Fina Admits to Helping Kill Newborns with Birth Defects

Fina Admits to Helping Kill Newborns with Birth Defects is the moment when Fina Hidalgo acknowledges that she assisted in the killing of some newborns with disabilities. Her admission turns an inquiry into incomplete family and medical records into a confrontation over who was responsible for deaths recorded as ordinary infant fatalities—and over the moral language used to excuse them.

Records and the Question of a Death

The admission comes as Amaia Salazar investigates the history of births in her family. An old obstetric record lists a natural twin birth in 1980, with both girls described as apparently healthy but neither named. Amaia asks whether the record would show if one of the babies had died. She is told that a death occurring in the valley should have a certificate, and asks for it to be found. The conversation shifts from what the archive records to what its official entries may conceal.

Amaia then asks Fina whether she and her brother had killed newborns with disabilities. The question is direct, prompted by Fina’s earlier dismissal of the law’s distinction between a newborn and its mother. Fina answers by separating her brother from the acts and describing the household pressures she believed families faced when caring for several children, especially a child with a disability.

The Scope of Fina’s Admission

Fina acknowledges that newborns with disabilities were killed. She claims that in most cases the families themselves carried out the killings, while in some cases she helped because the relatives lacked the resolve to do so. She gives no number of deaths, identifies no individual families, and does not specify which acts she personally assisted with. Her account therefore establishes participation without supplying a complete record of the victims or circumstances.

She also denies that her brother took part. According to Fina, he was morally and religiously scrupulous and did not understand what the families were doing. Yet she says he signed the death certificates when a child died in the valley. In her account, those deaths were officially classified as crib deaths; the physician who signed the certificates was dead, and the families would deny what had happened. The record-keeping that might have documented a death thus also offered a way to disguise its cause.

The Confrontation Over Responsibility

Fina describes the killings as offenses whose limitation period had passed. Amaia rejects that framing: she calls them murders, not mere offenses. Their disagreement is more than a dispute over terminology. Fina presents the acts as an answer to family hardship and invokes the deaths’ apparent legal impunity; Amaia insists that those explanations do not alter the nature of the violence.

Amaia studies Fina, who appears as a woman in a pink blouse and rubber boots, and recognizes the distance between her pleasant, nurturing presentation and the absence of remorse in her admission. Her anger rises as she considers the legal options. She concludes that the old crimes would be almost impossible to prove: Fina can deny them, the relevant certificates were signed by a doctor who is dead, and a defense lawyer could exploit the lack of proof. Amaia takes the certificate with her, but the scene does not establish that Fina is arrested or prosecuted for these killings.

What the Confession Establishes—and Leaves Open

The confession establishes Fina’s claimed involvement in some killings and her belief that relatives were responsible for most of them. It also reveals how the deaths could be presented as crib deaths in official records. It does not establish that either of the unnamed twins in the 1980 entry was killed, that Fina personally killed a particular child, or that the record in Amaia’s family case corresponds to one of the deaths she describes.

That gap gives the scene its force: a candid admission does not resolve the investigation into the family’s past, and the surviving paperwork cannot by itself prove the acts Fina describes. The exchange places the archive, the witness’s account, and the legal limits of proof in tension, while Amaia’s insistence on naming the acts as murder refuses to let their concealment make them ordinary.