“A remarkably well-researched and accomplished book.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A wrenching, riveting book.” —Chicago Tribune
The astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade.
In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the hidden social history of adoption before Roe v. Wade - and its lasting legacy. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.
“A remarkably well-researched and accomplished book.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A wrenching, riveting book.” —Chicago Tribune
The astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade.
In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the hidden social history of adoption before Roe v. Wade - and its lasting legacy. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.
The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade
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The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade
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Overview
“A remarkably well-researched and accomplished book.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A wrenching, riveting book.” —Chicago Tribune
The astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade.
In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the hidden social history of adoption before Roe v. Wade - and its lasting legacy. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780143038979 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/26/2007 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 - 17 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Contents
1. My Own Story as an Adoptee 1
2. Breaking the Silence 7
Dorothy II 14
Annie 24
3. Good Girls v. Bad Girls 29
Nancy I 47
Claudia 54
4. Discovery and Shame 67
Marge 79
Yvonne 85
5. The Family’s Fears 10 1
Jeanette 120
Ruth 127
6. Going Away 133
Karen I 155
Pam 16 4
7. Birth and Surrender 175
Margaret 19 0
Leslie 197
8. The Aftermath 207
Susan III 228
Madeline 237
9. Search and Reunion 247
Susan II 273
Jennifer 279
10. Talking and Listening 287
Lydia 302
Linda I 312
11. Every Mother but My Own 319
1. My Own Story as an Adoptee
My mother told me that on my first three birthdays she lit a special candle on my cake for the young woman who had given birth to me. She never explained why she did this for three years—no more, no less. I don’t remember this private ceremony, but I do remember that there were times in my childhood when she looked at me in a particular way and I knew she was thinking about this young woman, my mother.
Three generations of women from my family have been brought together by adoption. Neither my maternal grandmother nor my mother nor I have given birth to a child. I am the first for whom this was a conscious choice.
My mother was never told that she was adopted. For my grandmother to admit this would have been a public declaration of her own inadequacy, her inability to bear children for her husband. But my mother knew. She had found her birth certificate taped to the back of a painting at her aunt’s house. Her name had been Baby Helene before it was Hazel, and when she brought me home she named me Ann Helene.
My mother suffered her own private insecurity at not being able to bring a child to full term. But by the time she and my father turned to adoption there was no public stigma attaching to those who chose to adopt. In post–World War II America, families that wanted to adopt were carefully screened and represented a kind of model family—one with a mother and a father who really wanted to raise a child.
Although it is doubtful that families vetted through this process were actually any better or worse than other families, I was lucky enough to have parents who were loving and supportive and mindful of my development as an individual. They knew that they could guide me, but they also understood that I was not the sum of their parts. I was the product of two young people who had themselves, perhaps, been too young to fully understand the char acteristics they had inherited from their own parents and passed on to me.
My adoptive mother and father were offered very little information about my biological parents. She was nineteen and from a big farm family of English and German descent. He was athletic, a college football player from a family of means. Their parents felt that this was no way to start a family.
My mother cried whenever she told me this story. She knew it could not be so simple. I did not. The story of that young couple sounded like the plot of a movie to me. I liked being part of this soulful story of ill-fated love, of having a mysterious past, of not being related to my family, of being my own person.
When I became sexually active, I imagined that if the worst happened I would do as my mother had done: go off to another town to a home for unwed mothers and return with a story about a kidney infection, or about an Aunt Betty in Sandusky who needed my care. This is what young women who got caught in this unfortunate situation did. Almost every graduating class had a girl who disappeared. Everyone knew where she had gone, and that she had most likely been told, “If you love your child you must give it up, move on with your life, and forget.”
It never occurred to me that those girls may not have forgotten, that it might not have been so easy for them to just move on with their lives. But then I had never gone through pregnancy and childbirth myself. And I had never heard the story from a woman who had surrendered her child.
Then something happened that forever changed my understanding of adoption. In 1989, I was attending the opening of an exhibition at the Mary land Institute College of Art, where I had been teaching for seven years. Not long after I arrived, I noticed a woman who looked very familiar. I had a distinct and clear memory of having recently talked to her but I couldn’t remember where or when. I asked several people if they knew who she was, but no one did, so I continued to look at the exhibition.
Later, this woman walked toward me from across the room and with no introduction said, “You could be my long-lost daughter. You look like the perfect combination of myself and the father of my child.” I said, “You don’t know what you’re saying to me. I could be your daughter—I was adopted.” There was a long silence and I saw her start to react as I had. Eventually we compared dates, but they were one year and one month apart. She kept asking, “Are you sure about your birth date? Sometimes records are changed.” But I was sure.
