Tens of thousands of young Belgian women who became pregnant out of wedlock between the end of World War II and the 1980s were interned by their families in centers managed by the Catholic Church in Flanders (Western Europe).
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In other European countries it happened in a similar way and there were abuses, but a Belgian journalistic investigation recently surprised by the extent of the abuses. In these centers, where they were humiliated and in many cases sexually abused even while pregnant, they gave birth under the control of priests and nuns.
Babies, usually in the first days after birth, were given to adoption families without the consent of their mothers. These families paid considerable sums for the time, between 10,000 and 30,000 Belgian francs, which did not go to the young women who had given birth, but rather the Church itself. A not particularly pessimistic estimate would put the money that the Flemish Church would have obtained by selling these children over four decades at 600 million francs (about $17 million). 30,000 children in a population, that of Flanders, which in the last decade alone exceeded six million people.
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The information, revealed in the podcast “Children of the Church” from the flamenco newspaper 'Het Laatste Nieuws' For the first time, it has the testimony of several of those sold children and some of the mothers who bought them.
In addition to giving birth in conditions far removed from the medical practice of the time, In some cases, even under total anesthesia, they had to watch their newborn children stolen from them to sell them to adoption families. Young women were often told that the babies had been stillborn.
Later, those young women who had given birth under the supervision of religious people were sterilized during childbirth so that they would not become pregnant again. The fact that they had gone through these centers was known in their communities, and they were marked for life, with a stigma that made it difficult for them to form couples. They were, for the most part, single women for life.
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These religious centers, directly dependent on the bishoprics, on many occasions destroyed the records of the internment of these young pregnant women and the adoption of their babies, so Later it was very difficult to achieve reunification when the babies were adults and wanted to look for their mothers..
The Belgian Church, through its Episcopal Conference, responded to the information by saying that it felt compassion for the pain and trauma that the victims of that human trafficking must have gone through.
The bishops now ask that an independent investigation be organized to study those events, both the internment of young pregnant women and the delivery of their children, upon payment, to adoption families. Then, they promise, they will be able to study the need to compensate the survivors of that trade that was already illegal at that time.
Nobody expects criminal consequences because the eventual crimes, forty years after their commission in the early 1980s in the most recent cases, would have already expired.
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Yes, a parliamentary commission of inquiry can come forward to shed light on the scandal. Hours after the journalistic revelation, Justice Minister Paul Van Tigchelt said that four parish priests had been expelled from the list of members of the clergy whose salaries are paid by the State. Four other parish priests are being investigated, but the vast majority of the people involved in those illegal baby abductions and their sale have already died..
Van Tigchelt said that “the Church and society must assume their responsibilities by recognizing the victims, who must be able to know what happened and who was responsible. I do not want to create false expectations or hopes because most of the cases will have expired, but we must help the victims, give them answers, get out of this taboo. The parliamentary committee must respond to these questions.” One of the answers to be given is which doctors and why they agreed to participate in those births knowing that the children were taken from their mothers.
The second major scandal to shake the Belgian Church this year (the previous one, three months ago, was the revelation of hundreds of cases of pedophilia within religious school structures) plans as a shadow over the planned visit of Pope Francis to Belgium in 2024.
IDAFE MARTIN PÉREZ
BRUSSELS
TIME
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