16 November 2021

Young single women sadly losing their babies to adoption: USA and Australia.

In the 1960s, a group of unwed mothers wrestled with their decisions to give birth in secret at St Paul Minnesota’s Booth Memorial Hosp­ital. With the help of revealing interviews, historian Kim Heik­k­ila told their stories and shed light on the consequences of the mid-C20th’s devastating sexual double standard. In 1952-6 alone, c1.5 million babies were placed for adoption in US.

Teenage mother about to have her newborn baby torn away
Long Lost Family

Booth Memorial Hosp­ital

In 1961, Heikkila’s mother gave birth to a daughter at Booth Memorial at 21 and placed the child for adoption. She kept the adopt­ion secret for 30+ years and only reunited with her daughter in 1994, when Heik­kila learned she had a sister. Booth Memorial was just one of hundreds of maternity homes throughout the U.S.

Abortion was illegal in the U.S, sex education scant and social pre­s­sure against illegitimate children drove women into the homes. There they were cared for throughout their pregnancies and del­iveries.

Heikkila used Booth Memorial to examine the phenomenon of unwed mot­h­ers’ homes and the secretive adoptions back then. Using 1963 interviews with the hos­pit­al­’s pat­ients conducted by social work Prof Gisela Kon­opka (Minnesota Uni), she revealed desperation, shame, resolve.

Pregnancy was referred to as “being in trouble”, and the women felt they had no other choice. Though the interviews show women who ultim­ate­ly chose to surrender their children, their delib­er­ations were pain­ful and made in an atmosphere that strongly encouraged relinquishment.

In its advertising, Booth Hospital boasted about providing relaxation, spiritual renewal and a good beginning for the babies. Those women who agreed to give up their children received better treat­ment than those who didn’t. Most of the women planned to return to their communities without revealing the existence of the child, feeling pressure to prot­ect their families’ and their own reputations.

The young women at Booth had had better plans for their lives i.e to be mothers in stable, loving, married fam­ilies. But these goals threatened to derail with the unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. They also wanted to protect their bab­ies by ensuring they grew up in supportive famil­ies. But mostly these young women could best serve society and them­selves, they were told, if they relinquished their child for adop­t­ion. Then they could get on with their lives, at the same time reward­ing married women who were, by definition, fit mothers.

After losing a baby, the young mother’s grief could be intense and long lasting. Her pain was seen as punishment for her immorality i.e falling pregnant whilst single. Today open adoptions are much more common. But the pain and shame of secret pregnancies, and loss, still echoed through the personal stories of mothers and adoptees.

Birth fathers were generally disregarded and blamed for corrupting innocent girls.

**

Until the mid C20th, a receiving home was where children were accomm­od­ated temporarily when first taken into care or for short-term residence for children being transferred between placements. In Melbourne it meant a temporary placement for pregnant single girls.

St Joseph's Receiving Home in Grattan St Melbourne was originally run by a local woman, Margaret Goldspink, who had been informally ass­isting dest­it­ute pregnant women for many years, supported by Fat­her O’Con­n­ell of Carlton. Located near the important Women’s Hospital, the home prov­ided a safe, private place to stay during the last stages of preg­nancy. Mrs Goldspink also offered the home as a place for mothers to return to after their child was born, until they had somewhere to live.

Nuns caring for new born babies, 1967
Getty

St Joseph's Receiving Home in Grattan St Melbourne
Opened in 1905, photographed in mid 1960s.

If a girl who was a Ward of the State in a children's instit­ut­ion be­came pregnant, she was likely to be transferred into a matern­ity home of the same denomination.

Many unmarried mothers were separated from their children after their stay in a matern­ity home and hospital, and their children were adopted. Others found it impossible to care for their children and earn a living, with the result that children ended up in out-of-home care.

While adoption was seen as the most acceptable solution for unwed mothers, evolving societal attitudes and changes to government support for single mothers lead to a gradual drop in adoption rates. This was further strengthened when the Victorian government extended its Family Assistance in 1969 to include single mothers.

With the Federal election of the Labour Government in 1972, and foll­ow­ing the feminist activist movement, single mothers were finally ent­itled to receive the Supp­or­t­ing Mothers' Benefit (1973) on the same basis as all other unsupp­orted mo­th­ers. This shift reflected a more ac­cepting attit­ude from Australian society towards unwed mothers. From the early 1970s, fewer Victorian ch­ildren were available for adoption, and charitable services for single-mother-families shift­ed away from mat­er­n­ity homes.

Australian adoption then was a confidential, irrevocable process where unwanted babies were placed predominantly with childless couples, reliev­ing the state of the burden of their care. c200,000 child­ren had been adopted since the first adoption legislation was enacted in 1896.

But once abortion was legalised in Victoria in 1969, most women felt angry about being forced to have an unwanted baby or being forc­ed to give a baby away. Now they had a choice! Adoption rates dropped from 50+% in 1967 to just 10% in 8 years later.

Read The Conversation or see "Given or Taken" on Four Corners Sept 2017. 



20 comments:

Ex Pat said...

Thanks for recommending Find My Family. Even after 60 years, adopted children still wanted to know who their birth parents were. But it was too late. Both parents had died.

bazza said...

The 2013 film Philomena, with Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, tells a similar true story of how when children were born outside of marriage in Ireland, the nuns in the hospital would secretly give the babies for adoption. It was an award-winning film. (I liked the story but thought the film itself was very poor.)
CLICK HERE for Bazza’s ultimately untroublesome Blog ‘To Discover Ice’

DUTA said...