We continued to talk. She asked me if I had looked for my mother and I responded that I didn’t know if I wanted to invade her privacy. I said, “When you gave up a child for adoption in 1949, you didn’t expect her to come knocking on your door forty years later.” And she said, “You should find her. She probably worries every day about what happened to you and whether you’ve had a good life.” I could see in her eyes that she was speaking from her own experience, and the thought that my mother might feel the same sense of loss was shocking to me. I felt guilty and empathetic and naïve all at once. Why had I never considered this possibility? How could I not know? How could everyone not know?
I continued to listen, realizing that I had never heard the story of adoption from the perspective of a mother who had surrendered her child. It seemed incredible to me that after forty years of life as an adoptee I was hearing the other side of the story for the first time. As I listened I finally understood why this woman seemed so familiar to me: the image of the two of us talking had been in my dream the night before we met. I went home and wrote down every word of our conversation. I started to wonder if my mother’s worrying had caused the dream.
A year later, the woman I had met in the gallery had separated from her husband and was living down the block from me. I began to wonder if she really was my mother but had not told me because I seemed ambivalent about a reunion. Had she left her husband and home to be near me?
My parents had always been very open about any information they had surrounding my adoption. There was a file in my father’s cabinet with “Ann” neatly printed in my mother’s hand that contained all of my original paperwork. As a child, I periodically opened that file drawer as slowly and quietly as I could to look at the papers containing my original name, a carbon copy of a letter on tissue-thin paper from the minister of our church congratulating my parents on their recent adoption, and records of what I had been fed during the three-month waiting period before my parents could take me home. Now I returned to that file for the name of the adoption agency. I needed to know what information I was entitled to. I needed to know if this woman was my mother.
The man at the agency informed me that because I was born in Ohio before 1964, all I had to do was fill out a form, send it to the Department of Vital Statistics, State of Ohio, and the department would send me a copy of my original birth certificate. After all the stories I had heard about sealed records and professional searchers, it never occurred to me that I might be able to get a copy of my records with just a phone call, a notarized piece of paper, and two forms of identification.
When the envelope from the Department of Vital Statistics arrived, I was in the middle of making travel arrangements for a lecture I was to give about my artwork in an exhibition entitled “Parents.” I unfolded the single sheet of paper and saw my mother’s full name, her place of birth, and her permanent residence in 1949. The right side of the form, where information about my father should be noted, was blank.
I located my Ohio map. The trip I was planning would take me within an hour of the rural community where she was born. So I allowed an extra day and set off through a landscape of corn and bean fields, and an occasional white house and barn, in search of a yearbook picture. I wanted to see what she looked like. I wanted to see if I looked like my mother.
When I arrived I couldn’t find the public library, so I went to the school. The halls were empty; students had left for the day, but teachers were still in their classrooms. I could hear the rustle of papers and blackboards being wiped clean. The door to the library was locked, but the teacher in the next room offered to help. He said the yearbooks in the library did not go back that far but there was a chance one could be found down in the main office. We entered the office and he announced that I was looking for a year book from 1948, and the secretaries, principals, and vice principals all went to work rooting through their office bookcases. No one asked any questions.
This is the rural Midwest. When they couldn’t find the right yearbook they wrote down names of people who graduated that year so I could call them, maybe go to their house and look at their yearbook. I felt sick. Things had gone too far—I just wanted to look at a picture.
I tried to leave but a man came through the door and they all turned toward him and said in unison, “Do you have a yearbook from 1948?” The man said, “Who are you looking for?” And they all turned back toward me. I had to say a last name. I acted as if I were asking for somebody else. I tried to sound unsure, but he knew the name and he said her whole name out loud. And then he said, “She doesn’t live around here anymore, but there’s a house with a business out on Route 30 with that same last name. They might know where you can find her.”
I cleared out and started driving. I didn’t know where I was headed other than away from that school. I hadn’t wanted her name to get out. I just wanted to look at a picture. Then I realized I was on Route 30, the road with the business and the people with the same last name.
As I got closer I passed a road with the family name, the farm where I must have been before I was born. Then I saw the house and the barn and the sign for the business and I thought, I’ll just go in and buy something. I don’t know what. I pulled in, past buildings, past tractors, past corncribs, and reached the end of the driveway. But there was no business, just a sign out front, a number to call, and then a man came out of the barn waving. I had driven too far back into his driveway to pretend I was just turning around, so I rolled down my window and heard myself say, “I see your name up there on the barn. You wouldn’t happen to know someone by the name of Eleanor, would you?” And he said, “Yeah, that’s my sister.”
