The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (18 page)

The coercion of that era was often brutal and unapologetic. Women whose families sent them either to unwed mothers’ homes—dormitories reminiscent of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundry asylums for “fallen women,” run from the late eighteenth century through 1996—or affiliated “wage homes,” where women earned their keep as unpaid domestics in individual families. Severe isolation and shaming were normal, as was withholding information from the women about their pregnancies and impending labor. Maternity home women were forbidden contact with friends or family or with the boyfriends who fathered their children; treated as servants for home benefactors; dropped off at hospitals to labor alone, apart from married mothers, sometimes without pain medication; and coerced to sign relinquishment papers while they were still drugged or recovering from labor. Many were pressured to deny that they knew the fathers of their children, deliberately misled about their right to keep their child or
about services that could help them, and frequently refused a chance to see or hold their babies after birth. Some had their babies taken while they were sedated or were told that the babies had been stillborn but were never shown their bodies. “They wanted to keep us scared to death,” said Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh, a former ward of the Florence Crittenton maternity home in Silver Spring, Maryland, and founder of the Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative, which compiles information about the period. “They didn’t want us to be repeats. It was so traumatizing that many mothers don’t remember the births.”

When Wilson-Buterbaugh became pregnant in 1966 at the age of seventeen, her family sent her to a “wage home,” where she worked as a servant for a wealthy family associated with Florence Crittenton in exchange for her room and board. By day she was brought to the maternity home to complete high school requirements. At night she lived in the made-up attic of her guardians’ brownstone and sometimes served cocktails at their dinner parties, where she would overhear guests discuss her situation. After time spent in two wage homes, she grew depressed and requested to be transferred to the maternity home full time. There, she was instructed to identify herself only by her first name and last initial, both to maintain the secret of the pregnancy and to bolster a sense, explains Fessler, that “the person who went away to deliver the baby was someone else. And you could return home and be the person you always were”—to come back, as another Baby Scoop Era mother, Sandy Young, put it, a “born again virgin.”

In 1967 Young had just graduated from high school in Illinois. Around her eighteenth birthday she became pregnant by the boyfriend she had been seeing all year. After keeping the pregnancy secret as long as she could, Young told her parents at Christmas. She adored her boyfriend and hoped their relationship would work out. Although she was legally an adult, state law in Illinois—which Young describes as having been a “chattel state” in which women were considered legal dependents of husbands or parents—determined that Young’s pregnancy “incapacitated” her and that, therefore, her parents could make decisions for her. “We could be expelled from school, from college; there were morality clauses for teachers, you couldn’t teach as a single mother; we couldn’t get credit in our name, couldn’t get a job or an apartment. Even if we had somehow managed to save our child from adoption,” said Young, “unless our parents were behind us, we were toast, we’d lose the children anyway.”

Her father disapproved of her boyfriend’s family, so he decided to separate the couple. There was a large maternity home nearby, but Young’s
parents feared neighbors would recognize her; instead, he sent her to the Salvation Army’s Booth Memorial maternity home in Saint Louis, 250 miles away.

Because she had already finished high school, Young was put to work at Booth Memorial, sweeping stairwells and dusting. Alongside one hundred other “wayward” girls, Young wasn’t allowed to use her own name or wear her own clothes, and Booth Memorial staff closely monitored her contact with outsiders. When her delivery date arrived Young experienced childbirth alone in her hospital room, without pain medication but with a “Twilight Sleep” Scopolamine drug cocktail and a dangerously high amount of the labor-inducing drug pitocin, which left her bleeding heavily and on strict bed rest for eight days.

As Young sees it, “This was part of our punishment.” During her recovery Young’s boyfriend tried to see her at the hospital, but the maternity home had him arrested at the door. Young’s parents were called, and she was sedated. At some point a nurse came and took her son. She doesn’t believe she ever signed a surrender document. “When we left the homes, we left with not a piece of paper to show for anything,” said Young. “Like that portion of our lives never happened. All we had to remind us of it was our stretch marks.”

The experience left Young and millions of other mothers from the era suffering from something akin to posttraumatic stress disorder, so distraught from the experience of losing their first child that when they later had children within the safety of marriage, they feared that those children would be taken as well.

