Spain’s daily newspaper El Pais is running a series on investigations into claims of the trafficking of thousands of babies and young children during the Franco dictatorship (1939-75).
It reports that in the early years the regime took thousands of children away from Republican parents as yet another method of repression. From 1950, the theft or appropriation of children took a more subtle form, the babies often being taken from hospitals and children’s homes; in the majority of cases, these abductions were linked with religious organisations. The mothers were no longer prisoners, ‘Reds’, or wives of left-wingers, but simply young pregnant girls with little money, incapable of coping with the intimidation of doctors and nuns.
The newspaper series is bringing forth much debate and responses from those ‘adopted’ and from couples who ‘adopted’ these children.
In 1981 childless María del Carmen and her husband were advised by friends to see a nun who ‘gave away babies’. ‘Sor María told us to bring her a pregnant woman and she would then give us a baby from another woman. This was so that we would have no idea who the mother of our baby was, and no contact could be made.’ It also guaranteed a continuing source of babies for trade.
With difficulty, Carmen and her husband eventually found a young girl from the provinces who was pregnant by a boy who wasn’t her fiancé and wanted to give the baby for adoption. They introduced her to Sor María and then rang the nun every few days to see whether there was a baby for them:
‘One day Sor María said there’s been two births – one a pair of twin girls and the other a little boy. I decided that the first couple to ring me would get the boy, and it’s you! It was like a tombola. She told us to bring 50,000 pesetas. I have all the papers, but not one for the money we paid her.
‘We were surprised that when we arrived at the Santa Cristina clinic where Sor María worked, she took us to a different hospital – San Ramón – where the child had been born. The doctor told us the mother was a healthy young woman. He telephoned us three months later to bring him the documents. When my husband took them to him at San Ramón, the doctor said No, not here, come to my car … But we didn’t know that any of this was wrong, we were so overjoyed …’
Many instances of other methods of control are apparent:
‘ more immorality and impunity from the Catholic Church comes to light, substituting dead babies with living ones in order to give them to those parents who were more “decent”! The only way of putting a stop to these people and their ongoing abuses is to stop participating in their ceremonies – otherwise we form part of the problem …’
In many cases the mothers were told that their new-born baby had died and that it would upset them too much to see it. Some mothers eventually suspected that their babies had not died, as in the case of a woman from Barcelona who gave birth to a little girl forty years ago. She was told that the child was dead at birth but has recently found her daughter through DNA tests.
And poet Elsa López recounts:
‘I gave birth to a daughter in 1981. They told me the baby was very ill, that she was disfigured and they gave me a baby wrapped up that felt frozen solid! Then they told me she had died and that I mustn’t worry because they had baptised her and she was now an Angel of God.’
In some instances, nuns silenced young mothers saying that they had given their babies to people with whom they would be much better off. Nuns and priests exchanged information about pregnant girls with well-to-do supporters of the regime. The girls were often taken to religious institutions to give birth where they were persuaded by the nuns to hand over their babies. Many girls regretted those decisions made during the time they were so helpless and tried in vain for years to get their babies back but were impotent against the brick wall of rich adoptive parents, expensive lawyers and the Church.
Linked to the Church, the organisation Telephone of Hope was formed in 1971 by Serafín Madrid, a priest, to ‘aid new social and psychosocial problems in Spain’. It acted as a channel to find pregnant women and persuaded them to give their babies up for adoption, often employing pressure, threats and subterfuge. The adoptive parents paid between 50,000 and 150,000 pesetas and were able to choose babies by gender.
Libéria’s biological mother gave her to the local children’s home in Tenerife. Her husband had been murdered by the local cacique (wealthy landowner’s agent) whilst she was pregnant and, with already seven children to care for, she re-married but her new husband would not accept Libéria because she was not his child. The mother visited her child at the home every day.
Libéria described life with the nuns as a nightmare:
‘they would bang girls’ heads against the wall and punish us for absolutely anything. If a girl wet the bed the nuns would make her wear her knickers on her head and carry a notice declaring her sin. They taped excrement to our mouths … From time to time they would dress us in white and parade us in front of prospective parents. These people inspected our teeth, our hair, they lifted our skirts to see if we had rickets – it was like a horse market. A few days later one of the girls would disappear, usually the youngest one ...’
Libéria was never chosen. But one day, at the age of 8, she was chosen by the nuns at the home to be given to a nun whose relatives wanted a child. The nun changed Libéria’s name and hit her on the head until the child could pronounce her new name properly and she was then taken to live with a couple in Valencia. The couple spoke only Valenciano and so Libéria could not understand them. The nuns refused to tell Libéria’s mother what had happened to her.
Libéria’s adoptive father began to abuse her:
‘I told a nun what he was doing and she told me not to tell anyone and to pray.’
Decades later, Libéria recovered contact with her mother and siblings.
The article underlines the fact that people with an absolute lack of scruples used their privileged position, under the protection of religion, to alter the destiny of other human beings and to use the most vulnerable of people as vehicles for considerable money-making. The confession box must have been an incomparable method for information-gathering, and these events illustrate possible reasons for the Catholic Church’s prohibition of contraception and abortion.
Eleanor S. Davidson
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