Diane Sheehan was 22 years old when she gave birth in a hospital in Australia, in September 1976.
She was never able to hold her baby. She was told he had died minutes after being born, and, devastated, she signed what she believed were hospital discharge papers before returning home empty-handed. For 42 years, she carried that grief without knowing that she had actually signed away her son for adoption.
Everything changed in 2018, when a man wrote to her, thinking she might be his biological mother. A DNA test confirmed it: the son she had mourned for more than four decades was alive. Her story ultimately revealed a systematic practice in Australia, where an estimated 250.000 single mothers were pressured or deceived into giving up their babies between the 50s and 70s. In 2013, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard issued a formal apology for the harm that affected entire generations of families.
