Ireland’s Church Homes Gave Children’s Bodies to Medical Schools for Dissection

By Ed O’Loughlin
New York Times
April 17, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/world/europe/-ireland-church-childrens-bodies-medical-schools.html

The names of victims are read out at a vigil at the site of a mass grave containing the remains of 796 babies in Tuam, Ireland.

For decades, some of Ireland’s church-run “mother and baby homes” gave the bodies of many of the children who died in their care to medical schools for dissection, a government inquiry reported on Wednesday, indicating that the scale of the abuses at the homes for single mothers was greater than previously known.

The Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, created in 2015 by the Irish government, revealed that in Dublin alone, several of the homes run by the Roman Catholic Church had sent the bodies of 950 children, almost all born to single mothers, to medical schools as anatomical subjects. The practice continued until 1977.

Some other homes also kept few, if any, records of what had been done with the bodies of the children who died in their care, the report found.

At just one of the 13 homes examined, the Bessborough Home in Cork, the inquiry said it could find no information about the burial places of more than 800 children who had died there. It also said that it had received limited cooperation from the religious orders who had run the home.

The Bessborough Home in Cork, where the inquiry could find no information about the burial places of more than 800 children who died there.

The nuns of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, who ran three of the homes in Cork, did not record the burials of any of the children who died in their keeping, and it was unclear what happened to many of the bodies.

At the Bessborough Home, the commission found records of more than 900 deaths of children from 1922 until its closing in 1996, but was able to identify the burial places of only 64 of them.

An affidavit supplied to the inquiry by the nuns contained general statements with little supporting evidence and was “in many respects, speculative, inaccurate and misleading,” the commission wrote in the report released on Wednesday. It found it “very difficult to understand that no member of the congregation was able to say where the children who died in Bessborough are buried.”

The report noted that the arrangements made for anatomical studies were “distasteful at a minimum,” but that the practice of donating “unclaimed” bodies to medical institutions “was legal and commonplace, if not widely known.”