The home, which was run by an order of Catholic nuns and closed in 1961, was one of many such institutions that housed tens of thousands of orphans and unmarried pregnant women who were forced to give up their children throughout much of the 20th century.

In 2014, historian Catherine Corless tracked down death certificates for nearly 800 children who died at the home in Tuam between the 1920s and 1961 — but could only find a burial record for one child.

  • BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I’m old enough to remember everyone getting all bent out of shape by Sinead O’Connor ripping up a picture of the Pope.

    She was a couple of years early, but right.

  • buttnugget@lemmy.world
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    If your society cannot or will not support an unmarried pregnant woman on her own, your society is a failed one.

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    1 month ago

    My dad recent got a decent payout for being the internationally trafficked childhood victim of one of these unwed mother homes…

    Not worth his lifetime of trauma, nor the issues that came with being sold at age 4 to a “keeping up appearances” family that sent him away to boarding school on top of everything…

    But it’s something… he’s mid 70s, so you know, totally enough time to use the money.

  • FirstCircle@lemmy.mlOP
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    Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon_Secours_Mother_and_Baby_Home .

    The mothers were required to stay inside the home for one year, doing unpaid work for the nuns, as reimbursement for some of the services rendered. They were separated from their children, who remained separately in the home, raised by nuns, until they could be adopted – often without consent.

    Some women who had had two confinements were sent directly to nearby Magdalene laundries after giving birth, as punishment for their perceived “recidivism”. According to Professor Maria Luddy, "Such a stance, though not intended to be penal, allowed for the development of an attitude that accepted detention as a means of protecting society from these reoffending women.

    Confinements. Punishment. Detention. Reoffending women.

  • Javi@feddit.uk
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    1 month ago

    Religion has historically provided a safe haven to the sick and twisted among society, where they’re allowed to act with impunity due to their perceived status.

    That’s not directly due to the religion; but rather due to the societal pedestal being devout seems to put people on; “a holy person could never do that to a child” etc…

    The reality is, other areas that benefit from this sort of status too find themselves riddled with bad actors… Just look through charity organisations and I can guarantee you’ll be combing over a sea of sociopaths buying themselves good credit with public opinion rather than people looking to make a difference because they want to (not to say these people don’t exist; they just don’t end up running the show normally)

    • catty@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      mental health nurses who work in an asylum/“hospital”/“mental health unit” too according to a friend who works in one as a nurse.

      • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        There are thousands of diseases that historically kill newborns. Modern medicine helps with a lot of them from vitamins to antibiotics to surgical interventions.

        • xor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 month ago

          if you throw a bunch of babies into a pile of diseased babies, is that murder or just god’s work?
          if it wasn’t murder, there wouldn’t be 800 dead fucking babies in a septic tank

          general rule of thumb: if you’re hiding hundreds of dead babies, you’re a murderer… the details of how you killed them is irrelevant.

          if you drop a baby next to a pool of water and don’t stop it from drowning that’s not negligence, it’s murder.

          • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            You have a serious case of “didnt read the article” going on here. The deaths were already recorded - they were known and nobody was hiding the deaths. They were hiding the bodies.

            They pulled up the septic tank because there werent any graves for all the death certificates. This is improper burials. The reason there are so many deaths is likely just poor medical care as the article notes the place closed in the 1960s.

    • Sal@lemmy.world
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      There’s only two religions in the planet that do this kind of fucked up shit with any frequency, and it’s only because they’re the norm in both of those regions. Don’t make yourself sound like a literal Reddit atheist. You’re here exactly because Reddit sucks. Don’t bring it back.

      Many people are religious without doing this kind of shit.

        • Sal@lemmy.world
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          Show me examples of Buddhists, Native Americans, or Paganists doing this kind of stuff. The literal reason Islamism and Christianity are particularly bad is because they’re mass-adopted and politicians take advantage of that.

          Just remove all religion from politics and there won’t be any problems. Human rights dictate freedom of religion AND FROM religion, not just the later.

          • taulover@sopuli.xyz
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            Have you heard of the Rohingya genocide? Buddhists absolutely do fucked up shit.

            I would agree with you that not all religion is bad. But singling out Christianity and Islam as the exclusively bad ones is absurd. All religions have some really important things to teach us philosophically, but at the same time, pretty much every religion has been used to justify some pretty bad atrocities.

            • bloup@lemmy.sdf.org
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              So like I used to be anti-religion. But when I studied the history of religious thought, it seemed like every criticism I had of religion I was able to find a religious tradition which explicitly accounted for that criticism, and it made me realize a lot of the essential beliefs that I had about religion in general were simply untrue. Like there are religious traditions that literally deny institutionalization (so you can’t even associate religion in general with organized religion), there are literally religions that explicitly reject the existence of any kind of deity (so you can’t even identify religion with a belief in some kind of a god). In general, it seemed like the only thing that literally all religions had in common was that they represented a set of metaphysical beliefs that an individual has attached themself to for whatever reason. And I realized that it’s kind of impossible to never make any metaphysical assumptions about the world we live in. And I started to ask myself questions like “is it even possible to reject the entire category of religious thought in a meaningful way while still retaining the ability to reason about the world?” And “is there actually a good reason why I don’t want to think of my own humanist ideas about the world as religious in nature, or does it just make me feel kind of funny because I had already prejudiced myself so heavily against the concept of religious thought?”

