Home babies

October 30, 2017 3:59 AM

There was a time when Catherine wanted only to have a plaque erected in memory of these forgotten children. But now she felt that she owed them much more. “No one cared,” she said. “And that’s my driving force all the time: No one cared.”

The New York Times tells the story of Catherine Corless and the lost children of Tuam. (Note: this is a distressing story of child abuse, neglect and death, and mothers forcibly separated from their children, among other elements.)

Catherine Corless's essay mentioned in the piece. Names of the children. Tuam previously on MeFi.

posted by Catseye (31 comments total)

What were they thinking? All those dead babies.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:04 AM on October 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

Such a sad story. So many sad stories. How much misery is the Church responsible for? And for what? Senseless. It’s utterly senseless.
posted by scratch at 5:21 AM on October 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

Thank you so much for this! And God bless Catherine Corless for caring about these lost babies. I read through the list of names, the least I could do, and found several with the common family names I know were in my grandfather's family in that area of Ireland. The way people were interrelated in those small rural towns, no doubt some distant relatives. My Irish cousin's late wife was from Tuam. One of the little girls in the First Communion picture looks like my second cousin's little girl. As an unwed mother myself in 60's America, I can see how this culture of shame came down the generations to contribute to the loss of my son to adoption.

Is there somewhere we can contribute to Catherine Corless' work? What she is doing is both noble and necessary. May the babies of Tuam be remembered forever, and finally rest in dignity and peace. " Eternal rest grant unto them" and eternal shame on the Catholic Hierarchy for the cruelty they have inflicted on women and children in Ireland and elsewhere.
posted by mermayd at 5:41 AM on October 30, 2017 [16 favorites]

This is another support beam knocked out of the crumbling structure that is the Catholic Church in Ireland, child sex abuse, the Magdalene laundries, and now this.

Authority without supervision or consequence inevitably produces terrible results. At least now this is all coming out, and it's producing consequences.

...one in 10 Irish people from these latest findings now say they have no religion (468,421 people), a staggering 73.6% increase since 2011. This makes “no religion” the second largest group in this category behind Roman Catholics.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:11 AM on October 30, 2017 [9 favorites]

I learned about this just this week via the [fantastic] podcast Irish Passport.

Just got back from Ireland where the streets of Dublin were papered with posters advocating the repeal of the 8th amendment, banning abortion completely.
posted by Miko at 6:25 AM on October 30, 2017 [5 favorites]

What were they thinking? All those dead babies.

Probably shame at being a sinner, anger at being treated as a second-class citizen in their faith, and a deep repression of natural human urges. Nuns can be pretty. messed. up.

All that anger and frustration got channeled at the nearest target unable to protect him or herself. That together with the added justification that they were "birthed from a sin." I mean, an illegitimate boy couldn't even become a priest (this isn't exactly correct, but still)!

In the 1917 Code of Canon Law, canon 984 n. 1 asserted that illegitimate men were irregular for the reception of the sacrament of Holy Orders. This didn't change until 1983.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:28 AM on October 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

Here's the 1917 Code of Canon Law. You'll want page 341.

You'll see that Illegitimacy is right next to deformity, insanity, epilepsy, and being possessed by the devil.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:44 AM on October 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon reading this, her initial write-up, watching the videos, reading older articles, and Wikipedia-ing. It was grim and bewildering. I'm glad you posted this.

I wish I could grasp the significance of this number of deaths relative to what might be "normal" during that time. But I don't know if there are any direct comparisons possible -- the rest of the UK may have had orphanages, but they weren't regularly birthing babies there and therefore being the locus of all childhood mortality in the first three years. So it is hard to evaluate that aspect.

What's perfectly clear is the somewhat separate issues of not giving those children the burial that doctrine and custom requires, which is a great offense to common decency, and -- arguably more importantly -- the particular social context which vilifies the children themselves and the mothers and creates the environment in which this could even be possible. Frankly, it's like some medieval shit.

I think that it's very important to hold the entire society, particularly the government to account. Even in Corless's present-day investigations, you can see that this is a strong factor.

But, also, even accounting for the endemic awfulness of the church about this and so many things, I think that the Congregation of Sisters of Bon Secours needs to particularly account for this.

