You might do well to listen to the podcast in post #225 of this thread. They didn't "setup the entire system themselves". They set up their system, homes for orphans, hospital services, etc. Then the Irish government pushed all their social services off onto the Catholic Church. They used the orphanages to hold juvenile delinquents. They used effectively women's shelters as places of confinement. They arrested prostitutes and gave them to the nuns to deal with. The Catholic institutions did not confine people in Ireland, they did not stop people from leaving. The Irish authorities were the ones arresting people and taking them back, the Irish government abused the Catholic Church's charity. And then when you take all the prostitutes, homeless women, single mothers, etc and put them in the same facility, you get a dramatically higher rate of miscarriage and infant mortality there. It does require any abuse to reach that outcome given the circumstances. When the government is arresting women for being single mothers, and insists on hiding them away from society, adopting out the children was a solution that allowed mother and child out of the captivity the government insisted on.
And I'm sure someone is going to think "well if it wasn't for Catholic morals, they wouldn't have been so cruel to single mothers and prostitutes", and that line of thinking is ahistorical nonsense, ignorant of the fact that Christ being born of an unwed woman and being kind to prostitutes was a unique take relative to pre-Christian culture. Even hypersexualized ancient Greece shoved such women out of the public eye.
