UNITED STATES
Fresno Bee
BY ANNE BIGGS
Fresno
June 20, 2014
In Ireland, at 14, my birthmother was raped on her way home from school. Three months into her pregnancy, she was transported to Castlepollard, one of many of the mother-baby homes throughout Ireland, to anticipate my delivery. While she waited, her name was changed, and her belongings taken from her. She toiled in the fields, washed walls and cleaned floors, but it was never enough. The Catholic sisters demanded 90 pounds to cover her maternity costs. Her family couldn’t pay, so she was sent to the Magdalene Laundries to pay off her debt to society.
We newborns were taken from our mothers because the Catholic Church deemed them sinners in the eyes of God, and unfit to care for us. We were labeled “bastards,” and later “banished babies.”
We were kept a secret to the outside world. Only when a chance for adoption came was care taken to meet standards required by the government to leave Ireland. When my time came, I didn’t meet their requirements. Sisters immediately provided me with the temporary care necessary to be adopted. Why weren’t we all treated as well, every day?
I spent the first four years of my life with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Ireland. They were responsible for my care. My health issues, plainly put, were abuse and neglect.
I survived that mother-baby home in Ireland and, in 1953, I was carried off a plane and handed into the arms of my shocked adoptive parents. The sisters wrote them, stating I was “fragile.” Their definition of fragile must have been: unable to walk or talk, severe malnutrition, intestinal parasites, rickets, epilepsy and emotionally stunted.
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