CANADA
The Irish Times
Jennifer Hough
Mon, Dec 22, 2014
When Valerie Andrews heard an interview last year on the CBC, Canada’s state broadcaster, with Irish adoption campaigner Philomena Lee, she thought “great, but why don’t you give us some airtime?”
“We are here, we are the Canadian Philomenas,” says Andrews, who has been fighting for years to have the story of Canada’s mother-and-baby homes unearthed and acknowledged.
Canada’s tale is all too familiar: pregnant single women incarcerated in religious homes, forced to attend church and carry out unpaid labour; babies removed after birth and illegally adopted, with no way of tracing them.
Testimonies, trickling out slowly from under layers of grief and shame, suggest what happened was just as extreme as what occurred in Ireland, contends Andrews, executive director of Origins Canada, an adoption rights group.
But the Canadian story is yet to have its breakthrough moment, one, perhaps like the Philomena movie, that pierces public consciousness in a way that makes the issue impossible to ignore.
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