Foreign Correspondent: June 28

Foreign Correspondent‘s Philip Williams tonight investigates the tragic tale of Spanish parents whose supposedly still born babies were taken from them under the Franco regime and given to other families.

A big black question mark is creeping across Spain, shaking and shocking a growing number of mothers and fathers of still-born babies and prompting them to dramatically rethink the fate of their children. Did they really die or were they sold to other families in a macabre, callous and widespread black-market trade that’s only recently been uncovered? And stepping into this murky saga is an apparent foreigner who was one of those stolen and sold and who’s only now returning to his real birthplace in search of his natural mother and the truth.

It began as cruel and calculated program under Spain’s dictator Franco. Babies were taken at birth from regime opponents and given to so-called respectable families who supported the general.

But long after Spain’s civil war ended and World War 2 faded it seems that this sinister program infected practice in hospitals and maternity clinics across the country.

What started as a heartless and ruthless episode of political and social engineering metastasised into a money maker for opportunist doctors and maternity staff.

As this scandal erupts and spreads, Foreign Correspondent investigates a number of harrowing cases involving mothers who claim they were duped and who are now desperately searching for their adult sons and daughters, another woman who is sure the dead sister in a commemorative tomb is no such person, a guilt-stricken father who bought a son and a man who grew up American utterly unaware of his heritage and who’s arrived in Spain looking for answers and his birth mother.

Europe Correspondent Philip Williams explores a landscape of broken hearts and bitterness punctuated for some with renewed hope that their children may have survived.

It airs at 8pm tonight on ABC1.