But the hellish poverty that led to these deaths is not the fault of anyone being blamed for them by the UK press. Fancy that. But let me ask a question: what would have happened to these families if these facilities, threadbare as they were, had not been available to them?

I don't think you want to know the answer but you can probably figure it out.

the fact these babies were used as LAB RATS?

Don't look now but your agenda is showing.

I'm pointing it out.

Do you always refuse to read articles that don't support your cause?

Typical.

me b zola is way too kind, you should be ashamed.

reporting this.

Not one.

Just the Daily Mail which is a complete tabloid.

In 1930, there were little to no protections for test subjects in clinical studies. It wasn't until after World War II and the Nuremberg Trials that international standards were established. The U.S. Public Health Service didn't have a standard for taxpayer-funded medical research until the early 1960's.

The era of this story would have been the same as the Tuskegee Experiments in the U.S., where black farmers were infected with syphilis, and were not provided with treatment even after penicillin was discovered as a treatment. And the study continued until 1972 -- nearly 25 years after the Nuremberg Trials and a decade after the PHS set standards forbidding that kind of research.

So just because it's the Daily Mail doesn't mean that it didn't happen. I'd like to see more independent documentation, mind you, but I've got an awful feeling that this was probably the case.

And it isn't even proven yet that the babies in the mass grave at Tuam were given the vaccinations.

"According to the Irish Daily Mail, old medical records show that 2,051 children and babies in care homes were given a one-shot diphtheria vaccine for international drugs company Burroughs Wellcome between 1930 and 1936.

There is no evidence to suggest that consent was gained for these alleged illegal drug trials - which were carried out before the vaccine was made available for commercial use in the UK - nor any records of the effects on the infants involved."

That's not something that was done back then. Today test subjects must be informed as to the risk and reward of participation, and BOTH minors and their parents must both approve -- and it's all in writing and kept as part of the project file.

In this case, since the children were orphans, it would have required only the approval of the orphanage (I would assume - not conversant with UK laws in the matter), but it's not likely there would have been written documentation, only verbal consent.

The lack of evidence is not, in itself, particularly damning.

Did you give the Catholic Church the benefit of the doubt then too?

The people who let children in these homes die from treatable illnesses and starved others to death wouldn't think twice about experimenting on them.

sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

But there is ZERO evidence of using the babies for medical experiments.

Why not just claim they ground them up and fed them to the mothers?

The actual story is that other mother/baby houses in Ireland gave vaccinations to babies without consent.

The pols in Ireland want to investigate and find out if same was done at Tuam.

The stories are bad enough without inventing bogus stories.

I'm sure you'd say that the mothers were lucky they had someone to feed them.

And that others had ground up babies so what's the big deal.

And that it was so far in the past we really couldn't prove that the babies didn't willingly allow themselves to become food.

And that the church had made reparations and I'm a horrible person for being upset by all of this so late in the game.

And that nothing like that could happen NOW because the Catholic Church knows that it's illegal to grind up children and feed them to their mothers.


Thank you for providing me with great references the next time someone claims that there are no apologists on DU.

Link 2 had this interesting item:

"There was no laws on medical testing in Ireland until 1987."

I love how everyone conveniently forgets all about their Lord when it comes to defending the abuses by their church.

I generally prefer to get facts before resorting to hyperbole.

People who use hyperbole when referring to an atrocity committed by his followers or the apologetics who continue to defend them despite proof of said atrocity.

I thought I was using references to show that those so-called jabs are anything but stale.

Judging by the howl coming from apologists they must be very fresh.

And ugly.

An empirical observation.

As to the rest of your post, well . . . .

And that the Sisters were careful and attentive and that the children's diets were excellent.

That's not a howl either, it's vomit.

Not that I think for a moment that you would stoop to distortion.

Do you know what the government did with that report in 1947?

There are many others who are not just making excuses for but actually defending the nuns.

How can you read those posts and not see the denial ?

I take it you don't know what happened with that report.

I take it you have nothing to say about the information contained in the report .

That 1947 report notes an unusually high death rate, yet notes that "However, despite the shocking number of deaths, the report found that "the care given to infants in the Home is good, the Sisters are careful and attentive; diets are excellent. It is not here that we must look for cause of the death rate".

So, the inspectors in 1947 noted severe problems, did not put the blame on the caretakers, and nothing was done until bodies were discovered 30 years later.

No, I'd say the facts have not been posted. At least the facts that do not support talking points.

Maybe they didn't know it was against the law at the time to experiment on babies at the time?

Perfectly understandable.

Maybe I'm tired, insomnia sucks, but I don't get what ya posted.

was referring to posters who always show up in these threads to make sure that NO ONE is attacking members of their faith while completely ignoring the plight of their religion's victims.

