In this episode we dive into the hard topic of human trafficking. This is one of many episodes we will be doing on this topic as it is a vast and ever changing issue.
Come with us as we go all the way back to the late 1700's to present day baby farming.
Join us on Patreon at www.patreon.com/crimejuicygang for bonus episodes, unaired content, exclusive expert interviews, swag, and a peek behind the juice!
In this episode we dive into the hard topic of human trafficking. This is one of many episodes we will be doing on this topic as it is a vast and ever changing issue.
Come with us as we go all the way back to the late 1700's to present day baby farming.
Join us on Patreon at www.patreon.com/crimejuicygang for bonus episodes, unaired content, exclusive expert interviews, swag, and a peek behind the juice!
Final Baby Farms
Krista: [00:00:00] This is the CrimeJuicy Gang and the CrimeJuicy Cocktail Hour!
Carrie: For our last episode of the season, gang, we're going to be talking about baby farming. Thank you so much for listening. Becca is going to give us a background.
Becca: Baby Farming is a part of human trafficking. Some common features of human trafficking include coercion, force, that sort of thing. 20 to 40 million people are currently in modern slavery today. Human trafficking industry grosses around $150 billion in annual profits. Baby farming is part of this industry, but in many cases it doesn't get counted as human trafficking because it's given the nod by government and religious establishments. When first recorded this episode early on in the season. We we, we lost it.
Carrie: We had to record this episode four, times this is the fourth recording.
Becca: But then we did an episode with SWOP – Behind Bars and it shed light on some human trafficking issues that hadn't crossed our paths. The statistics were from the Polaris Project, which is kind of at the forefront of the human trafficking non-profit activism. After talking to ladies at SWOP – Behind Bars the Polaris project groups in consensual sex work with human trafficking, has some problematic stats and approaches to addressing the issue.
Another thing that we learned in that episode was that human trafficking definitions are very murky and demystify, like changing our views around what human trafficking is and looks like, is really important to successfully addressing the issue. And one of the questions the Blair asked us, which I've been thinking a lot about when in researching this topic is well, what's a pimp? Who is a pimp? And in this episode, I think we get the answer to that question, and it turns out that nuns are pimps – can be…Well, a lot of what we're going to, we're going to look at all of the, some situations where I think we can clearly be like, all right, that's the person selling another person. You know, and this topic definitely pushes the line of consent because, A) we're dealing with children, B) we're dealing with highly stigmatized women who are in many ways coerced into situations where they have to surrender their child to this branch of human trafficking.
Carrie: Yes. The name baby farming was used as an insult back in the day. The historical practice of accepting payment, you know, for the custody of a child was brought up in the Victorian era. That's where the term comes from. You could get a lump sum payment, or you could get periodic payments, but we had people who would get this money and kill the babies. That's where that term comes from. Where we're applying this is in the modern day focus with human trafficking in general. So just to make sure that we've got that kind of clear why we're calling it, that because it's still going on folks.
Krista: And in ways that would actually move and shake your whole being to the core for the fact that it was somebody that was just looking to do the right thing, had to go through this horrific process because the quote unquote legal process is almost just as corrupt as the black market process. If not more.
Carrie: You are correct about that Krista that's for sure. Becca can you start us out with the Philippines what's going on down there?
Becca: The Philippines is a nation that's been dubbed the baby factory. Teen and pre teenage pregnancy is a huge issue there. There's not a lot of talk about contraception and sex ed in the country. Girls under 18 need parental permission for contraception and HIV tests, but the age of consent is only 12. There's a lot of misinformation about contraception. It's believed that it damages the uterus. Catholicism's a huge influence. Abstinence is what's taught. The church wields, huge political influence over politics and has a fierce lobbying arm, which has led to very limited access to contraception. There are black market abortions but there's a six-year prison sentence for possessing or using abortion pills.
Krista: It sounds like when I went to school in Texas.
Becca: Whoa, and it's so dangerous to get an abortion. If it goes any wrong, the person who's performing the abortion is like, okay, you're on your own. Over half a million people get abortions in the Philippines and a hundred thousand get hospitalized from complications and many die. In fact, there's entire wards dedicated to post abortion patients. One thing you've got the situation where there's a lot of teen and pre teenage pregnancies, abortion’s illegal. So you end up with a bunch of extra babies. Abortion is very dangerous. Something particular to the Philippines that make this kind of baby farming. There's like an economic incentive. There's a necessity incentive, but also adoptive parents can be listed as birth parents on the birth certificates, so you could just be like, biological parent.
Babies get advertised on social media. So I can get a kid for like as low as six bucks, like USD. It's usually higher, but that number was shocking.
Krista: Wasn't that more so in the Malaysia?
Becca: I think that was the Philippines. Malaysia, I think they're charging more because it's not like, Oh, it can cost up to 2,500 to buy a baby with all the falsified paperwork. Cause yeah, they got a falsify paper…
Krista: There are offices you can walk into, but they're really not travel agencies. They're baby agencies and I'm sorry to be laughing.
