Orwell’s Maternity Ward

How to wrap one’s mind around a story like this. Out of the U.K., per the Telegraph:

A pregnant woman has had her baby forcibly removed by caesarean section by social workers.

Essex social services obtained a High Court order against the woman that allowed her to be forcibly sedated and her child to be taken from her womb.

The council said it was acting in the best interests of the woman, an Italian who was in Britain on a work trip, because she had suffered a mental breakdown.

The baby girl, now 15 months old, is still in the care of social services, who are refusing to give her back to the mother, even though she claims to have made a full recovery.

Men have endured for millennia under the despotism of this or that form of government. But it is a crowning feature of our particular age that we have so perfected using the “general welfare” as an excuse that even the worst sorts of barbarism—such as ripping a woman’s baby from her womb—go largely unremarked. Presumably the woman in question, repatriated to Italy and now separated by some 1,100 miles from her daughter, is cured of the delusion that the United Kingdom is any longer a “free country.” We ought to be, too.