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WINNIPEG — The children’s advocate for Manitoba’s First Nations says social workers are seizing an average of one newborn baby a day and “shoving them anywhere.”

Cora Morgan said she was with a mother in hospital on Monday when Child and Family Services took the woman’s three-day-old son. The only reason given was that the mother had been a ward of family services until she was 18, Morgan said.

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“It was heart-wrenching,” she said. “It just seemed so utterly heartless.”

Manitoba is seizing a record number of newborns — as many as 40 in one month from one downtown Winnipeg hospital — rather than supporting parents, Morgan said.

In this system, you are guilty until you can prove you’re innocent

Numbers tabled in the legislature in May show that, between 2008 and 2014, Manitoba has consistently apprehended between 318 and 388 newborns a year.

The infants are being taken into care without any assessment of the parents or their ability to care for the child, she said.