Becca: Got a laugh or you'll cry. In Malaysia if you're an adoptive parent, you can't do a list it on the birth certificate, but there's ways to falsify those documents. So in Malaysia, it's, it's also very huge. It's advertised on social media where customers can choose what parents will bear their kids. They've got situations where there's brothels, where the prostitutes are also having their babies sold. Which we'll get to again kind of echoing that in the homes for mothers and babies in Ireland, that we'll talk about later. But kids that can't get to adoptive parents are sold the sex traffickers, begging rings, that sort of thing. This is one of those times where it's like, if good homes can't be found, bad homes will be found.
But there's also a complex legal adoption process and that gives traffickers and market. You can choose babies online, their cataloged on websites by gender, color and race. Many of these I guess baby hustlers, or I guess baby pimps, they don't work with local mothers because local mothers tend to ask where their babies go. Isn't it illegal to give birth there if you're a foreigner?
Carrie: In the Philippines?
Becca: Malaysia.
Krista: Yep, not only were trafficked into the country for prostitution and told something completely and totally different, you're forced to have a baby, and then you're forced to sell it because if you one get caught with the baby, you get in trouble and then add everything else onto it.
Becca: So these women end up like illegally in the country working in brothels and they can't keep their babies because it's illegal for them to have babies in the country. It's just this whole process of coercion. It's a way to really capitalize on one, it's human trafficking at it’s finest. You get like the product and the by-product you can sell them both.
Carrie: It's the best of both worlds. Money, hand over fist.
Krista: Some of the children that are born from these situations are not in the best of ways.
Becca: No. And yeah, like again, like if they can't be filled to adoptive parents, they're sold the sex traffickers and begging rings where they're maimed. There's like groups of housing for pregnant women, unlicensed shelters, there's also a huge stigma about getting pregnant out of wedlock. Women either run away from home or kicked out by their families or they get brought in. And there's all kinds of ways where it's directly and indirectly coercive. During their pregnancy, they stay completely out of sight. They live secretly until they give birth. So it's a really convenient way of keeping someone imprisoned because they can't go outside because they're obviously in violation of the law because they're pregnant.
Carrie: It's a totally against their will, but they're in violation. That's the law working against again.
Becca: Yeah, you've got the law that's or people within the legal, within the law that are also complicit because you have to have the birth certificate under the adoptive parents’ name. A doctor needs to change that on the prenatal records. And then fake documents are submitted to government registry and they issue a birth certificate with the adoptive parents' name on it. The money trail goes to high places right up to the country's national registration department. There are medical chains that do this on a regular basis and they have national registration officers that they work with regularly. There's ways to pay people off on all along the chain.
Carrie: Wow.
Becca: And then the adoptive parents aren't investigated, like they don't do background checks to see where these kids are going because that's not the point.
Carrie: We have to have oversight on an adoptive parent. I mean, you just have to.
Krista: Legal adoption companies still miss a lot of things. They’re legally adopted to people who were straight up and pedophile child porn rings legally.
Carrie: legally.
Krista: It's not a perfect science. I hate to put it that way, but it's not.
Carrie: No, but I mean, we gotta have, we gotta have some kind of form.
Krista: Something, but even still, everybody looks good on paper.
Becca: Right. And then people that like don't look good on paper may actually be really awesome.
Krista: In my time in property management, that is one of the biggest things that I learned. The ones who look good on paper were usually the shittiest tenants, people that were looking for another, just that person to give them that one chance never were late on their rent, paid ahead, kept their apartments in working condition, never [00:10:00] called us unless like the ceiling was leaking or it was bad. That is my personal experience. The paper. Cool. Let me see you.
Becca: Let me look you in the eyes then. The other place - this one's really interesting and will also be echoed in both Spain and Ireland - is Nigeria. It's the perfect storm. It's basically the perfect storm of baby farming because there's stigma against childless married couples. So if you're married without children, there's a massive stigma against you. You're suspected of witchcraft. Families pressure couples to get divorced if they can't have kids. And there's also a stigma of being a single mother and then abortion is illegal. So you've got this intense pressure cooker of supply and demand for selling babies and buying babies. And it's given rise to a lot of NGOs and religiously affiliated organizations that take in women who are pregnant out of wedlock, provide food and shelter in exchange for their baby. They can like be sheltered and live in secret while they're pregnant, and then afterward the payment is the baby. And they do this through clinics where there's miracle doctors that work. A married couple that doesn't have - that can't have kids goes to a miracle doctor and the miracle doctors like, Oh, magic magic. Got you, baby! These NGO are…And yeah. And then but once women are in these NGOs, if they change their minds about giving or these homes or whatever if they change their minds and they're like, no, I want to keep my kid. They're told that they'll be arrested if they go back on the deal, which isn't true, but they're in a really, really, really vulnerable situation. So they're lied to get them to keep up with the deal. They target runaways and even attorneys and activists have been threatened and intimidated by these trafficking syndicates. The women are kept separate from the buyers. It's crazy. It's a perfect storm.
Krista: It is a perfect storm. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Yeah.
Carrie: And the witchcraft thing is really real. It's a huge cultural thing there. And it's been going on for a minute, it's very ingrained and it really is a big deal. The pressure to have a child is immense and the pressure to not have a child, if you're not married is immense. So they're screwed, like you said, Krista both ways.
Becca: Yeah. And then you get these middlemen stepping in that are like, we can capitalize on the situation and sell babies!
