Hidden children

Brendan Watkins is one of thousands of children of priests who found their biological parents through DNA testing and social media. His birth wasn’t the only secret his father kept.

By Suzanne Smith for Compass Published 12 Aug 2023

A global issue

Greens Senator David Shoebridge says Terry’s case raises concerning questions.

“These are extraordinary facts that seem to show a national undocumented trade in babies being run by the Catholic Church, says Shoebridge.

“But from a systemic level it raises just so many troubling questions about what happened and where the documents now lie.”

There has never been a global scholarly study on the numbers of children of priests and nuns.

But in 2022, Doris Reisinger, a senior academic at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and a former nun published a landmark report on the issue in the United States.

“We are definitely talking hundreds of thousands of children affected by reproductive abuse,” says Dr Reisinger, who has examined thousands of pages of survivor accounts, court documents and newspaper articles.

“I found the first abortion case involving a 13-year-old girl. And I found cases with girls even younger than that — 11-year-olds who had become pregnant as a result of sexual abuse by a priest.”

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-13/children-catholic-priests-search-truth-justice-secrets/102706050

==Farming babies 100's of 1000's of children > reproductive abuse > systemic > world wide==