A Spanish mother has been reunited with her daughter four decades after being told the child had died at birth.
It is the first proven case in a growing scandal over babies stolen by Spanish hospital doctors and sold for adoption. A DNA test proved the blood tie between the two women after the daughter hired private detectives to trace her mother.
“The adoption was legal, with her birth certificate saying she was ‘adopted from an unknown mother,’” said Antonio Barroso, the head of an organization investigating cases of missing babies.
The mother was left to mourn a baby she believed had died at birth in a Barcelona clinic.
“The doctors told her that her daughter had died. She even has the death certificate,” Barroso said. “We went to a laboratory and the result left no doubt. It is only now that the girl has seen her own death certificate.”
Mother and daughter — who had asked not to be named — were reunited in December and the case had since been passed on to the attorney general’s office, he said.
Many of those seeking lost babies are women who never saw their baby’s corpse because the hospitals said they would take charge of burial.
Barroso’s organization has asked the attorney general to investigate several hundred cases of illegal adoption.
He said the case opened up the possibility that many children adopted in circumstances that may have seemed legal were stolen. In other cases adopted children were apparently registered as the biological children of their adoptive parents.
Barroso helped found the group after discovering that his own parents had paid an intermediary who produced children for adoption from a hospital in Zaragoza.
The cases go back many decades. Although they began during the dictatorship of General Franco, they seem to have carried on after his death in 1975. The Catalan Republican Left party is scheduled to ask Spain’s parliament today to aid those seeking lost children.
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