Niños Robados - The Stolen Children of Spain

[Eva_Luna]

@Nava

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.

What about the actual medical records, though? Or were those faked, too? I can’t imagine having a baby after a normal pregnancy, being told that it had died, and then not wanting a LOT of answers about why it had died.

[Nava]

The medical records for the baby’s death (when the mothers were told it had died) were faked; mind you, it’s not like there were requirements for autopsies or anything, and many of those women had no idea how to exercise even what few rights they had - the certificate might have as little information as the one for my great-grandmother, who died at 96 of “old age”, or the one that’s currently most frequent, “cardiopulmonary arrest” (in Spain nobody’s CoD is listed as cancer, or an embolism, or… it’s all “cardiopulmonary arrests” except when it’s “blunt trauma”, meaning “car crash and the autopsy showed the deceased wasn’t in the middle of a heart attack”).

The women whose babies were stolen while in prison, there were never any medical records in the first place - the babies’ first piece of paperwork is the certificate of being born from their adoptive mothers; note that this was actually SOP for legit adoptions, unless the adoptive parents specifically wanted the baby to know her origin (the only cases I’ve heard of this happen were when adopting a dead relative’s child).

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Wilson

And your position on stealing Spanish toddlers?

Acceptable, if done for subsistence purposes. Not for sport.

[RedFury]

Don’t know much about the Spanish story, but I recently saw this excellent film of a similar practice in the UK: Oranges and Sunshine: an illuminating true-life drama

How could more than 130,000 children be shipped from Britain to Australia and other Commonwealth countries, often without their parents’ knowledge, and the world not know about it? This was the question British social worker Margaret Humphreys began to ask in 1986, when an Australian woman arrived unannounced at her workplace and asked for help in finding her lost family.

<snip>

In the film, we follow Margaret (Emily Watson – Hilary and Jackie, Red Dragon) as she investigates the history of a government-approved deportation programme. She gradually uncovers the devastating effects that the deportation has had on its victims, many of whom are estranged from their families and, in some cases, left permanently damaged.

In Australia, Margaret’s efforts amass evidence that defenceless children, in the care of the Roman Catholic Christian Brotherhood, have been physically and sexually abused by members of the order. However, Margaret is seen as a troublemaker, an outsider stirring up long-forgotten memories.

Back in the UK, charities and government officials are refusing to accept responsibility for sending the children abroad, insisting that many were from broken homes and would have been worse off in the UK

– bolding mine.

Bone-chilling though highly recommended.

[BrainGlutton]

@RTFirefly

What I’d like to know is, what is the reaction of the Roman Catholic Church now? Is the RCC in Spain outraged, actively investigating, leaving no stone unturned to find out who in their ranks were culpable in this atrocity?

I wouldn’t expect it

.

[Cazzle]

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.

My married but poor-as-churchmice grandparents had a baby girl in 1955. She was whisked away immediately after she was born and later my grandmother was told her kidneys were malformed and she wouldn’t live. She was never permitted to see the baby. The funeral was held before she was allowed out of hospital. They couldn’t afford a grave marker but she knew how to find the grave by the position of a distinctive tree, and now the tree is gone she can’t find it.

In the 90s I applied for the baby’s birth and death certificates as part of my family tree research. The birth was never registered. The death was, but the date was wrong, the child was recorded as unnamed (she wasn’t), the cause of death didn’t match what my grandmother was told and the burial information was wrong. I approached the cemetery for help finding the grave and they went so far as to open sealed records for me. They have no record of the baby being buried there. They do have a burial for a baby named “Lee” in the same week, but that doesn’t match the first or last name of my infant aunt. I’ve been through the death records and there are no deaths registered for babies named Lee in the state for that year.

Stories like the Spanish one always catch my attention because I wonder if I have an aunt out there somewhere who doesn’t know she was stolen at birth, or if it’s simply that the culture of the time didn’t regard the death of a baby as being particularly important and everyone just half-assed the official record keeping.

[Lasciel]

@Nava

Sorry, I don’t watch a lot of TV. I’ve seen some articles on the issue, as well as references in recent-history books; I remember catching a newsblurb stating that one of the problems the judiciary is facing in researching these cases is that most are… uh, can’t remember the word, “over time”. They’re still doing the research on account of “we can’t prevent something like this from happening if we don’t know how it happened”, but** the people involved can’t be taken to trial because it’s been so long.**

(bolding added)

I know this is late in the game, but the phrase I think you’re looking for in english is “statute of limitations.”

[Nava]

Thank you, Lasciel
For anybody who’s interested and can catch it, the Spanish movie I mentioned in a previous post is La voz dormida (“The sleeping voice”). It’s based on a novel by Dulce Chacón.

[JKellyMap]

Thanks, Nava, for your informative contributions to this thread.

[jayjay]

Yes, thank you, Nava!

[Mtgman]

@constanze

America had the Indian boarding schools, where children were taken away by force from their parents to be properly assimilated into white culture.

America isn’t out of the woods yet. NPR’s All Things Considered did an investigative report into South Dakota Child Services taking Native children and placing them in foster care at much higher rates than the general population. This is a modern practice, not something from 50+ years ago.

In South Dakota, Native American children make up only 15 percent of the child population, yet they make up more than half the children in foster care. An NPR News investigation has found that the state is removing 700 native children every year, sometimes in questionable circumstances. According to a review of state records, it is also largely failing to place native children with their relatives or tribes.
…
Jolene Abourezk worked for the department for seven years. She says when she worked there, removing kids was expected.

Department officials told her, “It’s good, you are doing a good job for taking more kids,” Abourezk says. "It’s just the norm here. It happens so often people don’t question it. So you know if something happens all the time the same way, people don’t question it anymore. It’s just how it’s done.

