An estimated tens of thousands of newborns in Spain were stolen from hospitals during the end of Francisco Franco’s regime, taken away from often poor and single mothers and given to wealthy and conservative Catholic parents — families that could suppress these babies’ “Marxist red genes.” Nuns, some of whom were powerful enablers in this kidnapping scheme, encouraged women to give their babies up for adoption. Women who refused were sometimes put to sleep or forcibly separated from their babies and were later told that they had died. In 2017, after stumbling upon medical records, Ana Belén Pintado suspected that the couple who raised her weren’t her birth parents after all; she was, in fact, a stolen baby. In this incredible piece, Nicholas Casey tells Pintado’s heartbreaking story as she searches for her birth mother.
On July 9, 1973, Pilar felt contractions and returned to Santa Cristina. It was an easy birth with no complications. She even remembers holding her baby for a brief moment. But then the baby was taken away and someone came to put an anesthesia mask over Pilar’s face. She cried when this happened; it was as though she knew something terrible was coming. When she woke up again, a doctor and nurse told her the baby was stillborn. The hospital would handle the paperwork and the burial. It never occurred to her that they had lied.
Pilar had never gone searching for her daughter because she had thought there was no daughter to look for. Now, she was sitting right there, a grown woman with a family and an entire life story that Pilar was only starting to know.
