Some years ago, this writer wrote several versions of an article entitled “Silence, Secrecy and Shame Lead to Trauma.” Some versions were for regional and national presentations at conferences on adoption, addiction, and trauma. Two versions were for this newsletter. In the October 2, 2022, edition of The New York Times Magazine, sent to us by Cathy Haight, there was a lengthy article entitled, “The Stolen Children of Spain” by Nicholas Casey. Readers will want to read the entire article, which can be found by simply googling that original title. This article will summarize the story.

Ana Belén Pintado was born in Madrid, Spain, grew up in a small town south of there called Campo de Criptana, as the daughter of Manuel and Petra Pintado. This was during Francisco Franco’s regime, as he became more and more restrictive of all human rights. Ana was born in 1973, after rights to divorce, abortion, contraception, and even women’s right to vote had all been rescinded. Growing up with loving parents, and no siblings, in a devoutly Catholic family, she never had a clue that she was adopted, let alone that she was a “stolen baby.” She did wonder why she had no siblings, when everyone seemed to have several children. After her father died, a lawyer handling the estate found some papers indicating she was born with a different last name, but her mother snatched the documents away and refused to speak about them. By the time her mother died, in 2014, Ana was 44 years old, had three children and a husband.

In October 2017, while she was clearing out some items in her garage, she found some childhood items she remembered, and then she found some papers she had never seen—medical records from 1967, from her mother’s doctor, stating she had been married eight years, was 31 years old, and had not been able to have a child. A set of x-rays showed she had a uterine anomaly and obstructed fallopian tubes. She was sterile. Ana was born six years later, in July 1973. She found another document just as puzzling: a birth certificate which indicated that her mother had given birth to a girl in Santa Clara Maternity Clinic in Madrid. The date was July 10, 1973, her birthday. She took a closer look. She could see that the top third of the birth certificate had been torn off. “And that’s when I thought,” she says, “I might be a stolen baby.”

She was familiar with the story of babies stolen from hospitals in Spain during Franco’s regime. According to many birth mothers, nuns who worked in maternity wards took the infants shortly after birth and told the women, who were usually poor and/or unwed, that their children were stillborn or died right after birth. The babies had been sold, it turns out, to wealthy Catholic parents, with forged papers. No one knows, even now, how many were stolen—probably tens of thousands.

The stolen-baby crimes were just part of Franco’s assault on freedom. When he and other military officers plotted to overthrow Spain’s government in 1936, it led to the Spanish Civil War. When he could not subdue the Basque country, he invited Hitler to try out his new bombs on the town of Guernica. Some readers may be familiar with Picasso’s painting inspired by this horror. Newspapers were censored and many books banned, including those of Federico García Lorca, Spain’s most famous poet and playwright. Lorca had already been murdered during the civil war. Franco’s political movement, the Falange, even published a detailed schedule for housewives outlining times to take the children to school, bleach clothes, and prepare dinner. (Actually, the U.S. government published child-care books in the 1920s and 1930s with schedules, but not that autocratic.)

The most lasting abuses, however, were the removal of children from their parents, by the stolen babies program, but also a psychiatrist named Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, who had trained in Nazi Germany, had the idea of a Marxist “red gene” carried by the children of Franco’s left-wing opponents. He claimed this gene might be suppressed by removing children from their mothers and placing them with conservative families. Franco’s men soon began the abductions on a large scale, targeting children orphaned by Franco’s firing squads and took newborns from women who gave birth in jail as political prisoners, all sent to “loyalists.” When that supply wasn’t enough, they teamed up with nuns and doctors in Catholic hospitals to persuade poor or single women to relinquish their children, and then nuns began actually telling women their babies had died, and selling the babies to wealthy Catholic families. He had also turned over the education system to nuns and priests to indoctrinate children by using the Bible to teach reading and to instruct them in only Catholic values. Journalists Jesús Duva and Natalia Junquera wrote about this in a 2011 book, Stolen Lives. Some nuns began to abduct babies to meet the demand of a huge black market.

Other countries, such as Argentina, had as many as 30,000 persons “disappeared” and gave their orphaned children to right-wing families. After decades of protest, Argentina formed a “truth-and-reconciliation” commission to investigate, but Spain never did that after Franco died in 1975. They had an agreement called the Pact of Forgetting, citing the need for peaceful democracy, even if it meant lack of justice. That has endured to this day. The stolen babies, now middle-aged adults, have never been acknowledged.

