Religion
In reply to the discussion: Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story [View all]struggle4progress
(118,379 posts)the former county workhouse, refurbished as a county mother and baby home, run under contract with the county. It was not a Bon Secours nunnery: there was a local Bon Secours religious community, but it was located approximately a kilometer away from the Tuam home. There is no reason to think that deliveries occurred at the Bon Secours nunnery: it would make no sense to transfer a woman from the home to the nunnery a kilometer away, and then to transfer her back with her baby after delivery
The death records do indicate some children delivered by Caesarian section
It is not really appropriate to compare doctor-consult fees for delivery in one's own family residence, where family provided food and linen, with the costs of the facility here. The Tuam home did hire nurses, for example. Overall Irish maternal mortality for 1925 -1930 period were in the range of 4-5%, comparable (say) to New Zealand. A common cause of mortality was puerperal sepsis, which results from inadequate attention to sterile conditions. At the Tuam home, Corless found a total of four death records for mothers from 1925-1961. Guessing crudely that 3200 women passed through the home, the low maternal mortality figures suggest a lot of scrubbing floors, boiling laundry, and sterilizing instruments -- and a natural guess would be that the mothers who were working off their debt did much of that. Since $6.50 per day in current dollars won't cover many personal expenses such as food, clothing, linens, and so, it is also a natural guess that mothers working off their debt also did much of the gardening work in season. It's not clear that any "profit" was realized from such activities, other than improving conditions for residents of the home
To understand the economics of the institution, one needs more information. Children not otherwise placed stayed in the home for an average of about 6 years. So the 1932 figure of 135 babies in the home with 24 mothers suggests very few mothers found 100 pounds to pay their way out: this probably indicates that the maternal population consisted of urban destitute. At the time, the condition of the urban destitute in Ireland was dreadful. Records indicate that at least one mother was a resident of an institution for the mentally disabled when she became pregnant; information on most of the mothers is unlikely to become available soon, since some of them, and quite a number of their children, are probably still alive