Opportunists Everywhere

Georgia Tann may have facilitated the most adoptions in the history of the United States (believed to be from 5,000-10,000 children impacted over 3 decades of time) but there were others pursuing the same opportunity to enrich themselves by taking children from unmarried, white girls and placing them into wealthy homes – whatever the market would meet. The time period is known as the Baby Scoop Era and it’s range was approximately the end of World War II and the early 1970s. The social mores of that time period were a factor as well.

One such “business person” was Dr. Thomas J. Hicks, who sold or gave away more than 200 infants from the ’40s to the ’60s. Some of the infants were illegally placed through a local Akron OH woman who was a black-market adoption channel.

Most of the girls who went to the Hicks Clinic were young, unwed and poor, trapped in a depressed mid-century Appalachian mining community. Many were teenagers whose parents were struggling to feed the mouths already under their roofs. An unplanned pregnancy had serious consequences, even beyond the obvious social stigma.

The TLC network will highlight this story in a six part, three night special titled Taken at Birth.

Dr Hicks was a father of three, who was married to a Baptist Sunday school teacher. Hicks died at age 83 in 1972. At the time he died, Hicks was without a medical license, having surrendered it to avoid prosecution following his 1964 arrest for performing abortions.

A local probate judge who didn’t have any knowledge of what Dr. Hicks had been doing, and so had no allegiance to him or his family, decided to look into the situation. There were an estimated 200-plus babies that had gone to Akron Ohio from the Hicks Clinic.

Two hundred babies? To Akron?

Hicks started out from compassion but soon saw there was money to be made and turned his efforts into a business. Dr. Hicks housed pregnant mothers in the attached apartments to the right of his clinic and at his farm and in an abandoned telephone company building. A local woman in Akron OH then informed desperate, childless couples who paid $1,000 per baby that their baby was ready for pick-up. Most of the babies were passed through the back door of the clinic along with a forged birth certificate. No record of biological parents was maintained making it particularly difficult for “Hicks Babies” to discover their roots.

McCaysville Lost and Found serves to facilitate searches and provides a communal link for Hicks Babies and their families. Their mission is to support of those beginning, in the middle of or who have already completed their birth quest.

The Modern Foundling Wheel

Safe Haven Baby Box – Indiana

I first read about this concept in the book Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy while I lay in hospital having just delivered my oldest son. Mothers could abandon newborn babies anonymously in a safe place known as a Foundling Wheel. This kind of arrangement was common in the Middle Ages and in the 18th and 19th centuries.

A modern form, the baby hatch, began to be introduced again from 1952 and since 2000 has come into use in many countries, notably in Germany and Pakistan but exists in countries all over the world under various names.

Now in the United States, there is the Safe Haven Baby Box which is found in Indiana. Although every state in the US has a Safe Haven Law, anonymity is the benefit of the Baby Box. A Safe Haven Law requires the one relinquishing the baby to actually walk in to an authorized facility and physically hand the child off to a person. The one relinquishing is going to be asked some questions.

I am decidedly pro-Life because 9 months is a lot to ask of any woman who does not want to or cannot for whatever reason parent a child. However, if abortion is not accessible for whatever reason, an anonymous method of giving the child away safely is preferable to infanticide. And no, I do not think abortion is infanticide though there are plenty who would argue the point with me.

Although a baby left in a Baby Box is not going to know anything about their origins, inexpensive DNA tests and matching sites could still reveal some things about their origins in a future time once they reach adulthood. I know, it worked for me. No, I wasn’t relinquished but both of my parents were.

Eugenics

I’ve heard many adoptees actually say that they wish they had been aborted. This is a terrible situation for a human being to feel like. I celebrate that I am alive and the heritage I am saddled with has the wounds of separation inflicted on my own two parents by being separated from their mothers.

Once again Population Control has captured the media frenzy following the Climate Change debate hosted by a CNN town hall recently. Rush Limbaugh was going on and on that Bernie Sanders endorsed mass abortions in third world countries. The truth is a bit more nuanced.

When asked if population control would play a part in his administration’s policy for dealing with climate change, Sanders answered “yes”. “And the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies and make reproductive decisions.”

