By Jacqueline Rose, from Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, which was published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rose is the author of more than ten books, including Women in Dark Times (Bloomsbury). 

On October 12, 2016, a front-page story in the Sun, a conservative UK newspaper, reported that nine hundred women who were not British citizens had given birth at a single National Health Service hospital in the previous year. Taxpayers were to pick up the four-million-pound tab. The hospital—read the nation—was being “deluged” with foreign mothers.

The article was illustrated with a photo of Bimbo…