True, but I find it hard to believe that it could have gone on for so long without higher-ups being aware of and tacitly condoning this informal policy. If nothing else, some of the priests who were either involved or aware would have eventually worked their way up the ladder, becoming bishops and archbishops.
The Spanish government at the time was an unelected. undemocratic, ideology and dogma-led organisation.
Quite, such organisations need keeping away from the reins of power.
No, as far as authorities have so far been able to determine it was several shorter conspiracies. Sort of like, if you have large criminal organizations you’ll have lots of crime, but having a lot of robberies doesn’t mean the Mafia is in town. The information I’ve seen talked about several small conspiracies rather than a large one.
Tom Tildrum, I think that happened to be, exactly, his point.
From the programme I had the impression that, yes, people did know or suspect what was going on but the scale was unknown. Also this started with the Civil War which people still don’t like to talk about.
One of the things they took advantage of was a law designed to protect unwed mothers which allowed for birth certificates to say “Mother unknown”. The idea behind this was to ensure that the mothers of illegitimate children were free to have their babies under medical supervision with no fear that their “shame” couod be proven. Another law said that adopted children would be issued a new birth certificate naming the adoptive parents as the birth parents. This one was enacted shortly after the civil war and was a deliberate attempt to cover up the rehoming of the children of so called dissidents and rebels.
A stolen baby would first have it’s own proper birth certificate naming the true parents, then a false death certificate followed by a new, false, birth certificate, parents unknown before finally being issued with yet another, official birth certificate, naming the adoptive parents. Thats a whole load of obfuscation and plausible deniability
I, for one, oppose the theft of Spanish babies.
OK, but all that’s on the civil side. The RCC is an extremely hierarchical organization with its own internal norms and behaviors. I have a hard time believing priests would be telling birth mothers their babies were dead in order to cover up their removal to another family, without some sense that it was OK with the bishop etc.
Extremist.
Ehhh, yes and no. It’s hard to explain, but in a manner of speaking, the Church varies in every single parish in the world. It’s hierarchical in custom, but cellular in organization. Bishops often have only a faint idea of what priests do, and don’t generally check up on hospitals and so forth outside of the specific religous duties. Most don’t really understand what the hell goes on on the lowest levels, if only because they don’t have time to check.
In truth, however, this kind of thing isn’t all that unusual in much of the world. Harsh it may be, but it’s also been common throughout history. I’m surprised by the shocked, shocked! of people complaining about it. Aside from the rather grotesque (to be fair: alleged) deception, this is sadly quite normal.
I’m not even sure a born-dead baby would get a birth certificate, as you wouldn’t have any reason to register it with the civil registry (in general, women whose baby was stolen were told it had been born dead and that they could not see the body “for their own good”). I mean, the only purpose of the birth certificates you get from hospitals (as opposed to the ones you get from the registry) is to have the kid registered in the civil registry and added to your “family book” (married people get it when they marry, an unwed mother with her first kid).
I’m okay with stealing non-Spanish babies.
And your position on stealing Spanish toddlers?
Switzerland had itsown scandaldealing with children from families of “travelers”: From 1926 til 1972 about 600 children were taken away from their families if they belonged to “undesirables” and given to socially acceptable families to adopt.
In Germany, after the War bothProtestant and Catholic orphanages mistreated the children in their care by telling them they were worthless and putting them to too-hard work.
Australia had not only unwed mothers, but the Stolen Generation where mixed children were taken away from their aboriginal parents to be raised in orphanages as cheap domestic servants in the hope of eventually breeding the black out by letting mixed only marry whites.
America had the Indian boarding schools, where children were taken away by force from their parents to be properly assimilated into white culture.
This is not meant in any way to excuse what happened in Spain, only that similar terrible things happened elsewhere, too.
I think the mothers were being told that the baby had died shortly after birth – generally they had heard their babies’ cries as they were whisked away. It struck me watching the programme that the practise of allowing fathers/birth partners in the delivery room must have made it much harder to deceive parents in this way.
