SPAIN
Spiegel
By Helene Zuber in Madrid
Until into the 1990s, doctors and nuns in Spain allegedly stole newborn babies and sold them to couples hoping to adopt. The vast scope of this lucrative baby-snatching network is only now coming to light as courts heed victims’ calls for investigations and possible trials.
It’s been a year since María Luisa Torres was reunited with her daughter. She gave birth to the girl in a Madrid hospital, but then the baby was taken away from her.
“For almost 30 years, I saw my child in the faces of people on the street,” says Torres in a gravelly voice. But on a summer day last month, it is indeed the face of her daughter Pilar that emerges from a stream of pedestrians on the main shopping street in San Fernando de Henares, a town near Madrid. She has big, brown eyes and a pale complexion, and her face is framed by perfectly trimmed bangs and long hair dyed a mix of black, violet and red. …
This specter of a Spanish national Catholicism even survived Franco’s death in 1975. Nuns, especially members of the Hijas de la Caridad, or Daughters of Charity, whose training was more religious than intellectual, worked in the maternity wards of hospitals and in baby nurseries. They blindly obeyed their mothers superior and priests who, in turn, decided who deserved a child and who didn’t. As a result, what were generally young or unmarried women became victims of baby theft. After all, the reasoning went, according to the Church’s teachings, these mothers were living “in sin.”
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