“And the Mexico City agreement, which denies American aid to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control to me is totally absurd. So I think especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, is something I very, very strongly support,” he concluded.

Conservative pundit SE Cupp is taking fire after wrongly accusing Sanders of promoting eugenics, a grotesque means of shaping the human population by selective breeding. What is important is that every child is wanted and every mother is supported in being able to raise her child.

Abandoned Over A Pregnancy

This happened to my maternal grandmother. For whatever reason, she was abandoned by her lawful husband (my mom’s father) and she was abandoned by her own father.

Despite the joy that usually accompanies a pregnancy, it is one of the most stressful life events. If a pregnancy is unexpected or unwanted, the stress compounds.

When the person coming to grips with this surprising change is then abandoned by her support system (parents, a lover, a spouse), it’s devastating. Though either parent could be shunned, the mother typically bears the brunt of the rejection.

The expectant mother may believe some false concepts about herself – what they say about me is true, the baby is the cause of all my trouble, love is temporary and people always leave when times get tough. Beyond false beliefs are the fears – of being abandoned again, of the judgement of other people, being spiritually condemned or being unable to care for herself and her baby

These mothers may go into denial, acting as though they aren’t pregnant. Some may attempt to hide the pregnancy. In modern times, there is a stigma if the woman chooses a legal abortion. The woman may become emotionally unavailable or wallow in self-pity or blame. There is the worry about her ability to cope all alone and doubt about her ability to be a mother.

If the mother-to-be has decided not to keep her baby (or after she has relinquished her child), seeing happy couples caring for their baby together will be especially painful.

If this mother is unable to find support, she will realize that she can’t depend on others to help her. If it is a difficult pregnancy, it will compound the challenges.

Forbidden Words

One can be human and do really bad/evil things. This is a sad truth of reality and society. There is a sickness in men, sadly. It is as old as humankind and it takes what it wants whether the object of its passion is willing or not. We give that behavior names, rape, incest.

It becomes complicated when that bad behavior results in the conception of a child. In abortion language there is often an exception for this situation that allows a women to take away the physical memory embodied as a fetus and go on with her life. Of course, she will never forget regardless.

Some of these “results” end up being adopted. Some adoptees have such an unfortunate experience that they wish they had been aborted but not all adoptees feel that way. In fact, there is no one size fits all when it comes to adoption experiences.

Perpetrators are real people with real problems who do something that healthy people cannot justify. They may have stressors in their life. These may cause them to act out in inappropriate and inexcusable ways. Pretending that men who commit rape are born broken and inhuman takes away the responsibility they should still bear for their actions.

Anyone conceived in rape or incest must embrace their own inherent self-worth and insist upon their human rights. Know this – what any ancestor did whenever they did that whether it is directly related to a subsequent person or not – this is not who we are individually.

At one time, such an event would have labeled the result a bad seed with flawed genes. While it is true, we inherit much from our genetic foundation, we also have the free will to make of our own selves what we will.

The #MeToo movement is an effort to bring sexual violence out into the light of awareness so that we can begin to understand how such things happen and why such behavior is wrong and how all of us can do better.

This is not a blog for or against abortion. It is a plea to give all people, including adoptees regardless of their origin story, human rights – dignity, heritage, truth.

Adoption is not the solution to Abortion

The argument is wrong on so many levels that it is hard to know where to start. One thing that really irks me is when people and organizations use adoption as an excuse to be anti-choice. Being pro-choice is not the same as being pro-abortion. Abortion is often a difficult decision and sometimes haunts a woman for the rest of her life. She should not be forced into back alleys and dangerous procedures when she sees no other way to end a conception that she never intended.

Adoption is not a solution to abortion. Adoption is a choice about whether or not to parent. A lack of family support is often at the root of a decision to abort or surrender to adoption. The separation of a child from its mother has wounds that well-meaning people neglect to understand. The bonding of a child with its mother begins in the womb and no substitute mother is similarly prepared by nature.