Insomnia does indeed suck.

The study, as I understand it, was undertaken by a pharmaceutical company. A company that may quite likely have spewed an impressive array of bullshit to convince the operators of the home that this was in the children's best interest.

But we don't know everything at this point.

you always come up with the best research! Nice work!

Why would ANYONE give the Catholic Church the benefit of the doubt?

It's very sad

The Church, otoh, had an obligation to care for the victims. The nuns watched them suffer and die.

Which is more heart breaking?

I'm too tired to explain why your post is so offensive.

If there was money to pay for funerals I'd imagine they would have had them but there wasn't. Did your parents send any remittances during those years? Mine did so I think I have some standing in this discussion.

Because the Catholic organisations that were charged with caring for mother and child took monies donated by private individuals, the funds granted by Government of Eire, and from adoption fees, and put it in the coffers of the "Holy" Mother Church. This, so-called moral group of nuns did not care about "bastards" except as money generators because they were the product of what the holy call sin.

Why are you attempting to excuse what amounts to mass murder?

"Because the Catholic organisations that were charged with caring for mother and child

let's say it again:

charged with caring for mother and child

took monies donated by private individuals, the funds granted by Government of Eire, and from adoption fees, and put it in the coffers of the "Holy" Mother Church

This is not about POVERTY, this is about FRAUD and THEFT of the worst order, and the gall to not merely kill infants, but to make a PROFIT!

The church would not allow them to buried on church property - they were sinners being born out of wedlock and all.

punishing the innocent children for the (perceived) crimes of the mothers.

Last edited Thu Jun 12, 2014, 10:32 AM - Edit history (1)

You are very brave.

opportunistic ~ adjective...exploiting chances offered by immediate circumstances without reference to a general plan or moral principle.

disease ~ noun...a particular quality, habit, or disposition regarded as adversely affecting a person or group of people.

Hmmm.

Make your own judgments.

...you would see that the reason they were dumped in the septic tank was that the church withheld baptism because they were born out of wedlock and could therefore not be buried in "consecrated" ground. Cost hasn't fucking thing one to do with the Church's treatment of these children. Religious intolerance and greed does.

I don't know if my grandparents sent money, I expect they did. But what I do know is that my mother was forced to work as a nanny for an upper middle-class family to "pay for her keep", and she never saw a dime of that labor. I also know that my adoptive parents paid $550 for me (I have the receipt), above and beyond their legal fees.

What sticks in my craw the most is the shaming that was done to my mother, the torture of having to care for another's child to "show her" what a "good" family was and what "she could never provide for me".

I don't understand your point of view. I do know that people who share mine have been shamed for decades into silence and we are now standing up to those who wish us to remain silent.

I have no patience with people who make excuses for the abuse hurled upon these women and the sorrow carried both by mother and child for the rest of our lives.

I suppose the slaves should have thanked their owners for giving them food and shelter too.

Unfucking believable.

And I'm not talking about anyone in Ireland.

By Ireland I mean the Republic of Ireland. And if the nuns had paid for coffins and funerals where do you think the money would have come from, anyway? It's easy to buy into a familiar narrative but it gets harder when you start sorting out the facts.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

the fact that more than one source, including salon, has highlighted this;

BUT:
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/horrific-documentary-reveals-hundreds-of-irish-babies-used-in-medical-research-and-dissection-131353793-237416651.html

http://rt.com/news/165196-inquiry-ireland-mother-baby-home/

http://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/vaccine-trials-doctor-willing-to-travel-here-to-help-inquiry-633186.html

stop saying this. The children were denied baptism, because of their illegitimacy. By order of the church they could not be buried. Money had fucking nothing to do with it. Those babies were deemed invaluable if the could not be "adopted" (read: sold to the highest bidder)

Yes he is.

Denialists continue to protect Mother Church from those horrible people who want justice for being sexually assaulted as children.

...you know there's something very wrong.

It's not like the Church has changed, their stance on GLBT rights, birth control and absolute refusal to give condoms to people in AIDS ravaged third world countries is hardly a secret anymore.

Their teachings enslave women all over the world, it's a sin to not continue to have children you cannot feed or clothe until you die (who cares if most of the kids die too? They can always make more).

They not only refuse to give out condoms, they actually tell people that condoms don't work.

They can prevent the deaths of millions and they refuse to do so.

I call it murder.

wedlock, and, due to the teachings of the Catholic Church, they were outcast by their families.
They were then used as forced labor, and their babies, if they were lucky, were given away. If unlucky, starved or used as lab rats. The church coffers grew fatter, of course.

Your agenda is showing.

