Ireland has released a five-year investigation report revealing that tens of thousands of unwed mothers and babies were abused and forcibly separated in the country’s Catholic “mother and baby homes” between 1922 and 1998, and that as many as 9,000 babies died in the homes.
Ireland is inextricably linked to Catholicism, and the conservative religious culture has long fostered a distorted culture of sexuality and misogyny, and the 80-year-long history of the Mother and Baby Home is just the tip of the iceberg.
Ireland, one of the most devoutly Catholic countries, had a conservative religious culture throughout the 20th century, and for nearly 50 years, even contraception was illegal in the country, and unmarried pregnancy was considered a social taboo. Because families considered unmarried daughters to be shameful, they were secretly sent to these Catholic mother and baby shelters to cover up their “sins,” and when the unwed mothers gave birth, the children were forced to be adopted. The horrors of the “mother and baby homes” were uncovered as local historian Catherine Corless pursued the story.
In 2014, Catherine Corless first discovered that the mother and baby shelter in the western town of Tuam had unrecorded burials for up to 800 dead children. Later in 2017, 20 underground caves were discovered buried in cesspools at the former site of the mother and baby shelter, where a large number of human remains were unearthed and verified to belong to infants from 35 weeks old to three years old. In the past few years, the inhumane treatment of unwed mothers and their children in “mother and baby homes” has come to light, in addition to the long hours of labor required by pregnant women, due to the generally poor conditions in these shelters, diseases such as measles, meningitis and whooping cough have caused the death of a large number of babies, and thousands of babies have died as a result of abuse or vaccine testing, and some of the remains of babies were used for medical research; most of the surviving babies were Most of the survivors were adopted illegally.
A survivor mourns at the site of the Tuam Mother and Child Shelter. The remains of hundreds of babies were found buried in the cesspool at the site of the shelter in earlier years. (Getty)
Victims attended the memorial service, including single mothers or children who were forcibly adopted back then. (Getty)
Slut punishments: hard labor, pliers to deliver babies, sexual assault
Moreover, unmarried women who became pregnant were considered “unclean” and were abused by nuns when they were sent to shelters. Some unwed mothers recounted their experiences: they saw nuns dragging babies around on the floor like rag dolls, giving them injections, forcing them to deliver babies with pliers, and even sexual abuse by priests. These episodes have been reported sporadically in the media in the past, but have never been acknowledged by Irish officials or the Church.
After a five-year investigation, the Commission of Inquiry into the Mother and Child Homes finally released its final report on Tuesday on the incidents at the Catholic Mother and Child Homes. The 2,865-page report states that between 1922 and 1998, some 56,000 pregnant women between the ages of 12 and 40-plus were admitted to the country’s 18 mother and baby homes, where some 57,000 babies were born. However, as many as one in seven babies died in the institutions before they could be adopted, a rate that is apparently higher than normal but which has remained undisclosed by the authorities in these officially recognized institutions.
The Führer and the Holy See formally apologized to the victims, but did not accept
The investigation report points out that neglect, malnutrition and lack of resources for survival are the causes of death, which shows that the mother and child institutions not only did not save the lives of these children, but also deliberately weakened their chances of survival. But the report did not acknowledge all the allegations, such as the allegations of “forced and illegal adoptions from abroad,” which the Commission of Inquiry found to be unsubstantiated and did not acknowledge or deny.
“The (abusive) institutions in the report are not from a foreign power, but are of our own making as a society. We have treated women badly and we have treated children badly.” Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin described a time when Irish society had a deeply distorted view of sexuality and intimacy, leaving young mothers and their children to pay a terrible price. Martin, along with the Irish Catholic Church, issued a formal public apology to all victims of the Mother and Baby Home on Wednesday (Jan. 13) and launched a national reparations program.
However, the investigation report and the official apology from the state do not mean that the matter has come to an end. Some of the victims said they refused to accept the government’s apology until they had read the full report. On the other hand, there are victims who have been searching for their relatives for decades without any active cooperation from authorities or churches. Some have been given only partial and incomplete information when requesting biographical information from child and family agencies, and have even been verbally abused by nuns from informed churches. For these victims, the ordeal has not yet ended.
