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Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by AroundTheWorld, Jun 7, 2014.

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  1. AroundTheWorld

    AroundTheWorld Insufferable 98er
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    Crazy stuff...doesn't shed a good light on the Catholic church...and that's an obvious understatement.

    --------------------------

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...rmer-irish-home-for-unwed-mothers/?tid=pm_pop

    In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam.
    Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.
    More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.

    “The bones are still there,” local historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the origins of the mass grave in a batch of never-before-released documents, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “The children who died in the Home, this was them.”
    The grim findings, which are being reviewed by police, provide a glimpse into a particularly dark time for unmarried pregnant women in Ireland, where societal and religious mores stigmatized them. Without means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home. “When daughters became pregnant, they were ostracized completely,” Corless said. “Families would be afraid of neighbors finding out, because to get pregnant out of marriage was the worst thing on Earth. It was the worst crime a woman could commit, even though a lot of the time it had been because of a rape.”

    According to documents Corless provided the Irish Mail on Sunday, malnutrition and neglect killed many of the children, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia. Infant mortality at the Home was staggeringly high.
    “If you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but I’m still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank],” Corless said. “Couldn’t they have afforded baby coffins?”
    Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for the Home Babies, as locals call them. Many in surrounding communities remember them. They remember how they were segregated to the fringes of classrooms, and how the local nuns accentuated the differences between them and the others. They remember how, as one local told the Irish Central, they were “usually gone by school age — either adopted or dead.”
    According to Irish Central, a 1944 local health board report described the children living at the Home as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” and with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.”

    Corless has a vivid recollection of the Home Babies. “If you acted up in class, some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies,” she said. She said she recalled one instance in which an older schoolgirl wrapped a tiny stone in a bright candy wrapper and gave it to a Home Baby as a gift.
    “When the child opened it, she saw she’d been fooled,” Corless told Irish Central. “Of course, I copied her later and I tried to play the joke on another little Home girl. I thought it was funny at the time…. Years after, I asked myself what did I do to that poor little girl that never saw a sweet? That has stuck with me all my life. A part of me wants to make up to them.”
    She said she first started investigating the Home, which most locals wanted to “forget,” when she started working on a local annual historical journal. She heard there was a little graveyard near what had been the Home, and that piqued her curiosity. How many children were there?
    So she requested the records through the local registration house to find out. The attendant “came back a couple of weeks later and said the number was staggering, just hundreds and hundreds, that it was nearly 800 dead children,” Corless said.
    Once, Corless said in the phone interview, several boys had stumbled across the mass grave, which lay beneath a cracked piece of concrete: “The boys told me it had been filled to the brim with human skulls and bones. They said even to this day they still have nightmares of finding the bodies.”
    Locals suspect that the number of bodies in the mass grave, which will likely soon be excavated, may be even higher than 800. “God knows who else is in the grave,” one anonymous source told the Daily Mail. “It’s been lying there for years, and no one knows the full extent of the total of bodies down there.”
     
    #1 AroundTheWorld, Jun 7, 2014
  2. Amiga

    Amiga 10 years ago...
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    I'm sorry, but the thing this remind me is.... we are completely against abortion, but once the child is born, fk them. Which also lead to... we don't give a fk or concern about the living (the mothers and their circumstances - as both a society that doesn't understand the struggle these women go through and a religion that push that view). In a way, that continue today.
     
    #2 Amiga, Jun 7, 2014
  3. ThatBoyNick

    ThatBoyNick Member

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    800 dead baby bodies, i got the feeling of throwing up when i read that :(
     
    #3 ThatBoyNick, Jun 7, 2014
  4. Bandwagoner

    Bandwagoner Contributing Member

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    Your thought fails in grammar AND logic. 800 babies died between 1925 and 1961 in a home that housed the poorest people of a poor country. There will be over 3000 aborted babies in the USA just today.
     
    #4 Bandwagoner, Jun 7, 2014
  5. Amiga

    Amiga 10 years ago...
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    Society and Religion created a condition where these unwed mothers are basically forced to go there to have babies.

    Babies are born.

    Babies aren't care for (high dead rate)

    Dead babies and children stuffed into septic tank (inhuman).

    Today society has progressed pass most of that.

    Today there are still folks that...

    Create a condition that look down on any women that want to have an abortion and have very little sympathy if any, about why they want an abortion. Yet, most of these same folks are against any programs that support the poor.

    How are they similar --- look down on women because of their actions (or sometime other actions such as rape). Don't care that much about the living poor.


    p.s. I wish there isn't any abortion, but reality is there is and instead of trying to reduce those through laws, I said education, support and understanding go much further.
     
