The Spanish Civil War was fought from 1936 to 1939, with the rebel Nationalists fighting against the existing Republican government. On 1 April 1939, the Republicans surrendered to the Nationalists, and their leader, Francisco Franco, took power.[1]:1767 This began thirty-six years of fascist rule under the Nationalist government, of which one of the tenets was unifying the population with a single culture, including strict Catholic ideals.[2]:2,26 This led to a combination of factors that allowed for sixty years of systemic baby-stealing. This paper seeks to determine to what extent Franco’s government was responsible for Spain’s stolen babies.
One source that I draw on extensively in my investigation is Kimberly Josephson’s senior honors thesis from 2013 at Carnegie Mellon University, “Stolen Babies in Spain: Human Rights Abuses and Post-transitional Justice.” The origin of this source is valuable to my investigation because it comes from a well-regarded institution with contributions from a professional historian. Its content is valuable because it has a wealth of information regarding the story of child abduction in Spain, discussing the Civil War and its outcomes from multiple perspectives and the stolen babies over multiple “eras.” At the same time, a limitation of the content to this investigation is that a substantial part of it is dedicated to an analysis of post-transitional justice, including a comparison with contemporary Argentina, which is outside the scope of this paper. The purpose of Josephson’s thesis is also limited for my investigation because it is focused on demonstrating the abuses of human rights that arose from the practice of stealing babies, which means it will favor that perspective and lack others; for example, she writes, “The Nationalists were careful not to label this as ‘stealing.’ … They claimed to have a noble cause,” both of which imply that the author disagrees.[3]:19
Another source that is beneficial to this essay is Nicholas Casey’s 2022 article in The New York Times titled “Taken Under Fascism, Spain’s ‘Stolen Babies’ Are Learning the Truth,” which tells the story of Ana Belén Pintado and her search for her birth parents. Its purpose is valuable to my investigation because, as news journalism, it seeks to report only the facts in order to tell the story correctly, discussing the rise of Franco’s regime and its movement of stealing babies in objective terms. In addition, its origin is valuable to a historical study of Franco’s Spain because the article was written by experienced journalists—Casey has worked for major newspapers for more than fifteen years and won several awards[4]—and published by a reliable news organization. However, its content is limited for this investigation because it focuses on the story of a single woman, so the purely factual writing serves a secondary purpose in the article. This is also a limitation to the purpose because Casey’s goal is not that the reader comes away with a better understanding of Spain’s history of stolen babies but of the specific story he is trying to tell: it starts with a scene in Pintado’s garage and ends on a happy note of her reuniting with her mother.
The pattern of the child thefts can be stated very simply: “abduction of children from those who had power against those who did not,” in the words of Lydia García Dueñas. [2]:31 However, those who initiated them knew that it would not be popular, even with those on the receiving end, to steal babies with no moral or ideological basis. Antonio Vallejo Nágera was one of the leading psychiatrists in Spain before the Civil War and rose to prominence within Franco’s Nationalist party during it. He conducted “scientific” research on Republican subjects to find evidence for the existence of the “red gene” and the biological inferiority of Republicans to Nationalists. His ideas have been defined as eugenics—a concept that was gaining popularity elsewhere at the same time—and have been compared to Hitler’s ideology. [3]:17–19, [5]:60 They were convincing enough, though, that the public, especially the upper classes that favored Franco, was willing to believe that they were doing a service to children by taking them from their Republican parents by force and reconditioning them so that the red gene would not be expressed; they were saving them as God required them to “separate the wheat from the chaff.”[3]:19 Thus, a system of moral child abduction was born.
In 1940 and 1941, Franco’s government passed three laws that laid the legal foundations for the paradigm of baby-stealing. Babies born in prison could be taken into state custody at the age of three years, those whose parents were executed or had disappeared could be taken immediately, and those who did not know their names or could not be associated with parents could be renamed by the government. Within two years, the state was the guardian of 9000 children, and the number was 30 000 by 1954. [3]:21–24 This was intentional action by the Nationalist government to eliminate their political opponents—Republicans and anyone associated with them—and prevent them from being a major force in social and political life in Spain.