Irish Prime Minister Martin apologized on behalf of the government to all victims of the Mother and Baby Home on Jan. 13. (AP)
The ultimate suppression of “reproductive autonomy” after 50 years of contraceptive bans
“Mother and baby homes are just one of the products of Ireland’s religious conservatism. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, all forms of contraception were outlawed in Ireland by legislation in 1935, and the import and sale of all contraceptive products was banned. In July 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical Humanae Vitae, which clearly stated that the Catholic Church would not accept any form of artificial contraception, and the Irish Catholic Church at the time was “absolutely committed” to this line set by the Vatican.
The Irish Church took an absolute stance on the issue of birth control, forbidding the faithful from using contraception in any way, even for the normal maintenance of the relationship between husband and wife and the risk of pregnancy for the wife, with irreparable social consequences. It was only in 1985 that Ireland lifted the ban on condoms and spermicide.
On May 26, 2018, Ireland voted in a referendum to lift the ban on abortion. Large crowds of female supporters celebrate in the streets of Dublin. (Getty)
The past of the ban on female contraception and abortion shows that women in Ireland in the past had no rights to reproduction. For a long time, women had neither access to contraception nor the option of abortion. The situation was even more tragic for unmarried women, who were often sent to church-based mother and baby shelters for forced labor, forced childbirth, and forced separation of flesh and blood, and were not given any pain relief during childbirth as a form of “atonement. Ironically, the investigation report also confirmed that these unwed mothers included cases of pregnancy by adultery and incest.
In addition to the tragedy of the “mother and baby homes,” the Church of Ireland, like many European Catholic countries, has seen a number of cases of sexual abuse by clergy. Allegations of sexual abuse of children in the Church began to emerge in the late 1980s, and in the 1990s the Irish government began to open investigations involving hundreds of priests and thousands of children, spanning several decades. In addition to the revelations that many senior clergy knowingly covered up, some were involved in inappropriate heterosexual relationships and child abuse in church nurseries. Although Pope Francis apologized for church “crimes” such as mother and baby homes and clergy sexual abuse during his visit to Ireland in August 2018, few convictions have been secured.
The road ahead: conservative and liberal?
As the Irish government describes in this report, there is a “brutally misogynistic culture” in society. In fact, what has happened in the Irish Church over the last few decades goes far beyond the pro-choice and pro-life issues that continue to be debated in Catholic society today. It is also because of the scandals that have plagued the Catholic Church that Ireland has slowly embarked on the road to religiosity in the 21st century. It is only in recent years that the country has begun to loosen its grip on abortion and homosexuality, first with the 2015 referendum to legalize same-sex marriage and then with the 2018 referendum to repeal the ban on female abortion.
On the political front, the country elected its first gay prime minister, Leo Varadkar, in 2017, and the current children’s minister, Roderic O’Gorman, is also a gay man, and has been described in recent years as entering a “post-Catholic” era.
Demonstrations for women’s reproductive autonomy and for the relaxation of abortion rights have been taking place in the Catholic country in recent years. In Northern Ireland in 2018, protesters dressed as waitresses in a satire against religious totalitarianism. (Getty)
However, this does not mean that Irish society as a whole has since decided to “move to the left”. According to the country’s census, the percentage of Ireland’s Catholic population fell sharply from 84 percent in 2011 to about 78 percent in 2016, but it is already higher than most Western European countries. Although the scandals that have surrounded the Church for decades have made the Irish Church less authoritative today, the majority of the country’s population still embraces its Catholic identity, and the successive liberalizations of same-sex marriage and abortion rights in recent years have struck a nerve with conservatives, who question leftist policies that have worsened social mores and increased the number of divorces and petty crimes.
Carole Holohan, a lecturer in modern Irish history at Trinity University Dublin, explained that Irish society has undergone a rapid transformation between one and two generations since 1990, when more immigrants and foreign investors entered the country and more liberal ideas were injected, both on a religious and economic level. For the older generation, the change came too quickly.
Recent Comments