Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business

by Mike Milotte

  ‘Almost 500 babies were flown from Shannon for adoption last year.’

  The Irish Times, 8 October 1951

  ‘It would be interesting to know how The Irish Times obtained the figure.’

  Department of External Affairs, internal memo

  The children involved in Ireland’s transatlantic adoptions were frequently referred to as ‘orphans’, and the institutions they came from as ‘orphanages’, yet almost without exception they were the children of unmarried mothers – ‘illegitimate’ children in the stigmatising language of the day. A review of 330 foreign adoption cases in 1952, for instance, revealed that 327 of the children were ‘illegitimate’ and only three were orphans.1 What was more, 99 out of every 100 were the children of Catholic mothers; children with few rights in Irish law, and little hope of acceptance in Catholic Irish society. The practice of dispatching such children abroad began at a time when there was no legal adoption in Ireland, but it continued for 20 years after adoption was introduced in 1953.

  The export of ‘illegitimate’ children to America was organised by nuns, with full official sanction. It was regulated by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles

  McQuaid, and facilitated by the State, with the Department of External Affairs issuing passports so the children could be taken out of the country. As far as possible the whole business was conducted in conditions of secrecy – on orders from McQuaid himself – and although individual government ministers were well aware of what was going on, the matter was only discussed once, and briefly, by the full cabinet. It was rarely mentioned in the Irish press, although foreign papers reported and commented on it from time to time. The civil servants who were involved lived in constant fear of awkward parliamentary questions or an angry public outcry. When Archbishop McQuaid asked the Department of External Affairs in November 1951 about the number of ‘adoption passports’ being issued, the secretary of the Department suggested to his Minister, Frank Aiken, that they could tell McQuaid the number was an ‘official secret’.2

  In fact, the true number of ‘illegitimate’ children sent across the Atlantic may never be known. No one was counting before American businessman Rollie McDowell’s visit in July 1949. From then onwards the American embassy in Dublin kept a record of entry visas issued to such children3 and from the end of 1950 onwards the Department of External Affairs kept a tally of adoption passports issued. These official figures suggest that around 2,100 children were sent to America between July 1949 and the end of 1973, but there is no record of the numbers before 1949. The earliest post-war reference to a child going to America for adoption is November 1947, but there may have been many before that.4 Nor is there any way of knowing how many children were taken or sent illegally. What newspaper reports there are from the time certainly put the number of children being dispatched across the Atlantic at a much higher level than is acknowledged in the official figures. The Irish Times, for example, reported in October 1951 that ‘almost 500 babies were flown from Shannon for adoption’ in 1950, while already, it said, in the first nine months of 1951, ‘that number is believed to have been exceeded’.5 The same report referred to 18 parties of children leaving Shannon in one week in October 1951, yet official figures reveal just nine adoption passports issued for the whole month of October, and just 122 for the whole year of 1951, a small fraction of the ‘almost 500’ reported by the newspaper.6 The Irish Times’ article was read with interest – but with no apparent surprise or explicit disagreement – by the officials in the Department of External Affairs who were issuing the passports. Their sole response was a brief internal memo: ‘It would be interesting to know how The Irish Times obtained the figure.’7

  Whatever the numbers, the easy availability of Irish children for removal abroad, particularly when it was prominently reported as in the McDowell and Perry cases, helped paint a picture of Ireland abroad not unlike the image the Irish themselves would come to hold of Romania, China, Russia, Vietnam and other countries where they went in search of babies to adopt in later years: a pathetic and brutal country, teeming with abandoned and desperate children just waiting to be scooped up by more enlightened and kindly souls, and removed from their misery with a minimum of fuss. Regrettably, such an image of Ireland was not entirely unjustified.

  The decade after World War Two was probably the most desolate and gloomy period in modern Irish history. As a wartime neutral, the country was cut off from progressive post-war developments in Europe, and isolation simply made the country more conservative than it already was. Ireland was a solidly Catholic country and the Church’s authority was unquestioned, at least in public. It was still a predominantly rural society as well. Church and State were as one in their determination to enforce a deeply traditional moral code, and in the process they displayed what many would see today as an unhealthy obsession with matters sexual, seeking to extend their authority into the bedrooms of the nation. Artificial birth control was outlawed and chastity was demanded of everyone who wasn’t married.

  Today almost a quarter of all families in Ireland are headed by a single parent – most of them unmarried mothers – but in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, single parent families, other than those headed by widows or widowers, were virtually unknown. Unmarried couples did not live together, with or without children. ‘Illegitimate’ children, with few exceptions, were consigned to ‘orphanages’. And the orphanages were bursting at the seams, for despite the confining Puritanism of the times, premarital and extramarital sex were far from uncommon. Nowadays, when around 25,000 children are born each year to unmarried women in Ireland (amounting to 34% of all births in 2010), the figures from years past may seem small, at between one and two thousand annually. But it all added up, and the fact that more than 100,000 Irish children were born outside marriage between 1920 and the mid-1970s – when the stigma lessened – seems adequate enough testimony to the hypocrisy of the times.8 Countless thousands more ‘illegitimate’ children were born to young, unmarried women who fled to England to hide their shame. They were so numerous they earned the nickname ‘PFI’ – Pregnant From Ireland.

  There was scarcely a family in 1940s, ‘50s or ‘60s Ireland that didn’t have a relative, friend or acquaintance who either got pregnant out of wedlock or fathered an ‘illegitimate’ child. Yet it was a taboo subject, never discussed in polite company and if mentioned at all then only in hushed tones of holy indignation. An appalling stigma attached to ‘illegitimacy’. Having a child outside marriage was regarded as an unspeakably scandalous act. The mother was seen as a wicked sinner and her child a tainted outcast. Father Cecil Barrett, head of the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau, and Archbishop McQuaid’s closest adviser on such matters, described single mothers as ‘fallen women’ and ‘grave sinners’ with severe ‘moral problems’. Their children were the victims of ‘wickedness’.9 Humanitarian or material assistance, Barrett maintained, ‘may be of no avail, unless the rents in the mother’s spiritual fabric have been repaired’.10 Another Catholic writer described ‘natural’ children as ‘rebels’ who ‘suffer from complexes analogous to those of certain invalids’. They were ‘destined for suffering and often for failure’, while ‘the girl who gives birth to one of them takes upon herself the responsibility for these evils’.11

  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 pare
nts 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.12 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 we
re 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.13

  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.