Carrie: It's a miracle!
Becca: It's a miracle, miracle job. Yeah. And this is another situation we'll see this echoed where religiously affiliated organizations are the ones that are running these baby farms and capitalizing on this extreme stigma to make a buck off of babies.
Carrie: The ones in Nigeria are all religious denominations Catholic, everybody's there, except I don't know if the Mormons are, but everybody else is wheeling and dealing down there in it. In Nigeria is the real deal, gang. It's like the wild, wild West.
Krista: I've never been.
Carrie: Oh, well I haven't either, but I've heard.
Becca: It's not like the Mesa. Maybe we don't have to go there. It's like, okay, check this shit out. Maybe we don't.
Carrie: No maybe I don't. I, you know, I'll, I'll go with what I'm told on that one. Okay. I'll go to Egypt.
Becca: Ooh, maybe we do. I don't know.
Carrie: I do want to meet a real witch doctor.
Krista: When I went to school in Texas, I did meet a boy. His name was Simba, and he came, I forget where it was, but like, he lived in like a village and he got to bring the spear and the lion carcass from the lion he killed with a spear when he turned 13.
Becca: You’re a man now, you got to fight the lion.
Krista: Yeah. He got to, he brought that to school and that was pretty awesome. I feel bad that he got dropped off in Dallas, Texas. I wouldn't do it, but that was what they did when they turned 13.
Becca: That's so bad ass.
Krista: That is bad ass. But the, yeah, the shaming part, you know, it's really weird that having children is shameful and not having children is shameful.
Becca: What can we do right?
Krista: You're a weirdo if you don't want to have children, but you're a weirdo if you want to have children, whether or not you're in a relationship why should it matter? It's complex more complex. And I haven't, I guess I'll have to read more studies. But I know a lot more people are no, there doesn't need to be any more children brought into the world right now. And I've done my duty. I'm done, not bringing anymore.
Becca: Cheers.
Carrie: I’m done too, Krista.
Becca: Spain was interesting.
Krista: I will say the Europeans and their nuns.
Becca: Oh my God.
Krista: They're nuns were bitches. Mean!
Becca: I was thinking about a full like, well, I'm like this fucking nuns are just like bitch!
Carrie: Oh yah!
Krista: They were physically abusive, sexually abusive, mentally abusive, financially abusive somehow. Oh, God, I love God.
Becca: God's the only one I love. I fucking hate everyone else, they say, but yeah. So this all started following Franco's rise to power in 1939. Anti-fascists were being killed and their children were being placed in fascist homes or brought to the Catholic church homes which were run for children, so these are orphanages. The Catholic church was a pillar for the fascist regime. Franco made it legal to list adoptive parents as birth parents on the child's birth certificate. Again, we're seeing this and it laid the groundwork for decades of widespread baby theft carried out through the churches and religiously affiliated hospitals in Spain.
After Franco's death in 1976, amnesty was deemed to ease the transition to democracy, but this ongoing amnesty has blocked stolen baby cases from being investigated. And when we're talking about stolen baby cases, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of mothers who were told their babies had died. So right after the parents were put to death and the babies were moved into these homes, it just was, Oh, this is like a really fucking profitable industry. Women who were unconventional, parents who were leftists, they went to these hospitals like the O'Donnell hospital in Madrid, the worst one was the San Ramon Hospital, also in Madrid. The hundreds of thousands of mothers were told that their babies had died. They weren't allowed to like see them. They weren't allowed to go to their funerals. When a lot of these graves were exhumed, adult bones were found, animal bones were found, no bones were found. The, where was it? The San Ramon hospital actually kept this baby in the freezer, in the basement, which when it was like raided and investigated, they found it. And this was the baby that they would like thaw and give to the parents to hold, to say that their baby had died. And they're all this baby feels like he just came out of the freezer and they're like, no way, he's just dead and cold. So they actually had a baby that they would give them. Oh, thaw the baby. But yeah, it was basically like these, the Franco regime installed the church in hospitals and schools and basically put them in a position to reallocate children from undesirable families to suitable families.
Carrie: Wow.
Becca: Yeah. As many as 300,000 children were stolen and trafficked and yeah, this started during, you know, the World War II times. Families are…
Carrie: A lot of money changed hands as well, right?
Becca: Oh yes. Oh yes. It was quite profitable. And yeah. I mean, again, we're seeing, this is all enabled by just it being easy to write the adoptive parents' name on the birth certificate, and then there you go.
Krista: And, Oh, they got the recessive gene from my grandmother. That's why they have black hair instead of this, or, yeah. And you know, in the Victorian era you had to keep those wastes cinched tight and right. Those hips gotta be wide for childbirthing, but don't childbirthing. Did they wear corsets while they were pregnant?
Carrie: They did.
Krista: Yeah. That's insane.
Becca: If we do a corset episode, it's going to be the shortest fucking episode. Although, corsets are great, I do love a good corset.
Krista: It is. I mean, I mean, it all just depends on how tight you make it. But we do also need to bring up that it was the Salvation Army that really started mother - maternity homes, I guess, in the states. They were in the United States in the 1800s, unfortunately they started in Minneapolis.