In the end, in addition to all the outrage and sorrow I feel, I marvel at Catherine Corless. I don't think it's possible to excessively portray her as a hero, no matter how much she resists the label. It's not just that she was relentless in all this work, but her character is revealed in how she continues to work closely with all the survivors and family who contact her.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:47 AM on October 30, 2017 [11 favorites]

Reading this reminded me of a saying that your utopia is someone else's dystopia. The Irish Republic was organized as perhaps Europe's only modern theocracy with the government and the church acting hand-in-glove to provide public services, educate, preserve culture, enforce moral standards, and serve as a national binding force. And all of that was supported on the backs of a prison system dedicated to the isolation and exploitation of unwed mothers and their children.

You can argue that past standards of two-parent families were better and that there are negative consequences to single and teenage parenthood, but enforcing such standards required a segment of the population to live in a system reminsicident of some of our darkest dystopian fiction. But at the time, it was someone else's conception of an ideal system.
posted by deanc at 7:43 AM on October 30, 2017 [11 favorites]

"But at the time, it was someone else's conception of an ideal system" - deanc

And for much of the 20th C that person was Eamon De Valera..

But for the last twenty years or so, I get a real sense that opinions are changing in Ireland and what seemed an unbreakable edifice is now on the verge of crumbling into the sea.

"Catholic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with De Valera in the grave" -with apologies to Yeats
posted by foleypt at 8:52 AM on October 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

it is important to note these are not technically orphanages, the Magdalen laundries were essentially place for women of ill-repute who brought shame on their families by acting out in any way, not just sexual, woman could be confined there for going against parental authority even when over 21yrs old.
Often women who were intellectually disabled were also sent there as it was considered a safe place where they could work on mind-numbing tasks.

since the babies born to the so called 'fallen' women would be considered fruit of a poisoned tree I have no doubt in my mind that these children would not have been cared for as well as other children at the time although I am not aware of data about deaths that could compare to any regular population sample.

The only time these women were allowed out (in the neighbouring laundry to my school St Vincent Convent Secondary School) was Tuesday afternoon and we would see them file out with Nuns as we went back after lunch, invariably they Nuns would call 'eye's down' as they passed us, presumably lest they infect us with their thoughts, I'm talking 1980.

They would go out supervised to spend there few pence on sweets in the local shop for a few hours and then return. Once a week.
We had no clue.

We understood these to be intellectually disabled women being 'cared for' by the Nuns. The utter horror years later of realising that these were imprisoned women too terrified and brainwashed into believing their own guilt, many of whom were presumably in sound mind when committed, because their families had to commit them to these places, and there was a lot of shady practice relating to inheritance where a male cousin would claim all manner of things if a young woman inherited significant property....so many abuses

and so many deaths

a friend who went to school with me later managed to do something, as speechwriter for the Irish Taoiseach she influenced and wrote what is considered the best speech of his career ....

but there is still so much horror

I recall my father trying many many years to find his niece and nephew, sent to one of these places because his brother and sister-in-law were alcoholics....so the state removed the children without asking any of the 6 bothers well established with good families if they would take them in...quite a painful part of my childhood as I'd see my parents exhausted after another fruitless search, literally with tears...we'd look up expectantly....headshake....look down, 'well put on the kettle for a cup of tee!' enforce brightness.

It turned out at his brothers funeral when we managed to find them that they were in Tipperary all along, he had gone there three times on information from neighbours and had been turned away each time. the only justification we can think of is the state was paying per child presumably.

this is as nothing to the horror of so many women, their loss, the complicit men who got off scott free...

but the echoes are all around us. This is one of the most egregious example of Ireland's mix of toxic religiosity and the patriarchy underpinning it, every culture will have its particular efflorescence or rather excrescence, this is ours.

.
posted by Wilder at 9:04 AM on October 30, 2017 [42 favorites]

the rest of the UK may have had orphanages, but they weren't regularly birthing babies there and therefore being the locus of all childhood mortality in the first three years.

I don't know why you would say that. There were mother and baby homes all over the UK. My husband was born in one. His mother cared for him in early infancy and then stood in a window and watched him be driven away by his adoptive parents.

In central London. In 1972.

Like the children of Tuam, my husband had no legal right to his birth records or to any information about his birth mother or origins. He obtained his records illegally.

