Separated at birth
Carol Maney never got to hold her baby, or even see him. She didn’t know if she had given birth to a boy or a girl. She remembers her waters breaking and then waking up in an operating theatre with green tiles and chrome. All she knew was that she had gone to bed pregnant and woken with a torn birth canal and stitches.
“I was cold, I woke up, I got off the bed and all this blood went everywhere. The nurse came in and told me off for making a mess. For nine days I had no memory. I think I was drugged the whole time,” she tells The Weekly. And she was traumatised.
When Carol came to, her baby was gone, ripped away. She was 17 years old, alone, without support – a naïve, unformed country girl who hadn’t even known how babies were made. To avoid bringing shame on the family, she had been sent to Elim House, an institution in Hobart, Tasmania, where pregnant girls could avoid the social disgrace of a child out of wedlock – of loose morals – where, for the term of their pregnancy, they could disappear.
Run by The Salvation Army, it was a brutal place. “It was dreadful,” says Carol. “We were treated like rubbish, as if we were nothing, like we were not
