A woman in white enters the room. It is night and young mothers are sleeping or trying to sleep after giving birth and family visits. In the end, some silence, broken only by the baby cries of newborn babies, still feared to trade the warm, safe womb of the mother for a noisy, aggressive outside world.
He can’t remember the features of the woman who sneaked into his room, he doesn’t remember only that he was wearing a white robe and that hesitantly walked in after all, as if he didn’t want his presence discovered. “What a contradiction!” thought the young mother. “If you’re at work and your job is to take care of us.” With her eyes half-open but exhausted from extreme exhaustion, she sees how the woman bends down and takes her baby. And how quickly she leaves the room. I would never see him again.
Fear of your baby being stolen is experienced by many, and many, with the unannounced public disclosure of the abduction of a newborn baby in a Bilbao hospital this week by a woman who held her in her hands for hours to the desperation of her parents. whether he will appear, whether he has left the country and that they will never see him again. It’s heartbreaking to even imagine the heartbreak, helplessness and uncertainty of both of them at that moment. The kidnapper told them, “I’m having a hearing test so I can discharge him tomorrow.” Hours later, they found him on the eighth floor mat of a local farm. We see it in a TV show and have a hard time believing it. This only happens in movies.
No. Not only does this happen in fiction, as we have recently observed, baby theft is a common practice in Spain, and it faced complete impunity for decades, from the end of the civil war to 1933. late 1990’s. of the last century. In 2021, 47 investigative cases were opened following a request by the different regional prosecutors’ offices to find out about the investigations of the head of the Technical Secretariat, Álvaro García, into the abduction of newborn babies in Spain.
In fact, according to Amnesty International, there were “multiple scenarios of illegal abduction of minors that deserve special attention in the context of Francoist gender ideology and its control over women: prisons, hospitals, maternity hospitals and charitable centers” without being adequately managed by religious communities. A Genuine General Case Against Women, conceived by the Franco regime, where we inherited thousands of family dramas, lost identities and broken ties in a scandal like no other in a country considered modern in 21st century Europe.
Thus, for many years, there were hundreds of dark hospital rooms where women dressed in white entered to separate mothers from their children forever. “They said he was stillborn” was a phrase that had been repeated for decades, just as “they wouldn’t let me see him”. Such an event should never happen. Never. The solace that remains for us today is that at least one family, one who is about to be on the other side, will finally be able to caress their baby calmly and together today at their home in Bilbao.