Their lives were not as valuable as those of children born to a married couple.

If someone doesn't want this horrid and repulsive religious belief to be discussed, I can see why they'd post 50 Google results to bomb the thread and make it about ANYTHING else.

Officially ok to call some believers odious shitheels. I'm just wondering if we can get a list of which sets of theists qualify.

It's also OK to call some of them "dumbasses" while chewing out people for not respecting the religious beliefs of others.

Never have gotten the lowdown on this, only hemming and hawing about how the "dumbass" label only applied to people with certain beliefs acting on those beliefs as legislators, rather than as people with religious beliefs. (Never mind that then there is criticism of expecting people to separate their religious beliefs from their political goals.)

Double standards ROCK if you're the one setting them!

is disgraceful and a travesty. I am very happy that attitudes have changed. Even if a hardline attitude was taken against the mothers' sins (which I do not support at all!), the babies should have always been treated with love and care.

The apologists don't seem to be bothered by their conscience, maybe they can explain how they'd square this with their Saviour.

I've been told christians are morally superior, if this is true now would be the time to prove it.

I wouldn't want to think you're using these deaths to trot out a tired old anti-Christian argument.

I don't have an omnipotent vengeful deity looking over my shoulder.

Okey dokey, "you're using these deaths to trot out a tired old anti-Christian argument" it is.

And no one on DU would ever claim that christians are special.

I especially interested in that last assertion.

But I'd rather watch you try to make this all about me instead of addressing the atrocity cited in the op.

Do go on.

Your unsubstantiated claims.

It would be much more productive to discuss what actually happened here without stepping over your antireligious biases in every other post.

Here's your chance to teach me how to be productive and unbiased like you.

I do not think there was a mass murder by nuns 40 years ago.

I do not think they are victims of Mengelean experimentation.

I do think they were not well-cared for and neglected, sometimes grossly neglected.

I do think the Irish government saw these institutions as a cheap solution to child welfare concerns.

I do think orphanages were far more common before legalized abortion.

What I do not know is why nothing was done after these bodies were discovered decades ago nor how they got there in the first place.

About the orphanages, have you read the information from these sources?:

I have yet to see a church teaching that advocates, let alone condone, child neglect.

What I do see is an institution that for decades served as a quasi-official placement of last resort.

Where do you think the government was while this was going on for decades?

I was asking two separate questions, sorry I wasn't more clear.

It failed them. So did these caretakers.

Sorry, you can't blame this on church teaching.

I blame all of the good decent christians who did nothing to stop it even though their Lord commanded them to.

How anyone can deny or defend the people who perpetrated this atrocity is beyond me.

Why do you refuse to acknowledge that the Church is also culpable?

But my overriding concern is to learn what happened, how it happened and why it happened.

And it didn't.

Why?

Answer my question.

And familiar.

Yes, the Government was SUPPOSED TO PROTECT AND CARE FOR THE CHILDREN IN THAT HOME.

As were the caregivers.

As to why, that's why facts are more needed than rhetoric.

You look like you need some help.

I'm sure they have a monopoly.

You went into deep denial.

You make pointing out hypocrisy easy.

Frankly, the first thing that comes to my mind when hearing about 800 dead bodies in a septic tank is not Bible quotes and Christian hypocrisy.

YMMV.

who were supposed to care for children placed in their home, asking why said christians were responsible should be the first thing that comes to mind.

Your outrage at outrage directed at the outrageous crimes committed by members of your faith is, however, duly noted.

And completely predictable.

If the op wanted to illuminate the depths some christians will go through to protect the reputation of their church by denying and defending atrocities, I'd say he got his money's worth.

Well done.

What we would really want, I think, is something like a breakdown of the Home population by age and year, a breakdown of the deaths by age and year and cause, indications of annual funding, and all reports we can find on conditions at the Home

There is one statistic that rather stands out

Of the 800 children who died at Tuam between 1925 and 1961, about 300 died in the period 1943-1946. Thus the average number of annual deaths 300/4 = 75.0 in those four years is almost 5 times higher than the number of annual deaths 500/32 = 15.6 in the other thirty-two years

To make good sense of these figures, we might want to convert to mortality rates, for which we actually need to know the facility population during the years in question, but it's a striking difference: in the mid-1940s, there were on average just under three child deaths a fortnight, and in the remaining period on average just over one child death every other fortnight

A 1947 inspection report indicates: ... 34 per cent of children died in the home in 1943; 25 per cent died in 1944; 23 per cent died in 1945. More than one-in-four (27 per cent) of children living in the home in 1946 lost their lives that year ... The average of these mortality rates leads to something like 27%, which together with the 75 deaths per year for the period we estimated above suggests an occupancy of 278: the actual 1947 report indicates 271 children were living there. So it natural to believe that the Home was overcrowded for many years in the mid-1940s

The situation seems to have been similar at other Homes in the WWII era:

... death rates for children in the Sean Ross Abbey home ... between 1930 and 1945, reach<ed> a peak of 42% in 1942, when 73 out of 170 children born there died. In Bessborough, in that same year, 53 out of 106 children born died — a death rate of 50%. The following year the figure was even higher, with 60 out of 106 children dying ...

