The Sunday Read: ‘Taken Under Fascism, Spain’s “Stolen Babies” Are Learning the Truth’

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.5 • 97.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2022

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

The phenomenon of babies stolen from hospitals in Spain, once shrouded in secrecy, is now being spoken about. The thefts happened during the end of the regime of Francisco Franco, the right-wing dictator who ruled the country until 1975, and even today the disappearances remain a subject of mystery and debate among scholars. According to the birth mothers, nuns who worked in maternity wards took the infants shortly after they were delivered and told the women, who were often unwed or poor, that their children were stillborn. But the babies were not dead: They had been sold, discreetly, to well-off Catholic parents, many of whom could not have families of their own. Under piles of forged papers, the adoptive families buried the secret of the crime they committed. The children who were taken were known in Spain simply as the “stolen babies.” No one knows exactly how many were kidnapped, but estimates suggest tens of thousands. Nicholas Casey relates Ana Belén Pintado’s discovery, after the deaths of her parents, that she was a “stolen baby,” and considers the web of culpability and the tricky question of blame, as Spain reckons with its past.

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0:00.0	People go to Spain and they might see Barcelona, this modern beautiful city on the beach.
0:12.5	Or they might go visit the Alambrán, Granada, or see a DJ in Ibiza.
0:18.0	But Spain in the 1970s was a much darker place than what it is now.
0:23.4	And that's because of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
0:27.7	I wrote a story for the New York Times magazine about one of the most harrowing and also one
0:33.0	of the most long-lasting abuses that took place in Spain during that time.
0:37.8	Long-lasting because the victims were so young.
0:42.3	In those years, women say that they were losing their babies the day that they were born.
0:47.3	The hospitals told them their babies were still born, but they weren't still born.
0:51.6	They were actually sold by nuns and doctors to families, usually Catholic families.
0:58.6	And in their new homes, the children usually grew up having nice, normal lives, except
1:03.8	for the fact that a secret was being hidden from them.
1:07.3	No one knows how many babies were taken from their parents, but people think that it
1:11.2	could have been in the tens of thousands.
1:14.4	Most of the stolen children never knew that this had happened, but as they became adults,
1:18.5	a few found out.
1:22.8	This story focuses on a woman named Anna Bailen Bintavo, who, after the death of her supposed
1:28.6	parents, learned that they actually weren't who they said they were.
1:33.6	I wanted to tell the story of Anna Bailen's search for her real mother.
1:39.2	My name is Nick Casey.
1:40.2	I'm a writer at the New York Times magazine.
1:43.2	My job is to find compelling stories anywhere in the world, but the one which I wanted to
	...

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