PART OF THE PUSH
for women to relinquish babies for adoption back then came from rising concern about infertility in the postwar years—some adoption researchers suggest increased infertility could have resulted from sexually transmitted diseases among returning GIs—as the Baby Boom and popular media put a spotlight on couples unable to conceive. The rising desire—demand—for children inspired a cultural shift in attitudes toward adoption. Although it was still regarded a vaguely shameful secret, there began to be an emphasis on the adoption “supply chain,” focusing less on finding homes for needy infants than finding babies for childless couples.

Facilitating this change was an ironic historical twist. Before the 1940s unwed mothers’ homes had for decades been run by Christian charities, which had taught the women skills to support themselves and parent, and
firmly believed that mother and child must be kept and supported together.

In the 1940s control of the homes shifted to social workers—just then emerging as a recognized class of professionals—who viewed illicit sex as a pathological disorder and unwed mothers as feeble minded or mentally ill. (More specifically, they viewed unwed white mothers as pathological. Unwed mothers of color were viewed as naturally and irredeemably promiscuous and, therefore, had the mixed blessing of being less likely to be pressured to relinquish their babies for adoption, as there was lesser demand for black babies, but more likely to be coerced into other forms of reproductive control.) Although the Christian-run homes had viewed single mothers as sinners in need of religious charity, now “professionalization” redefined what had simply been morally shameful into a social disease.

“We were deviant, unnatural, had to be cured,” said Wilson-Buterbaugh. Her Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative has documented numerous sociological reports from the period that reveal the paternalistic and punitive orientation of the homes. Social workers noneuphemistically called resident birthmothers “inmates” and asserted that their role as social workers was to serve as disciplinarian parents to girls who had gotten pregnant on purpose. In a caseworker paper presented at the 1960 National Conference on Social Welfare, Dr. Marcel Heiman made exactly that argument, alleging that caseworkers must compensate for defective parental discipline in families in which a girl becomes pregnant out of wedlock by taking on the parents’ role. “The caseworker must then be decisive, firm and unswerving in her pursuit of a healthy solution for the girl’s problem. The ‘I’m going to help you by standing by while you work it through’ approach will not do. What is expected from the worker is precisely what the child expected but did not get from her parents—a decisive No! . . . An ambivalent mother, interfering with her daughter’s ability to arrive at the decision to surrender her child, must be dealt with as though she (the girl’s mother) were a child herself.”

In light of the growing number of married couples seeking white babies to adopt as their own at the time, sociologist Clark E. Vincent, author of the 1961 book
Unmarried Mothers,
offered a chilling warning that maternity homes could become the hub of a market driven by supply and demand. “If the demand for adoptable babies continues to exceed the supply . . . then it is quite possible that, in the near future, unwed mothers will be ‘punished’ by having their children taken from them right after birth,” he wrote. “A policy like this would not be executed—nor labeled
explicitly—as ‘punishment.’ Rather, it would be implemented through such pressures and labels as: ‘scientific findings,’ ‘the best interests of the child,’ ‘rehabilitation of the unwed mother,’ and ‘the stability of family and society.’”

“As far as people were concerned,” said Fessler, “they were bad girls, sluts, not deserving of being mothers.” The women were told that they would forget about their children. But in taking oral histories from more than one hundred mothers from that era, Fessler found that not only did mothers not forget; most suffered lifelong guilt and depression.

“It’s a death: the baby is here, then the baby is gone,” said Joe Soll, an adult adoptee and a New York City psychotherapist who runs a weekly support group for people affected by what’s sometimes called adoption loss. “Many of these women suffer from PTSD. It’s almost like unresolved grief. You can’t go to a funeral, can’t cry, can’t grieve, must forget about it. You’re told to make believe something that happened did not happen.”

In fact, as research has shown, for some relinquishing a child for adoption is worse than death. A 1999 review in the
Journal of Obstetric, Gynecological and Neonatal Nursing
found that “Relinquishing mothers have more grief symptoms than women who have lost a child to death, including more denial; despair, atypical responses; and disturbances in sleep, appetite, and vigor.”

