While the child crime scandal within it was relaunched in September by the broadcast ofForgotten by God, a program on Flemish public television, then the creation of a new parliamentary commission of inquiry, the Belgian Catholic Church is violently shaken by a new affair. The newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws revealed on Wednesday December 13 that at least 30,000 babies given birth by young single women, sent by their parents to religious institutions to give birth, had been forcibly taken from their mothers and sold to adoptive parents. This practice would have been in force from the post-war period until the early 1980s.
Before giving birth to their child, young women were forced to work in the places where they were placed and were forbidden from any communication. Some testified to humiliation and sexual violence perpetrated by the nuns, or even forced sterilizations.
The affair arouses all the more excitement since a Flemish elected representative spoke at the podium of the House of Representatives on December 14 to tell, in tears, her own story. Yngvild Ingels, a 43-year-old sociologist and member of the Flemish nationalist party N-VA, was given the first name Emmanuelle-Claude at birth (probably that of the nun who attended the birth in a cloister). before being entrusted for 6,500 Belgian francs at the time (some 600 euros in today’s purchasing power) to a couple without children. “Your mother was very young and could not take care of you”her adoptive parents taught her when she was 7 years old.
According to the MP, the couple did not know much more about a matter settled through the Caritas Catholica association and the institution, near Dunkirk, where her biological mother had given birth to her. The adopting parents were also expecting a boy, who they were told had died.
Disappeared archives
Today, Mr.me Ingels still hopes to identify his biological parents but all records relating to these adoptions have reportedly disappeared. She only knows what the civil status says: “Born in Dunkirk of unknown ancestry on 1er January 1979.” “Those who settled my adoption must have known very well who my biological parents were”she declared Friday in Het Laatste Nieuws. Like, no doubt, the doctors, lawyers and judges who, at the time, intervened to facilitate these transactions.
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