Nuns stole my newborn girl in 1971... now I’m so desperate I reported her MISSING
Dig under way to check for remains
MOTHER & BABY HOME HORROR:
Inconsistencies on date of birth
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 Irish Sunday Mirror: “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,
It was hard going back into that labour ward again knowing what happened ANN O’GORMAN YESTERDAY
‘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
Ann wants to know where Evelyn is 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. They were adopted out of St Patrick’s mother and baby home on the Navan Road in Dublin and Ann managed to track them down and meet up years later. She added: “When I fell pregnant the second time I went to a social worker and I ended up there. I didn’t know any different. I didn’t know who to turn to. I got to hold them when they were born.
“I had to leave them there, I just told them I loved them and they would always be with me in my heart and I just left.
“I don’t even remember how I got back to Limerick.”
Ann went back to the married man she’d met when she was just 16 and who was almost a decade older than her.
When she got pregnant he told her he did not want the baby so she ended up in Bessborough for a second time.
Ann revealed: “When I gave my name they had a record of me being there before but they had no record of my baby being born there.
“It never dawned on me until it all came up when I was older and wiser.
“It was hard going back into that labour ward a second time knowing what had happened. The memories came