Lovechild

If I were to mention the Stolen Generation, your quick little minds would immediately jump to the Indigenous children torn from their mothers during the early to mid 1900s. Maybe after a bit of thought you'd mention the Canadian equivalent, but you wouldn't imagine the atrocities occurring between middle class Anglo-Saxon women.

I'm not much of a television person, but on my mother's recommendation I sat down in front of the box last night and watched the new Australian drama Lovechild. Not far into the program I had the realisation that the forced adoption of underage mothers' children was essentially another case of a stolen generation.

If you're not familiar with the happenings of the mid-late 1900s, mothers-to-be who were underage or unwed were often handed over to the church for the term of their pregnancy. By their parents. Once the girls gave birth to their child, it was ripped from her and adopted out to families, sometimes (illegally) sold. These children grew up not knowing who their true mother was, just like the Indigenous children known as the Stolen Generation.

How do you feel about this? Do you think these children's and mothers' rights have been violated? Do they deserve an apology? If you have no opinion, or even if you do, I urge you to catch the next episode of Lovechild next Monday at 8:40pm. Maybe you'll see the fierce and independent young girls depicted in the program as a form of a real life femme fatale.