I've posted in another thread in this group a graphic showing a general WWII era mortality rate increase for children in Ireland.

Why might we see such spikes in total deaths or death rates in the WWII era? Ireland, though independent from the UK from 1921 and officially neutral in WWII, still suffered the effects of the war: a state of emergency was declared; the battle of the Atlantic affected shipping to all the Isles, including Ireland; food became scarcer; and both food and vital services (such as electricity and gas) were rationed

Under these circumstances, the condition of the poor worsens. So it might be natural to expect increases in the numbers of abandoned infants, as well as increases in the numbers of women experimenting with prostitution to make ends meet -- either of which could increase crowding of the homes

The 1947 inspector's report is quite unhappy: it reports malnutrition and starvation in the Home. But before we rush to blame the nuns, perhaps we should note that County Galway owned and funded the Home, which was merely administered for the county under contract with the Bon Secours. The contract in the late 1920s provided 10 shillings (that is, 120 pence) weekly per head, or about 17 pence per day for all costs, and was sometimes contested as being too generous. It is, of course, possible that the deteriorated WWII economy in Ireland might also be expected to limit county budgets

It's fine with me if you dislike Catholicism: you have every right to hold your own opinion. But if you want to blame the Bon Secours sisters for the deaths in the Tuam home, I think you have some obligation to make a better argument than merely pointing and yelling, Ick! Catholics!

And when you make your argument, you should try to get your facts right: your link speaks of the discovery of

That fact is indisputable.

Why.

I don't want more excuses and misdirection.

They were directly responsible for the day to day care and feeding.

Why did christians do this?

Because I was under the impression that they were supposed to protect them.



Why.


Didn't.


They?

Are you fucking serious?

Did you just weed through most of the report and only cite the part where they lied about the conditions?

If you want me to respond to your posts make them worthy of a response.

Why did you only post part of the report?

Did you not read it?

to a news story about it; so if you discover how to get access to the whole thing, do let us know

I've quoted several parts of it by now

In my #32, I further quoted from the report 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"

Earlier, in my #28, I not only quoted mortality rates for 1943, 1944, 1945, and 1946 from the report, I also noted out that it reports malnutrition and starvation in the Home

Malnutrition can result from various medical causes, including cancer, liver disease, schizophrenia, ulcerative colitis, dysphagia, persistent diarrhoea or persistent vomiting, congenital heart disease, cystic fibrosis, or cerebral palsy. Perhaps an inadequate water supply for or crowding of the Home spread diarrheal diseases affecting digestive absorption. Perhaps children with problems like tremor or cerebral palsy were abandoned at the Home

There are many possibilities. I don't know the full story here, but it might be useful to understand more accurately what happened

You even misrepresent your own posts.

Catholic bishops are apologizing for these crimes while you repeatedly refuse to acknowledge the facts cited in your own links.

I think I'm done with you.

ugh.

I need a shower.

Jun 9, 2014

Yesterday’s papers reported that 2,051 children in care homes in Bessborough, Cork and Sean Ross Abbey, Tipperary were involved in “secret” vaccine trials in Ireland ...

Certain reports claim that some of these trials were carried out in the 1930s.[11] At this time, research ethics and law around the world had not started to develop in any meaningful way ... The only directly relevant Irish law during the time was the Therapeutic Substances Act 1932, which set out the legal requirements for obtaining licences to conduct research with any therapeutic substance in the State. It does not, however, deal with issues regarding requirements for the involvement of children in clinical trials ...

If an inquiry goes ahead, it will need to look at whether the trials were legal in the sense that they complied with the Therapeutic Substances Act 1932. From an ethical perspective, the inquiry could go beyond this and address issues about whether the trials exposed the children to unacceptable levels of risk and whether they were conducted in the absence of informed consent. In this regard, it must be noted that, informed consent alone does not necessarily make a trial ethically acceptable, if the trial had an unethically high level of risk, for example. In addition, if consent was received, it could be asked whether it was appropriate for the protection of these children. For example, it was claimed that the “mother, manager or medical officer” were asked for consent for the involvement of the children in the vaccine trials.[14] However, the question is whether these individuals were appropriate guardians of the children’s interests. Generally, the consent of parents or legal guardians is sought, as it presumed that parents will seek to protect their child. It cannot be assumed that managers of residential homes or medical officers would have automatically played this role on behalf of the children. Moreover, even if consent were sought from the mothers, given their apparent lack of freedom to make decisions regarding either themselves or their babies, it is perhaps unlikely that they would they have been in the position to refuse consent ...