Becca: Ouch. In 19 or 1886, “the Rescue Home for the Fallen and the Falling is now open for women who desire and are earnestly seeking salvation of their bodies and souls.” Yeah, these were billed as women's places where they could go to be pregnant and give birth. Not necessarily give up the baby, but 80% did end up surrendering their babies and mothers reported that they did so under intense pressure.
Krista: Or they were told their baby just died.
Becca: And middle-class women were targeted. This was - they were bound by really strict stigmas and societal pressure.
Krista: Again, it's all about the money. You don't make enough money to take care of this baby. How are you going to do that? So why don't you just let us help you? And we'll give this baby to somebody that has money and they'll take care of it.
Becca: Well, the Salvation Army was interesting because you could see how supply and demand molded it, where it didn't necessarily start off as a baby farm. But then they're like, Oh, this is profitable. Like post-World War II there were so many families wanting to adopt that it actually caused a shift in these home towards being extremely adoption-oriented [00:20:00] and they were able to justify the supply and demand with social engineering deeming women unfit.
Krista: Yep. And that, that was easy. I mean, if you look up the list of things that could get you put in the, the asylum for a month or years or the rest of your life, one of them was just pretty much being upset on your period.
Becca: You crazy!
Krista: Dude, I believe for up to seven days, leave me the fuck alone. But they're like, Oh shit, it's not dead.
Becca: It must be crazy if it's either dead or insane.
Krista: Like what's wrong with it? It bled for seven days and didn’t die.
Becca: It just got more angry.
Krista: Yeah, no, it is. It's messed up how women get targeted in all of this, because some of them are abused women, and then they're just forced in. They're vulnerable to begin with because they were abused women or even children minors. And then they're forced into an even more mentally abusive situation where they're put to blame as to why they got pregnant. And they're, you know, they're to blame for this. And now there's a blame for this child being brought into this world.
Becca: As we saw in Nigeria you've got social workers lying to these mothers in the Salvation Army telling them that once they agreed to adoption, they had no legal way to change their mind after the baby's born. But that's a hundred percent not true. Women were pressured not to even talk about their pregnancy through this. It was just something you don't talk about. It's like, if you don't talk about it, you can't have advocacy.
Krista: And the advocacy that you do have, they usually have to be in secret because it'll, it's harmful to them.
Becca: And all this shit would be so much easier if we just laid eggs.
Krista: I mean, I'm down.
Becca: I can sit on it or I could throw it at a wall.
Krista: Or no, like I'll, I'll put it over here. Just like fish. I'll put it over here. I mean, we've evolved enough to get incubators. Like, Hey, I leave my egg. Like, do you want to fertilize it? Nope. Cool.
Becca: Husband over there jerking off on the egg…I guess we need to get a backup generator in case the power goes out or, the power goes out it’s like quick! Sit on it! O
Krista: Oh my God. That, that would be a weird announcement.
Becca: I masturbated on the egg, babe. We're having a baby. Okay.
Carrie: It was finally time, sweetheart.
Becca: Or if we did the sponge thing where we budded, you know, you're over there and he's over there and you just go pff! And then there's. And then like in a couple months you find a baby growing under the couch or something, or?
Krista: If we just lay eggs, I feel the fact of like consenting to have children would be a lot easier because it's like, if the guy has to literally go and like jack off on the egg instead of get the like pleasure pleasurable part of it, I feel like a lot of possible…I mean, I'm not saying , things would end, but I feel a lot of by-product of those certain things.
Becca: Definitely. I think it would shift. It would be oh, she was asking for it. She put her egg like right out there.
Carrie: She left her egg out on purpose!
Krista: I didn't mean to.
Carrie: I wasn't thinking Shawn! I wasn't, I didn't mean anything by it. I didn't want you to jerk off.
Becca: I didn’t know you’d jack off on the dining room table!
Krista: Bad habit!
Becca: You’ve got to like hide your eggs from them if you don't want to get pregnant, and like leave them out if you do.
Krista: Maybe put it in their beer cooler. Like you're ready?
Becca: What is it that, that fucking show, “The Future is Wild,” where they're this is what the future's going to look like. And there's going to be like giant elephant-sized turtles roving across the plains and swam octopuses. That what just happened was our version of that.
Carrie: It was such a good show. You remember that show?
Becca: Oh, I remember watching that show with you. That was so much fun.
Krista: I do though - one, one last thing. I think the egg-laying process, it would be like, if anybody's ever seen the movie, “Home” with the little blue aliens in the booth, and they’re like Oh, I have to go to the bathroom, and he’s like number one or number two? Number three! Oh, you got to take a day off for that one. I feel like that’s the egg-laying situation.
Carrie: Number three.
Krista: Three today!
Becca: Don’t fuck with me! Give me some chocolate and some wine and run away.
Carrie: But what if you hid the egg and nobody can find the egg and nobody knows? What do we do?
Krista: I mean, I guess wouldn't that make us more like birds? Like we get called chickens anyways by them disrespectful people. So there we go. And you can recklessly fertilize it.
Becca: Go for it.
Carrie: This is, “The Future is Wild,” folks.
Krista: I hope this is the future shit. Tell stories and the good old days.
