In 2014, the bodies of nearly 800 babies and small children were found in the septic tank of a former mother and baby home in Tuam, Galway. They had been deposited over four decades, a practice that only ended in 1961. This grisly discovery, made by a local historian, forced a long overdue public reckoning in Ireland.
Why was it considered necessary, by individual families as well as the Catholic church and the Irish state, to place unmarried pregnant girls in brutal institutions, to subject their babies to coerced adoption, often abroad, and to treat the children that remained with such indifference or active malice that in Bessborough, one of the largest homes in the country, the infant mortality rate in the early 1950s was five times the national rate? Why was there such extreme shame and secrecy about sex and reproduction outside of marriage?
