Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business (3 page)

Men, on the other hand, who fathered children out of wedlock, faced no such stigmatisation. They may have feared retribution from a girl’s family (if family members knew), but by and large the attitude was that it was the ‘fallen’ woman who tempted the hapless man into a sinful relationship. Men were just men and women had to control the male’s ‘natural urges’ by acting modestly. The idea that women, too, might have natural urges was anathema. Female sexuality was denied in a repressive regime designed to exercise maximum control by the male dominated Catholic Church over women, their bodies, and their reproductive capabilities.

Given such attitudes, it was hardly surprising that a girl who became pregnant outside marriage was unlikely to tell her own parents of her predicament, or if she told her mother, the father was kept in the dark. And whoever in the immediate family knew, certainly the neighbours would never be allowed to find out. Many young women who got pregnant were thrown out of the family home and completely disowned by their parents, so great was the shame.

If they were allowed to return it was only after they had got rid of their babies, the visible proof of their mortal sin.

Before the early 1970s, when an allowance for unmarried mothers was first introduced, the Irish State offered no help. Rather than provide an adequate means of life to so many mothers and their children, the State, in effect, closed its eyes to the reality of thousands of births outside marriage. Successive governments ignored the constitutional undertaking to cherish all the children of the nation equally, and simply abandoned all responsibility in this area – as in so many others – to the Catholic Church and its religious orders.

For most of the unfortunate young women caught up in this world of exclusion and deceit, the only option was to turn to the nuns for help. Religious orders such as the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary, the Irish Sisters of Charity and the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul ran maternity hospitals and mother and baby homes that catered exclusively for single women. There were also religious-run ‘orphanages’ for older children, and beyond them the industrial schools. Most of these homes received income from their local authority which had a statutory responsibility to provide the bare necessities for those who could not provide for themselves, and that included ‘destitute’ children. But the Sisters also received bequests and donations, and many boosted their income further by running farms, bakeries and laundries, all staffed by ‘fallen women’ who were compelled to work for their own and their children’s keep. Yet, as with so much else, the full extent of the financial dealings of these religious-run institutions – who were in effect being paid twice for the service they provided – remains shrouded in mystery.

As for the unmarried mothers, even if they had the means, they were unlikely to have the inclination in conservative Catholic Ireland to set up home as single parents.

The overwhelming majority of them had no real alternative but to give their babies away as soon as possible after birth. The stigma attached to their condition meant their first objective was to hide the fact that they had had a child at all, a process that involved concealment, deception and denial, with unquantified consequences in terms of long- term psychological damage. Again, it was the nuns who ran the fostering and adoption societies who arranged to have the children of these single mothers taken from them. And in most cases, it seems, they not only made the arrangements but took all the critical decisions as well, assuming control in the belief that they knew best. So convinced were they of their right to decide that they frequently disposed of children without consulting or informing the mother beforehand. Their assumed moral (whatever about legal) authority to do so was simply not questioned. And, again, this was a further source of income for the sisters, for although they appear not to have charged directly for providing children to adoptive parents (which would have been illegal after 1952), they certainly knew how to maximise the ‘donations’ that flowed into their coffers from the grateful recipients of children for adoption.

For the children themselves there were few options. In the absence of legal adoption in Ireland before 1953, many were ‘boarded out’ to foster parents, with the possibility of being informally adopted, in so-called
de facto
adoptions. But for some – barely old enough to work – fostering was a euphemism for child labour, mostly on farms, and not infrequently with bachelor farmers. The fate of these children has never been recorded. The alternative, of course, was to remain in institutional care with the nuns.

For the nuns this whole business was something of a paradox. On the one hand they were virtually the only people prepared to offer any kind of help or relief to women who were shunned by the rest of society. But on the other hand they were part and parcel of the established Church, the sole arbiter of society’s moral values. As such, the nuns themselves helped enforce and perpetuate the ethical code that rejected unmarried mothers and banished their hapless offspring. It was a vicious circle.

Entering a mother and baby home run by the Sisters was, more often than not, a last resort for a pregnant woman, a move that was undertaken with great trepidation for these homes had frightening reputations as places of retribution and punishment as much as places of confinement. They most certainly were not places where the bringing forth of new life was celebrated. The nuns provided secrecy, but they exacted a price. Girls and young women entering these institutions, unless they had independent means, had to ‘work their passage’ with hard manual labour, scrubbing and cleaning indoors, working the land outdoors. Many women whose children were not fostered or adopted immediately had to work in the convents for as much as two years after their babies were born before the nuns would agree to take charge of their children. Indeed, some of these unfortunate young mothers became so dependent they remained for the rest of their lives working in the institutions where their children had been born.

This, then, was the world that Rollie McDowell, Eugene Perry and hundreds like them visited so cursorily in their quest for children. They, of course, came from a very different world: the world of wealthy, powerful, self-assured, middle class, white America. They were the victors of the Second World War. Whatever they wanted seemed to be theirs for the asking, Irish babies included. Unlike the mothers of the children, the Americans had everything going for them. Regardless of individual attitudes, it was a grossly unequal relationship, a form of cultural and economic exploitation. At the outset it was not the nuns but the Americans who set the ball rolling, for white middle class America had always experienced a shortage of ‘suitable’ babies for adoption. It was estimated that 20 American couples were chasing after every available white American child. Inevitably in such circumstances a black market developed within America with unscrupulous doctors and lawyers, among others, running ‘baby farms’ – obtaining babies from unmarried women and selling them to childless couples for thousands of dollars.

