"Horror in Belgium: the Catholic Church forced single mothers to sell 30,000 babies born in religious centers"
English/Spanish article
English/Spanish article
Quote:Tens of thousands of young Belgians who became pregnant out of wedlock between the end of World War II and the 1980s they were admitted to centers managed by the Catholic Church in Flanders. In other European countries it happened in a similar way and there were abuses, but a Belgian journalistic investigation surprised this Thursday by the extent of the abuses.
In those centers, where they were humiliated and in many cases sexually abused even while pregnant, they gave birth under the control of parish priests and nuns.
Babies, usually in the first days after delivery, were handed over to adoption families without the consent of their mothers. These families paid considerable sums for the time, between 10,000 and 30,000 Belgian francs, which did not go to the young women who had given birth, but kept the Church itself.
A not particularly pessimistic estimate would lead to 600 million francs (about $ 17 million) the money that the Flemish Church would have obtained by selling these children for four decades. 30,000 children in a population, that of Flanders, which in the last decade alone exceeded six million people.
In addition to giving birth in conditions far from the medical practice of the time, in some cases even under total anesthesia, they had to see how their newborn children were stolen to sell to adoption families. Young women were told on many occasions that babies had been born dead.
Later, those young women who had given birth under the supervision of religious were sterilized during delivery so they wouldn't get pregnant again. The fact that they had passed through these centers was known in their communities, and they were marked for life, with a stigma that made it difficult for them to form couples. They were, for the most part, single women for life.
https://www.clarin.com/mundo/horror-belg...m5oCb.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
