Who is my Mother, and Who are my Brothers?

Catholic leaders in Chile have admitted that they knew for at least ten years about a scheme to steal children from single mothers. Unmarried pregnant women were harassed by priests into giving up their children for adoption; those who refused were anaesthetised and told that their child had died, while healthy infants were kidnapped and placed with married couples. This occurred mainly under the régime of Augusto Pinochet, the nice old man who fostered such tender solicitude in both the Reverend Blair and his spiritual godmother and champion of family values, Margaret Thatcher; but there are allegations that priests and doctors were still playing their little games as recently as 2005. Similar schemes existed in Spain and Argentina, mainly as a precaution against left-wingers being allowed to breed; in Chile the motivation was apparently less plebeian, deriving mainly from a wish to protect the reputations of rich families. It is as yet unclear whether the Catholic Church received any consideration, material or otherwise, from those families which benefited either by the addition of an adopted child or the subtraction of an illegitimate one. In any case, although it has now condescended to co-operate with the police and the national child protection agency, the Church felt no particular need to confess, repent or atone until the activity was disclosed by an outside agency, in accordance with the usual pattern of such abuses.