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A woman who gave birth at a mother and baby home almost 50 years ago has reported her daughter missing to gardai.
Ann O’Gorman had Evelyn in the summer of 1971 at the notorious Bessborough institution in Cork but still doesn’t know if her first born is alive.
The 65-year-old said: “Now that I’ve reported her missing I feel at least she is recognised as a person.”
Ann was just 17 when she gave birth at the institution run by nuns and though she heard her baby cry she woke three days later to be told the infant had died.
She told the Dublin Live: “I was terrified. I didn’t even know where the baby was supposed to come out of.
“I could hear the other girls screaming in the labour ward which was really frightening. I was polishing the corridor the day my waters broke.
“I was in agony and you weren’t allowed any painkillers. They used to say you deserved the pain. One nun said, ‘Well you weren’t roaring when you had sex’.
“The labour went on for a long time. When the baby came I could hear her crying. They got the nurse and she twisted my stomach to get the afterbirth out.
She twisted so hard I passed out from the pain. When I woke up two days later there were bloody scabs from where her fingernails dug into my stomach.”
One of the nuns told Ann her “angel had gone to heaven” and days later she saw two men carrying a shovel and a wooden crate at the back of the property.
But when she asked if she could see where her daughter was buried she was told no – and incorrect details in files she was given last year only fuelled her suspicions.
Evelyn’s date of birth was July 24, 1971, but her birth certificate records it as June 24, 1972. It gives Ann’s age as 18 and as 19 in another entry on the same form.
The death certificate lists the baby’s cause of death as prematurity, yet in another entry on the same document the birth is described as “full term” and “normal”. Ann went back to the baby’s father, who was married, because she “didn’t have anywhere else to turn” and she had twins, a boy and a girl, in 1973.
More at Woman who gave birth at mother and baby home reports daughter missing to gardai
Ann O’Gorman had Evelyn in the summer of 1971 at the notorious Bessborough institution in Cork but still doesn’t know if her first born is alive.
The 65-year-old said: “Now that I’ve reported her missing I feel at least she is recognised as a person.”
Ann was just 17 when she gave birth at the institution run by nuns and though she heard her baby cry she woke three days later to be told the infant had died.
She told the Dublin Live: “I was terrified. I didn’t even know where the baby was supposed to come out of.
“I could hear the other girls screaming in the labour ward which was really frightening. I was polishing the corridor the day my waters broke.
“I was in agony and you weren’t allowed any painkillers. They used to say you deserved the pain. One nun said, ‘Well you weren’t roaring when you had sex’.
“The labour went on for a long time. When the baby came I could hear her crying. They got the nurse and she twisted my stomach to get the afterbirth out.
She twisted so hard I passed out from the pain. When I woke up two days later there were bloody scabs from where her fingernails dug into my stomach.”
One of the nuns told Ann her “angel had gone to heaven” and days later she saw two men carrying a shovel and a wooden crate at the back of the property.
But when she asked if she could see where her daughter was buried she was told no – and incorrect details in files she was given last year only fuelled her suspicions.
Evelyn’s date of birth was July 24, 1971, but her birth certificate records it as June 24, 1972. It gives Ann’s age as 18 and as 19 in another entry on the same form.
The death certificate lists the baby’s cause of death as prematurity, yet in another entry on the same document the birth is described as “full term” and “normal”. Ann went back to the baby’s father, who was married, because she “didn’t have anywhere else to turn” and she had twins, a boy and a girl, in 1973.
More at Woman who gave birth at mother and baby home reports daughter missing to gardai