The law also condoned child theft through the legal “definitions of birth, rights of the child, and a mother’s right to anonymity”.[3]:33 The death of a child within twenty-four hours of birth was often considered as an abortion, meaning no birth was recorded, and mothers who put their children up for adoption were guaranteed the right to withhold their names as a measure to dissuade actual abortions, listing the mother as “unknown” on the birth certificate instead. Together, these conditions meant that a bad actor—or someone following orders—could confiscate a child from their mother, claiming that the baby was dead, and give it to other parents as an “adoption,” “allegedly at the mother’s request,” with the only paper trail and the knowledge of the true mother pointing to the death of her child shortly after birth.[3]:33
The Church was inextricably connected to the pattern of child abduction in Franco’s Spain. Kimberly Josephson writes, “Strong Catholic values imbedded [sic] in Franco’s regime guaranteed the power of the Church. It employed thousands of nuns in nearly every hospital and maternity ward in Spain through the 1980s.”[3]:33 The culture that Franco exploited and built upon placed such strong trust in Church officials that the people never questioned what they said. Their work in hospitals and orphanages, some of them entirely under the auspices of the Church, made it even more plausible that they were able to offer babies for adoption who did not have mothers or whose mothers did not want them.[3]:33 “[T]heir influence was perhaps strongest in the hospitals’ charity floors that took in the poor. There, the nuns were often deployed to encourage single mothers to give their babies up for adoption to married couples.”[6]
The Church did not act on its own, though; its actions could not have been possible without implicit consent by the government. “The alliance between the Church and the State formed a perfect pairing and what one did, the other covered up, and vice versa.”[3]:34 Nuns and church officials were “empowered by a dictatorship that allowed them to operate with impunity” and “especially invoked the protection guaranteed under” a law protecting mother’s anonymity when they put their children up for adoption. [3]:33, [6]
Franco’s government collapsed upon his death in 1975, but the pattern of abductions continued as late as 1999.[5]:60 The reason was simple: “although the case of stolen babies is given a political tone, what has really driven this trafficking of babies is money.”[7]
For adoptions in the 1950s, the new parents “made yearly payments on the child’s birthday until he or she turned 18. Adopting parents paid between 50 000 and 1 000 000 Spanish pesetas, or between 300 and 6000 euros today.”[3]:32 When the new democratic government passed a sweeping amnesty law in the late 1970s, doctors and nurses saw an opportunity to continue making money off of feigned adoptions with little risk of prosecution. María José Esteso Poves writes, “Between 1976 and 1983 there was a boom in stolen children. Ideological crime had become a business.”[7] Her source Guillermo Peña claims that one of the major perpetrators, gynecologist Eduardo Vela, may have amassed a fortune of 159 million pesetas by 1989[7]—although, in court, he maintained that he was not connected to the stealing of babies.[8]
To these hospital workers, whether they were ruled by fascism or democracy was unimportant. Their morals still told them that it was better for the children to be raised by the new parents—often wealthy, married couples—instead of their birth mothers—often single or poor and thus poorly posed to care for the children.[6] Even if they did have doubts about selling babies without their parents’ consent, the business was lucrative and effectively legal.
