Tag: Homes for unwed mothers

Increasing The Supply

I did think this – immediately. That banning abortion is meant to increase the number of babies available for adoption. Actually, I’ve thought this for some years as I have learned more about the traumatic impacts of separating children from their biological parents and have generally turned against the practice, even though but for adoption, I would not exist.

When I was doing my own family roots journey, I contacted the Salvation Army in El Paso TX because I knew my dad had been adopted from there. They told me that they closed their home for unwed mothers after Roe v Wade because they had no clients to serve. Very revealing. Three out of nine justices on the Supreme Court have adopted children. Adoptive parents are very influential when it comes to laws related to adoption as they are the ones who have the money. They are the ones who wish to keep an adopted person’s information away from them and hidden away in a sealed file.

An adoptee friend of mine who didn’t even know she was adopted into well into her adulthood as that had been hidden from her, a family secret, wrote – “Domestic supply of infants?” I guess they want to restart the supply chain, no matter how wrong that may be, how harmful to parents, family, the person who ends up being funneled into the system. She added –

Note there are no safeguards being proposed for the people who will be forced into that system. No additional funds for sex Ed, contraception. No requirements for men to take greater responsibility, no requirements for prospective adoptive parents to undergo evaluations, education and ongoing therapy. No after adoption services. No additional services for people forced to give birth. No aftercare services for people who lose their children to adoption. No acknowledgment of the fact that the majority of states will be erasing the children’s identities and severing them from family and community. No. Just an acknowledgment that there isn’t enough supply to meet demand.

Door of Hope

 

On this day in 1935, my dad was born in a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers called the Door of Hope in Ocean Beach, a suburb of San Diego.  The building still stands.  I believe it is some kind of restaurant/bar at the moment.

My grandmother was a self-reliant person.  She had to be.  She grew up without her natural mother who died when she was only 3 mos old.  On a visit to California at about the age of 15 (when her family visited relatives living there), she refused to return home.  Until then she had been enslaved by her step-mother in a Rayon factory in Asheville North Carolina.

My dad’s father was a much older man married to an even older woman who was a private nurse by profession.  I doubt my grandmother knew the man was married when she started seeing him in La Jolla CA.  She most likely knew it by the time she knew she was pregnant.  It is just a likely he never knew he had become a father.

What is clear is that my grandmother didn’t run around with every Tom, Dick and Harry.  She clearly knew who my father’s dad was and although she gave my dad her maiden surname, she left us breadcrumbs as to his father’s identity – both in how she named my dad after the man as well as placing a head shot of the man with his name on the back right next to a photo of her holding my dad.

They are seated on the front porch of another Salvation Army home for unwed mother’s that she was hired at in El Paso Texas.  That is how my dad got there and eventually was adopted from there when he was about 8 mos old.

Note on image –

In 1915, the Door of Hope, a home for unwed mothers, was built on a 10-acre site in Ocean Beach’s Collier Park. Initially operated by the Sand Diego Rescue Mission, it was taken over by the Salvation Army in 1931. In 1962, the Door of Hope moved to a much larger facility in Kearny Mesa.