Chile: Catholic priests investigated over stolen babies

Jonathan Franklin in Santiago
theguardian.com, Thursday 15 May 2014 18.34 BST

The Catholic church in Chile is under investigation over allegations that priests played a central role in a network that stole newborn babies from single mothers.

Police investigators are now probing dozens of cases in which unmarried women who became pregnant were pressured by priests to give up their child for adoption. Those who refused were anaesthetised during delivery and, upon awakening, told that the child had died. The healthy babies were hidden from their biological mothers and given away in order to be raised by married couples in "traditional" Catholic families.

Church leaders now admit they have known about the network for at least 10 years. Unlike in Spain and Argentina, where babies were stolen from families considered to be too poor or too subversive to raise the children well, the motivation in Chile was to shield the reputations of well-off families from the social stigma of unmarried motherhood.

Most of the cases now being investigated date from the 1970s and 1980s, but some were reported in 2005.

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