Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., (October 15, 1917 – February 28, 2007)
American Historian, Writer, Social Critic, and Agnostic
As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our concern for human rights. In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense. They were notorious not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression but for enthusiastic justifications of slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, genocide.
The latest scandal centres on baby-trafficking by Church, government officials and clinics over several decades. As many as 300,000 babies may have been the victims of a practise that saw infants taken from “morally or economically deficit” parents and sold to couples deemed more acceptable . . . [A] right-wing Catholic doctor, Eduardo Vella, said to have been complicit in the money-spinning business. Dr Vella stands accused of telling women that their babies had died when they hadn’t, and handing over the infants to other couples for cash . . . Typically, doctors and nuns would tell mothers their babies had been born dead, or that they had died shortly after birth. Then they would sell the newborns to adoptive parents and forge all official documents.
Always Question Authority 