David QuinnOnce again the Church finds itself in the firing line, this time over how it ran mother and baby homes in the past
The world’s media have been happy to report that ‘800 babies were buried by nuns in a septic tank’. Some have given the distinct impression that the nuns starved the babies to death. In other words, the mother and baby homes were, in effect, extermination camps for children born out of wedlock.
The truth of what happened in those homes is bad, but not as bad as that. The desire to embellish the story arises from the usual media desire to embellish any story but also out of the desire to make the Church look as bad as possible.
This probably explains why the self-same media, both here and overseas, is much less interested in what happened in mother and baby homes not run by the Catholic Church. The fact is, many countries had mother and baby homes, or their equivalent, and very many were not run by the Catholic Church.
An investigation into the mother and baby homes is now very likely. What will it uncover? Will it find, for example, that 800 babies were dumped in a disused septic tank in Tuam? That is unlikely because it now appears that this did not happen. Were any placed in it? That remains to be seen.
What complicates things enormously is that the Tuam mother and baby home was on the site of a former, Famine-era workhouse and many of the remains buried in its vicinity date back to that time.
A further complication is that a housing estate was built near the site in the early 1970s and some bodies may have been moved at that time. Will the State really order a mass exhumation of all the bodies going back all the decades to find out what is what?
The report that the nuns deliberately starved the children also seems very wide of the mark. Many of the mothers appear to have arrived into the homes malnourished and so did many of the children because some of the children who ended up in the homes were not born in them.
The thing is, none of the very worst stories need to be true in order to accept that the mother and baby homes were unacceptable. In essence, they were dumping grounds for the unwanted of society which became death traps for a huge number of infants and children.
Considered sinful
Society as a whole simply did not want to deal with unmarried mothers and their babies. They were considered sinful and they were also considered to be an extreme threat to the already very parlous financial state of many families at a time of very great poverty.
It was (and often is) the same in countries all over the world. And so we developed these mother and baby homes and women who were kicked out of their own homes by their families were frequently forced into them by poverty.
Why did they become death traps? The chief reason is because antibiotics did not exist before the mid-1940s and inoculations are also a fairly recent invention.
Before that, the child and infant mortality rate in Ireland, like other countries, was extremely high, on a par with many Third World countries today.
Children aged 0-4 died at a rate 20 times higher than today. My father’s sister died as a baby in the 1920s. My mother’s youngest brother died aged five in the 1940s. Most families have similar stories.
Diseases like measles were extremely contagious and a child was much more likely to die from measles if already malnourished.
So when you put lots of malnourished children at close quarters to one another in poorly resourced institutions when infectious childhood diseases were often so fatal, you were asking for trouble. It is no wonder, therefore, that the death rate in these places was four to five times that in the general population which was already very high by modern standards.
Clearly we should have found a much better and more humane way to deal with unmarried mothers and their children. The Church itself ought to have been far more merciful than it was.
How do we deal with unwanted children today, by which I mean children who are unwanted by their mothers, or their fathers, by their extended families and/or by society? Unfortunately the problem of unwanted children has not gone away by any means.
Today, of course, unwanted children are commonly aborted. This is why it is so strange to witness people who favour a liberal abortion law and think Irish women should be able to have their abortions in Ireland, being so indignant about how we treated unwanted children in the past.
Morality
When we treat a given category of person badly we often do so in the name of whatever is the highest prevailing morality of the time. In the past it was religion. Today it is ‘choice’.
We regarded illegitimate children as somehow ‘lesser’ and today we are taught that children in the womb aren’t even human.
And many of us are inclined to become indignant at people pointing out that aborting unwanted children is wrong in the same way people in the past would have become indignant at people pointing out the inherent injustice of mother and baby homes.
We become indignant whenever our preferred moral system is under attack.
So society today should indeed sit in judgement at how society dealt with unwanted children in the past. But then it ought to ask itself how it deals with unwanted children today.