Born, then

In delivery rooms around New Zealand, the state is removing baby after baby from the same mother. Are we failing the very families that need the most help? Michelle Duff reports.

Jean Te Huia has been a midwife for 28 years. She used to try to work with the system. That was until she saw a newborn baby whisked away from its mother by hospital staff the moment she gave birth to it by emergency caesarean section.

Aware of the importance of skin-to-skin contact and the baby’s need to breastfeed, Te Huia tried to find the child. She was told the mother was not allowed to see the baby, as it was earmarked for foster care by Oranga Tamariki. It would be picked up by its new parents later that day.

It was Te Huia’s job to explain this to the distraught mum. ‘‘This was the first either of us had heard about this, we hadn’t been involved in any conversations. She had to stay in the postnatal ward for three days, recovering, without seeing her baby.

‘‘That’s when I realised I couldn’t be part of a system that removed newborns from their mothers like that. Now it’s my mission to make sure Ma¯ ori women are safe from this insidious, unjust behaviour.’’

New laws making it easier for the state to take babies from their mothers are being blamed for a sharp increase in newborns being removed.

A Stuff investigation has found more children are now born into care than at any time in the past decade, with around five babies a week now separated from their mothers. Most of these pe¯ pı¯ are Ma¯ ori.

Iwi leaders and Family Court lawyers say the practice of uplifting newborns hours after birth is creating a ‘‘stolen generation’’ of Ma¯ ori children, with a system so stacked against parents that regaining custody is almost impossible.

Newborns are taken into care when it is decided they are at risk of abuse, neglect or harm.

In the past three years, the number of babies removed from their parents in the first three months of life has jumped by more than a third. In the year to June, 281 babies were removed, compared with 211 in 2015.

The stated aim of new agency Oranga Tamariki is fewer children in care. However, some experts say social welfare reforms ushered in a draconian shift in policy that was never compatible with this objective. New legislation now works to prioritise earlier intervention and taking children into permanent care.

One of these laws, enacted in mid-2016, means a parent who has had a child removed previously must now prove they are capable of keeping any new baby. Critics say this unfairly discriminates against parents who may have had no Oranga Tamariki contact for years, and establishes an unfair burden of proof on the parent.

‘‘This legislation assumes people don’t change, so you’re guilty until proven innocent,’’ says Dave Hanna, director of Wellington’s Wesley Community Action, an agency whose work includes supporting young mothers. ‘‘They’ve usually got factors working against them anyway – living in poverty, hardship, with difficult relationship backgrounds.’’

His agency is concerned at the number of court-ordered uplifts it is seeing, often hours after the birth. Often, parents are unaware until social workers arrive at the hospital with police.

‘‘Sometimes we will have been working with a woman for quite a long time, we know her issues . . . and then Oranga Tamariki comes in out of nowhere and will uplift the child.

‘‘Taking children from their mothers is a really blunt instrument, and is potentially really damaging for them.’’

Often, the bereaved mother will get pregnant again, Hanna says. ‘‘This may seem like an illogical thing to do, but they mourn the loss of their child and there’s no support for them. The child is taken, the mother is still yearning for it, this possibly leads to poor mental health outcomes and addiction issues and they still have other children. You can’t just take a child away and things get better – that family is still there.’’

In the case Te Huia was involved with, the mother had past addiction issues that had seen children removed from her care – the last four years earlier. Since then, she had entered rehab, attended counselling and had good family support. This made no difference, Te Huia says.

‘‘A mother whose child has been removed from her care can never find redemption, unlike a murderer in this country,’’ says Te Huia, who is the director of Nga Maia, the 200-strong Ma¯ ori midwives association. ‘‘It’s an absolute travesty of justice that we spend millions on educating foster parents – but where is the support for birth parents?

‘‘If a woman has lost a child to the state, shouldn’t she be a priority? At the moment, I think the law is there to punish these parents, not help them.’’

A report in Britain, released in October, sparked concern after showing that newborns subject to care proceedings had increased to 35 removals per 10,000 of the UK’s population.

The rate for New Zealand children is 47 per 10,000 overall, and 103 for Ma¯ ori. Globally, New Zealand consistently ranks poorly for child abuse and neglect, most recently placing in the lowest five out of 30 OECD countries. A child is killed here on average every five weeks.

Because data is collected across so many organisations – police, health, Oranga Tamariki, justice – it’s difficult to get a clear picture of whether things are improving. The Family Violence Clearinghouse, a reference library, collated the figures centrally until last year, when it stopped due to a lack of funding.

While substantiated findings of abuse by Oranga Tamariki have dropped by 40 per cent over five years to 13,966 in the year to April, this is more likely due to a narrowing in the investigation of cases, says Otago University researcher Emily Keddell.

‘‘Their data is not a good indicator of rates, it can just tell

‘‘Taking children from their mothers is a really blunt instrument.’’ Dave Hanna, Wellington’s Wesley Community Action