Abourezk now works for her tribe, the Oglala Sioux, and reviews every case to help get kids back.

“When I look at the cases and read the police reports,” she said, “it just seems like a lot of them are just minor offenses.”

Few social workers would wish for more cases. A close review of South Dakota’s budget shows there’s a financial incentive for the department as a whole to remove more children.

Every time a state puts a child in foster care, the federal government sends money. Because South Dakota is poor, it receives even more money than other states - almost a hundred million dollars a year.

Bill Napoli chaired the state Senate Appropriations Committee until he retired three years ago. He says he remembers when the state first saw the large amounts of money the federal government was sending the Department of Social Services in the late 1990s.

“When that money came down the pike, it was huge,” Napoli says. “That’s when we saw a real influx of kids being taken out of families.”

He said there was little lawmakers could do to rein in the department. This was federal money, and it went straight to social services.

“I’m sure they were trying to answer a public perception of a problem,” he said. “And then slowly it grew to a point where they had so much power that no one — no one — could question what they were doing. Is that a recipe for a bureaucracy that’s totally out of control? I would say so.”

In an interview with NPR, department officials Wieseler and Kim Malsam-Rysdon say they strongly disagree, and that money has never influenced the department’s decisions to remove a child.

“The state doesn’t financially benefit from kids being in care,” Malsam-Rysdon says. “The state is always paying some part of it.”

She says it’s true the department gets more money the more children it takes. But she says, “it’s still state general dollars that have to match all those dollars that come in.”

Except it’s not exactly a match. According to state records, last year, the federal government reimbursed the state for almost three quarters of the money it spent on foster care.

Then there’s the bonus money. Take for example something the federal government calls the “adoption incentive bonus.” States receive money if they move kids out of foster care and into adoption — about $4,000 a child. But according to federal records, if the child has “special needs,” a state can get as much as $12,000.

A decade ago, South Dakota designated all Native American children “special needs,” which means Native American children who are permanently removed from their homes are worth more financially to the state than other children.

In 10 years, this adoption bonus program has brought South Dakota almost a million dollars.

Malsam-Rysdon says that money stays in the department and is used to help children.

“The key to that funding is that those dollars are to be used to support adoptive placements,” she says. “So the state does not gain monetarily from placing kids in adoption.”

But that money and a hundred million dollars more funnels into the state economy every year. The department employs a thousand workers. It supports almost 700 foster families who receive as much as $9,000 a year per child and 1,400 families who receive thousands in adoption subsidies. Dozens of independent group homes also receive millions of dollars in contracts to take care of children.

Governor Bill Janklow ran the state in the 1990s. Asked how important the federal money that goes to social services is to the state he said: “Incredibly important.”

“I mean look, we’re a poor state,” he says. “We’re not a high income state. We’re like North Dakota without oil. We’re like Nebraska without Omaha and Lincoln. We don’t have resources. We don’t have wealth. We don’t have high income jobs. We don’t have factories opening here hiring people in high wage jobs.”

The federal government gave South Dakota at least $15,000 for Howe’s grandchildren while they were in foster care. More than half of that money went to the department’s administrative costs, according to federal records.

This is part 1 of a three part year-long investigation the program is doing. I listened to it when it was aired and I felt the kind of helpless rage that many in Spain and other places where this sort of thing has happened must have felt. I can’t imagine what this must be like. I’m very interested in hearing parts 2 and 3 of this story and I hope the situation gets some more attention in the US.

Enjoy,
Steven

[Evil_Captor]

Add human trafficking to the sins of the Catholic Church, as a new report by the BBC has exposed amassive baby stealing operation by the Catholic Church in Spain. As many as 300,000 (some reports say as few as 30,000-40,000) babies were stolen by the Church between 1939 and 1990. Evil dictator Francisco Franco started the operation, charging the Church with stealing the babies of political opponents.

However, it’s important to note that Franco died in 1975, but the baby stealing operation continued for another 15 years. I guess once you get into a habit of being evil.

The operation was particularly nasty when you look at the details: the nuns would tell the mothers of the babies they had stolen that they had died shortly after delivery, and in at least one hospital they kept a baby corpse in the refrigerator to show the mothers that their child was dead.

You can add this to the worldwide pederasty scandals, the horrific abuses at Maryknoll orphanages in Ireland and Australia, and the opposition to birth control to the list of horrors the Catholic Church has been engaged in.

[Frank]

Previous thread.

[RTFirefly]

See Niños Robados - The Stolen Children of Spain in this forum.

ETA: Looks like Frank beat me to it.

[Evil_Captor]

Well feel free to close this thread. I did a search for thread titles with the word “Catholic” in them and was surprised to find none.

[Nava]

Thanks guys.
ETA: Evil Captor, that’s because you were looking for the wrong info, having grabbed the wrong culprit.

[Evil_Captor]

@Nava

Thanks guys.
ETA: Evil Captor, that’s because you were looking for the wrong info, having grabbed the wrong culprit.

Well, no, I had considered doing a search for Stolen Babies but then it occurred to me that Stealing Babies and Stolen Children and Stealing Children were all possibilities, so the two loci that were the same were Spain and Catholic. I opted for Catholic. In hindsight, Spain would have been better. Except Spanish could have also been used (Stolen Spanish Babies). My thread title is much more descriptive and accurate than the one that was used. Unless you are maintaining that the Catholic Church was not involved in stealing the babies, which contradicts all the reports I’ve seen.

[Nava]

Read the other thread, please. You don’t seem to have done so.

[Evil_Captor]

@Nava

Read the other thread, please. You don’t seem to have done so.

Actually I did. Please clarify what you are talking about.

[Bridget_Burke]

@Evil_Captor

Actually I did. Please clarify what you are talking about.

Please read the other thread. Make your contributions there.

Is that clear enough?