Thursday, April 8, 2010

A Brief History of Baby Lifts

I missed this in Time Magazine when it came out in February:

An American church group is being detained in Haiti for attempting to illegally take 33 children out of the country to an orphanage. The law notwithstanding, are good intentions enough? Or is kidnapping just that no matter what the circumstance? History offers some examples.

Haiti

Zoe's Ark

The Tsunami

Romanian Baby Trade

Operation Babylift

Pedro Pan

The Stolen Generation

The list provided of mass movement of children is by no means complete -- for example, in the Stolen Generation, it talks of the forced removal of aboriginal children to be placed in white families in Australia without mentioning the similar history in the United States and Canada. The South Korean diaspora of "war orphans" also isn't on the list. Adding these would have given them a tidy "Top Ten," but then there's the orphan trains, the Baby Scoop Era, Georgia Tann. . . .

1 comment:

Von said...

The view put forward re The Stolen Generation is as you can imagine simplistic, as it is such a short piece.Much is written about it, some true, some not true and some conjecture.
What is not mentioned is The Forgotten Generation, the 500,00 taken from English Orphanages to be sent to a 'new life' in what Britain likes to regard as 'the colonies', the Australian born children separated from their families and sent to orpahnages during the Depression who were not orphans and all those affected by removal, their children and the generations after who still suffer.
If all are included and remembered the numbers are huge.