The sale of babies is widely regarded as repugnant, but it has been used for political purposes in the dark days of Spain, and Argentina. Here's a story from the Sunday NY Times recounting some of the history, focusing on one woman's search for her birth mother.
Taken Under Fascism, Spain’s ‘Stolen Babies’ Are Learning the Truth. Thousands of Spanish children were taken from hospitals and sold to wealthy Catholic families. By Nicholas Casey, Sept. 27, 2022
"Up to the early 1930s, Spain had been among Europe’s most progressive countries, allowing for married couples to divorce and women to seek abortions. Under Franco, those rights were swiftly rescinded. Contraception was outlawed, adultery was criminalized and women lost the right to vote. Newspapers were censored, and many books were banned altogether, including those of Federico García Lorca, Spain’s most renowned poet and playwright. (Lorca had already been murdered by Nationalists during the civil war.)
...
"But one of the most lasting abuses of the era was borne by children. ... Franco’s men soon began the abductions on a large scale. They targeted children orphaned by Franco’s firing squads and took newborns belonging to women who had given birth in jail as political prisoners. All were sent to be raised by regime loyalists. The era of the “stolen babies” had begun.
...
"Some nuns — aided by doctors, nurses and midwives — began to abduct babies to meet demand. In certain cases, the nuns still managed to persuade mothers to give up their children willingly, though many say they were coerced into surrendering their newborns. Others say they were sedated in the delivery room and then told, when they woke up, that their babies had died. In reality, the children had been sold to other families.
"Franco’s regime was not the only one to use the theft of children as a political weapon. In Argentina, as many as 30,000 people were “disappeared” by a military junta that ruled from 1976 to 1983 and gave their orphaned children to right-wing families, prompting decades of protests and demands that the government investigate. In Spain, people often refer to the Argentine cases as offering a precedent. But unlike Argentina, Spain never established a truth-and-reconciliation commission. In fact, the country did the opposite, passing a broad amnesty law in the years following Franco’s death that absolved members of the regime of most of their past crimes. While those responsible for the abductions were not explicitly granted amnesty, the policy did reflect a consensus that had emerged in post-Franco Spain — to avoid confronting the dark legacy of the dictatorship. The agreement even had a name: the Pact of Forgetting. Spain’s leaders, on both the right and left, espoused the need for peaceful democracy, even if it meant sacrificing popular calls for justice. “Let’s not disturb the graves and hurl bones at one another — let the historians do their job,” said José María Aznar, a former prime minister, in a speech years later.
...
"In 2004, the conservative government was defeated by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, a Socialist who came into office with plans to address the taboos of the past.... at Zapatero’s urging, Spain passed its historical memory law in 2007, which condemned the crimes of the Franco era and recognized its victims for the first time.
"A new generation of victims began to emerge — this time led not by the mothers who had lost their babies but by their children, now grown, who were seeking their biological parents. They formed grass-roots organizations like the National Association for Irregular Adoption Victims, which estimated that as many as 15 percent of the adoptions in Spain from 1965 to 1990 were performed without consent of the birth parents."
Posts
