A new docuseries from Topic explores the Catholic Church’s role in a massive cover-up surrounding suspicious infant deaths, illegal forced adoptions and countless missing kids in Ireland
The Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home was supposed to support young women and children as unwed mothers-to-be navigated pregnancy and postpartum life.
Run by the Bon Secours Sisters — a Roman Catholic nursing congregation whose motto is “Good Help to Those in Need” — from 1925 to 1961, the once-lively maternity home in Tuam, Ireland, is now synonymous with tragedy, as investigations into their practices revealed evidence of unreported deaths, secret burials, illegal foreign adoptions and thousands of unaccounted-for children born in their care.
About a decade ago, rumors began to swirl that nuns at the home had quietly buried numerous children on the property throughout the 20th century, in an out-of-commission septic tank. Reports estimated that as many as 800 deceased children may have been dumped in the tank, prompting an investigative committee to look into the allegations and order excavations on the suspected mass burial site.
The excavations produced shocking results: a large quantity of skeletons belonging to children ranging from newborn to 3 years of age. And that was only the beginning.
The Missing Children, a new three-part documentary from Topic, explores the mystery of what exactly happened to the thousands of children born at Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home.
In addition to discovering that the infant mortality rate at the Tuam maternity home was twice that of similar facilities at one point in time — raising questions about the living conditions for those in the home — investigators learned that many children were forced into illegal adoptions against their mothers’ wills.
The Missing Children features interviews with victims of the Tuam home’s misconduct, who were separated from their mothers as babies and sold into adoptive homes. One of those survivors is Patrick Naughton, a man born in the home in 1954 and given up for adoption. Naughton met his birth mother years later, who told him the unnerving tale of what happened.
“She burst into tears and she said, ‘I don’t know whether you’ll ever believe me. … I never ever put you up for adoption. I never gave permission for an adoption,'” Naughton recalls in an exclusive clip from the show below.
Naughton’s mother told him that when he was a baby, she came to check on him one morning in the Tuam home and he wasn’t in his cot. After frantically searching for her son, she came across a nun who was holding him. The nun, ignoring her questions, carried Naughton out the door, and he never returned to the home.
“I’d like to see the paperwork that my birth mother signed me over to my adoptive parents,” Naughton says in the show. “I want that one sheet of paper … and nobody can give it to me.”
In addition to discovering that the infant mortality rate at the Tuam maternity home was twice that of similar facilities at one point in time — raising questions about the living conditions for those in the home — investigators learned that many children were forced into illegal adoptions against their mothers’ wills.
The Missing Children features interviews with victims of the Tuam home’s misconduct, who were separated from their mothers as babies and sold into adoptive homes. One of those survivors is Patrick Naughton, a man born in the home in 1954 and given up for adoption. Naughton met his birth mother years later, who told him the unnerving tale of what happened.
“She burst into tears and she said, ‘I don’t know whether you’ll ever believe me. … I never ever put you up for adoption. I never gave permission for an adoption,'” Naughton recalls in an exclusive clip from the show below.
Naughton’s mother told him that when he was a baby, she came to check on him one morning in the Tuam home and he wasn’t in his cot. After frantically searching for her son, she came across a nun who was holding him. The nun, ignoring her questions, carried Naughton out the door, and he never returned to the home.
“I’d like to see the paperwork that my birth mother signed me over to my adoptive parents,” Naughton says in the show. “I want that one sheet of paper … and nobody can give it to me.”
