Stolen maternity hospitals in Spain: a silent conflict between 1939 and 1999

Javier Lopez Rodrigo Madrid, 19 Mar “It is hard to represent an absence that has left no trace and to highlight the presence of victims erased by oblivion”. This is one of the key ideas of the exhibition “Sleep in you. Stolen maternity hospitals in Spain”, which is exhibited at the National Museum of Anthropology in Madrid. A project created by several Spanish associations that aims to make the theft of newborns visible, a practice suffered by thousands of mothers in Spain between 1939 and 1999. “Sleep in You”, a title inspired by the poem “The sad mother” by Chilean Gabriela Mistral, is a journey through the different experiences of mothers, fathers and children who were “victims of this crime”, as the creators of the exhibition told EFE. The project was born when Aránzazu Borrachero (researcher) and Pedro Lange-Churión (photographer) met the president of the association “All stolen children are also my children”, Sol Luque Delgado. Through an appeal to volunteers from the association who would like to tell their story, the organization selected 20 testimonies that represented the truth of thousands of families. The theft of newborns was framed - although it later continued - in the dictatorship that Spain suffered from the end of the Civil War (1939) until the death of dictator Francisco Franco (1975), which imposed the female model where women were confined to the home and family, whose discipline came to be modeled through organizations such as the Section Feminine, closely linked to the Catholic Church. Such networks fostered control over those widowed or economically precarious women who, far from obtaining opportunities to develop a profession to support their families, lost custody of their children or were told that they had died in childbirth. As he told EFE Borrachero, “Franco had an obsession with reproduction”, the regeneration of a society divided and exterminated after the war, which needed social recomposition, albeit with certain limits to the “uncontrolled reproduction of the popular classes” vis-à-vis the middle and upper classes. The faces of those mothers and relatives, who were taken from their loved ones without knowing them, can be seen in the National Museum of Anthropology in Madrid in this series of photographs created by Pedro Lange-Churion, who through a “very difficult” emotional process has managed to capture “a baroque aesthetic” and “reminiscent of images of the Virgin as an ironic commentary on motherhood that these women could not enjoy and that would reflect the harshness of these testimonies in their eyes”. In this search process, the exhibition also shows the difficulties faced by the victims of these robberies - whether mothers or the stolen children themselves - in locating their families, because, in the absence of a regulated regulatory framework, they are stuck in different processes. They only have one bill on stolen babies, which has been pending in Parliament since June 2020, and which Sol Luque is following closely, as “it would represent a turning point in the journey of impunity and oblivion that has accompanied the disappearances.” The case of stolen babies rose to Spanish public opinion until 2008, after the adoption of the Law on Historical Memory, and in relation to children who were taken from republican families to be educated by families affected by the regime of General Franco in the early years of the dictatorship, but later complaints extend this practice until the 90s of the last century, linked to plots for economic purposes. There are two groups of people affected, people who discovered that they are adopted and that their adoptive parents “bought” them without knowing their origin, and families who suspect that their children could be stolen and given up for adoption to other families after simulating their death in hospital. All the social interest in this problem, which “also existed in other countries such as Israel or Serbia” has made the project, apart from traveling to more places in Spain, have an interest and possible international projection towards the United States and these countries already mentioned, where “the modus operandi in stolen maternity hospitals was very similar to that of Spain”, says Borrachero. CHIEF jlr/rb/sgb/ma/amg (photo)