Ireland to US Child Adoption Corruption Through Catholic Church

Rally is Catholic and disgusted with the coverup and relatively little US media coverage of this issue. Ireland has covered the story, but I particularly want my US readers to get up to speed on this corruption.

This occurred post World War II through the early 1970’s (1949 to 1973). There still are effects on adoptees and original families.

A major point that I do not want lost in this story is that both the Irish and US governments were 100% complicit in this operation. The way that governments handled these covert adoptions laid the foundation for many of the international adoption issues today.

What would I like to see happen? Acknowledgement; assistance to all adoptees for search, bureaucratic and citizenship issues, and mental health issues that have come about because of this; and any mental health assistance and search efforts to the original families.

Additionally, I think this operation adds another reason to the list for why the US does not really want to help older adoptees obtain citizenship. If they were to grant citizenship to all adoptees prior to the Citizenship Act, then they would have to fully come clean on this operation, too. Some adoptees may not realize that they were internationally adopted instead of domestically adopted.

This was widespread to enough countries that I also have to bring up that this may have influenced the lack of teeth in punishing agencies in the Hague regulations.

We have covered the Spanish trafficking of 300,000 children that involved the Catholic Chruch already here. That topic has had almost no US media coverage.

Los Angeles Times published a story on the Ireland adoptions back in 1998. See here. That article did not delve into enough of the corruption like  author Mike Milotte’s book  Banished Babies, published in the late 1990s. An update of his book was published in April 2012. Rally will give a full review of the book at a later date.

For now, you can watch the 25 minute video with Mike that was posted on YouTube in April 2011. Unfortunately, the video just cuts out after 25 minutes, but the situation is explained in shocking detail. See  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWdtdGCv9gk

Here are some of the interesting points from the video:

(1)The Catholic Church through “orphanages” which really were mother/child homes ran the operation. US Catholic Charities was the organization on the US side. The Irish government approved whatever documents the Church sent via the nuns.

(2) The author talks about how he interviewed Air Lingus stewardesses who witnessed the babies being transported to the US and what their impressions were of what was going on.
(3) The author has documented 1,918 cases of falsified passports-mostly from nuns signing as the relinquishing mother. 24 of the 1,918 were from Protestant homes that seemed to operate the same way as the Catholic orphanage operation.

(4)There are an untold number of cases that are not documented due to US women who would travel to Ireland ,”pretend” to be pregnant and then take the Irish woman’s baby . She would then obtain a US passport as if she birthed the child. The author qualified this as ” regular “occurrence. He also said that many babies came to US WITHOUT passports at all! To me, this highlights the US complicity. It reminds me of what I read in the US Embassy cables from Guatemala from the 2000’s.

(5)Vetting PAPs: this was a joke. Sometimes they interviewed people, but all it took to adopt was a priest letter. The author mentions that in 1952 one of the heads of Catholic Charities went to Ireland and met with senior Irish government officials and flat out told them that Catholic Charities lacked  manpower and experience to vet PAPs. Ireland did NOTHING about it and kept sending kids!

(6)Also, one of the people working for Catholic Charities was “accumulating babies” and SELLING THEM.

(7)For the other adoptions, there was no money that exchanged hands, but the author has many letters from nuns to US APs postadoption that bemoan how they don’t have supplies and clothing. This was basically a guilt trip on the AP who usually would send YEARLY checks to the orphanage, but it was not required.

(8)He mentions some abused adoptees that he has interviewed. As no one in the US is tracking the outcomes, we really don’t know the quantity that were abused from this operation.

(9) The pregnant mothers did have to work at the “orphanage.”There was usually a farm attached with crops and cattle.
They would have to stay LONG AFTER baby was born AND he has documented that some stayed up to 2 YEARS WITH the baby before the nuns would take away the baby and place with US PAP. Often no notice was given to the mother. He has interviewed the mothers who of course were forever devastated.

 

We invite any adoptee or mother that is from this situation to contact us and consider guest blogging on this topic.

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