Forced adoption Qld: Victim slams government response to calls for redress and compensation

A victim of the “barbaric crime” of forced adoption has told how her son was literally ripped from her womb, sharing her disgust at the response of Queensland’s Attorney-General to calls for redress and compensation.

Dorelle Downs doesn’t want an apology for the “barbaric crime” that literally ripped her beloved son Michael from her womb and denied them 23 precious years together.

She wants action by the State Government to change the statute of limitations so victims of the heinous forced adoption policy can claim compensation.

Mrs Downs, 71, is disgusted with the response of Queensland’s Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman after The Courier-Mail revealed the horror many women – and their children – have been living because of the removal practices that ran from 1951 to 1975.

Dorelle Downs.

Last Saturday Ms Fentiman said the government would “look at” a redress and “of course we have had an apology”, referring to the 2013 apology by then Prime Minister Julia Gillard to the more than 150,000 people affected.

Mrs Downs, of Miriam Vale south of Gladstone, is sick of rhetoric.

“An apology means nothing without redress,” she said.

In March, the Victorian Government committed $4 million to design a redress scheme, including an immediate $500,000 hardship fund providing payments of up to $10,000 to mothers in “exceptional circumstances” such as terminal illness or financial distress.

“If Victoria can do it, why can’t Queensland?” Mrs Downs said.

“Many of these women have now passed on, some at their own hands. Do we all have to die for governments to be rid of this?

“We continually hear about the Stolen Generations, but because we are the white stolen generation we don’t matter.”

Dorelle Downs was forced to give up her son and is advocating for change. Pics Adam Head

As it stands, Queenslanders cannot pursue compensation for forced adoption more than three years after it happened.

Mrs Downs has been fighting for more than a decade – with fellow victim Margaret Hamilton, of Warwick – to have the statute of limitations changed.

It was in 1970 at age 19, while working as a governess at a sheep station in Quilpie in western Queensland, that Moorooka-raised Mrs Downs became pregnant.

“I called my mother and she said, ‘well, you can’t come home’; she was ashamed and worried what the neighbours would think, and I was sent to the Anglican-run St Mary’s home for unmarried mothers in Toowong.

“I thought it was somewhere they’d help you look after your baby: how wrong I was.”

On August 23 of that year, Mrs Downs gave birth in the Royal Women’s Hospital in unduly painful circumstances.

“They cut me, an episiotomy without any anaesthetic, and ripped my baby out and took him straight out of the room,” she said, five decades failing to dull the awful memory.

“I later found out he was a boy, with crooked little fingers like I have, and I named him Michael.”

Dorelle had her baby taken away from her.

Mrs Downs said the nurses were “really nasty” and refused to let her see her son.

She held out as long as she could – 10 days in a hospital ward with mothers who’d miscarried – before the pressure from social workers to sign the adoption papers became too much.

“Governments, churches and institutions lied and deceived us,” she said.

“We weren’t told we had 30 days in which to revoke adoption ‘consent’.”

Traumatised, Mrs Downs moved to New Zealand in 1972 – “because I couldn’t stand to be in Australia without him” – and later adopted two children with her then husband.

“I tried several times to get Michael back,” she said.

“He had been placed in foster care with a view to adoption so I kept asking, why can’t I have him? And they said, ‘you signed that piece of paper, go away’.”

In 1993 when Mrs Downs was still trying to track down her son, Michael was also trying to find her.

“One day he called and said, ‘I think you could be my mum’.

“I asked, ‘have you got crooked little fingers?’ and he said yes and I said, ‘you’re mine’.”

In 2018, Michael, now 52, successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to have the adoption order discharged, his surname reinstated to Mrs Downs’ maiden name, and for her to be legally recognised as his mother.

But nothing can, or ever will, replace those stolen childhood years.

Mrs Downs said: “I regularly wonder how life would have been different for us both if he had not been kidnapped from the womb.

“It was a barbaric crime, and governments have had decades to rectify the wrongdoing.”

Originally published as Forced adoption Qld: Victim slams government response to calls for redress and compensation