Scandal 1000s of Stolen Babies - not just Spain - now Ireland

[retroHelen]

A few years ago I did a thread about the Scandal  1000s of babies born in Spain in the 20th Century, in Catholic run Hospitals and the parents being told by Nuns/nurses that their babies had died and being presented with a dead baby. Then a funeral arranged by the hospital that the parents had to pay for. Then years later many of these tiny coffins exhumed and found to contain hospital waste or rocks/rubble. Documents and ex-nun accounts of presenting different post-birth women with the same dead baby kept in cold storage for this purpose. This started a whole investigation into Doctors/Priests/Nuns deciding that some families or mothers were 'unsuitable parents' - not Catholic - Communist/atheist leanings - unmarried. Also, there were Catholic Agencies for wealthy childless or wealthy Catholic families wanting children/more children around the World asking these Catholic Adoption agencies for babies, so they were taking babies by deception to sell to these families.

 

Tv shows had women in Spain by the hundreds discovering that their babies had not died and been adopted, often to America and they were petitioning the United Nations to help them find their lost/stolen babies. Sadly, the Priests/Nuns/Doctors were burning hospital records in some hospital incinerators before authorities could seize them. Some adults whose parents admit they were bought/adopted had their DNA checked but very few have been reunited with their lost real parents.

 

All last fortnight I listened each day to an ongoing investigation on BBC Radio 4 that has been going on in Ireland for a few years about a different topic, but has ended up exposing the same practice there as well. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06b5fzl/episodes/downloads

 

It started with the discovery of a mass illegal grave of 800 babies and children at  the site of what was once a Catholic run Mother & Baby/children's Unit in Tuam Ireland. It was supposed to be for unmarried women to go to to have their babies and leave them there for adoption. It was demolished a few years ago., but there were always rumours that many babies left there died in squalid conditions and no one seemed to know where any were buried. Claire Corless, a local lady looked into any records of the place and the records did not add up as to what happened to many of the children in there. Then workmen were dong work there and discovered the old sewer/cess-pit and it was full of up to 800 small bodies - unconsecrated illegal disposals of dead babies and children. Even so there were many more unnaccounted for that had 'died' according to the records.

 

Aside from eye witness reports/personal experiences I heard of the mistreatment of children and mothers in these bleak Workhouses/hospitals. It transpired that mothers had gone into the place to have their babies, which were immediately removed and told the baby had died by Nuns.  However, this was a ploy so that the mother had no chance of returning to reclaim their child if her circumstances improved/she married the father. This meant the baby could be sold for great profits to the Church organisations in America./Canada/Australia. 

 

The numbers of stolen babies in other Mother & Baby units/Magdalen Laundries in Ireland is growing and growing as more people come forward to testify or records/certificates are found to be falsified. This and the Paedophile scandals where some priests were just moved around to carry on committing crimes and now parishioners are asked to help pay compensation claims is changing the whole dynamic of how people of ireland regard the Catholic Church in ireland. 

 

On the one hand Clair Corless and other people revealing the scandal and victims are getting anonymous threats of violence against them, but on the other hand honest people are not just blindly going to Church without question anymore.

 

Then there is also the issue of mothers and some fathers wondering where their children have gone and that they may not know that they have family back in Ireland that may be looking for them. Then the children finding out that their birth certificates are false and wondering who their real mothers are:

 

https://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/adoption-machine-paul-jude-redmond

 

https://www.amazon.com/Adoption-Machine-History-Irelands-Scandal/dp/1785371770/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1529553552&sr=1-1&keywords=the+adoption+machine

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2018/0612/969974-illegal-adoption-action/

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/dozens-of-cases-of-people-who-do-not-know-they-are-adopted-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-say-campaigners-845746.html

 

 

 

 

Edited August 2, 2018 by retroHelen

[hatcheckgirl]

That's immensely sad.  What Jehovah must be seeing!  It is truly a disgusting world.  I know a bit about those poor children who ended up being transported to Australia after the war.  They were not all orphans but were stolen from their mothers.  It was horrible what they went through - Catholic and Methodist organisations, child abuse in all it's extremes.

[retroHelen]

The scandal of the 30   000 stolen children of Spain is back in the News again as the government of Spain has been requested by the European Courts to regard the event of most of the 20th Century in Spain as "Crimes against Humanity" which means that the Spanish Government cannot cover up the scandal by declaring a Statute of Limitations on most of the cases like they have been doing. This meant that most of the cases were declared as 'Out of Date' for criminal prosecution when people had just found out that they had had children stolen from them and trafficked by church-run hospitals/orphanages. https://www.thelocal.es/20181121/spain-takes-first-step-towards-historic-stolen-babies-law

 

It has also been confirmed now that what was once a political policy under Franco, had been such a lucrative business for the religious institutions, that it became a continuous business after Franco's time. It has also come to light that all Catholic countries need to look to their church run hospitals and orphanages because it has been revealed that Guatamala and Argentina definitely ran the same child selling business from their institutions as well. 

 

Why is this more than just a scandal of the Catholic Church? The policy under Franco and afterwards was that the hospitals/orphanages had played 'God' in the sense of deciding who would make suitable mothers for children brought up in their country. At first it was children of unmarried mothers, the mother wanted to keep the baby, she may have been wealthy enough to do so, but other members of the family would contact the hospital/orphanage, to ask them to co-operate with the scheme to tell the mother, after she gave birth and indicated she wanted to keep her baby, that it had died and spirit it away for sale elsewhere and leave the mother with a coffin of hospital waste to bury.

 

Later, even during so-called Democracy in many countries and Spain,  the orphanages - short of cash - would assess other women. They may have declared themselves as being atheist, communist or another none Catholic faith. In some cases, the government would have arrested the father as a radical or religion that was restricted in that country, so the institution would see the child as easy to remove from the family - no one would stand in their way as they were not favoured in the country. It makes me wonder if any of our brothers in Spain or Latin American Countries or any other Catholic Country may have been duped this way when their pregnant wives went into hospital and came home without a baby, being told it had died. It seem to have gone on on an industrial scale in some places!

 

It's been part of documentaries on our Radio 4 News service this week as a series, following a similar one of Ireland as I showed above.Looking mainly at Spain, Guatamala & Argentina. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003jr1