I get that this is shocking for people who are first-time-callers to the system of homes for unwed mothers, but this system was in no way uniquely Irish. It was perpetuated all across the Western world, including in the US and in Canada. The Irish nuns stand out for their particularly egregious abuses of the system they ran, include the sale of Irish children to the US, as seen in Philomena.
posted by DarlingBri at 10:02 AM on October 30, 2017 [19 favorites]

"it is important to note these are not technically orphanages, the Magdalen laundries were essentially place for women of ill-repute..."

Aren't these homes independent of and in addition to the Magdalen laundries? It's not clear to me how the two institutions interacted -- it seemed like the laundries were more punitive in orientation?

"I don't know why you would say that."

I wouldn't have assumed that on my own, and as I began reading the article I wondered a lot about how things were handled here in the US.

But I got that impression by how the article presents the things that intersect the UK, particularly things not mentioned giving the impression that they didn't exist. And the article (and commentary here and elsewhere) ties this closely with the close church and state cooperation and the particular cultural milieu of Catholic Ireland, that it was easy to jump to the assumption that something about this is specific.

At the very least, the mother and baby homes in the UK during the same era would provide a good basis for infant mortality rate, taken together with the general infant mortality rate Irish/UK differential, to the degree there was one. Because it seems pretty important to me that given the article and so many people emphasize the numbers, that we get an idea of what those numbers really indicate. The article provides a few contemporary accounts of what seems like poor treatment. I wish there was more analysis of this, given how shocking 800 children's deaths, over that time and buried that way, are.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:28 AM on October 30, 2017

There will be a full report made in 2018. I hope it's rigorous and provides some of the statistical analysis you're looking for, IF. I do know that under-5 mortality plummeted in Ireland after WWII as urban conditions improved. Beyond that, not sure where to find a baseline, and it wouldn't be that useful unless compared with data on when each child died, since it was such a span of decades.
posted by Miko at 11:34 AM on October 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

I was putting together a FPP on it last night and one of the links had a chart demonstrating how much higher the child mortality was in the baby homes than in Ireland as a whole over time. I've closed all the tabs, but I'll see if I can dig it up later.
posted by tavella at 12:09 PM on October 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

But I got that impression by how the article presents the things that intersect the UK, particularly things not mentioned giving the impression that they didn't exist. And the article (and commentary here and elsewhere) ties this closely with the close church and state cooperation and the particular cultural milieu of Catholic Ireland, that it was easy to jump to the assumption that something about this is specific.

It is specifically religious. It isn't specifically Irish.

In England, the state dealt with orphans by making them the responsibility of Local Authorities (towns or boroughs, basically.) Each had an orphanage. In Ireland, there was no Irish State and thus no formalised system prior to 1916. The gap was filled by the Catholic Church, which voluntarily ran orphanages. After 1916, the Irish State allowed the system to continue rather than adopting responsibility for orphaned children.

Neither the UK nor Ireland had a system for dealing with unwed pregnant women. In both places, this gap was filled by the voluntary sector. In Ireland, this was exclusively the Catholic Church. In the UK, it was the Catholic Church, Protestant churches, Quakers, and I'm assuming there was somewhere for Jewish women.

So yes, it existed in the UK. My husband was born in London at the charmingly named Crusade of Rescue, now the more palatable Catholic Children's Society.

It wasn't very different in the US, by the way. Orphanages could be run by state or by religious groups. (See: Tennessee Children's Home and Tennessee Baptist Children's Home.) In many places, like NYC, there was no provision for these children at all and enterprises like the NY Foundling Hospital were entirely private.

But there was no provision at all for unwed pregnant women. All services were private. My father was adopted through what was the Edna Gladney Home for Unwed Mothers, and is now the Edna Gladney Adoption Center. (He may originally gave been an Irish airplane baby but that's a different story.)
posted by DarlingBri at 12:29 PM on October 30, 2017 [6 favorites]

England also had boys and girls homes. I met an older man when I visited London earlier this year who said he was raised in a boys home and that it was not an orphanage. I'm still not sure what the difference is but he made a point of making the distinction. It made me think of the the Spencer Tracy movie Boys Town, a kind of hybrid boarding school/orphanage.

