A Baby Daughter Stolen With Costs | UK Column Interviews

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
Good afternoon to the UK Column audience. I'm here with a guest today, a lady called Carys, who's come all the way from South Wales.
Carys, welcome to UK Column Studio 2

**Carys** (0:20)
Thank you for having me.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:23)
How was the trip down?

**Carys** (0:24)
Nice trip down.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:25)
Nice trip down, and a friend gave you a lift, which I thought was a nice touch. Yes. So thank you very much for coming down. It always makes a difference to be able to sit and talk to somebody in person.
Zoom calls and distance interviews are fine, but it does make a big difference when you can actually sit and have a chat together. So, yeah, brilliant.
You've got a story about your daughter. You're separated from your daughter. And you contacted me a little while ago to talk through what had happened. And in particular, you said that you were very keen to be able to tell your story to the audience. And as always, with the mums that approach me with cases about the Family Courts, I am always very interested to hear about the cases because I've worked for quite a few years to try and get information and the truth out about what's been happening with the Family Court. But of course, the other thing that I've learned is that every case can have similarities, but every case is unique to the family and the mother concerned. And you kindly provided a really excellent summary here. So we'll work through that. And our aim is to actually try and show the audience, explain to the audience what's happened to you and what you've experienced. And then there's some really tough points that we need to discuss about how this system works. So let's start at the beginning and just tell us a little bit about yourself. And then you became pregnant and that's really where the story starts. So you begin where you'd like to.

**Carys** (2:20)
Okay, so I'm a mother of two. I've got an adult child who is 26 now, who was 19 at the time of my daughter's birth in 2019
This is about family court corruption. So I had no social services involvement in my son's childhood at all. I brought him up as a single parent very successfully.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:47)
You're still in contact with your son? Oh, yes, absolutely.

**Carys** (2:50)
We're very close.
He's a successful, happy, healthy member of society. I brought him up absolutely fine. No social services involvement. And then when my daughter was born in 2019, I was thrown into hell.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:10)
So where was your daughter born?

**Carys** (3:12)
She was born in the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:15)
Right, okay.
And so this is really the start, isn't it? Your daughter's born and what happens? You're there in hospital and what was the hospital like? How were you treated?

**Carys** (3:29)
For the first four days, I was treated well. Normally, it was the same sort of treatment that I had after the birth of my first child. And then on day four, everything completely changed, but I wasn't given any explanation as to why it had changed.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:45)
How had it changed?

**Carys** (3:48)
Just the attitude of the staff towards me.
I'd had a traumatic birth. My daughter had been bombed by forceps after a very long labour, and I'd contracted sepsis, and I was on crutches, had been birth injured. So it was a traumatic birth, and my daughter had been taken to the NICU as well, because she had also contracted sepsis during the birth. So it was a traumatic birth, and we were sort of held there. And yeah, it was sort of... I was treated well for the first four days, and then there was a marked shift in how I was treated, and I wasn't given any explanation for that at the time.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:28)
Just push this point a little bit. So what changed in the attitude or the way they spoke to you?

**Carys** (4:34)
Very much the attitude, and also physically I wasn't treated very well. So obviously I was injured and well, and I was treated nicely. I was treated with respect in the first four days, and then after that, I was not treated well at all. And it was only after the removal of my daughter that I realized why, from doing subject access requests to the hospital notes to find out what had happened. And it was only then that I found out what had happened and why there was such a marked shift in how I was being treated.

**SPEAKER_1** (5:07)
Right. Were you on your own at this stage as a mother, or did you have a partner supporting you?