    #5 Amiga, Jun 7, 2014
  6. meh

    meh Contributing Member

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    You are correct. The United States is much richer and much greater than Ireland as a country. Therefore the fact that these young women who cannot support their children over there should be able to do so in the US, right?

    I take it you therefore believe that babies born out of wedlock to mothers unable to financially support them, should be granted government subsidy from pregancy onward into child support so they can be granted a chance at the American dream? That they be provided with health care should they become ill? That they be provided with food so they won't go hungry? Long story short, I take it you believe in Welfare?
     
    #6 meh, Jun 8, 2014
  7. SamFisher

    SamFisher Contributing Member

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    Oh the melodrama.

    How many millions of sperms did you murder during your morning spank session?
     
    #7 SamFisher, Jun 8, 2014
  8. Bandwagoner

    Bandwagoner Contributing Member

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    My post was more melodramatic than txtony's completely false statement that "we" are against abortion and have no child welfare in this country?
     
    #8 Bandwagoner, Jun 8, 2014
  9. Bandwagoner

    Bandwagoner Contributing Member

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    Sorry are you making a pro abortion argument? It is so convoluted I can't tell. I am pro abortion to about 2 years old so no arguments from me.

    It is interesting that you are using a non abortion world to make a welfare argument and yet we have millions of abortions a year though.
     
    #9 Bandwagoner, Jun 8, 2014
  10. rimrocker

    rimrocker Contributing Member

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    That is incredibly wishful thinking.
     
    #10 rimrocker, Jun 8, 2014
  11. LosPollosHermanos

    LosPollosHermanos Houston only fan
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    Lmao.
     
    #11 LosPollosHermanos, Jun 8, 2014
  12. Bobbythegreat

    Bobbythegreat Member
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    Don't get me wrong, I'm all for people killing their babies, especially poor people who shouldn't have kids to begin with, but it's funny to me how quickly some people are to equate human life with semen when it furthers their narrative yet in other issues some of those same people argue for the importance of human life....it's just weird.

    The "People are starving? Who cares? I flushed thousands of them down the toilet this morning in a rubber" argument might not be received well.
     
    #12 Bobbythegreat, Jun 8, 2014
  13. Bandwagoner

    Bandwagoner Contributing Member

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    Don't flush rubbers dude, bad for the septic tank.
     
    #13 Bandwagoner, Jun 8, 2014
  14. Bobbythegreat

    Bobbythegreat Member
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    Old habits.
     
    #14 Bobbythegreat, Jun 8, 2014
  15. meh

    meh Contributing Member

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    Huh? I'm Pro-Life.

    I just find your idea that America's "rich" when it comes to helping impoverished children and their mothers to be laughable.
     
    #15 meh, Jun 8, 2014
  16. Bandwagoner

    Bandwagoner Contributing Member

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    Interesting. I directly compared it to the workhouses of ca. 1920 Ireland so I assume you think the care to be similar?
     
    #16 Bandwagoner, Jun 8, 2014
  17. meh

    meh Contributing Member

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    So you're saying that all children born out of wedlock in the US have basic care and allow every chance to succeed and have a good life for themselves.
     
    #17 meh, Jun 8, 2014
  18. Bandwagoner

    Bandwagoner Contributing Member

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    I wrote that the post by txtony saying we don't allow abortions but then once born we don't care for babies was foolish on many levels.

    Then you compared early century workhouse to current conditions for poor Americans. I asked if you were serious. Are you?
     
    #18 Bandwagoner, Jun 8, 2014
    Last edited: Jun 8, 2014
  19. Amiga

    Amiga 10 years ago...
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    The message isn't that we don't allow abortions but once born, we don't care for babies (though that's true in some cases).

    The message is we care so much about the unborn, but don't care much for the living. Why not care for both? Why do we treat unborn > the living, including babies? We go to great length to protect the unborn, but we turn a blind eye to the living. I see that as strange on many levels. Of course, this we does not refer to everyone, but does refer to a large percentage of us.
     
    #19 Amiga, Jun 8, 2014
  20. giddyup

    giddyup Contributing Member

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    Take care of your own. That begins by wrapping your member and ends with caring for any progeny you create intentionally or unintentionally.

    Why does everyone ELSE have to bear the burden? As a society, we generally rise to the occasion and could manage much better if those creating babies took responsibility for them or found someone who would willingly.
     
    #20 giddyup, Jun 8, 2014
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