HANNE Andersen vividly remembers the June night 29 years ago when her baby was born at Lions Gate Hospital - and the moment just after that when her daughter was taken away.
It was just after 10: 10 p.m.
"She came out. I couldn't see her. They had sheets covering over me so I couldn't see," Andersen says.
Then, "I heard her cry. Right away I wanted to hold her.
"I said quietly, 'I want to hold my baby.' I was ignored. I didn't even know if I had a boy or a girl."
She repeated her request louder.
Then she saw a nurse about to leave the delivery room with the baby in her arms. "I yelled, 'Where are you going with my baby? Bring me my baby now.'"
She saw the doctor and nurse exchange a look. Then the nurse brought the baby over.
"I held her for five seconds," she said. "Then I blacked out."
Years later, Andersen would obtain her medical records and learn that she had been given a powerful barbiturate at that moment, as well as an anti-lactation drug to stop her body from producing breast milk.
She spent the next day in hospital in a drug-induced fog - far away from the maternity ward - and was ignored when she asked to see her child.
"I don't know who took me home," she said. "My baby was abducted on the delivery table."
Now 44, Andersen is one of hundreds of women speaking out about how their babies were taken from them illegally and adopted over several decades across the country. Long shamed into silence, the women are now demanding answers about how a system that was supposed to protect them instead abused them and deprived them of their rights.
Many are joining a class action lawsuit filed by lawyer Tony Merchant against the provinces for the actions of social workers who pressured unwed teenage mothers to give up their babies.
The mothers were often sent to church-run homes for "unwed mothers," got no legal information about their options and, in cases like Andersen's, were also lied to.
Ten days after the birth, Andersen said she called up the ministry office and asked for her baby back.
She was told the adoption was final, and that wasn't possible, except through an expensive court case.
"I cried for a whole year afterwards," she said.
Decades later, Andersen still struggles with grief and anger that her child was stolen from her - by a system she says was set up to do just that. "It never goes away," she says. "We live with this the rest of our lives."
Andersen grew up with her Catholic family, attending private school in North Vancouver. Her life was that of a normal teenager until she became pregnant at 15, the result of a rape. Soon social workers began pressuring the family to send Andersen to Maywood, a home for unwed mothers in Vancouver run by the faith-based Salvation Army.
She entered the home in February 1983, an experience she describes as "like a jail for pregnant girls."
Andersen says she and the other approximately 20 teenage girls in the home were forced to sit through religious sermons and weren't allowed to leave without permission.
They were told they were making a noble decision to give their babies to married couples who couldn't have children of their own.
"They didn't ask us what we wanted. There was no choice," she says. "They never said 'your child.' They always said 'the baby' or 'it.' I think it was so we wouldn't think of our baby as our baby."
Andersen said a school counsellor who came to visit her eventually arranged for her to spend the last month of her pregnancy back home with her family. But social workers were soon once again making appointments.
Andersen said she asked the social worker questions about getting help that would allow her to keep her baby. She was told there were no services available for her.
"We were dehumanized," she said. "They saw us as reproductive slaves."
Merchant, who is representing several hundred women across Canada with similar experiences, shares that view.
"The majority of these children were adopted into the United States. There was a desire for white children," he said.
"There was a very concerted plan that these women should not have their children."
"In many cases, children were abducted," he said - taken without any legal right from the mother.
In British Columbia, a mother could not legally give up her child for adoption until 10 days after the day of the birth. Those in charge of their welfare ignored that law, often believing their actions were in the best interests of both the babies and their teenaged mothers.
"The women were manipulated, defrauded, lied to, cajoled, threatened," he said. "They were lied to about their legal rights." The practice continued right up until the mid-1980s.
"The 1940s grab-that-girl-and-take-her-away-and-hide-her-in-anunnery attitude - the facts say the old thinking was very much at work," he said.
Andersen went on to graduate from high school in North Vancouver, to have a career in real estate and a solid relationship.
She never had any other children. "I thought on some level my next child would be taken again," she says.
For years she looked for her daughter's face in the crowd.
Then, in 2007, Andersen met her.
It was her daughter, then in her early 20s, who had gone to Vital Statistics records and found out who her mother was.
Their first conversation was on the phone. "She said 'Hi.' Right away I knew it was her," says Andersen.
Six months later they met for the first time.
Andersen says she now has a continuing relationship with her daughter. But that doesn't make up for everything she lost.
"I missed all her firsts," she says.
Andersen is still deciding whether to join the class action lawsuit. She also plans to discuss a criminal investigation with the North Vancouver RCMP. She would like to see an inquiry into how children were taken from mothers like her and to have counselling made available to them, along with help in opening adoption records.
Some people have suggested she and others should just move on and forget about the past.
But: "Mothers don't forget their children," she says. "They don't move on from having their babies stolen."
