IRELAND
Irish Examiner
Wednesday, December 02, 2015
By Conall Ó Fátharta
Irish Examiner Reporter
Children as young as 12, pregnant as a result of rape, were in Bessborough Mother and Baby Home into the 1980s.
Details from maternity registers, released under freedom of information, reveal between 1954 and 1987, young girls were pregnant in the institution.
The youngest child in the registers dates from 1968. The girl is listed as being just 12 and had been transferred from Bessborough to St Finbarr’s Hospital in Cork, where her child had been stillborn in January 1968, as a result of “ante-partum haemorrhage”.
However, the presence of children in Bessborough pregnant as a result of rape continued into the 1980s. For example, Maternity Record Book 40 lists a girl of 14 whose child was stillborn in 1982. The record simply states the child “premature 33wks, gasped and died”.
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