I call this trope "Male Gaze Rape" and it's why I seriously can't stand rape in fiction. What you're actually talking about is the best way that trope goes — it forms the nucleus of a generic origin story written by a man about a woman (Girl With A Dragon Tattoo is a good example). The even worse version is when rape…

"The question was asked, 'What could make a woman become so dark? To lose all sense of her maternity, her womanhood, and her softness?'"

Am I the only one who thinks that Kim K looks like she could be Queen of Spain/is crazy beautiful in that picture?

Thank you for your tireless dedication to journalism, sir.

Update! I spoke to my mom today for more details. She told me the home had adoptive parents waiting outside the hospital door while she was giving birth without her consent. She refused to let anyone take my sister from the room without her. Tough cookie my mom.

We had "homes for unwed mothers" here in the USA too. My biological mother was sent to one when she was 17, this was in the mid-1960's. Her catholic family threatened to disown her completely if she kept her baby thus she was shuttled off to live at a home run by a bunch of judgmental nuns. After she gave birth they…

Everybody involved in the Magdalene laundries should be in fucking prison. It was slavery pure and simple.

I haven't seen the movie but I read the book. What she went through was absolutely horrendous and heartbreaking, and she was HARDLY the only one. This was truly an industry for the church. They made A LOT of money off of the women from free forced labor and also from selling their babies. It's really a terrible…

Stuff like this is why my grandma left the Catholic church 70 years ago (she is 90 now). She initially left because she was fired from a Catholic school for setting foot in a non-Catholic church (no really, back then all non-Catholic churches were considered heretics) and also because of their backwards views on…

Ireland didn't regulate pharmaceutical trials until 1987. So apparently these luckless children were just fair fucking game.

My mother was born in the mother and baby home in Bessborough in the 50s. I don't understand how after the revelations of the abuse in the industrial schools in the 90s, everything run by the church didn't immediately get a government inquiry. The Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes should have been…

So, the Catholic Church is pretty much equal to any other authoritarian ignorant misogynistic institution out there. Why THE FUCK do they claim to have anything to do with God, sacred things, and other SHIT that is supposed to impress people? If the fucking CHURCH doesn't do any better than your regular communist…

I suppose most of them are dead. And, we can only hope that they died slow, painful deaths gripped in terror for the destiny of their immortal souls while they remembered the faces of the little children they helped to kill when they were charged by their god to love them.

And this is why religion is not an adequate substitute for government.

It reminds me of the Residential Schools for Native children in Canada- an attempt at cultural genocide- where they also did medical and nutritional experiments on children in additional to every kind of abuse imaginable. As much as I blame the Catholic church for this bullshit, it really is part of a larger pattern…

My mom was in a Catholic home for unwed mothers in Chicago in the mid seventies. She was pressured everyday by the nuns and priests to give up my sister for adoption. My mom was stubborn and kept the baby, but most of the girls and women surrendered their babies out of guilt for having no husband (many of them had…

"The Magdalene Sisters" was the name of that film an excellent but highly depressing film.

Charges need to be brought against the priests and nuns who ran these hellholes. Negligent homicide, child abuse, unlawful restraint, slavery...I can think of lots and lots and lots.

Let's call it what it really was, a concentration camp for unwed mothers and their children. I do hope we've learned something from this and make sure it never, ever happens again.