I think in some circumstances with boys homes, the children may still have a parent(s) who is not able to care for the child. This man seems to have been treated fine and he learned a trade. I didn't ask how he ended up at the boy's home.
posted by shoesietart at 2:07 PM on October 30, 2017

In Canada, there was the Ideal Maternity Home in Nova Scotia, with its infamous Butterbox Babies.
posted by orange swan at 2:30 PM on October 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

She kept digging, eventually paying for another spreadsheet that listed the names, ages, and death dates of all the “illegitimate” children who had died in the home during its 36-year existence.

The sobering final tally: 796.

That's practically one death every two weeks.
posted by lucidium at 2:50 PM on October 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

One thing that got me was the assumption some people made that the bones were from the Great Famine (also called the Irish Potato Famine), and they basically shrugged resignedly, because of course you’ve got children buried in mass graves everywhere. I didn’t realise until now that Ireland is still traumatised, but of course it is: the population today is still lower than it was in the 18th century.

I’ve heard people say that Jews need to get over the Holocaust or Blacks need to get over slavery, but we’re all traumatised, we’re all carrying the pain of past generations and it’s crippling us. The people of Tuam “knew” that little children die when times are tough and it didn’t seem shocking to them and so it was passed on, and on. We have to stop this, all of us, for all the little children.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:53 PM on October 30, 2017 [7 favorites]

the Great Famine (also called the Irish Potato Famine),

Just a technical note and meant in a helpful spirit, as I recently learned, in Ireland the 'famine" is often called The Great Hunger (an significant point of politics, because there never was a famine in its classic definition of 'a shortage of available food' - Ireland was rich in food production during the entire time 1/5 of its population died and another fifth left), and some people even find it offensive/dismissive to call it the "potato famine" as if the only issue was potatoes or that they were just unhappy because of not having potatoes.

Your point about generational trauma is so right on. We're not over it. We're not over any of it - we're still living it, all of it. It made a difference to our predecessors and made a difference in how they raised us and how they behaved and how they passed the world along to us. I agree it is important to categorically reject arguments that the past doesn't matter.
posted by Miko at 3:49 PM on October 30, 2017 [11 favorites]

While I haven't found the chart I was thinking of, there was a 1947 inspection report that had deaths as percentages:

* 34% in 1943
* 25% in 1944
* 23% in 1945
* 27% in 1946

I would be extremely surprised if a third of all Irish newborns died, even during WWII. So yes, death rates appear to have been incredibly high -- it's not clear if the above includes just infants, but the report specified that of 66 births or admissions from January to September 1946, 21 died.

The same report also claims that "the care given to infants in the Home is good", but given the incredible death rates, I suspect that was an attempt to avoid being targeted by the then all powerful Irish Church -- can't blame the nuns. Good care does not result in over a third of examined infants being emaciated. I wonder if they were executing the same plan as the "Butterbox babies", where infants identified as not likely to be profitable were put on starvation diets.
posted by tavella at 4:02 PM on October 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

Here's a chart of urban and rural infant mortality in Ireland. So in 1946 when 21 out of 66 infants died, the urban mortality rate was around 71 out of 1000. So the rate was nearly four and a half times normal, and more like five times when looking at the national rate. And this wasn't just one terrible year that could be marked up to an epidemic, this was year after year after year.

(Root document here.)
posted by tavella at 4:16 PM on October 30, 2017 [7 favorites]

How much misery is the Church responsible for? And for what?
eternal shame on the Catholic Hierarchy for the cruelty they have inflicted

The Catholic Church certainly bares some responsibility for these atrocities, but let's not forget, as the Prime Minister said, that it's not like the nuns were breaking into houses and kidnapping children. The Church, and the Bon Secours order in particular, were executing a social mandate: Irish society cruelly rejected unwed mothers and illegitimate children.

Sure, the reasons for this were couched in Catholic rhetoric, but not every Catholic society fills septic tanks with dead babies, and plenty of equally oppressive societies have other, non-religious justifications.

I say this not to let Catholicism or the Church off the hook, but because I feel like in many of the comments above, the Church is too much of a whipping boy. The Church, like the rest of Irish society, was once awful but has improved over time, and that is important to note. This absolves no one, but it should probably temper our rage at these institutions *as they exist today*.

