors of the home for unwed mothers to gather.
She reunited with her daughter 18 years after she was taken at birth - for which she is overwhelmingly thankful - but said it is not a fairytale.
"People say 'oh how wonderful', do they really want to go through that hell for that moment? People don't get it, they seem to think adoption, losing your child, is a rescue story, a wonderful Disney rescue story. It's not."
After years trying to seek justice, Wilkinson received a personal apology and accepted funding from the Anglican church for legal expenses and a contribution towards legal aid, but said it never will compensate for the loss of her first child.
She now wants the church to publicly apologise for the harm inflicted on young women sent to the home to have their babies taken.
St Mary's Women's Home opened for unwed mothers in 1904 and was formally renamed St Mary's Family Home in 1983, by which time it operated as
a social centre for mothers and children.
