The Shift

Adoption shifted the focus of charitable organizations from providing homes for truly homeless and orphaned children to the profit motivated supply of infants to childless couples with the financial resources to afford it.

A number of reasons were used to justify separating mothers and their infants. Not because it was profitable – of course.

Punishing unmarried mothers, preventing a reliance on public assistance which might raise the cost to taxpayers – the planned removal of white infants from white unmarried mothers who were deemed unfit for whatever reason – including a perception the mother was neurotic for wanting to keep her baby – was perpetrated by adoption social workers.

Unmarried mothers were sometimes viewed as breeding machines when the demand for these infants exceeded supply. A high demand coupled with low supply increased the pressure on unmarried mothers to surrender their babies.

It isn’t difficult to see how this created serious abuses around a mother’s relinquishment of her child. Georgia Tann opportunistically profited from the shift.

The Strange Case of Practice Babies

Cornell University launched its practice baby program in 1919 when child development theories were so rigid they advised shaking the child’s hand before bedtime.

These babies typically had eight “mothers.” And every six weeks, eight more would take their place; planning the child’s nutritious diet, their naps and tending to their every need.

The “practice baby” program was a home economics study. The babies were cared for by a group of “practice mothers” — young 22-year-old students — in a “practice apartment.” The babies at Cornell were referred to as Domecon – a surname that meant “domestic economy”.

There were hundreds of babies, mostly children of unwed mothers, who were on loan from orphanages to colleges like Cornell, University of Minnesota and Eastern Illinois State University and many others. Students were able to practice the latest child-rearing theories of the day on living newborns.

It was considered a science. After a year or two, the babies would leave their multiple mothers to find homes in adoptive families. These were children coming through the welfare system. They didn’t enter the program until they were at least the age of 3 months or sometimes as old as 8 months. They had the best of health-care inspection, an emphasis on nutrition and physical development and all kinds of individual attention.

At Eastern Illinois State University in the 1950s, the state welfare department shut down a practice baby program there when they learned 12 different home economics majors were raising one boy.

In orphanages at that time, there were often simply not enough hands, and in this program, it can now be said that there were too many. No one really thought it through enough or it can be honestly said that they simply didn’t understand the consequences of what was being done to these babies.

By the 1960s, enlightened pediatricians such as Dr Benjamin Spock urged mothers to “trust yourself” in a more hands-on approach with their children.

Practice baby programs were eventually phased out as new research underscored the need for a primary bond with a single caregiver.

The whole program never used real names because the babies were orphans. They were later adopted and no records of their origins were kept.

It’s About Pregnancy

In the fight against abortion, it is often very easily overlooked the kinds of demands any pregnancy places upon a woman. They are not minor. It takes almost a full year out of any woman’s life to gestate another human being. It changes a woman’s body, a woman’s daily life and if the pregnancy goes to term and she delivers the baby – her entire life will no longer be the same. It is not an equal situation regarding the man who made being pregnant possible in the first place.

So, one fact overlooked in the choice to have an abortion is a woman who is unwilling to commit such an extended period of time to gestating yet one more human being – and if being honest, thoughtful people realize that this planet is already overpopulated. There is no longer any need for human beings to be fruitful and multiply.

I know that not wanting to commit myself to 9 months of pregnancy was part (but not the only reason) that I once chose to have an abortion. However, I would be quick to add, every time I have had the circumstances to support me and the willingness to go through the extended period of time to gestate a child, I have loved every minute of it.

Adoption advocates seem only to care about the production of children that can be taken from mothers who are unable to make the longer commitment to raising a child. Adoption carries with it definite wounds to the original mother and to the child she surrenders to adoption. While there is a time and place (orphaned or abused children) for adoption, banning abortions is not for the support of infertile couples wanting to have a larger volume of babies to chose from. It is about controlling the lives of uppity women – plain and simple – by jerking around the emotions of people who love their own children.