Americans could pay more Irish to adopt children
Sixty thousand children from
mother and baby homes were ‘sold’ to the U.S. by Church and State. Fifty per
cent more women died giving birth in those homes, than in the general
population. One civil servant questioned the birth certificates being issued.
One mother, in all that period, managed to get out with her baby and keep it. Following
gasps of air sucked in or expelled, there is a profound silence in the auditorium
of the Glor theatre in Ennis on Sat (8.3.2014) as Martin Sixsmith, who brought
us the story that led to the film Philomena, tells the largely female audience
the result of his continuing research for a forthcoming BBC documentary. I feel
sick. The word slavery rises in my mind. It won’t go away. This is slavery.
Maybe the women were not owned but their incarceration was a form of slavery.
Dublin’s Archbishop McQuaids’
influence, in particular, fueled the teaching that single pregnant women had
sins to propitiate. (Many of the Nuns were victims of this misogyny too). Maybe
the women were not actually owned, although one has to ask who ‘owned’ their
children, and I don’t want to take away from the slavery of others who were owned, sold,
chained and manacled by suggesting, that this too, is slavery. But if you have
no way to get away, if you have to pay off the indenture of your pregnancy,
birth and housing for self and baby by hard manual labour (because you can’t
possibly raise that amount of money yourself), what else can it be called?
People come to believe the justifications their abusers insert in their minds.
The first aspect of slavery is ownership
but the second, pervasive and enduring, is what happens in your head. It is
when you come to believe you don’t have a right to a life of your own. Abusers,
rapists and persecutors of all kinds tell themselves stories that justify their
abuse. They develop a twisted perspective that their wrongdoing is ‘for the
good of’ their victim and instill this deep into the consciousness of those they
abuse who, literally, can’t defend themselves from this insertion because the
invasion of their identity is so destroyed by the trauma they are enduring. They,
then, come to believe that their abuse is due to their own fault! This is what
abuse is. It is this belief, in the traumatised and in the perpetrators that
has to be exorcised.
Perpetrators have to come to see the harm they've done before their cure can begin.
As with addicts, until perpetrators can genuinely acknowledge themselves the harm done, both to themselves and
others no possible cure can begin. We have to get this corrosive
perspective of sinfulness out of our heads and put right the continuing
wrongdoing.
First steps to a world fit for their grandchildren: change the law and rid ourselves of corrosive attitudes
A first step is to change the
law here to allow mothers and children seeking to find each other to do so. If
Philomena and her sisters in motherhood lived in Northern Ireland this could
happen because the updated laws make it possible. But we also need to challenge
attitudes and delusions that ultimately lend support to perpetrators and
misogyny. The women whose children were sent away should not have to carry this
burden alone. The remnants of these corrosive attitudes need to be removed from Irish society and the ground harrowed to make it a better place for their grandchildren.
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