People seem to think Ireland was a paradise from the 1920's to 1960's when it was extremely impoverished and lets not even include WWII that happened right in the middle of it all. Yeah the babies died it's tragic but the infant mortality rate for Ireland at that time was ridiculously high. Just remember it's the fault of the Church and go with that and everyone will like you on these boards.

Jeebus, it's bad enough to know that Mengela existed, but FFS…

It wasn't just Mengela in pre-Nazi Germany… It was Burroughs Wellcome between 1930 and 1936!

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund
21 T. W. Alexander Drive
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709
Telephone: 919-991-5100
http://www.bwfund.org

In 2008, the Indian Uday Foundation published a controversial list. In it, the children's aid organization identified the names of every medicine that had been tested by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Within two and a half years, 49 babies died in the hospital during clinical studies.

Among the various substances tested on children was the anti-hypertensive drug Valsartan. The compound was produced by the Swiss manufacturer Novartis. The company denies all culpability in the deaths. "The children that participated in the tests were very ill. It cannot be determined that administering Valsartan was the cause of death for any of these patients," says Novartis spokesman Michael Schiendorfer. Would similar tests have been possible in Germany or Switzerland? How would the public react if babies had died at a clinic in Basel or Frankfurt?

International drug manufacturers regularly avoid such questions -- while sending their new substances around the world to be tested. India, Brazil, Russia and China are all popular destination countries.

Several studies indicate that more than half of all drug trials worldwide take place in newly industrialized countries. Not only are the studies cheaper to carry out there, but many participants are thankful that they are being cared for in any way at all. The companies are lured by the prospect that established international standards are less stringently applied than they are in Western Europe, Japan or the United States.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/drug-companies-perform-medical-tests-in-developing-countries-a-899798.html

applies to these children that were not at all willing, nor had parents looking out for their interests.

Medical care in general is less expensive in places like India. There's a booming business in what's called "Medical Tourism" where a person flies to a foreign country, gets a knee replacement by doctors just as well-trained as any in the United States, and then spends two weeks recuperating at a nearby resort. All of that is cheaper than a knee replacement in the United States.

So the cost of conducting clinical trials by foreign medical professionals would represent a significant cost savings. And bear in mind that human subjects protections in the U.S. typically preclude making payments to subjects that would be considered incentives. Reimbursement for actual costs is acceptable, but being a "professional test subject" is not. So the savings in terms of payments to the patients themselves would be only marginal.

The idea they adopted profit over lives decades back should have been a clue

Look at the children in the pictures. All of them had mothers, fathers and families. Their mothers were shamed into giving them up. That was the way, then.
There must be many older adults who were raised in those institutions, and older women who surrendered their babies.
The religious right can go on about our immoral single mothers, this was how they dealt in the good old days. This kind of thing happened in the US too.

Add in some governmental oversight neglect and capitalistic greed and you have recipe for the abuse and murder of babies.

The same people who are antiabortion today were experimenting and murdering children yesterday.

In religious run institutions of all things. Which should give you every reason to question any organization that demands complete obedience.

HAve you got a main stream source for this?

I provded several irish newpapers.

There's not one actual news outlet carrying this story.

I've never seen people defend using babies in pharmaceutical experiments before...pathetic seeing it done on DU.

People demand links and when they get them, they're just ignored.

Which means all they were really interested in, is stirring the pot imo.

The article juxtaposes these two figures to give the impression that they're related. The headline is a complete fabrication.

Beyond that, today's notion of consent didn't exist in the 30s.

That wasn't unusual during the era.

And those 800 children who died died of many causes. There's nothing showing that any of them much less all died of a vaccine.

I think the travesty is the way they were treated in general, that they were subject to such terrible conditions and died in greater numbers than other children. The issue of the vaccine trials isn't specific to them, though. Even in the US during that time period and beyond we allowed testing on institutionalized people.

If you actually read the articles you linked to you'd know that.

Other mother/baby homes had babies vaccinated and pols in Ireland are calling to find out if these were too. For the historical record.

From the article and what is being referred to when talking about medical experiments by pharmaceuticals it this:

According to the Irish Daily Mail, old medical records show that 2,051 children and babies in care homes were given a one-shot diphtheria vaccine for international drugs company Burroughs Wellcome between 1930 and 1936.

There is no evidence to suggest that consent was gained for these alleged illegal drug trials - which were carried out before the vaccine was made available for commercial use in the UK - nor any records of the effects on the infants involved.

and the fact that the trials were done without conmsent, or for that matter, anyone looking out for said children stands true.

If the fact that "other homes did it too" somehow washes the Church free from shame, than I suyppose you have a point. Never mind the fact they were not merely accountable to the government, but also the people in the pews whose pennies made their treasure hoard.

Most countries (USA too) like the UK had their 'homes' for different groups of people, usually the lower classes. That home it was mentioned the children were set apart 'segregated' in schools & shunned by society in general.

