Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Spain's Stolen Babies

By BJ Bjornson

At this point, it is rather hard to be shocked by yet another abuse of power by the Catholic Church, but the scale of this crime still somehow managed it for me.


Spanish society has been shaken by allegations of the theft and trafficking of thousands of babies by nuns, priests and doctors, which started under Franco and continued up to the 1990s.

. . .

The scale of the baby trafficking was unknown until this year, when two men - Antonio Barroso and Juan Luis Moreno, childhood friends from a seaside town near Barcelona - discovered that they had been bought from a nun. Their parents weren't their real parents, and their life had been built on a lie.

. . .

Lawyers believe that up to 300,000 babies were taken.

The practice of removing children from parents deemed "undesirable" and placing them with "approved" families, began in the 1930s under the dictator General Francisco Franco.

At that time, the motivation may have been ideological. But years later, it seemed to change - babies began to be taken from parents considered morally - or economically - deficient. It became a money-spinner, too.

The scandal is closely linked to the Catholic Church, which under Franco assumed a prominent role in Spain's social services including hospitals, schools and children's homes.

Nuns and priests compiled waiting lists of would-be adoptive parents, while doctors were said to have lied to mothers about the fate of their children.


Up to 300,000 babies taken away from their mothers, and that same number of mothers traumatized by the supposed �death� of their child. Worse to me is the fact that sounds as though there will be no accountability for this crime.


After Franco's death in 1975, the major political parties agreed an amnesty to help smooth the transition to democracy.

But this amnesty law has never been repealed, so attempts to investigate Spain's baby trafficking as a national crime against humanity have been rejected by the country's judiciary and resisted by its politicians.


The child-stealing, and the profiting from such, continued on well past 1975. I�d say it�s long past time that the people behind this, and the organizations who supported them, are brought to account for this.



2 comments:

  1. Just another example of how the Catholic Church has zero basis for claiming any kind of moral authority.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Our Top Story Tonight.
    Gen. Francisco Franco is still dead...
    ...and it's still not soon enough.

    ReplyDelete