The legacy of the abduction of babies is still very real in Spain. News outlets all over the world have reported on the history, presenting it as an immense travesty, with some focusing on victims whose cases have been more or less successful—for example, in The New York Times, Ana Belén Pintado, who was reunited with her biological parents but could not get her revenge in the courts;[6] and, in El Salto, Ascensión López and Purificación Betegón, neither of whom have been able to make much progress on their cases by any route.[7] The generation that includes both the mothers whose children were stolen and the doctors, nuns, and others who performed the thefts is dying out, making closure impossible for the middle-aged adults who were stolen as babies.[6] Meanwhile, the democratic government that has existed since 1978 has taken an apathetic stance on the issue,[3]:28 with some officials arguing that there was never a large-scale, systemic problem: “The Popular Party government maintains that no children have been stolen.… The then Attorney General of the State, José Manuel Maza, told the [European Parliament delegation] that the stolen babies ‘are isolated incidents’.”[7]
In conclusion, while the underlying causes of the stealing of babies in Spain lie within Franco’s government, Nationalist officials alone are not responsible for the majority of the problem as it can be seen now. Franco and his associates made intentional choices in the 1930s and ’40s to create a society that elevated those who supported his fascist government and its ideology and ostracized everyone else, especially his direct opponents. He set up a system that allowed him to control their population in a very intimate way, with the goal of a sort of cultural homogeneity. However, it was not mainly his officials but those of the Church who carried out this project, and when they continued the practice after Franco’s death the new government did nothing to stop it. All of these people are responsible for the alleged crime against humanity that was the six decades of stealing babies.[3]:30
Kimberly Josephson, in her thesis, relies exclusively on secondary sources, including books, academic journals, news articles, and web pages. Her method is primarily to take the information she finds in these sources and analyze it to support her argument—that the stealing of babies constitutes a crime against human rights and the Spanish government needs to do something about it—in much the same way that this investigation does. Nicholas Casey, in his New York Times article, instead draws on primary sources: he is mostly writing about Pintado’s story based on his conversations with her, and about other stories for which he interviewed someone involved. Other news stories take similar approaches, such as María José Esteso Poves in her article “Bebés robados, un crimen que continúa en democracia,” where she uses both interviews and her background knowledge as a person from Spain to describe the situation today, taking a similar stance to Josephson’s.
There is one major obstacle that shows up in all of these sources: just as the statute of limitations had supposedly expired on the stolen-baby cases that were brought to court,[6] the statute of limitations on historical research has nearly expired. Decades after the peak of the issue, “surviving victims or witnesses may no longer be able to testify to abuses and other evidence may be long gone.”[3]:5 The perpetrators—those who are still alive—are old enough that their memories have faded, and they can no longer defend themselves in court with clarity.[8] Historians studying the abductions, and the victims, are forced to refer to archival records from a government that has not worked to help them and, for the most part, has not maintained those records, especially after forty years or more. [3]:5 More generally, it can be said that historians do not work in a vacuum; their studies are affected by the lasting effects of the very events they study. My sources are not able to construct a complete picture of the issue, through no fault of their methods but because the Spanish government—and, to an extent, Spanish society—cannot provide them with the information they would need.
↑ 1. Sandie Holguín, “How Did the Spanish Civil War End? … Not So Well,” in American Historical Review volume 120 issue 5, jstor:43697076
a b 2. Lydia García
Dueñas, “‘Que mi nombre no se borre de la historia’: The stakes of including
women’s historical memory in Spanish politics of memory,” at Université Libre de Bruxelles,
repository.gchumanrights.org/
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o 3. Kimberly Josephson, “Stolen Babies in Spain: Human Rights Abuses and
Post-transitional Justice,” at Carnegie Mellon University,
kilthub.cmu.edu/
↑ 4. “Nicholas Casey” in The New York Times,
nytimes.com/
a b 5. Carolina Escudero,
“Giving voice to the traumatic event, Spanish mothers of stolen babies. Three strategies to silence mothers
during and after the dictatorship,” in International Journal of Humanities and Social Science volume
10 issue 3,
researchgate.net/
a b c d e f 6. Nicholas Casey, “Taken Under Fascism, Spain’s ‘Stolen Babies’ Are Learning the Truth,” in The New York Times Magazine, nytimes.com/2022/09/27/magazine/spain-stolen-babies.html
a b c d e 7. María José Esteso Poves, “Bebés robados, un crimen
que continúa en democracia,” in El Salto,
elsaltodiario.com/
a b 8. “‘Stolen
babies’ case: Spanish doctor Vela goes on trial,” BBC,
bbc.com/