              • PunkRockSportsFan@fanaticus.social
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                Weird. I had the exact opposite experience.

                I find every religion to be a liars den of lies.

                And all religious people are liars fools or worse.

                Humanism and religion are polar opposite ideas.

                Don’t apologize for religion. It’s gross.

                Keep that shit away from me and my kids. You bring it near my kids we are going to have a fucking problem.

                • bloup@lemmy.sdf.org
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                  I feel like you didn’t actually try to understand any of what I just said. I hate to break it to you, but it’s literally just a fact that there are religions that make metaphysical assumptions that are literally equivalent to secular humanism. If you think that they’re actually contradictory, it just means that you probably actually haven’t tried to study the history of religious thought from an actually critical perspective where you didn’t just presume that you already had it all figured out.

    • PattyMcB@lemmy.world
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      Religion is a social cancer. Sometimes it’s benign and the host reabsorbs it. Other times it’s spreads and kills living tissue

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    DNA analysis found that the ages of the dead ranged from 35 weeks gestation to 3 years.

    Ok, atrocities aside, how the hell can you tell age from DNA? DNA doesn’t change as you age.

    • Machinist@lemmy.world
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      Telomere length is the only thing I can think of, but that’s totally a guess and I don’t know much about it. Telomeres, as I understand it, are padding at the end of DNA and shorten as you age.

  • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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    Playing devil’s advocate here, could it be that they ran something like a baby euthanasia outfit? like, no contraceptives back then, extreme social stigma surrounding birth out of wedlock, poverty forcing women to give up their newborns, giving them up to the nunnery, which had no resources to deal with feeding caring and raising thousands upon thousands of children, and so either A) simply took it upon themselves to take the logical step and cull some of them, or B) that a high number of babies died of natural causes (neglect, malnutrition, sudden infant death syndrome, disease, whatever) and they simply disposed of them.

    I don’t know what else could explain this, it’s not like we’re seriously talking about gangs of murderous baby killing nuns roaming the streets at night and snatching up babies by the hundreds for lust murders, right?

    As far as I’m concerned, the only crime here is the institutionalized psychopathy of a religious patriarchal system that refused to take responsibility for giving people a legal and moral avenue to raise children that were brought into life in violation of religious law.

    Makes more sense to me at least, I may be fuck way off wrong.

    • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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      Article says

      DNA analysis found that the ages of the dead ranged from 35 weeks gestation to 3 years.

      A major inquiry into the mother-and-baby homes found that in total, about 9,000 children died in 18 different mother-and-baby homes, with major causes including respiratory infections and gastroenteritis, otherwise known as the stomach flu.

      So basically just Dysentery, yeah. The nuns were no saints (lol) either, though, because they punished the unmaried mothers and put them through hard labor (lol).

      This is a terrible time for jokes, I’m so sorry about that. I always make sure to ask for forgiveness (lol).

      • Soapbox@lemmy.zip
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        1 month ago

        dude… WTF is with the (lol)s in your post? None of what you said is funny, or even reads remotely like it’s even trying to be a joke.

        • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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          Right, okay

          1. “they’re no saints” is funny because they’re part of a religious organization who revere saints

          2. “made to do labor” is funny because in english Labor is a term used to describe the final step of childbirth

          3. “ask for forgiveness” again because religion that reveres asking the lord for forgiveness.

          Hope that helps you out, buddy.

    • BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world
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      So you think they “care” so much about these single women and their babies that they would kill their babies and hide their remains in a septic tank?, what’s wrong with you. Don’t you think the more humane thing would be to promote contraceptives and safe sex and safe abortions in case of accidental pregnancies, and run proper orphanages for the unwanted kids. But of course the actual church is against all of this, cause the idea that religion has anything to do with morality is ridiculously stupid. All religions are cults full of dumb fucks desperate to matter in this meaningless existence.

      • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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        Nuns, historically, have not had much if any authority in the church. I think just a couple of years ago they ousted one of the only female pastors in the USA.

        • BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world
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          What made you think I’m talking about nuns, I’m talking about those in power, who’s orders they follow willingly, they could choose not to and walk away or expose the church higher ups, they choose not to, so don’t tell me about nuns being powerless, what they are is soulless

          • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            If only it were so easy. I’ve been atheist since middle school but I was raised by a Catholic and an Evangelical, if a person actually believes they suffer for eternity for not appealing to the source of all true good then you’re not going to convince them to walk away because of the church’s policy on condoms. And even if you did convince a handful, it’s not going to dent the Church’s bottom line. Real change has to come from the higher ranks.