Spain’s Stolen Babies

-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger

Up to 300,000 Spanish newborn babies were stolen from their parents and sold for adoption over a five decade period. The mothers, often young and unmarried, were told their babies had died and were not allowed to see the body or attend the funeral. A secret network of doctors, nurses, priests, and nuns trafficked the babies beginning during the reign of General Franco and continuing into the early 1990’s.

The Catholic Church is closely linked to the scandal, which, under Franco, played a powerful role in Spain’s social services including hospitals, schools, and children’s homes. The system of baby theft continued even after the dictator’s death in 1975.

Lists of would-be adoptive parents were compiled by nuns and priests. The adoptive parents, in many cases, were unaware that the babies had been stolen, they were told that the mothers had given the babies up.

Countless faux burials for the “dead” babies were performed with casket filled with animal bones and rocks. Some hospitals kept frozen baby cadavers to show to mothers as proof their baby had died.

The Catholic Church saw this as a moral crusade, removing babies from sinful unmarried mothers and placing them with those who were more worthy, in the eyes of God. If the Church also turned a profit, so much the better.

It is often argued that without God there are no objective moral values. If stealing and selling babies can be justified as an objective moral action, then there are no objective moral values.

H/T: Pharyngula, Daily Mail, The Guardian, BBC News.