These women lost their children because they were lesbians – why can’t the government say sorry?

The former politician Linda Bellos, who ‘struggled through tears to tell us how she lost custody of her children when her youngest was just two’. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

I am more than just aware of the faint outlines of queer history – it is something I see in Technicolour. I immerse myself in lesbian books, films and art, and have written all sorts of articles about contemporary lesbianism. It is for this reason that I was shocked to learn only recently of the state having removed children from the custody of lesbian mums.

In July, a radio producer contacted me to tell me about 74-year-old Judi Morris, whose son George had slid into heroin addiction and fallen in and out of the criminal justice system. The call started a journey that would end in a radio documentary, Missing Pieces: The Lesbian Mothers Scandal.