Bad Things Happen When People Are Not Free

CBN.com posted a story today about Spanish babies who were taken away from their mothers at birth and sold on the black market.

The article reports:

Beginning during the Franco dictatorship in 1939 and continuing until the 1990s, newborns were stolen from hospitals and trafficked by a secret network of doctors, nurses, priests, and nuns.

It began as a system for taking children from families considered politically dangerous to the Franco regime to re-educate them.

The story came to light as a result of a deathbed confession:

What began as a system of political control gradually turned into a giant money-making operation. And it never came to light until a man named Juan Luis Moreno sat by his father‘s deathbed and was told that both he and his childhood friend Antonio Barroso were both purchased from a nun.

“It was horrible, first to know that my father was dying, but then to learn that my father wasn’t really my father and that my best childhood friend was stolen just like I was,” Moreno told CBN News.

Barroso recalled, “When I was a boy, other boys at school said that my mother wasn’t my real mother. So I asked my mother, and she said, ‘of course you’re my son.’ But when I did a DNA test with my mother, the probability of maternity was 0 percent.”

The article concludes:

The victims’ group Anadir has filed more than 900 lawsuits over stolen babies, but most have been thrown out because of lack of evidence.

Even if the Spanish legal system gets to the bottom of this crime, it can never repair the damage done to so many Spanish mothers and the children they never knew.

This is the video covering the entire story:

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