Antonio Barroso always suspected that something in his family wasn’t quite right. He was 38 when the secret was finally revealed: his parents had bought him as a baby.
“I discovered my whole life was a lie,” Antonio said.
The truth came out during the deathbed confession of a family friend. Like Antonio’s parents, he and his wife had been unable to conceive. Both couples had bought their babies from a nun, for “more than the price of a flat”.
How very, very sad!!! 🙁
One of my childhood friends was “adopted” from Italy. Her parents, our neighbors, got her from nuns there and cruelly told her later that her mother was an Italian prostitute. I put adopted in quotes because, come to think of it, they had no problem getting a baby even though they were middle-aged and the husband had advanced MS. Those were conditions that disqualified couples from adoption, typically. So, I wonder if the nuns sold her to them? 🙁
“Adoption” abuse was rampant in Ireland, too. The nuns sent many children to Irish-Catholic homes in America after taking them away from their birth mothers.
from a nun??? this would make the child abuse stuff look pretty tame by comparison, though I’m not trying to minimize that…
While this is an abominable practice, we have to be a little careful here. Decisions about ‘who is fit to parent’ used to be much less formal. Additionally, remember there were orphanages filled with children in every city – because parents died, disappeared or simply dropped them off due to financial or social limitations. Finally, children were “bastards” if they had an unmarried mother. We are judging the practices of people in another era by the standards and social structures/resources of our own. The practice is abominable; I do not excuse it. However, we must be careful to use the lens of the time in question to look at practices of another era.
I agree with Montanan.
Montanan,
What does faking deaths and switching babies, as described in the story, have to do with previous social standards? I don’t know of ANY era in which it was acceptable to switch a baby on a mama or tell parents that their baby died and bury an empty casket.
From the article:
“Ana Josefa Escabia died several hours after giving birth in Terrassa in 1975. Her husband clearly remembers seeing his daughter alive.
“I saw her born,” Salvador Martin said, his eyes welling with tears, 36 years later. “She was gorgeous, just like her sister.”
But doctors later told Salvador his baby had been stillborn. A sealed coffin was delivered to the cemetery.”
Some of the kids were simply stolen and sold. There is no justification for this — wrong is wrong.