For Ana Belén Pintado, her childhood seemed ideal at the time. Her parents ran a bakery and she enjoyed the peaceful small town, surrounded by ancient windmills and hills. Now, she found her parents had kept her true identity a secret.

She went to a neighbor who had been a close friend of her parents’, and asked them to tell her the truth. The friend told her she had known about the adoption and that they insisted no one must ever know, and Ana must never find out. The neighbor kept the secret until Pintado and her husband, Jesús Ignacio Monreal, came to her door. Pintado’s husband was not completely surprised. He had heard rumors that Ana was adopted, but never mentioned them to her, because he thought she knew and did not want to discuss it. He grew up in the same town, and knew that the subject of adoption was difficult. They both knew that for her mother to be unable to have children would have been a source of shame. Hearing of her father’s extreme anger about keeping the secret, they realized it was more than that—they had been complicit in the crime of stealing her.

Pintado went to Campo de Criptana’s town hall and asked for a copy of her civil registry document. She found out she had been registered under a different name than her parents, Pardo López, the same last name she thought she had seen on the inheritance documents. The parents’ first names appeared to be Miguel and María. With these documents, she began searching in her village, but many of her parents’ friends were deceased. One neighbor, however, told her that her mother had told her social group that she had been asked by those involved in the adoption (abduction) to wear a pillow under her dress to appear pregnant when she went to the hospital, and said she had paid a large sum of money for the adoption. Then Ana found a set of greeting cards saved by her mother, from a nun in Madrid, saying, “May your child, who I remember, be an encouragement for you to continue living full of dreams.” She recalled visiting a nun in Madrid with her mother, waiting outside while her mother delivered an envelope with money. The card was signed “Sister María Gómez Valbuena.” She did an Internet search for the name and found scores of allegations of abductions, many like her own, from the hospital where she was born.

Stories of these abductions began to come out in print in the 1980s. A doctor named Eduardo Vela was involved, yet the hospital system continued until a new prime minister took over in 2004, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, a socialist who vowed to address the taboos of the past. In 2007, a law was passed condemning the crimes of the Franco era and recognizing its victims at last. Children of those mothers were seeking their lost origins. They formed organizations like the National Association for Irregular Adoption Victims, which estimated as many as 15% of adoptions in Spain from 1965 to 1990 were done without birth parents’ consent. In 2011, the first lawsuit was filed, on behalf of 261 people, and more came forward as a result. Within a month, the number of cases was 747.

As more cases came forward, they discovered that many victims had filed complaints, but judges had simply archived the cases, citing statute of limitations. The new attorney general began investigating and the number of cases increased to more than 2,000.

The first suspect to emerge was Vela, the gynecologist named in the 1989 article, and then Sister María Gómez Valbuena. Among the witnesses in the case against her was a woman who had worked as a janitor in that hospital. She asked that only her initials be used because she feared retaliation. She said “I cleaned her office. I saw everything.”

She remembers Sister María being severe and unrelenting, particularly toward the unwed women on the charity floor. She referred to them as “heathens” and “subversives,” sometimes to their faces. Many of the babies were reported dead, though this woman had seen them in incubators. There were rumors of a body of a newborn preserved in a refrigerator. Some persons interviewed said that mothers who demanded to see the remains of their babies were shown corpses of other babies. She also remembered a blue notebook on Sister María’s desk, with lists of names of prospective adoptive parents she had seen visiting the nun. They would come in the morning with a check, be interviewed for several hours, and leave with a baby that afternoon. She never told what she had seen because it would have been her word against that of the hospital. “Back then, women were nothing. You had to submit to your father, then to your husband, and then to the state.” Similar stories appeared in the media as Zapatero investigated. David Rodríguez, a student in Madrid, said his mother told him she paid 60,000 pesetas to Sister María when she adopted him. He met with Sister María, who denied the claims and said she couldn’t say more about his adoption because of her “faulty memory.”

As she continued to search for her mother, Pintado realized she needed to look further than her neighbors. In 2017, she found an organization called S.O.S. Stolen Babies, victims searching for family members, with chapters throughout Spain. She was warned that only a dozen of nearly 400 S.O.S. members had ever found their families. She was pointed to a government office that helped S.O.S. members get information on birth mothers through records requests. She did that, but she also decided to write letters to families with the surnames Pardo and López. López is an extremely common surname in Spain, but she had sold the family bakery and her children were older, so she had the time and resources. She wrote to dozens of families, and received several replies, some saying it wasn’t them, but they supported her efforts. Then she got a call from the Madrid government office, saying they had found a first name for her mother in the hospital records, but it wasn’t María; that appeared to have been forged. Her mother’s real name was Pilar. The official also said the mother was born in Avila, close to Madrid. Now she could search for Pilar.