There is no easy answer like "Religion sucks!" or "Fuck the Church!" or "Fuck Ireland!" that isolates and explains away why such terrible things can happen and go on for so long. We all have it in us to commit atrocities, and no one has a clear model for why they happen. By all means, blame the perpetrators, but let's not pretend our enlightened MeFite souls are so much purer.
posted by andrewpcone at 7:52 PM on October 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

This absolves no one, but it should probably temper our rage at these institutions *as they exist today*.

OK well, today, the Catholic Church in Ireland is TODAY refusing the demands of the Irish State and of the UN to compensate the survivors of the Magdalene Laundries, who have never been paid. The Catholic Church in Ireland is TODAY shuffling paedophile priests from parish to parish to protect them. The Catholic Church in Ireland is TODAY forcing Muslim children to drive 30 miles each way every day because it won't give their unbaptised souls a place in the local schools under their exclusive control. Etc.

So there's plenty of scope for modern day rage Catholic Church in Ireland.

Irish society cruelly rejected unwed mothers and illegitimate children.

Because of the teachings of the Catholic Church.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:38 PM on October 30, 2017 [11 favorites]

Given that the Bon Secours did not suffer even a moment of self-reflection when this came out, but instead hired Terry Prone and her PR firm Communications Clinic to lie for them, I am quite comfortable continuing to regard them as abhorrent.
posted by tavella at 10:07 PM on October 30, 2017 [10 favorites]

I should note that it seems possible the baby homes were not an insignificant contributor to the infant mortality rates all by themselves. Ireland had only 67,922 live births in 1946, so going by the chart that would have been around 4400 infant deaths. If the Tuam's home rate of 21 infant deaths in 9 months was average for the other 13 baby homes, then that would be nearly 400 right there. Close to ten percent of all the infant deaths in Ireland.
posted by tavella at 10:47 PM on October 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

And it is by no means certain that Tuam was average; per Irish Central, the Examiner reports that the Bessboro home in Cork had a mortality rate of 68 percent in 1944. 68 percent. 121 dead children. That's not a orphanage, that's a killing ground.
posted by tavella at 11:15 PM on October 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

These sorts of homes existed all over the English-Speaking world, Australia, Great Britain, USA, and Canada up until the 1980s in some places. Before that, there were "baby farms" where infants were left to die while their mothers became wet nurses to the wealthy, before the advent of safe infant formula. There is a current heartbreaking exhibit in London of articles that were left with babies by their natural mothers when they left them at the Foundling home, in the hopes that they would be reunited some day.

The homes in Ireland were especially bad and persisted longer than in some other places, but they were by no means the only such places, and in the USA and Canada, the Protestant and Jewish homes were just as bad, except that babies were not left to die when they became a saleable, valuable commodity after adoption became popular and profitable for adoption brokers. Australia has issued an apology to mothers who were incarcerated in the Homes there and forced to surrender their babies.

Someone has already mentioned Georgia Tann and the Tennessee Chilren's Home, a horror show where children were sold to the highest bidder, often celebrities with dubious qualifications to be parents. This is where "Mommy Dearest" Joan Crawford got her adopted daughter. In Canada we had the Butterbox babies of the Ideal Maternity Home. I knew a woman adopted from that place, and she had a catalogue of babies for sale that the home had issued in the the 1940's, babies sold like puppies complete with cute pictures.

Shaming unwed mothers and persuading them to give up their children is still going on today, especially in Fundamentalist religious cultures and on the internet where unscrupulous baby brokers seek poor naive young women "in trouble". Yes, there are ethical adoption agencies and necessary adoptions, from foster care and mothers with long-term, serious problems that make them unable to raise their children, but there is also still a lot of corruption and religious shaming in adoption.
posted by mermayd at 5:06 AM on October 31, 2017 [5 favorites]

Shaming unwed mothers and persuading them to give up their children is still going on today
Case in point.

Related: Meet the New Anti-Adoption Movement: The surprising next frontier in reproductive justice
posted by Miko at 6:20 AM on October 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is not unique to Ireland by any stretch: 400 Children May Be Buried in Mass Grave at Notorious Scottish Orphanage. Surprisingly, for such a protestant country, the orphanage was also run by a Catholic religious order. I see this both as the worst of the bad old days (aka 30 years ago or more) for the Catholic Church coupled with society wishing to sweep these people under the rug. The Church became the default place to dump them, but those in the Church seemed to have missed that whole "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'" bit.
posted by Hactar at 6:29 AM on October 31, 2017 [2 favorites]