Snatched at birth

It's never hard to find evidence of infant mortality in earlier centuries when you stop to peruse old graves. Here, one headstone marks the deaths of four young children from one family: Thomas died in 1802 at 3 months, newborn twins the following year and a second Thomas in 1815 aged 4 years. Their parents, Sarah and David, in the next grave, lived until the ages of 61 and 67 respectively, and very probably had other children. Diphtheria, typhus, cholera, TB and a host of other diseases and infections once stalked every family, rich or poor.

It was the newborn twins who caught my attention in particular. They must have died at or soon after birth, and their names and sexes are not even recorded. Probably they were whisked away from the exhausted mother before she had time to start grieving. Maybe she was told it was for the best, that two babies would have been hard to rear.

Lost babies have been very much on my mind since watching the harrowing televison documentary Spain's Stolen Babies a couple of days ago. It appears that for 60 years, until quite recently, possibly as many as 300,000 healthy newborn babies were taken from their mothers at birth and trafficked for adoption across Spain and further afield. The babies were whisked away at birth and their mothers were told they had died. Sometimes they were shown the frozen corpse of another infant, kept in the hospital mortuary for the purpose. The babies were then transferred, via a network of doctors and nurses, priests and nuns, to families, which, in return for payment, were able to pass the babies off as their own children without any record of their true parentage having been preserved. The scandal has only recently come to light following the deathbed confession of one such adoptive parent to his now-adult 'sons': "I bought you from a priest."

It seems the practice was initiated by General Franco to allow babies born to 'undesirable' parents (i.e. his political opponents) to be removed and placed with approved families. The Catholic Church, hand in glove with the dictatorship and also the main social service provider in Spain, was the obvious route for the baby trafficking to be enacted. The trade in stolen infants was a lucrative source of revenue for religious institutions up until the 1990s. The medical profession was also complicit and one particular doctor who has been heavily implicated is still practising. When interviewed by a reporter the old man was initially ingratiating but as soon as he realized where her questions were leading he started to brandish a crucifix and to recite loudly from the Bible.

Legitimizing the theft of children is a feature of dictatorships. In recent times it happened most notably in Argentina but the Nazis did it too. Historically, conquerors routinely stole the offspring of the vanquished to raise as their own. Here in this Welsh graveyard the nameless twins were laid to rest close to home and family. Tragic, but right and fitting in the circumstances. But in Spain and elsewhere, thousands are wondering who and where their children or parents are. And the perpetrators of the crime have not been brought to justice.