Another case, highly publicized, involved a woman who went into labor and delivered twins, previously undiagnosed. When they were born, they were quickly rushed away, and she was wheeled into a dark room. When she asked why, the nurse told her Sister María had told her to prepare the babies for adoption. The next day, a friend arrived to check on her, and they demanded to see the babies in the nursery, which they did. She noticed how tiny they were compared to the other babies. She went to Sister María’s office and asked why she was told her children would be adopted. She replied “Well, you’re young and you already have a child, and you’re not married.” She told Sister María, “This is my problem, not yours, and my daughters are my daughters.”

That afternoon, a doctor came to her room and said one of the twins had died. Then, a few minutes later, he came back and said the other one had died. She did not believe him and forced her way into the nursery with the incubators and saw her two daughters. She asked the doctor why she had been told they were dead and he told her they were brain-dead. She said “Look, I don’t understand medicine, but ... a brain-dead person can’t move.” She went back to Sister María’s office and the nun asked her what names she had chosen for her children. When she said Sherezade and Desiré, Sister María said they weren’t very Catholic names. When she went back to the incubators, the babies were gone and she was taken to a morgue, and shown two much larger bodies. She thought no one would believe her. But, in 2011, she heard about a protest in Madrid about stolen babies, and she attended. A prosecutor from Madrid got in touch with her, and she filed a complain against Sister María. She never got to confront her in court, because Sister María died in bed at age 87 in 2013. She had never been formally charged, and never admitted to selling babies. The doctor, Edward Vela, did face allegations, but the court dismissed the charges, citing the statute of limitations.

After that, some victims turned to daytime talk shows on television. The shows were publicly addressing the horrors of the Franco era. In 2011, a woman and her daughter were reunited on El Diario, based on DNA evidence. Pintado had seen the talk shows and had keen contacted by one of them. In January 2018, she appeared on Viva la Vida, and told her story. After that, she decided to call every journalist she could find. The stories in newspapers and on radio and television caused some of her neighbors and former friends of her adoptive parents became angry at her, but other people supported her search. Then, one night in July 2018, she received a phone call that changed everything.

A man said he wished to remain anonymous, but he was an “intimate friend” of Pilar Villora Garcia. Would she like to take down Pilar’s number? She called it right away, and said, “I was a stolen baby, and an anonymous person has called me and said you might be my mother.” “Let me call you back,” the woman said. Five minutes later, the phone rang. The woman said “What are the dates?” They compared notes, and everything matched, except the government office had said Pilar was 23 at the time, and she was 24. She contacted the office again, and they had Pilar’s full name, which matched. She called her back and said, “I know who my mother is. And it’s you.”

They met in person three months later, in September 2018, at a restaurant in Aranjuez, a city about halfway between their homes, an hour’s drive away. Pintado was on edge, but as the two groups of family approached each other, they ran into each other’s arms. They told each other their life stories. After Pintado was born, she was taken away and someone put an anesthesia mask over Pilar’s face. When she woke up, she was told her baby had died. She never went searching because she believed what she was told.

Pilar and Ana Belén Pintado became close and other family members see each other often. Pintado said she still needed justice, to have someone held accountable. She learned that. the doctor who delivered her and signed the paperwork was Jose María Castillo Diaz. She hired a lawyer and, in January 2019, filed a case against him in a criminal court in Madrid. A judge accepted the case, and Castillo Diaz was ordered to appear at a hearing where he confirmed that his name was on the paperwork, but then in March of 2021, he died. This year, she hired a new lawyer, who asked for more documents. She had the name of a midwife. Her birthday was coming up, and her husband had planned a surprise. She said, thinking of her mother, “We lost 45 years, and you can’t get those back, but when I see my mother now, it’s like looking at a girl with new shoes. She tells everyone she sees in the street, ‘They stole my daughter, but now we’ve found each other.’”

The article contains other facts, and several photos. If readers found this interesting, they are urged to find the original article and read it, and possibly other articles about the stolen babies of Spain. This is truly a story of persistence and eventual triumph.