Pictures show painfully thin, sallow children and records prove those 'homes' were a hotbed of diseases, neglect, abuse. The records will never match the actual death rate. The 800 dead thrown out like garbage is probably just a guess and much, much higher.

'The Church' has a lot to atone for as do most all societies, all countries exterminated, ignored/abused their personal second/third class people.

Currently in the USA we have hundreds of children held in limbo as undocumented persons. Held in those 'for profit' detention centers that feed off the $160 per day federal money they get to 'house' each person. Almost 100 reports of abuse in the past couple months. Unreported? who knows how many. The 'for profit' prisons are another major, major human rights blight on the USA.

These living children need help today from Pope Francis and all the South American countries and Congress needs to help too.

Most of these children have family/parents here in the USA to afraid to speak-up because of fears of deportation to countries they don't even know.

They can mourn the dead, count the bodies later. That pit of dead was discovered almost 20 years ago.

it's so much more fun to sit around condemning the Catholic Church, the Irish and Pharmaceutical companies for the crimes of the past than to do something about the ongoing crimes around us today!

Y'know, that argument is getting mighty old.

And besides, how dare anyone talk about a scandal that the Irish papers, government and religious leaders are themselves addressing and investigating?

the abuse of women and children in State sponsored and Church operated institutions in the 20th Century is old news and has been under official investigation by the Irish government since 2000.

http://www.childabusecommission.ie/

If you check out the link, you will note the vaccine trials are discussed.


Most (all?) of the perpetrators are dead. The Irish government and some Catholic organizations have paid some reparations. More reparations are being discussed.

The new scandal is that it recently came to light that children were buried in unmarked and inappropriate places. Proper birth and death certificates were filed at the time, so there was no secret about that. It was when a woman recently tried to trace the location of the graves using public records that she discovered that the children and infants at one location had been placed in a mass grave unmarked in any official record. There is some confusion, but there is an old concrete septic tank or cess pool buried on the site. It appears that after the tank was taken out of service, some bodies went into it or on top of it (to save the effort of digging?)

Why do you?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ireland/10885038/More-Irish-mass-graves-likely-to-be-found-warns-Archbishop-of-Dublin.html

To some this may appear to be "old news" but to others of us it provides a cultural and religious context for the kind of oppression and abuse still waged against women and children even today.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/columnists/gerard-howlin/our-public-anger-is-the-incoherent-expression-of-our-private-shame-271620.html
http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/women-still-being-treated-badly-says-wallace-271656.html
http://www.nwci.ie/discover/what_we_do/womens_right_to_health/reproductive_rights

If we do not learn from the past we are doomed to repeat it, and we will NEVER go back.

"Our morals have since changed, but not improved, hence, the frantic urge to pin the blame elsewhere; anywhere. "

I think that article deserves to be read by everyone posting on this thread - it's the best analysis of the entire horrible history and the current reaction to the revelations of that history I've seen. It rightly acknowledges that the way the Church treated those women and children was a reflection of Irish attitudes and conditions at that time.

The recent public acknowledgment that these children went into mass graves is part of the ongoing self-examination of the entire Irish culture, not just the Church. The Irish people were no more ignorant of what went on those homes than the German people were of the death camps. The difference is that the German people have faced up to what happened, and the Irish people are now in that process.

I do not intend to down play the conditions in those homes or ignore them. It's just that I have been aware of them for 14 years since the scandals first hit. Using these sins to jump on the Catholic Church today is like denouncing the Spanish Inquisition. It strikes me that many are more interested in taking the opportunity denouncing the Church for any reason than they are concerned about what happened to these people.

Today 84% of the Irish identify as Catholic, only 11% go to Mass.

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/numbers-in-irelands-catholic-church-continue-to-drop-stigma-attached-to-attending-mass-200315991-237575781.html

I would submit that many people have assimilated the teaching of Jesus Christ, applied them to the institution and walked away. They still believe; they just won't tolerate the system any more. For myself, I am a devout Catholic. However, the Roman Church is structured around the belief that women are second class humans. Therefore, while I remain a Catholic, I am a member of my local Episcopalian Church.

"It rightly acknowledges that the way the Church treated those women and children was a reflection of Irish attitudes and conditions at that time. "

So you trot out the same damned excuse that the Confederate sympathizers trot out about slavery?

Wrong is wrong, and if it is not shown and exposed as wrong, then future people will try to say "let's do that again, it worked last time."

used to send hordes of nus across the country side seizing women, children and babies to torture.

At this point I would be ecstatic if you would even admit that the Catholic church was responsible for the needless suffering and deaths of the children in this home and others.

$$$$$ They were going to try to let them die anyway, might at least bring in a bit of change.

Anyone get my reference?