Last night I finished reading the gut wrenching book The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children For Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v Wade by Ann Fessler. I picked this book up on a pure whim, and yet it turns out it is one those must reads by anyone who considers themselves pro-life, especially in light of this year’s heated political debates.
I had always heard stories about “those women” who had been shipped away when they got pregnant. My mother’s stories, though, made it sound like there were not many of them who got pregnant. Yet, according to the statistics over one MILLION women who got pregnant from the 1950s to 1972 were forced to give away their children. For the first time ever, we get to hear their side of the story. And it is difficult story to hear-brutal, in fact.
Fessler explores the societal and cultural forces in post War America that caused parents to punish their sexually active daughters who got caught. In fact, that is the real sin in post War America; being pregnant outside of marriage. And she explores the long term impact on those women whose babies were stolen from them and given to complete strangers. Fessler, herself is an adoptee whose mother was forced by society to give her away. Fessler focuses on the psychological issues that adoptees also face as well as the adoptive parents.
One reason why this book is so important is that it explained to me for the first time ever how the Sexual Revolution of the 60s happened. When Catholics look back on that period we only hear the negative, but I feel now I understand what happened and the deep pain that fueled the Rebellion. Fessler doesn’t just focus on post WWII pregnancies stats,she focuses on the early 20th Century statistics. We cannot tell for sure how many were having sex, but we can how many abortions were done and how many children were given away, and the STD rates. I was shocked to find out how sexually active pre-marital society was in “the good old days.”
I know I commonly hear ALL-THE-TIME from pro-lifers that a woman who has an unwanted pregnancy should consider adoption not abortion. I used to think the same way. Ironically, the first time I reconsidered came from a college study buddy who shared with me how her mother gave her away for adoption and what that meant for her long term. Like many adoptees I would later discover, she had a deep identity crisis. There is a even a psychological term used for the groups impacted by adoption; A “triad group.” Counselors realized that a 1/3 of their patients in the 70s and 80s were connected to that triad group. One surrendering mother in Fessler’s book calls adoption a “social experiment.”
Fessler herself is clearly pro-abortion. I did not come away from the book feeling abortion was ok, but the book 100% changed my entire view on adoption and that is one powerful reason why I think every single pro-lifer who is sincerely interested in changing hearts and minds needs to read this book. In a way, I realize that those who fought for abortion rights were responding to the same social and cultural injustices inflicted on women. From my view, instead of changing society they instead went the opposite extreme. Sure a woman didn’t have to give her child away, now she could hide that she was ever pregnant by aborting it. Today in the early 21st Century the pro-life movement is finally figuring out that we have to change the social injustices if we really want to save lives. The abortion movement has not figured this out. They are still wanting women to hide their pregnancies if the woman so chooses.
The other very disturbing aspect of this book is the Church’s clear role in coercing women to give away their children. The Catholic Church comes up again and again and again. The role of the priests and the nuns and the Church agencies that stole babies, demeaned the pregnant woman and later who would fight the surrendering mother’s desire to find her child. Fessler doesn’t just blame the Church, she explains what happened within the Church for them to go from encouraging and helping unwed mothers keep their babies in pre-War America to being a part of the coercive network that forced moms from their children. She doesn’t blame the Church, she blames the Social Worker and the whole “the whole social worker knows best” syndrome. Out went the nuns in charge, and in came the social workers. The nuns became employees and as the nuns left their positions of power, so too did the compassionate and caring responses went out the door.
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