It must also be borne in mind that legal and ethical standards were particularly underdeveloped at the time of these trials. Thus, if unethical conduct is thought to have occurred, this will be as a result of an inadequate legal and ethical governance framework in the area, as opposed to breaches of specific legal and ethical standards at the time. This lack of a comprehensive framework for the involvement of human subjects in research was unfortunately not unique to Ireland during the time these trials took place and is thought to have contributed to various appalling research scandals and violations of human rights around the world ...

http://humanrights.ie/children-and-the-law/vaccine-trials-on-children-in-residential-settings-legal-and-ethical-perspectives/

Comptes rendus de l’Académie des science
Séance du 26 octobre 1885
p. 765-773 et p. 774

... unexpectedly on the 6th of July last, three persons from Alsace presented themselves at my laboratory: Theodore Vone, grocer from Meissengot, near Schlestadt, bitten on the arm 4 July, by his own dog that had become rabid; Joseph Meister, 9 years old, also bitten on 4 July at 8 in the morning by the same dog. This child knocked to the ground by the dog carried numerous bites on the hand, legs, thighs, some rather deep that made his walking difficult. The principal bites had been cauterized only twelve hours earlier with carbolic acid, 4 July at 8 p.m. By Dr. Weber of the town. The third person who hadn’t been bitten was the mother of little Joseph Meister ...

... M. Vulpian as well as Dr. Grancher, professor at the Faculty of medicine, were good enough to come to see immediately little Joseph Meister and to establish the condition and number of his wounds. There were not less than 14.

The opinion of our wise colleague and of Dr. Grancher was that by the intensity and the number of bites, Joseph Meister was almost inevitably to come down with rabies ...

... I carried the number of inoculations to 13 and to 10 the number of days of treatment ... In the last days, I had thus inoculated Joseph Meister with the most virulent rabid virus, that of the dog made more potent by a great number of rabbit to rabbit passages, a virus that gives rabies to these animals after seven days of incubation ... Joseph Meister has thus escaped, not only from rabies that his bites would have produced, but also from that which I had inoculated him with in order to check his immunity produced by the treatment -- a rabies more virulent than that of ordinary canine rabies ...

http://www.foundersofscience.net/Rabies.htm

and such questions are complicated, because they involve balancing a number of factors, including the trade-offs between imperfectly known risks and imperfectly known benefits

An earlier form of the practice ("variolation&quot involved deliberate inoculation of persons with pus from smallpox lesions, when the source-case was believed to represent a relatively mild form of the disease. Certain ethical dilemmas are already evident in that practice, since it involved some judgment-call about how virulent the pus chosen actually was, as well as some speculative trade-off between the actual danger of infecting someone with a known smallpox contagion and the danger that the person to be inoculated might become exposed to a more dangerous form of smallpox at a later date

In the late eighteenth century, Jenner tested folk-legends that a prior case swinepox or cowpox might prevent smallpox. The methods by which he tested his theories would be regarded as entirely unethical today: they included inoculation of persons (including children) with smallpox material, after a known or reported or deliberately-induced case of swinepox or cowpox. The story eventually ends, of course, with the worldwide eradication of smallpox in the twentieth century

The story of Pasteur's development of a rabies vaccine similarly involves behavior that would be considered highly unethical today, and the case indicated in my post upthread is only one of the examples that could be cited illustrating Pasteur's questionable activities in testing his vaccine. Note that, at the end of his treatment of Joseph Meister, Pasteur went far beyond what he thought might suffice to protect Meister from rabies and deliberately injected Meister with material he knew could itself quickly produce a fatal case of rabies -- and that he did so solely in order to check his immunity

The ethical standards for such trials have evolved considerably since the times of Jenner or Pasteur, but many of the fundamental ethical dilemmas remain. Jenner and Pasteur were no doubt convinced that the risks, to which they might expose others, might outweigh the potential benefits -- and such thinking continues in modern vaccination trials

The modern standards, of course, will require considerably more research into potential risks and benefits -- and one nowadays probably hopes to consider potential risk and benefit to the vaccine-trial participant, rather than mere risk and benefit to society-as-a-whole

Beyond the question -- Were past vaccine-trials legal under the laws of the time? -- one can ask to what degree such past trials meet, or fail to meet, more modern ethical standards. The over-arching question here seems to me: Were the vaccine-trial participants exposed to risks that outweighed the benefits they might reasonably have been expected to receive by participating in the trials? If, as reported, several thousand Irish children in such homes between 1930 and 1936 were given experimental diphtheria vaccinations by Burroughs-Wellcome, then the trade-off is between the known dangers of the vaccine and the known risk of diphtheria at the beginning of the trial: if evidence at the time suggested the vaccine itself posed few dangers and might protect against the disease, but the risk of diphtheria itself was high in the experimental population, then one might think the test was ethical

in favor of clinical trials which might improve the lives of the test populations?

There were some famine-era burial found in 2012 on one part of the former workhouse grounds (Area I)

Corless believes there is a mass grave in the walled Area 4, but so far it seems to be hypothetical

You ought to know by now that facts are irrelevant to the posters you're dealing with.

A number of standard media seem to be getting the story wrong at every turn

Much of the coverage is of the leads-if-it-bleeds variety, starting with the so-far undiscovered "mass grave." But what's really revealing is the way some posters have added their own fictional embellishments.

So sweet.

I'll leave you two alone.