The seeds of Maria Laurino’s most recent book, The Price of Children: Stolen Lives in a Land Without Choice, were planted in 2017 with a random phone call. Her Ohio cousin, John, was looking for travel advice, but wound up telling Laurino about an online group he had joined, made up of hundreds of grown adoptees like himself searching for their birth parents in Italy.
Laurino’s curiosity was piqued. Her cousin put her in touch with the creator of the group, John Campitelli. Using Campitelli’s exhaustive research as a jumping-off point, Laurino took a deep dive into not only the tragic stories of a handful of adoptees and their birth mothers, but uncovered an international adoption pipeline run by Church officials over two decades that scouted out and preyed upon poor young Italian women, many from the south.
This is not simply the Italian version of the Magdalene Laundries, Ireland’s Catholic asylums where unwed mothers, “fallen women,” and orphans were forced to labor for decades. The Price of Children accuses the Church of running an adoption racket that repackaged nearly four thousand children as “war orphans”—and then simply as “orphans”—to rid the country of the moral stain and financial cost of illegitimate children. Seizing babies from mothers’ arms and even grown children from impoverished families under the ruse of temporary foster care, the Church sent these “orphans” overseas to more affluent American childless couples, never to be heard from again. Until now.
To draw the reader in, Laurino opens with the story of Campitelli’s mother, Francesca, a poor olive-picker from Puglia, who in 1963 was impregnated by her boss and forced by her family to move to a Catholic home in Turin for unwed mothers. “In one of life’s crueler lessons, the nuns taught Francesca how to knit baby shoes,” Laurino heartbreakingly writes. After nursing for a few days, Francesca was forced to give up her baby, who was placed in a brefotrofio—an orphanage for illegitimate children—and earmarked for an American couple in Ohio: the Campitellis.
Reluctant to walk away, Francesca stayed in Turin to be closer to her child, repeatedly returning to the brefotrofio to reclaim him until finally the mother superior lied to her and told her the baby had already been sent to America. The child was several yards away, just past the brefotrofio gates.
These personal stories give the book its beating, aching heart. Laurino—who sometimes gets lost in attempts at poetic writing—is at her best when she is straightforward and lets the stunning facts speak for themselves. Each child brought in around $475 to the Church, the equivalent of $4,500 today, Laurino reports. Italian women were coerced, tricked, and often lied to in order to get them to sign away their parental rights. Laurino also takes us on several searches, some fruitful and others not, including that of her cousin John, and describes Campitelli’s epic journey to find Francesca, who, upon their reunion, bakes her long-lost son a birthday cake. Laurino details Campitelli’s creation of his online organization as well as his continuing struggle to change Italy’s draconian adoption laws, which seal records for a century. Campitelli is the first person Laurino thanks in her acknowledgements. Without him, she says, this book would not exist. But Laurino diligently does her own homework.
Using the correspondence of two American priests, Msgr. Andrew P. Landi, who ran the adoption program from Rome, and Msgr. Emil N. Komora, who worked from New York to find more “deserving” families throughout the United States, Laurino carefully stitches together details of the Church scheme. Laurino found documents linking Landi to the Vatican’s Msgr. Ferdinando Baldelli, a close associate of Pope Pius XII whose influence with the government helped keep the program running from 1951 to the late 1960s, skirting Italian laws along the way. “Orphans” were sent in groups, barely chaperoned, on long flights in piston-engine planes, with stewardesses often enlisted to change their diapers, then kept overnight in New York’s Chelsea Hotel before being sent out across the country to eager families.
Laurino takes a few entertaining, though grim, detours. For instance, she wades through the “war orphan” news coverage of the day, citing war correspondent Martha Gellhorn’s Saturday Evening Post story of the adoption of her Italian-born son, Sandy. Gellhorn, then forty and recently divorced from Ernest Hemingway, searched widely for the right child and finally settled on a “blonde fatty,” as she described him. The coda to the Post story was not a happy one, with Sandy sent off to boarding school and eventually landing in prison for drug possession and dealing.
That story opens up a whole other question about sealed adoptions, in which parents and the children themselves are kept in the dark about family histories, including alcohol abuse, fetal alcohol syndrome, addiction, and mental illness. Keeping adoptees and adoptive parents ignorant of genetic predispositions is a sin in itself, and Laurino uses concrete examples of Italian “orphans” who suffered from such lack of knowledge. (DNA testing and ancestry sites are both helping to break the silence, she admits.)
But the ones who suffered most were the birth mothers, some of whom were told their babies had died in order to get them to walk away. One mother was even taken to a cemetery by the nuns to mourn at a fake grave. Strangest of all—though perhaps not surprising—is that Msgr. Landi was himself an orphan, the son of southern Italian immigrants who died when he was still a boy.
The book does not simply add to the dreadful list of sins of the Catholic hierarchy but provides historical context on misogyny in the Church and in Italy. The precursor to the orphan program was the ruota degli esposti, the Medieval abandonment wheel, which for centuries provided a place for unwed mothers to surrender their babies anonymously to the Church for adoption. The babies were given the surname “Esposito” (a common Italian name in the United States and abroad), meaning they were exposed to the public. The shame of giving birth out of wedlock was so great that women would give up their own flesh and blood to hide their sins.
That worldview, Laurino believes, was born from the long tradition of the Adoration of the Virgin. She writes that “in a religion that asserts celibacy as the highest moral realm, heralding Mary as the ideal woman—who remained a virgin during the birth of Jesus and throughout her life—has created a precarious psychological tightrope for women, emphasizing the pollution of sex while simultaneously establishing their primary role as childbearing vessel.”
In other words, sex is always bad, especially for women, unless it’s for procreation. Ideas about the Virgin and the Church’s obsession with purity, Laurino asserts, have fed male hatred for women as sexual beings for millennia. It’s no coincidence that at the start of the orphan program in June 1950, Pope Pius canonized Maria Goretti. Goretti, a peasant girl born in 1890 who was murdered after refusing to sexually submit to an Italian farmhand, was the subject of the first open-air canonization in history, with a half-million people gathering in St. Peter’s Square. Goretti’s story, as well as that of St. Agnes before her, contains a “dark message, better for a girl to be murdered than to lose her virginity,” Laurino writes.
The scariest part of Laurino’s story, however, is not the past, but the present and future. In both Italy and the United States, updated versions of the ruota have been introduced: enclosed, temperature-controlled cribs that open with the push of a button and lock automatically after the baby is placed within; an alarm alerts EMS workers to take the infant to a social-services agency. In the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, controlling the reproductive behavior of women is once again the goal of government leaders. Though Laurino doesn’t mention them by name, Donald Trump and his more conservative vice president, J. D. Vance, hover like dark shadows over these pages—and over our lives and the lives of our daughters. As Laurino says, “the fear and hatred of women’s sexuality in Western culture still ferments like a yeast in the collective consciousness, always readying to rise.”
The Price of Children
Stolen Lives in a Land Without Choice
Maria Laurino
Open Road Integrated Media
$10.99 | 324 pp.