How much of a choice is abortion or adoption when you don’t have any other choices? 3 of the 4 children in my family line surrendered to adoption were because there was no other viable choice. Only one intentionally chose to surrender and intentionally chose the adoptive parents. Due to a mental illness that manifested quite strongly after that event, I am grateful she made that choice – the young man has grown into a phenomenal person within a nurturing environment.

I am a believer in Reproductive Justice. Access to safe, legal, and free or affordable contraception and abortion, informed and sensitive adoption policies, comprehensive sex education, and ethical and compassionate immigration policies that don’t criminalize asylum seekers are all examples of reproductive justice issues. Reproductive justice is a framework for considering your ability to control your reproduction and your destiny, safely and with dignity.

A Brief History of Adoption

Willa Cather said that those who gave up carried something painful,
cut off inside, and that their lives had a sense of incompleteness.

Before Georgia Tann, some states had laws that insisted a single mother breastfeed her baby for at least six months. This was to encourage the mother to become emotionally attached and raise her child – thus relieving the state of a need to care for them in an orphanage at public expense.

After Georgia Tann popularized adoption, these babies became a marketable commodity, and this necessitated the separation of mother and child. During the 30s, mothers were sometimes blindfolded during labor to prevent them from seeing their baby.

By the mid-40s, adoption was nationally popular. White single mothers were EXPECTED to surrender their babies to adoption. This policy was endorsed by the Child Welfare League, The Salvation Army, Catholic Charities and most psychiatrists and psychologists.

It was even predicted by a social scientist, Clark Vincent, that in the future, all white newborns from single mothers would be seized by the state – not for punishment – but in the scientific best interest of the child, considering the rehabilitation goals for the unwed mother and the stability of the family and society overall.

Such a concept was even advocated by the author, Pearl Buck, who asked Georgia to collaborate on a book about adoption. Georgia Tann died from the complications of cancer after dictating only two chapters. By then, the scandal of her baby stealing and selling operation seems to have discouraged Buck from pursuing the topic to its completion as a book.

Even so, Georgia Tann had influenced Pearl Buck’s thinking – in a 1955 article in Woman’s Home Companion – Buck advocated legislation forcing single mothers to surrender their babies for adoption – thankfully such a law was never passed.

Social pressure was enough to separate many single mothers from their children. By the 1950s, 90% of white maternity home residents surrendered their children. It is because I understand how close I came to being given up for adoption as I was born in 1954, that I consider it a miracle that I wasn’t. My mom was only 16, unwed and a high school student when I was conceived.

Adoption came to be seen as the perfect solution for infertility. Birth control and abortion were considered threats to the availability of children for such women and it would seem are viewed the same even today.

My source for this information is The Baby Thief: The True Story of the Woman Who Sold Over Five Thousand Neglected, Abused and Stolen Babies by Barbara Bisantz Raymond.

Abandoned Babies

Gary Gatwick

Today, I read the story about the baby that was abandoned in 1986 at the Gatwick Airport. He was later adopted, had a decent childhood and attempted to locate his birth family after having a child himself. He has been successful but much like my own mother, discovered that the woman who gave birth to him has died and thus, he’ll never get the answer to the question closest to his heart of “why?”.

Not that long ago, I also read a story titled The Foundling: The True Story of a Kidnapping, a Family Secret, and My Search for the Real Me by Paul Joseph Fronczak. His was also the story of a search for his authentic roots.

People who are not adopted or abandoned often do not understand why knowing one’s true identity is so important to some of us. A writer friend of mine once asked – “If the adoptive family was good, why does it matter?” As I talked to her about it, she came to understand how most people actually take such a deep knowing for granted. Indeed, many don’t really care about it at all until they are much older, if they ever do.

A piece in the Huffington Post some years ago realized that “this was a shared narrative with no fixed racial or cultural background: my own search for identity, though anchored in part by my own experiences, is part of something larger. It is a collective and contemporary identity crisis.”

Maybe this explains the popularity of DNA testing and the matching sites of Ancestry or 23 and Me. I also wonder, given the pushback on women’s rights taking place at the moment, if beyond threatening women’s health and autonomy, an unintended consequence could become more abandoned babies . . . and depending on where and when, may result in death.