CHILE
Oman Tribune
SANTIAGO Chile’s child welfare service is investigating reports that a Catholic priest was involved in giving babies up for adoption in the 1970s and 1980s without their parents’ knowledge, telling the biological mothers that their child had died.
Chilean investigative journalism centre Ciper published a report last month saying that an unknown number of babies who were born to unmarried mothers were illegally given to other families. In some cases, the women were persuaded it was the best choice for them, but in others they were told the baby had died soon after childbirth, the report said.
The cases took place during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. In Argentina, there are hundreds of documented cases of babies being taken away from imprisoned mothers who were considered subversives by the state during the ‘dirty war’ in the 1970s.
However, in Chile’s traditional Catholic society, the babies were removed from women from middle-class families not for overtly political reasons but because of the stigma attached to unmarried mothers at the time.
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