Nowadays, with so many known ways to avoid pregnancy, and with increasing state help for single mothers, there are, fortunately, fewer tragedies of the sort described in your post (giving the baby away).

Fun60 said...

The hospitals and homes you mentioned seemed more civilized than over here especially in Ireland. Information is still coming out of the abuse and mistreatment of unmarried mothers.

Parnassus said...

Hello Hels, The attitudes against unmarried mothers were a lot stricter back then, and unfortunately produced some tragic consequences. This is what happens when do-gooders try to control society--they absolutely do not care anything about those who do not fit in or who break the rules.
--Jim


Hels said...

Ex Pat

It was very difficult for those middle aged siblings to finally, after 60 years, find out who their biological parents were and what sort of difficult life their biological mother lived.

And it is difficult for elderly parents who have yearned for decades to see the infants they lost to adoption in 1963 or whenever. Find My Family does a remarkable job, reuniting the two generations wherever possible.

Hels said...

bazza

as much as I love Judi Dench films, I was cautious about seeing a film about nuns in an Irish hospital for unmarried mothers - the topic is painful for those of us who became young adults in the 1960s. However now is the time to see Philomena :)

Hels said...

DUTA

thank goodness Family Assistance, at least in this country, was extended to single mothers in 1969. And thank goodness that sex education in schools, contraception and early abortion are available for most teenagers. Nonetheless there are still hundreds of adoptions (in Australia alone) each year, so I am hopeful that these young mothers are provided with honest, open and sensitive counselling. The days of young mothers having their babies virtually stolen from them must never return.

Hels said...

Fun60

It will break your heart to read this. The BBC provided longitudinal evidence of an Irish mother and baby home in County Galway, starting in 1925 and run by an order of Catholic nuns. The conditions and treatments of the home were so awful that hundreds of infants died there until 1961 and were buried en masse in the back yard.

A modern Government Investigation had to investigate adoption processes in the homes i.e whether birth mothers gave full, free and informed consent for their children to be adopted.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54693159

Hels said...

Parnassus

They may have thought of themselves as do-gooders, trying to improve society, but the only people who felt better were the adoptive parents who could finally absorb a much wanted baby into their families. Controlling society should not have to include damaging young women's lives.

Joseph said...

How responsible were the teenager's parents for her misery? As soon as the pregnancy showed, the girl was shuffled off to a mother-baby home and wasn't allowed to see her family until after the baby was born. Even when she came home, she was never allowed to mention any baby.

Hels said...

Joseph

If the parents allowed their daughter to bring a baby back home, they would be thrown out of their own families, churches and social communities. If they forced their daughter into a secret mother-baby home to never see her baby again, they would lose the love of their daughter for ever. It was a terrible, no-win situation.

Anonymous said...

It is an interesting and complex matter. Always in the back of our minds should be and should have been, what is best for the child and I think those thoughts were there back then, although viewed from 2021, perhaps misguided. My very respectable church going mother's side of the family had cases of illegitimate children. The mentally defective Bosenberg illegitimate child was chained up like a dog in a back yard in Mildura. Some adoptees were very lucky.

Hels said...

Andrew

I suspect "what is best for the child" was often said to young mothers, to persuade them to allow their babies to be adopted by other, more suitable married couples.

Of course I agree that not that all young mothers would have been ideal parents... some would have been shockers. But without providing support and assistance, all young parents would struggle. I adored my children, but there were nights that I really truly did not want to get up one more time to feed at 3 am.

mem said...

this was a dreadful thing for mothers but is also an ongoing sadness for children . I have close contact with several young people who have been adopted at birth or close to it . The effect on them even if they didn't know until they were older was profound . At the root of their distress seems to be a never ending feeling of not being wanted and not good enough . This becomes particularly so when they have babies themselves and are faced with the task of trying to imagine how their birth parents could have given them away . To make it even sadder there are situations where these children are the result of rape or some other traumatic incident . This makes their existence even more painful for all concerned. I have family who went through a very torrid time with their adopted son who they absolutely adored and adopted within days of his birth . As he entered adolescence their lives all became very difficult . Thankfully now things are better but they have all been changed by the trauma.
I find that young people today find it hard to understand the world of their mothers and grandmothers and perhaps this gap in their understanding adds to to their distress as they try to fathom their seeming rejection by their mothers. Its so good that we are all talking about this now .

Hels said...

mem

I understand that the adoption people, churches and mother-baby homes took neonates away without the new mothers' informed consent, or even the chance to have a farewell cuddle and photo. Presumably the authorities thought they were saving the community from immoral sexual behaviour and rewarding proper married families who couldn't have babies of their own.

But did the decision-makers EVER acknowledge the endless pain they caused the mothers who lost their babies, for the rest of their lives? Or, as you say, the babies who grew into adulthood yearning to know their origins? I am not anti-adoption by the way - my dad was adopted by his aunt when his own mother went into a health care facility for years, and it worked out well. But we should all be well and truly familiar with the pain caused by forced adoptions of infants.

Luiz Gomes said...

Boa tarde minha querida amiga. Infelizmente vemos esse tipo situação aqui no Brasil também.

Student said...

Luiz

sadly it was probably true in most societies. The questions now are:
1. can single women legally and safely avoid unwanted pregnancies? and
2. if a single woman becomes pregnant, does she get the support to keep her baby if she wants and not have it taken away?

Elaine Powell said...

I was one of those in 1963. Wanted to finish high school. Didn’t tell parents till July and daughter was born in Aug. well kept secret. Found daughter after 55 years.

Hels said...

Elaine

What terrible situations teenage girls had to live through :((( Did you meet up with each other after 55 years? Did you make up for the terrible sense of loss suffered for all those years?