Spain's stolen babies
Spanish society is shocked as accusations of child theft and sales begin to emerge.
Currently over 900 cases of baby theft and trafficking are being investigated in Spain, although the actual number of children sold is thought to be around 300,000. Starting in the 1930's during the reign of dictator General Francisco Franco, these abductions continued until the 1990's, over fifteen years after the death of the dictator and introduction of democracy in Spain. Parent's of abducted children would be told their child had died shortly after birth and would not be allowed to attend the funeral or see the body of their supposedly dead child. It is believed that child theft started of as an ideological practice, but later became a moral issue of taking away babies from parents that were deemed unfit. Among those being accused are nuns and priests that would find adoptive parents, and doctors that lied to the parents about the death of their children.
What are the implications of child trafficking in a democratic state?
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Comments (1)
A very evocative and shocking article which not only deals with the subject of child trafficing in Spain in the 1970s but also with the issues related to the power of the church as a moral institution, government failiure in order to provide social justice and adoption in general.
The most tremendous and shocking information provided by this article for me was the part where the author mentioned that this particular kind of child trafficking still went on after the dictator Francisco Franco was unseated and Spain became a democratic country. It is unbelievable that in a democracy - where human dignity is inviolable and protected by the constitutional law - this industry of child trafficking secretly was tolerated.
Moreover, with Spain becoming a member of the European Union in 1986, I am wondering how many similar cases of human trafficking were going on in the Western world in those days, especially in Europe - under the protective shell of democracy. There might have been more cases like this in other countries we still don't know - a scary thought.
Talking about our modern world of today where adoption is not unusual anymore at all my thoughts drift more to the Asian world, for example to China. There, many parents give their children for adoption, supposingly for several reasons. However, I am wondering if these parents always decide fully on their own if they really want to give their child for adoption or if some kind of authority - whether governmental forces or the power of some religious institutions - influences them to do so.
Posted by SonjaS | October 19, 2011 8:28 PM