baby registry: Adoption's dark past: Author follows women forced to give up babies

By Jackie Burrell
CONTRA COSTA TIMES

IT WAS AN EXCHANGE in an art gallery that first forced adoptee Ann Fessler to consider adoption from a different perspective.

A stranger approached her and stated, "You could be my long-lost daughter."

It was a powerful moment, Fessler said, and one that got her thinking about what it must have been like to give up a child from a young mother's point of view.

Although Fessler was not this woman's child -- and it would be another 15 years before she began looking for her own mother -- that gallery conversation launched a journey that would result in "The Girls Who Went Away."

It was only a generation or two ago, in the 30 years between World War II and Watergate, when an estimated 1.5 million pregnant girls were spirited away to homes for unwed mothers. There, alone and frightened, they gave birth and surrendered their babies for adoption.

Many of those women, now 50 to 70 years old, are still here today. And their children -- the babies they relinquished under duress -- are out there, somewhere.

It was a different era, noted Fessler, whose myth-shattering book combines scholarly research with interviews with 100 women.

The birth-control pill was unavailable. Sex education barely existed, and abortion was not only a dirty word but a dangerous back alley operation. And while men's reputations were polished by sexual escapades, young women who became pregnant were shunned and tossed out of school.

"The big myth was that (these mothers) had weighed all the options and that her decision was based on her not wanting the child," Fessler said during a recent interview in San Francisco. "The second myth was that these women were promiscuous. And the third myth was that they got over it."

Most of these young women became pregnant with their first love, some the very first time they had intercourse. They weren't promiscuous, Fessler said. They were naive and powerless.

According to U.S. Census Bureau, in the 1940s and 1950s, when young women had no legal access to birth control, teen pregnancy rates began to skyrocket. Between 1945 and 1957, rates rose 78 percent, with one out of every 100 teenage girls pregnant.

Many of the women Fessler interviewed -- identified only by first name in her book -- were like Nancy, who became pregnant at 16. All Nancy knew about sex was what was written on the school restroom walls.

"I just didn't know ... I mean, the whole biology of it," she recalls in Fessler's book. "He kept saying, 'It's OK. It's OK. It's really hard to get pregnant.' What did I know? I didn't see a lot of pregnant people, so I figured, I guess it really is hard."

Nine months later a very pregnant Nancy finally worked up the nerve to ask her mother how babies are born.

"I mean it's borderline child abuse not to share this kind of information," Nancy says in the book. "How can anyone think that we will just absorb it naturally or that it's our responsibility as children to figure it out?"

Families packed pregnant daughters off to maternity homes run by religious or charitable organizations. There, they waited out their time, delivered and, Fessler said, were coerced into relinquishing their babies to social workers.

"The stigma was incredible," Fessler said. "The options were so little and the pressure so great."

Those post-war years were a unique time in the nation's history, Fessler said. A prosperous middle class arose almost overnight, and status became everything. An unwed pregnant daughter was beyond socially disastrous -- it was "low class."

Some pregnant teens rushed into marriage. A few tried single motherhood. But most were threatened with social and family ostracism if they came home with a baby. Some social workers -- who played the uneasy role of go-between, with unwed mothers on the one hand and 10 eager-to-adopt families for every available baby on the other -- told girls they were unfit to be mothers, that no man would ever want them, and that their children would be labeled "bastards" on the playground. No mention was made of support services or options.

At maternity homes, 80 percent of the babies born were given up for adoption. And their mothers took the "unfit mother" message to heart. Thirty percent never had another child -- some felt it would be unfair to the child they lost, others from fear of any further loss. Four of the 100 women Fessler interviewed had tubal ligations before they were 30.

"The worst part was they were told not to talk about it," Fessler said.

Then society changed. The Pill arrived. Abortion was legalized. And when celebrities began having children out of wedlock, it wasn't just OK, it was trendy.

Today, many of those girls --women in their 50s, 60s and 70s -- question why they let themselves be forced into a decision they didn't want. Fessler said that guilt is undeserved.

"Adoptees now don't understand," she said, "how difficult and complex the situation was then."

Meanwhile, loss and grief continue to haunt them. They peer into every face they pass, or apologetically approach strangers in art galleries. Some leave notes with their adoption agency or join the Soundex Reunion Registry.

Or they stay quiet and keep the secret deep inside.

Reach Jackie Burrell at 925-977-8568 or jburrell@cctimes.com.

PAM, CALIFORNIA

"The father of my son was my first love. I met him in junior high, and I figured out I was pregnant early on in the ninth grade. ... Being 14, we decided that we were going to get married. We got jobs and started saving our money. He worked two paper routes. ... We were just going to show everybody how grown-up we were because we intended to raise our child. ...

"My mom was just destroyed. ... My father had the kind of look on his face -- I mean, it would have been easier to have someone just take a gun and shoot me. I never got to open my mouth. The decision was made. It was so surreal to have people talking about you like you're not even in the room, like your life doesn't matter, like the baby was a mistake. He didn't feel like a mistake to me. ...

"And it's funny. While I was locked up, I would call the father, and he was going on with his life. He was having his summer and was, you know, worried about whether he would get a new tape or album. People had gossiped about him, but they were still allowed to hang out with him. Before I left home, nobody was allowed to be around me. ...

"I've spent 34 years thinking, 'If I had a choice, would I have done it differently?' I wanted college for him, I wanted him to have a mother and a father, I wanted him to have all the things that normal kids have, and it was very clear to me that society and the people around me would make that impossible. As an adult, you find out you did have a choice: You could have kept that baby. ... I'm sure there are women who suppress the experience, but I don't think it ever goes away. There isn't a day since I was 15 years old that I haven't thought about him."

JOYCE, FLORIDA

"I was in beauty school in Florida, and my mom picks me up and takes me back to Alabama and takes me to the doctor. The next recollection I have is being dumped at the Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers in Birmingham. It was an old, old, old house with big rooms. I was just put in a situation in which I had no control. ... Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to keep the baby, or explained the options. I went to the maternity home, I was going to have the baby, they were going to take it, and I was going to go home. I was not allowed to keep the baby. I would have been disowned. I don't even know if they had programs to help women and children back then. I don't know what was available. I was made to feel very ashamed of the situation that 'I had created for myself' and for my mother and for my family and friends, so I felt all those avenues were closed. I guess maybe I had to convince myself that I didn't give him away; I gave him a way to have two parents, a way to have a home. Maybe that's a cop-out on my part. I don't know, but that's the only way I can live with it."

LYDIA, CALIFORNIA

"I realized (decades later) that I had been used. I wasn't recognized as a human being. I was a mother. I was not a breeder or an incubator for somebody else. I was a young expectant mother and I was treated like I was this thing used to produce a child for somebody else. ... It makes everybody real uncomfortable to think that they took a mother's baby away, that she didn't give it up happily and voluntarily and as a gift. Nobody wants to face the fact that this is very traumatic. Even back in the '60s, it was a matter of finding a child for a family, instead of finding a family for the child. It leaves a lot of emotional wreckage, and it usually goes unaddressed because it's not even seen as a problem. It always comes to mind whenever I see somebody on the news who, God forbid, has their child kidnapped. Or you see in a magazine that a child anywhere in the world has been killed, and the mother is just grieving inconsolably, hysterically. We have all the same feelings, but the public doesn't know that. They don't want to acknowledge it because it is so unpleasant. It makes everybody so uncomfortable to think that in this civilized society, anybody could actually take a baby away from a young woman and expect her to not cry or be sad, or not want that to happen."