A terrible act of inhumanity that shows why justice must never be secret

Throughout all my years reporting on scores of chilling examples of what social workers are allowed to do behind the closed doors of our secret family courts, the case reported yesterday on the front page of the Daily Mail is not just the most disturbing of all.

It also illustrates how far our ‘child protection’ system has now gone horrendously off the rails. The facts are so shocking they beggar belief.

A pregnant Italian mother who was visiting Britain had her baby forcibly removed from her womb by British doctors on the orders of a secret court, before the child was handed to social workers.

This 35-year-old mother, who suffers from a bipolar condition, was visiting Britain for a two‑week training course with Ryanair at Stansted airport.

Preparing to return home to Italy, having successfully passed the course, she had a bipolar episode at the airport and became over-excitable when she thought she had mislaid the passports of her two daughters who were still in Italy. She contacted the police for help.

When they arrived, she was on the phone to her mother, so she handed one of the officers the receiver. The mother explained to the police about her daughter’s mental condition and said she had not been taking the medication and needed to calm her down.

The police then apparently contacted Essex social workers — as they are routinely instructed to do in such cases — and told the woman they were taking her to ‘a hospital to check that your baby is OK’.

On arrival, she was startled to find that it was a psychiatric hospital.

She protested that she wanted to return to her hotel, but was forcibly restrained, sectioned under the Mental Health Act and told she must remain in the psychiatric hospital.

What happened next, however, was truly astounding.

Having been held there for five weeks, pleading many times to be given permission to return to Italy, she was told one morning that she would not be allowed breakfast.

They would not explain why, and, again, she protested. She was then strapped down and drugged into a state of unconsciousness.

Waking up hours later, she found she was in a different hospital, and that while she had been unconscious, her baby had been removed by Caesarean section and handed over to social workers.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2517239/CHRISTOPHER-BOOKER-A-terrible-act-inhumanity-shows...