Becca: Oh, speaking of the good old days, we’re going back to Ireland. We’re going back to, well, this is the most recent revelation. Since the first, what, three times, we tried recording this episode, some new information's come to light, so it's a CrimeJuicy divine timing thing that happens.
Krista: I’m going to read a quote from Mr. Martin, who is the speaker for the parliament of Ireland. This is from Mr. Martin, who is the parliament speaker for Ireland. Right now, this quote was from January 21st of this year: “We did this to ourselves as a society. We treated women, especially badly. We treated children extremely badly. We had a complete warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy, and young mothers and their sons and daughters we forced to pay terrible prices for that dysfunction. As a society, we embraced judgmentalism, moral certainty, a perverse religious morality and control, which was so damaging, but what was very striking was the absence of basic kindness,” end quote. The Irish, the Scottish, but they're pretty stoic when it comes to things, and…
Carrie: It's huge.
Krista: Yeah. I feel like he did a pretty, a really good job. And he also highlights some of, the misogyny behind what was done to these women and children. It was a pretty big news story. Ireland pretty much apologized for over 9,000 babies being murdered and/ or adopted wrongfully or just died because of neglect.
Becca: Between the years, 1922 and 1998. 1998 is when baby-mother homes, they finally shut down in 1998, but dude like abortion just got legalized in Ireland in 2019. in 2008…
Carrie: It was also sanctioned by Britain. Okay. And kind of the coalition between those, those two places is huge on what happened and that was covered up. I also want to an apology from someone in the British Parliament because I feel they need to take responsibility as well. They're the ones that had the final checkbook.
Becca: In 2015, the Irish government set up the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation to launch an official investigation into these homes and the affiliated Magdalene Laundries. These institutions were run mostly by Catholic nuns, although there were also Protestant homes that did the same thing where unwed mothers were sent to deliver their babies. These mothers were referred to very legally, if it was their first time, they were quote unquote first-time offenders and the like. Very criminalized for being pregnant to the point where these were kind of treated as internments. The Magdalene Laundries were where a lot of these women were sent in to work and a lot of them were stuck there for decades and many died there. Having babies out of wedlock was basically criminalized. They were interned in forced to give up their babies. Some of these women even tried to adopt their babies after they, you know, to buy their babies back and they were barred from doing this because they were treated as being morally contagious. They were separated from the rest of the population. This started in workhouses when unwed mothers were coming to work houses and they started being separated from the general population because they would, infect the others with their immorality or whatever.
Carrie: The living conditions were horrible.
Becca: The women were treated awful and the bodies of almost 800 babies were found in a mass grave behind just one of these homes. Then the final report of the Commission that was just released January 2021 found that yeah, 9,000 children died between the years of 1922 and 1998. That's double the infant mortality rate of the general population and one in seven of these children born in the 18 institutions that were investigated died. If all these babies are dying, how are they being farmed? Well, they were also being adopted out. You've got the situation where the women are enslaved, they're working at these laundries for free. Some children are put in orphanages and they were getting paid by the state to have these children. When the children died, they were given five pounds per baby to bury them but instead of giving them a proper burial, they were the ones, the ones that were just found that 800 mass grave, they were actually found in this a decommissioned septic tank.
Carrie: They weren't burying them properly. They were just pocketing the money.
Becca: They're making money off of the women who were alive, the babies who died, and then they were making money adopting out the other kids.
Krista: The ones that were, when they would get to see the parents, they'd be all cleaned up but these babies were left in cribs that had two, three babies in them. They maybe got their diapers changed once, maybe twice a day, if it was bad enough. Left to [00:30:00] cry, no actual human interaction or touch, only when it came to feeding time, but after they were able to hold it for themselves, they didn't care.
Becca: Massive neglect. And women who got pregnant in Ireland and fled the country were actually kidnapped and brought back. It was called the Crusade of Rescue and they like women would be kidnapped from overseas and brought back to be interned in these homes for unwed mothers and forced to sign adoption papers.
Krista: It was absolutely horrific. And just for the mean it…
Becca: And it just ended in like 1998.
Carrie: That's yesterday. That was yesterday.
Krista: Not even that long ago. Also for the children that were adopted out, some of them don't even know they were adopted and then now they might know and they’re et's say you were born in 1998. Oh, I guess you're, I don’t know you've been able to drink for a while, but like, Oh, finding out that, Oh hell, maybe I was like severely neglected and didn't get that, you know, skin to skin when I was an infant. So maybe that's why I have all these issues? I was adopted from one of these places?
Becca: It's traumatizing.
Krista: It is. And you know, I know a lot of them are like, Oh, babies, they learn quick. But the things that they learn do stick with them and it's crazy. They're sponges. Let's not forget about good old America.
Becca: Oh, America. Yeah. The Salvation Army.
Krista: Joan Crawford adopted her baby from an illegal adoption ring in the Louisiana or – was that Louisiana or Tennessee? Tennessee.
Carrie: I think it was Tennessee.
Krista: Yeah, she got her first daughter from the one in Tennessee. A lot of celebrities illegally adopted children in Tennessee. There was also the Life and Health Sanitarium in the 1920s. These were the butter box babies. These women were made to pay $8 a week to have their babies. And then, so there was $8 a week to stay there, $500 for maternity services and then their babies would be sold on the black market for up to $10,000.
