This morning as I opened my email, there was the Irish mail newsletter, and the first headline was the death of 796 children in a County Galway home, over the years. Here’s part of that:
“The 796 infants and children buried in an unmarked mass grave in the septic tank behind St. Mary’s Mother and Baby home in Tuam, Co. Galway made headlines after their shocking story broke last week. But this is not the first time the Home and the ‘Home babies’ have been in the news. Following reports on the research of Tuam historian Catherine Corless, Liam Hogan, a Limerick-based historian and librarian, began uncovering a trail of damning news clips dating from before the Home’s founding in 1925 to after its closure in 1961. The Home was very much a matter of both public and governmental knowledge. And the way in which they discuss the Home’s occupants (or “inmates” ) makes clear the totally normalized disdain with which all the “illegitimate children” and “fallen women” were held.”
Canada had Butterbox Babies. The Ideal Maternity Home operated in Nova Scotia from the late 1920s through at least the late 1940s. William (a chiropractor) and Lila Young (a midwife posing as an obstetrician) operated it. The home promised maternity care for local married couples, and discreet birthing and placement for children of unwed mothers. It was the source of babies for illegal trade between Canada and the US, since laws in the US forbade adoption across religious backgrounds. There was an acute shortage of babies available for Jewish couples to adopt. The home would provide “black market” adoptions charging up to $10,000 for a baby. Many of the babies in the 1940s ended up in Jewish homes in New Jersey. “Unmarketable” babies were starved to death. Any deformity, a serious illness or “dark” coloration would often seal their fate. Babies who died were disposed of in small wooden grocery boxes, typically used for dairy products, hence the term Butterbox Babies. The Butterbox Babies bodies were buried on the property, adjacent to a nearby cemetery, at sea or sometimes burned. In some cases married couples who had come to the home for birthing services were told that their baby had died, while in truth the babies were sold to adoptive parents. Between four and six hundred babies died at the home, while at least another thousand survived and were adopted.
There are times when the mind simply boggles at what human beings do to each other, for whatever reasons. Aboriginal children in residential schools, beaten and starved, cut off from families; medical and biological experiments on people we have deemed “lesser”; young women hanged, stoned, or beaten for a misplaced cultural notion of ‘honour’. There are no words. One would hope that in this century, such things would be past. – but the truth is, they still happen.
It is my belief that every person is a part of the Creation of God. In a creation-centred world, all life has value. At the end of the Kalachakra Training of Buddhism, His Holiness the Dalai Lama asked all of us to make the vow – to commit to live for the benefit of all sentient beings. Seems to me that’s what Jesus was talking about too.
Morning has broken, here in Toronto – like the first morning of creation, where there is sun, warmth, growing things. Life in all its beauty and possibility. May we all commit to live for the benefit of all beings.