In the mid-1940s, hopeful American adopters were presented with a new source of children among the hundreds of thousands of displaced orphans in post-war Europe. Many such children were acquired by American military and government personnel stationed in US-occupied territories such as Italy and West Germany. Others were shipped to the States in groups to be offered for adoption there. Thousands of American servicemen were also stationed in Britain and remained there long after the war ended, but in 1948 the UK forbade foreign nationals from taking British children out of the country.
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As a result, many of the US military personnel stationed in Britain turned to Ireland, just a short flight away. As a wartime neutral, Ireland had no war orphans, but it had a superabundance of ‘illegitimate’ children. As in the rest of Europe, the dislocated years of the Second World War saw a huge increase in the number of births outside marriage in Ireland – up by an average of 23% a year – putting the nation’s ‘orphanages’ under even greater strain and providing opportunities for childless Americans like McDowell and Perry to take their pick. And, as these gentlemen had discovered, Ireland had no laws prohibiting the removal of such children. Nor were there restrictions on their entry into America since Ireland’s US immigration quota of 18,000 a year was under-subscribed.

The attraction of Ireland as a potential source of babies for well-to-do white Americans was heightened when other European countries moved, as Britain had done, to protect their children. By July 1948 the Children’s Bureau of the US Social Security Administration was reporting that many European countries who had suffered huge population losses as a result of the war were now ‘anxious to keep all children who are their citizens’, and as a result had ‘set up regulations which prevent children being taken out of the country for purposes of adoption’. By 1950, according to the Geneva-based International Union for Child Welfare, there were approximately 10 qualified European couples willing to adopt each available European child, a complete turnaround from the situation at the end of the war when children could, literally, be picked up in the streets. The Union’s secretary, Mrs J. M. Small, told a conference of the Child Welfare League of America in New York in November 1950 that it was now futile for American couples to go to mainland Europe in the hope of finding children for adoption.
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Ireland, by comparison, had become a happy hunting ground for would-be American adopters. The powers that be in Ireland, clerical and lay, had decided that ‘illegitimate’ Irish children were dispensable. Their removal from the country would not be banned, even though it was a period of mass adult emigration resulting in a declining population. The fact that Americans wanted these children was quite fortuitous for it meant they could be disposed of in a way that seemed beneficial for all concerned: the natural mothers were relieved of their offspring; the Americans found the children they craved, and the children themselves went off to a better life. That, at least, was the theory, but theory and reality were not always the same.

When American Catholics came looking for children to take away to the United States, the nuns who ran the orphanages must have been delighted. For one thing, they had more babies in their care than they could adequately cope with, and it seemed a natural match to pair them off with willing American couples. It also meant fewer mouths to feed, and, as an additional bonus, satisfied wealthy Americans were a potential source of generous donations.

America, of course, had always been seen as the land of opportunity by Irish people seeking a better life. There was nothing at all unusual about crossing the Atlantic to escape the confines and miseries of life in Ireland, and in the postwar era Irish people were again flocking abroad in ever increasing numbers. The nuns no doubt believed America would provide a wonderful chance to children who otherwise would spend many years of their lives in religious-run institutions, and it seemed self-evident that life with a loving family would be preferable to life with the nuns. But at the same time there had to be something fundamentally awry in a society that tried to solve its ‘illegitimacy problem’ by banishing thousands of children to a foreign country, while at the same time doing nothing to address the underlying fears and prejudices that made such banishment both possible and necessary. And unlike adult emigrants, of course, these children had no say whatever in where they ended up. What is more, despite all the efforts to find ‘good Catholic homes’ for them, there is an abundance of evidence that many of the children sent to America faced an uncertain future in the hands of people whose suitability as adoptive parents was seriously in question.

When we add in the plight of the natural mothers who were left behind with their dark, destructive secrets and their numbing pain, it is easy to understand why this is a story Church and State would prefer had not been told.

2. McQuaid’s Rules, OK?

‘We shall have to be careful not to do anything which would embarrass the Archbishop.’

Department of External Affairs
internal memo, 1950

It was Eamon de Valera, self-styled father figure of the Irish nation, who opened Ireland up to America’s child- seekers. De Valera – who had himself been born in America to an unmarried mother – was not only Taoiseach when the baby exodus began, he was also Minister for External Affairs and, as such, responsible for issuing the first children’s ‘adoption passports’. Yet there is no record of de Valera’s thinking on the matter and no record either of how many passports were authorised in his name. What is clear, however, is that he took no steps to stop the departures, although, in an era when tens of thousands of Irish people were leaving the country in a desperate search for work and a decent life, it was his Government’s policy to stem the emigrant tide, not add to it. It was not until after the change of Government in 1948, when Sean MacBride, of the small, radical republican party Clann na Poblachta, was Minister for External Affairs in the country’s first inter-party Government, that steps were taken to regulate – but not stop – the practice of dispatching ‘illegitimate’ children to America.

In the wake of the publicity given to the McDowell and Perry cases in the United States, demand there for Irish babies was rocketing. The McDowells themselves had been inundated with enquiries from other American couples wanting to know how they got their children.
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At the same time, various American Catholic welfare bodies were being bombarded with requests from childless couples across the States for assistance in obtaining Irish children. When the Perry story broke a few months after McDowell’s widely publicised coup, the Irish Consul in San Francisco, Patrick Hughes, wrote to the Department of External Affairs in Dublin seeking advice on the current law relating to such cases. He needed to know, he said, because ‘I receive many inquiries by callers, by telephone and by mail from persons who wish to adopt Irish children.’
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