ADOPTION experts yesterday backed a minister’s decision not to reunite parents with the children taken away from them on the evidence of the controversial paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow. Margaret Hodge, the Minister for Children, said that it would not be in the child’s interests to return them from a settled home, despite the chance that they were wrongly moved in the first place. It is estimated that 5,000 children may have been taken into care over the past 15 years as a result of Professor Meadow’s theory of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy. The theory, that some mothers harm their children to draw attention to themselves, has been largely discredited after high-profile court cases in which he gave evidence.

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