Carrie: That's better than Amway.
Krista: At any time there would be between 80 to 125 babies in the house. And between 800 to 1500 babies were born between 1928 and 1946. The ones that did not survive, they did find buried in butter boxes. And I don't know if anybody, I mean, obviously I'm not old enough to remember getting butter and milk and things delivered back in the day. But your butter would be delivered just like your milk in a crate. And so these babies were put in them and most of them were minorities that were killed off. But then these women would be in debt because they were already single women in a bad way. So then they would end up working there for the rest of their lives as well.
Becca: Wow. And then you got the ICE detention centers and Bethany Christian Services. Remember all of those kids that were unaccounted for from the ICE detention centers? Basically Bethany Christian Services, it’s based out of Ohio operates a network of foster care and adoption agencies around the country and their hustle was to file abandonment charges against the parents and these ICE detention centers after six months of no contact and seize guardianship of the children that were separated from their parents and then adopt them out for as high as $50,000 a piece. And in 2017 alone at Bethany Christian Services processed 182 detainee children. That was a tough pill to swallow. Not to name names, but the Betsy DeVos and her husband contributed over $275,000 to Bethany Christian Services over the course of four years. You got a big mess over there, and again, you see what we see in Malaysia where the money trail goes all the way to the top. And you also see a faith-based charity, and you also basically see like the parents completely dehumanized and put in a position where they didn't want to be separated from their children, but they were, and they were being forced to stay away from their children for long enough for these guys to swoop in and take custody.
Krista: It's just another part of our corrupt CPS system.
Carrie: And that's how you get Mexican Joker.
Becca: Thank you, Parker and Stone. We love you, call us! Again, a lot of these situations aren't counted in the human trafficking number because it's just this complex process of making it a gray area, kind of legal, state sanctioned, that sort of thing.
Krista: Here in America, you might not qualify for a baby, but sure as hell qualified for baby over there. And it's, it's messed up because I don't know. I know the adoption part. It's a beautiful thing. I think it is amazing that people are given that opportunity and I think it is awesome that there are agencies out there that do legitimate background checks, but at the same time they do overlook some really great people that would be the most amazing parents ever. And if given the chance they would do anything to get a baby. So it, it's great. Yup. Add the money and it's great in that sense that some of those children do end up in great situations because those parents took the risk to branch out from the traditional way of adopting a child. I'm not saying it was safe, not saying it was legal and yes, you might end up with a child that has more physical or illnesses than you would if you went through certain agencies, either way, either here in America or another through other countries, because there are legal ways in every country. But there's also those shitty people that are training them to be sex slaves for the rest of their lives.
Becca: Some of the themes that really stood out were, you know, shitty abortion and reproductive rights laws, rigid adoption laws, massive stigmatization of being an unwed mother. And I think it all boils down to social control. And I think that's what we're seeing with CPS in this country. What we see, you know, in general, it's you stay in line or we'll take your baby. It's the scariest thing.
Krista: My one son, he likes to not wear coats in the winter, even when it's really cold out and snowing and walk to the bus stop. Someone's going to call the copsand they'll come to my house and tell me that I'm neglecting my child, even though that child has four coats. Four! You know, and then I have, I personally have seen situations where it was just one incident and parent - someone's going to parent shame you. Yes. But something happens. I always thought it was going to go wrong. Something might go wrong, just be prepared, but it can be the smallest thing. And these people are fighting for these children, fighting for their children to come back to them. And it's the smallest thing that's keeping their kid from them and they're not doing anything wrong. But then you see people where the children are being molested in their home, or there's active drug use, or the child is being forced to do drugs, to be sold or whatever, by their parents to fuel their drug addiction. But they're doing everything in their power to give that child back to that person who is doing nothing to get better. Why? Or it's very, one-sided where a father can't get the children, so they need to figure it out. Let people adopt kids that deserve it. And not just because they have the money or a stable job. That doesn't mean they're stable.
Becca: And let people get abortions for fuck's sake. A lot of this is just controlling women to control culture and to control society. You're seeing women forced into situations where they're being exploited because of shitty rights. Like just not having rights to have a say over their body and their choices and being stigmatized into this or that.
Carrie: It's just the patriarchy trying to keep us in line. That's all make sure we're keeping our shit together. Oh, we got to smack some on this side, on the ass.
Becca: Got to smack some over there, got to smack some over here. I kind of think of it as animal products, animal byproducts. When we look at these baby farms where like the women are exploited for labor, whether it's sexual labor or domestic labor or physical labor, you know, they're getting free work out of the women or not necessarily free work in the cases of the brothels, but they're getting work out of the women that they're profiting off of, and then they're getting profits off of the kids that they make and it's just a way of maximizing your profits through selling people.
Krista: So just like, I mean, because at that point, people look at it as a product. Animals, we'll say dairy farms, they keep cows pregnant to produce the milk to sell the milk, and then sometimes use their children to produce the meat. Whatever. I eat meat. I don't believe in those practices. It's awful for the animal. And the by-product of that is also awful for you to consume. Eat how you want, but please make sure that if you are going to…if I owned a farm and I had a cow and I knew I was going to slaughter it, I would give it the best life it had and make sure it did everything it wanted to do.
