Baptised By Delivery Room Doctor

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I was born in the 50’s in a Catholic hospital in Chicago. My birth mother was part of a program through which she was cared for during pregnancy and then gave her child up for adoption. My adoptive mother told me that the delivery room doctor baptized me as a matter of course, in case something happened. After adoption, I was baptized in a traditional ceremony. The word “conditional” was never mentioned.

In the old days, was it a common practice for doctors to baptize babies, or did the circumstances of my birth lead to this action?

Is conditional Baptism a more modern practice?
 
MtnDwellar said:
Is conditional Baptism a more modern practice?
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Conditional baptism is not new. It’s in Attwater’s Catholic Dictionary (3rd edition, published in 1958), though without any mention of when it was first introduced.
 
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More than likely, your second “Baptism” wasn’t a water Baptism, but the additional rites such as anointing with Chrism, presentation of a candle, etc. Such things may be notated in the Baptism register but would never show up on any certificates.
 
MtnDwellar said:
In the old days, was it a common practice for doctors to baptize babies, or did the circumstances of my birth lead to this action?
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You were at a Catholic hospital, and it was back in the era when many Catholics still believed unbaptized babies couldn’t go to Heaven if they died, so in those days the hospital staff including doctors would likely have been encouraged to baptize those babies.
 
In addition to what you mentioned, after I was born, I was moved to an orphanage for an indeterminate length of time. There was no telling when a formal baptism might occur.
 
That’s why the staff would have baptized you. They didn’t know where you might end up or when.
If you’d been a healthy child born to Catholic parents who were going to have you baptized at their parish ASAP, then you likely wouldn’t have had a hospital baptism.
 
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Both my sister and I are RN’s who trained in Catholic hospitals back in the 60’s. We were instructed to Baptize any infant who was born under distress and may not make it. Usually that would be indicated by a low Apgar score at birth and a continued struggle to sustain life. I never had to do so but my sister who worked nights in L&D did. The baby did make it and have no idea if a conditional Baptism was performed afterwards. I believe that it is performed conditionally at a formal church Baptismal ceremony by a priest just in case the proper form (words/water) was not followed the first time to make it valid Baptism. I’ll be willing to bet nurses today aren’t given instructions on saving eternal lives as we were.
 
RN69 said:
I believe that it is performed conditionally at a formal church Baptismal ceremony by a priest just in case the proper form (words/water) was not followed the first time to make it valid Baptism.
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Usually, that’s not the case. If a hospital – especially a Catholic hospital! – asserts that they performed a baptism, then the parish would simply do what’s called “supplying the rites” (as @mfac11 mentioned). That means doing the rest of the ritual (anointings with sacred oil, etc). A conditional baptism wouldn’t be performed unless there were positive doubt that a valid baptism had occurred.
 
Thanks for the correction. As I said I wasn’t aware what happened afterwards. If an emergency Baptism had to be administered by a nurse, it had to be charted (hand written back then) just like any medication, medical treatments or vital signs performed with date/time and who administered it. Since I never had to actually do it, I am not sure whose responsibility it was to inform the parent(s). My guess would be the attending physician whenever he made his next rounds. The head nurse usually accompanied doctors on rounds giving him the patient’s chart for review and noting any new orders he may have made. Different times for sure but there definitely would have been a record made regarding the Baptism, at least in a Catholic hospital.
 
RN69 said:
Different times for sure but there definitely would have been a record made regarding the Baptism
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The problem (that I’ve seen pop up a few times) comes when the parents fail to follow up with the parish, such that the baptism never gets written down in a parish register. Then, six or fourteen or twenty-five years later, when the person wants First Holy Communion or Confirmation or Marriage, and is asked “where were you baptised?”, no one can find any corroborating evidence that the person is Catholic!
 
Problematic especially if those old paper charts never got transferred to a computer. I was working in a primary care physicians office when all of the old paper charts had to be scanned to convert over to a computerized system. What a chore! On a side note, my sister who does extensive genealogy work on our family says the Catholic Church’s sacramental records can be used to confirm an ancestors relationship to us. Not sure how that would work out with today’s privacy issues. I guess similar to the LDS database. It’s like going on a virtual ancestral archeology dig. Very involved.
 
RN69 said:
my sister who does extensive genealogy work on our family says the Catholic Church’s sacramental records can be used to confirm an ancestors relationship to us. Not sure how that would work out with today’s privacy issues.
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I think there’s a period of time during which the records are sealed. After a good deal of time, though, they’re able to be searched.
 
Maybe. She just finished researching our great grandfather’s life of whom we knew nothing about except a name. She said that she had to work backwards from our father to his father connecting the dots along the way. Thanks for your informative replies.
 
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