The nuns who worked at the home were trained in helping women give birth. And women who gave birth there weren’t charged up front for the cost of their help. But once a woman had given birth at the home, she was expected to pay with work. The standard time was one year of work in exchange for the treatment they received and their room and board. This meant that once a woman went into the home and gave birth, she wasn’t allowed to leave until she had worked off the cost.
In the meantime, mothers were separated from their children. The children themselves were kept in another area of the home, where they were raised by the nuns. Then, usually without telling the mother, the Home began trying to arrange adoptions for the children. The assumption was that young, unwed women could never provide for their children, and so it was better if they were placed with a foster family as soon as possible. Once a child was adopted, the Home refused to tell the mothers where they had gone. It wasn’t unusual for a woman to leave the Home to look for work and return to find their child had vanished.
Many of the children were adopted by families in Ireland. But many others were sent or even sold to couples in other countries like America, Canada, and Australia. In some cases, the children found themselves in loving homes. But children were also placed with families who exploited or abused them. If a child lived at the Home long enough without being adopted, they would eventually be sent to Industrial Boarding Schools. There, they would have to work long hours and were often sexually or physically abused. That’s assuming of course, that they survived.
The poor conditions in the Bon Secours home meant that young children died frequently. Usually, they fell victim to conditions like tuberculosis, cholera, or malnutrition. Hunger was constant for the children at the Home. And this also made them more vulnerable to infectious diseases. As a result, the death rate was enormous, particularly during the years of WWII. At the time, much of the country was struggling with a lack of food caused by the war. And that hardship hit the Bon Secours Home as well, making bad conditions worse. Over 25% of children at the home died every year between 1943 and 1946.
The bodies of these children were then quietly buried in mass graves on the property with no record of what happened to them. The Home relied on funding from the government. And if they had to answer for why so many children were dying, they might be shut down. Meanwhile, if the mothers of the surviving children wanted to get them out of the Home, they basically had to escape. And if they were caught by the police, they would be returned. For women who returned to the home, especially if they had become pregnant again, there was an even worse fate in store.