Becca: I live down the street from this college that raises like sheep and cows and stuff for meat. It's part of their like work co-op process. And those cows - it's so funny. There's jokes where it's like, Oh yeah, those cows they're massaged by lesbians every single day.
Krista: And yeah. Like I would make sure that cow had the best life ever.
Becca: Yeah. And I know these like meat analogies are really difficult to grasp, but there's definitely I mean, there's a lot of crossovers. There's, it's, it's a hard analogy to swallow and it's hard [00:40:00] because you know, it's it. Yeah.
Krista: And you know, also it's just like, so. Puppies. They do this to cats too. There's not as many stats on Cat Mills, like the Persian cats or the Sphinx cats or the hairless cats. And I don't know why, but there's definitely an underground market for cats.
Carrie: That’s because cats, cats can take care of themselves.
Krista: I mean, for the most part. They kind of figure it out. Yeah. I mean, cats choose to let, cause they're, you're going to continue to feed me? Okay. But just know it's on my terms.
Carrie: I will leave tomorrow.
Krista: Yeah. If you let me out, like I want to get out there. I'll figure it out.
Becca: I’ll be top cat. I'll be top cat real fast.
Krista: Right. But like puppies and dogs in general, puppy mills are an issue, which there are, there are certain situations in human trafficking where people are purposely made to make babies to sell to other human traffickers. There are those situations and in puppy mills about half of puppies live only to 12 weeks, which happens, in which happened in a lot of those situations. It's done illegally. There's more than 10,000 plus facilities throughout the United States alone done illegally. And these are for your, your expensive ass dogs, your, your German shepherds, your Dobermans, literally your tea cup, fricking, whatever. More than likely they sat in their shit because people are just awful. But you bought it for as much money because you wanted it, right? Just like how people will buy babies that are completely and totally illegal.
Becca: Right off the catalog.
Krista: Because they want it. There's over 4.3 million puppies born in the year or every year in puppy mills. Yes. Illegal puppy bills. There it's, it's a sickening thing and I I've even seen it and it's, it's, it's really sick. Just imagine that people treat human children that way. I mean, I love my fur baby. He is like my child. I coddle him. I hold him like a baby. He is, he is, is my, he is, he is my fourth child, you know? But I'm just, I guess I'm just trying to make that comparison because some people see humans and animals as different things, but animals have feelings, they have emotions. They also have PTSD and traumas just like humans do. And people are treating humans the same way that if they think of animals in a less than way, just a money.
Carrie: The mechanics of the situation are the exact same.
Krista: Yes, I that's, I guess that's what I'm trying to say. I always stumble over my words when it comes to that, because I'm trying not to like get too emotional and angry.
Carrie: It is an emotional subject.
Becca: One of the - it's funny. We're ending the season on two crying episodes, but this is an episode in particular that was very hard for all three of us. And I think that's why it took so many tries to, to get it right, because it's, it's a really hard one. And it makes you face a lot of the darkest parts of what's happening to people on this planet and…
Carrie: Bringing up Tennessee again. We've got a huge problem in Tennessee with people selling their children for drugs. They had to do a whole department, a whole separate department for this, and it's human trafficking from family, which is a whole…
Krista: That's a whole other freaking crazy. The addiction is a hard topic in general because everybody has different views. The depths that people will go to to get that fix. If certain things happen to them, the depravity that they would let happen to their own children, because at that point, nothing matters.
Becca: It's like being possessed. Cause like something else is kind of using your vessel then further itself.
Krista: Yep. You're in the spaceship, but you ain't driving. And it's not like mental. Well, it is a mental thing, but it's more like you allowed that darkness into your life and you, then you allowed it to control you.
Becca: We're going to probably cover some more human trafficking topics. Maybe one a season because ause they're really, really hard.
Krista: I think they're really close to all of us between personal experiences and people that we know.
Becca: Well, and that was the other thing in investigating…I don’t know if we’re in…but in researching this discovered that we're all a lot more closer to human trafficking than we think.
Carrie: Yeah. I think that's, that's why it was really difficult for us all.
Krista: Even if it's not in your face, like I was sold forsex, there's so many facets. And we did touch on some of those facets in our sex trafficking episode, that there are different types of sex trafficking.
Becca: Circling back around to the big consent thing about human trafficking is these kids, kids don't consent. Consent doesn’t just extend to sex. It extends to this entire situation and you can be exploited without someone fucking you. The mother's consent was broken. There was a fuck ton of coercion.
Carrie: They were all lied to. They were pressured.
Becca: The kids obviously didn't get a say in it.
Carrie: And the homes broke the law by lying.
Krista: Half of the time, the doctors that delivered these children weren't even doctors. They were just people that were there.
Becca: Well, that's why so many women died in the Irish Homes for Mothers and Babies, because a lot of them, these women were treated like garbage because they'd defiled themselves by having premarital sex. They weren't given – a lot of them weren't given painkillers during childbirth. A lot of them died in childbirth. A lot of - there was a lot of complications because they just, and then the kids were shunned in the schools and stuff that they went to, they were treated like throw-away people. The reason - we're all, “We're going to end on Ireland for a positive note!” And we, it does because that apology is huge.