Huh. I haven’t seen a Spanish birth certificate in quite a while, but it’s common in many, many places to list how many children the mother had given birth to previously, how many were born alive, etc. So it’s possible the issue might come up later. (And I obviously don’t generally have reason to see documents for dead babies - I generally see birth certificates only when clients are applying for green cards, or for my own personal genealogical research.) Can anyone shed light on that?
But what if terrorists have a nuclear bomb in town that will explode in 24 hours and the only possible way to defuse it is to steal Spanish babies ? What then, uh ?
That practice didn’t even start until much later - actually, about the time the robberies appear to have winded down and out (the '80s).
It’s difficult to get straight information without several hundred hours of reseach, simply going to newspapers and victim’s associations. The source for the 300K figure apears to have been Judge Baltasar Garzón, who isn’t exactly reputed to be an even-tempered person or one prone to excessive moderation; my crystal ball says it may even happen to match the amount of total adoptions in the period, but that’s only a WAG.
I’ve found news reporting that some of the children were adopted off-country (Germany and Peru were mentioned among the reception countries). AFAI can tell, there’s a mixture of several things:
- the politically-motivated cases, which were indeed top-down: pregnant women who were imprisoned for political reasons and whose children were stolen after a very short lactation period. In these cases, the parents usually knew they were getting a “Red’s” kid; these would have choosen specifically for their ties to FE (some of the reports say “the Regime”, some say “Falange”; I can’t imagine there were a lot of Carlistas among these reception parents, as Franco spent a lot of enrgy sticking everything he could find up Carlismo’s collective behind). This would be similar to the Argentinian desaparecidos.
- The greed-motivated ones, which took place later, involved small groups and where the woman may not even have been in a bad situation and the reception parents had no idea the kid hadn’t been freely given up (some thought the money was normal adoption fees, some thought part of it was “for greasing the wheels”, some were told it was to pay for the mother’s medical expenses and/or a previous hotel stay as she was home- and job-less),
- and also some of the cases brought to the judges are complaining about “pressure to give up a child” - but that’s… I’m sorry, it’s absurd. That pressure wouldn’t have come only from one person, I am a '68 vintage and I remember girls my age being thrown out of their house by (grand)parents who weren’t willing to raise a bastard. The pressure was societal, it wasn’t one person. We’re talking about a country and time in which women were legal cattle: couldn’t enter a contract except for marriage (and even this required parental permission), could own property but could not manage it, any laws which provided for equal treatment (such as the 16th-century one which obliged universities to accept female students) were ignored but any which made women 3rd-rate citizens were very much on (3rd rate because you could have cases where a 16yo son was the tutor/cattlekeeper of his widowed, perfectly healthy but female mother - so, men then boys then women)…
That information would come from the medical files, though, which in turn come basically from the patient. Nowadays it’s all in the computers, but my “nullipara” there comes from not having had a child in Spain post-computerization and from the information I have given to the doctors verbally. The Civil Registry doesn’t have access to it; they know I’ve never registered a child but not whether I’ve ever been pregnant or delivered.
Gosh, I could have sworn someone told me around here that there aren’t any conspiracy theories in Spain worth taking seriously, as opposed to those redonkulous Americans. Right-thinking countries dismiss them as a “source of jokes,” if I recall aright.
Um, a BBC documentary about things that actually happened is not a conspiracy theory. The Magdalene houses in Ireland are not a conspiracy theory, things actually happened. The Tuskegee experiments did really happen.
That doesn’t automatically validate all other conspiracy theories. (And that some people with tinfoil hats espouse several conspiracy theories at once doesn’t invalidate each single theory automatically: you can have a dozen theories, of which 11 are pure bullshit and one completely true).
There are certainly *less * conspiracy theories in European countries out in the public or generally accepted compared to the US (which might have to do partly with political history), but they are not zero.