Mirah Riben, vice president of communications for Origins-USA, a birthparents’ organization, relinquished her child in 1967 when her Brooklyn Jewish family couldn’t imagine another option for raising a child out of wedlock. Years later, after reuniting with her daughter and forming a relationship, the daughter died, and Riben was surprised to find the death easier to grieve than the initial separation through adoption. “It has been called a ‘limbo loss,’ a grief like mothers’ whose children are missing in action,” Riben said. “With death, there’s closure—something that isn’t there in adoption loss. It doesn’t keep the wound open.”

Sandy Young was told that her son would be in touch when he was eighteen, and she sent letters every year to the adoption agency for a file that the agency was supposed to be keeping in case mother and child both wanted to connect later in life. (Young was still living in Illinois when her son turned eighteen in the mid-eighties, and she said that thanks to the state’s “chattel law,” she had to have her then-husband—no relation to her son—give his permission for Young’s son to contact her.) When her son did contact the agency at twenty-three, three days after his first child was born, she learned that none of her letters had been saved in their file.

The experience of reunification was intense and overwhelming, as it is for many mothers and their relinquished children, and ties of blood mattered more than either had been told. There would be periods of nonstop communication, as they realized they had the same physical tics and that he and one of Young’s other sons, raised within her marriage, had been at the same military base at the same time, each hearing there was another guy on base who looked just like him. Then, painfully, there would be a “pullback,” in which Young’s son would stand her up after they had made plans to meet. “The intensity of the feelings was just too much for him,” Young said.

After one such pullback, when Young was again left without contact, she searched online late into the night to see if she could find pictures of her son and his then-preteen daughter. She came across a photo of a girls’ T-ball team, looking stern as they posed at a state championship game. “I’m looking at this picture, knowing one of these girls is my granddaughter, my firstborn son’s firstborn child, and I’m scanning this picture desperately, for hours. I know she looks like me and I’m trying to pick out which one of these children is mine,” recalled Young. “All of a sudden, all of the things I had buried for years erupted, and this animal wailing came over me like a tidal wave, and I couldn’t stop. I was sitting alone in the closet in the middle of the night like a wounded animal. I was so embarrassed when I realized what I was doing, because it’s so not me.”

In the wake of that breakdown and desperate for support, she Googled the word “birthmother”—“the only word I knew,” she said, “because the agency told me that’s what I was.” This was the genesis of her activism, enabled by the Internet, which Young calls “the absolute salvation of birthmothers, because we could go on and share our shame.” In time, though, she lost the shame. The first letter she wrote to the editor of a local newspaper, identifying herself as a birthmother, she said, “was like putting on my scarlet letter myself.”

Women of the Baby Scoop Era as well as later maternity home inmates who experienced similar coercion have become a small but dedicated army of reformers. Suz Bednarz is a Connecticut communications director who was sent to a maternity home contracted by a “grey-market” adoption agency, Easter House. There, she was threatened that her parents would be charged thousands of dollars if she tried to keep her baby. Later Bednarz helped shut the agency down and reunite more than sixty Easter House birthmothers with their children.

In other Western countries that had their own Baby Scoop Eras, notably Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, birthmothers and their
advocates have had increasing success in getting official acknowledgement of their experiences, as multiple governments, hospitals, and churches have issued formal apologies for their role in “forced adoptions.” In Canada several churches have begun an archival dig to determine their part in the coercion. In Australia ongoing advocacy by Baby Scoop Era mothers has resulted in public apologies from all but one of the eight state and territory governments, two Christian denominations, and one major hospital. In 2012 Australia’s federal government pledged to form a committee to draft an apology on behalf of the nation as well, modeled on the formal 2008 apology Australia issued to recognize the forcible adoption of as many as one hundred thousand children removed from aboriginal and indigenous communities between 1869 and the 1970s, known as the “Stolen Generations.” The Australian movement has helped create a social consensus in that country that adoption can be beneficial but can just as easily be coercive or abusive to natural families and that all attempts at family preservation must be exhausted before adoption is allowed.