Krista: Especially from a man.
Becca: So there’s like England and then there's the rest of continental Europe. I remember when I went to England, I was 20. Made the mistake of hugging people. They're like, the fuck are you doing?
Krista: What they do in public as to what they do on TV, or how they will use it to describe certain situations or feelings in, in art and in television, I guess that's, that's where the people are like, wait, what? They're okay with that being on TV, but you can't wait what? You know, so, but the fact that, that a man apologized that way and it, it, it meant something. I'm sure he had some help because I'm, that's a hard speech to write. Like how, I, I think even for a woman, it would have been hard to write.
Becca: You know, there's a really good book called “The Art of a Great Apology” or something like that. We read it in this rhetoric class in college, but it was basically looked at famous apologies throughout history. It looked at Clinton, it looked at like all those televangelists, it looked at a fuck ton of people and it picked apart like what goes into a good apology? What goes into a bad apology? The good apologies are when responsibility for one's actions are taken and excuses aren't made and hard truths are acknowledged.
Krista: The Catholic Church also in Ireland apologized for their role.
Becca: So come one England, we're waiting on you.
Krista: I have three kids and I'm going to be 33. I had my first son young and some people were like, Oh my God, you're so young. But not that long ago in American society, it was okay to be married when you were 15 and start giving children, not that long ago. So…
Carrie: That's a good point to bring back up.
Krista: I'm not saying that it was right, but culturally it was functional. I mean, yes, lifespan. Everyone’s like, Oh, but lifespan this lifespan that. Okay. Well, if you think about it, all the shit that they're putting in our bodies now is going to start killing us faster than it did before.
Becca: Honestly, I'm dreading the 35-year-old pregnancy. I wished I had had kids when it would have been easier in my body.
Krista: You know, I was actually…
Carrie: You’re in good health though, Becca.
Krista: Yeah, you're in good health.
Becca: I’m gonna to be an old mom. I'm not going to have the energy to keep up with them. Be like…
Krista: Oh you will.
Becca: I got coffee, I got coffee. I got this.
Krista: Well, as, as exhausting as they are just the, and I understand what people would illegally adopt children. It's amazing to watch, watch that happen, that evolution of a person, watch their personality and watch all of that. And I guess with legal adoption, you do get the fact of kind of knowing the parent or getting more medical stuff, because medical stuff is important.
Carrie: Medical history's important in this day and age, you need to know.
Krista: It's extremely important. Because not only does it dictate your organ functions, your brain too. Any mental illness is good to know as well.
Becca: Yeah. And that's another consent thing that got brought up when I was watching the documentaries about Spain and Ireland is these people were denied the right to their own medical history.
Carrie: That's true, Becca, I'm glad you brought that up. That is wrong.
Becca: Right. And then that could have been avoided. They didn't have to erase the parents. They didn't have to, like…
Krista: All you have to do is keep - maybe not the name or their birth date - but pass that information along. At the same time, people don't want a broken baby. People [00:50:00] don't want…
Becca: Except for the begging rings, except for the begging rings. They definitely want broken babies.
Krista: And if they're, if they're pretty, when they come, they're not, they're going to make them unpretty. And it's really sad that, Hmm.
Becca: Well, whole lotta baby talk, y’all!
Krista: It should be easier to adopt children to the right type of people, and it should also be easier to make that choice. If you were put in a precarious situation where it was not your consent to even be pregnant.
Becca: And that's another way of shifting the blame of – for getting raped onto women. Cause it's, all right, now this is your consequence.
Krista: Don't even get me started on the States that allow your rapist to claim parental rights and then you have to share custody with your rapist.
Becca: Oh gosh. And that's how poisonings happen.
Krista: That's how PTSD and suicides and you know, fun stuff happened and murder, murder. That's how women, that's why. One of the reason, that I killed my rapist!
Becca: Oh man. So thank you all so much for sticking with us for our first season. We really appreciate you. We've all been like all three of us. We produce, we do every part of this process and we've been learning on the fly and we really appreciate y'all being here with us. We're going to take a break, but we're going to be back for season two. Stick with us on Patreon at patreon.com/crimejuicygang/. We've got interviews with experts in the field of all things investigation coming out for ya. We got some more Royally Twisted miniseries episodes. And follow us on our Facebook page CrimeJuicy, or our Facebook group CrimeJuicy, also our Instagram handle CrimeJuicy, where you can see pictures of our pets and get updates about what we're working on for season number two and more bonus content.
Let us know what you want out of Season Number Two. We are putting together a topics list and we would love to hear from you about what you want us to talk about. So cults, crimes, controversy, whatever. Cryptids. I love cryptids.
Carrie: We all really like cryptids.
Krista: We do love us some serial killers and cults and crime, but we also love getting to know people. Armchair investigation is great, but when we do our interviews, we to get to know those people as well. If you enjoy that, or what kind of people you would like us to try to get interviews with, or if you have any ideas of shows that you think we would, you know, vibe with, I guess tag them. We'll see what we can do.We love you! Stay Juicy, Y’all!
Carrie: Love it.
Krista: Oh, goodness. That.