When a child is removed from their mother’s care, the priority is, understandably, the child’s safety. But what happens to the woman left behind?
It’s a question that has taken on renewed urgency following research published by University College London in June 2026, which revealed that women who had experienced care proceedings — court cases involving concerns about a child’s safety — were 21 times more likely to die within 10 years of giving birth than mothers who hadn’t.
“Normally when we look at these sorts of metrics it’s 3 or 5 times higher. To find 21 times more likely is really quite extraordinary,” explains Dr Matthew Jay, a senior data scientist at UCL.
Three-quarters of the deaths identified in the research were associated with homicide, suicide, injury or substance use. While the findings don’t establish that care proceedings caused these deaths, they expose the vulnerability of women who come into contact with the family court system.
“Not only is the risk of death much higher if a woman goes through care proceedings, but they’re preventable deaths,” Jay says.
The findings come amid growing concern about what happens to parents after their children are removed. Earlier this year, following the death of baby Victoria Marten, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel highlighted the lack of ongoing support available to parents after a child has been removed from their care, and the risks this can create both for them and for future children. It called for long-term provision independent of statutory safeguarding services.
Yet specialist support remains limited and geographically inconsistent. Pause, a national charity working with women to reduce the risk of repeat child removal, operates in only a fraction of England’s local authority areas. Elsewhere, the support available can depend heavily on where a woman lives.
Despite having really high levels of need, they fall between the cracks in services.
Kate Tilley, Head of Partnerships and Engagement at Pause
Amy Van Zyl, CEO of HerCircle, a charity supporting women with complex motherhood needs, says that mothers can find themselves effectively left once their children are removed.
“All standard support drops away from mothers post-removal, because services around her are there for the child. Women are too often an afterthought…supporting them after child removal is left up to the goodwill of children’s social care,” she explains.
Yet, if the circumstances that led to a child’s removal leave their mother in need of significant support, who is responsible for helping her afterwards?
The Women Behind The Statistics
For Rowan, it’s a painfully personal question. In 2020, her 22-year-old sister Fern died by suicide in Buckinghamshire, just two hours after receiving an email informing her that her baby was going to be adopted.
With a history of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety and an autism diagnosis, Fern understood that she would need additional support during pregnancy and motherhood. Her family says she was proactive in seeking it. Throughout her pregnancy, she stopped self-harming and engaged with her GP, midwife, psychiatrist and Buckinghamshire Children’s Services.
Desperate to stay with her baby, but aware she needed support, Fern requested a place in a mother and baby hospital. She was refused. An autism specialist also contacted a unit with an adjacent outpatient department for autistic patients, but a referral was never made.
“Fern was backed into a corner. She asked for help, and she didn’t get any from many different sources. It was like social services were saying she was too unwell to look after her child, but not unwell enough to access what she needed so that she could stay with them,” Rowan says.
Her death would later become the subject of a coroner’s inquest, which identified the absence of independent advocacy and the way the news was communicated to her as contributing factors.
But Fern’s family believes her experience also exposes wider failures in the support available to vulnerable mothers navigating the child protection system. Fern had fought to have a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) removed from her medical records, but her family believes it continued to work against her.
Who Supports The Mother?
For younger mothers, involvement in the family court system is particularly common. According to research from the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, first-time mothers under 25 are twice as likely as older mothers to experience care proceedings. Younger mothers are also at greater risk of repeat proceedings.
The consequences of removal can be especially difficult for women already living with trauma, mental health difficulties or unstable circumstances.
Kate Tilley, Head of Partnerships and Engagement at Pause, describes the profound emotional impact of losing a child to the care system.
“Women are often left really struggling to come to terms with not just the issues that led to their child being taken into care, but that additional compounded level of grief and loss. And despite having really high levels of need, they fall between the cracks in services, or they’re not able to access the services that are available because they’re just too traumatised and defensive, or filled with shame. The stigma is huge,” she says.
Women are too often an afterthought…supporting them after child removal is left up to the goodwill of children’s social care.
Amy Van Zyl, CEO of HerCircle
That stigma can make it harder for mothers to seek help, particularly when the services offering support are connected to the authorities responsible for decisions about their children.
Van Zyl believes meaningful provision must be independent of those statutory safeguarding functions.
“Help needs to be commissioned out,” she emphasises. “It’s completely inappropriate that the service that has a legal duty to remove children would then provide the support a woman needs to get well and recover.”
The question isn’t just whether support exists, but whether women feel safe enough to access it, and if it continues for as long as they need it.
What Needs to Change?
Reforms to children’s social care are underway, including plans for more joined-up support through multi-agency teams and a single professional coordinating each family’s care.
But campaigners argue that support must extend beyond the point at which a child is removed, rather than disappearing precisely when a mother may be experiencing acute grief, trauma or crisis.
For Jay, the causes of death identified in the UCL research suggest that meaningful intervention could make a difference.
“It seems quite obvious looking at those categories of causes of death, like suicide, homicide and substance use, that with the right funding, services and support, we could bring that rate of deaths down,” he says.
The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s recommendations suggest a growing recognition of that need. The challenge now is turning those recommendations into services that women can actually access, regardless of where they live.
But while these discussions take place, women are still dying prematurely. Just a few months ago, a woman Van Zyl was in contact with ended her own life after her child was removed from her care. The maternity team who delivered her baby all attended her funeral.
For Fern’s family, too, the impact of the lack of support is irreversible.
“I’m older than Fern was when she died now,” Rowan says. “I look like her, and her child does too. I can see myself in Fern every day.”
Her family questions whether better support could have changed what happened to Fern.
“What hurts me more than anything is that her death was pointless. What’s the point in all of that happening to her if it’s going to happen to someone else?”
As Rowan puts it: “If it’s all about protecting the child, we need to protect that child from their mum dying.”
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