Forced adoptions: At eight days old, my baby was taken from me
Shanti Das
While Christmas shopping in 1972, Ann Keen bought a bike for her five-year-old son. It had a bright red frame and stabilisers. It was “special”, Ann recalls. “I
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While Christmas shopping in 1972, Ann Keen bought a bike for her five-year-old son. It had a bright red frame and stabilisers. It was “special”, Ann recalls. “In my heart I wanted to have been able to buy it,” she says. “I wanted him to have a big present like that.” But she couldn’t give it to him; instead, she left it in the department store car park for another family to find.

The former Labour MP, then in her early twenties, had not seen her son since he was eight days old. Five years earlier — as a Beatles-mad, beehive-toting 17-year-old — she had brought shame upon her family by getting pregnant. In her small village of Ewloe, in Flintshire, north Wales, just over