About 20 young pregnant women were at the home, some of them with intellectual disabilities. All were forced to do heavy manual work and given little to eat so they would have small babies.
St Mary's maternity home closed in the 1970s. Photo / Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections, photographer Bruce Madgwick, Ōtāhuhu Historical Society
Wilkinson said the matron – Rhoda Gallagher, who has since died – ruled the place.
“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.
“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 . . . were sinners and that was it.”
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 women 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.”
Maggie Wilkinson remembers the distressing day the matron removed her baby against her will as if it were yesterday. Photo / Mike Scott
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.
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.
Eighteen years after the traumatic separation, Wilkinson was reunited with her daughter – for which she is overwhelmingly thankful – but said it is not a fairytale.
“People say, ‘Oh how wonderful’, [but] 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 of 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 would 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.