Then he started talking. He talked for an hour. He told me about her life, her husband, two boys, and a girl. But what he didn’t know was—there was another girl: two boys and two girls. He talked about growing up on the farm, the old Victorian house, and the banister they loved to slide down. Then he talked about her and how she was different from her sisters. He said, “She would much rather spend time in the barn than help in the house.” And he told other stories that sounded familiar.
Finally, he asked how I knew her and I told him my mother had lived around there when she was young and had moved away. She wondered whatever happened to Eleanor. So he went into the house and brought out her address and phone number. And when I left, I drove to the town where she had lived all these years, just to drive by, to make sure she was okay. I had always worried that her family had disowned her and she had lived in miserable conditions. Maybe I thought I might catch a glimpse of her. It occurred to me afterward that she might get suspicious when her brother told her the story of a woman who had been asking about her.
Maybe she had not told her children. She might be living in fear that I would show up on her doorstep next. I couldn’t decide whether I should contact her right away or wait. I waited fourteen years.
During the years that followed, I created several autobiographical installations about adoption. Whenever possible I offered space in my exhibitions for members of the community to display their stories of adoption along with mine. I was overwhelmed by what I read. The writings left behind by women in New York, California, Texas, and Maryland were the same. What the mothers had been assured when they signed the papers giving up all rights to their children turned out to be a lie: they did not move on and forget. I think my adoptive mother knew this when she lit those candles. I think three years was all that she could bear. She needed to move on and forget.
Table of Contents
The Girls Who Went Away1. My Own Story as an Adoptee2. Breaking the Silence
Dorothy II
Annie
3. Good Girls v. Bad Girls
Nancy I
Claudia
4. Discovery and Shame
Marge
Yvonne
5. The Family's Fears
Jeanette
Ruth
6. Going Away
Karen I
Pam
7. Birth and Surrender
Margaret
Leslie
8. The Aftermath
Susan III
Madeline
9. Search and Reunion
Susan II
Jennifer
10. Talking and Listening
Lydia
Linda I
11. Every Mother but My Own
Afterword
A Note on the Interviews
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
What People are Saying About This
Journalism of the first order, moving and informative in equal measure. (San Francisco Chronicle)
A remarkably well-researched and accomplished book. (The New York Times Book Review)
A wrenching, riveting book. (Chicago Tribune)
Haunting. (People)
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
In the decades between World War II and the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, a million and a half young women who got pregnant out of wedlock placed their children up for adoption. In The Girls Who Went Away, Ann Fessler gathers the forgotten history of a generation who gave up their children, one of whom was Fessler’s own mother. From her unique perspective, Fessler interviewed scores of women—most of whom had never before spoken of their experience—that were all but forced to surrender their newborns.
Few subjects are tiptoed around as gingerly as teenage pregnancy. But it’s this very sidestepping of the issue that helps to propagate it, not only in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, but even today. There are groups that advocate chastity, encouraging young boys and girls to take an oath to abstain from sex until they’re married. Many parents fight passionately to prevent teenagers access to contraceptives and information about sex and birth control. Instead, they eagerly pass out ubiquitous rubber bracelets to remind young boys and girls of the vow they’ve taken. During their formative years, Fessler’s subjects had very few, if any, resources aimed at prevention. To have it otherwise would make parents admit what they already knew in their hearts: teenagers have sex. And so the blame fell on the girls themselves.
This is perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of The Girls Who Went Away. These young women were victims of an American society that all but ensured teenage girls would become pregnant in huge numbers. At their most vulnerable, these young girls were sent away to have their children in secret, programmed to surrender their babies and their rights as mothers. With a scribble of a pen and the advice to forget and move on, these women went back home to lives they had outgrown. But they never forgot and certainly never moved on.
ABOUT ANN FESSLER
Ann Fessler is a professor of photography at Rhode Island School of Design and a specialist in video-installation art. She was awarded the prestigious Radcliffe Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University to complete her extensive research for this book. She is also the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the LEF Foundation, Boston; the Rhode Island Foundation; the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities; Art Matters, New York; and the Maryland State Arts Council.
A CONVERSATION WITH ANN FESSLER
Q. What has surprised you most during interviews and in reaction to your installations on this subject?
A. I think one of the biggest surprises was that many of the women I interviewed were themselves unaware of the fact that hundreds of thousands of other women had surrendered children during the ’50s and ’60s and that so many shared their sense of grief over the loss of a child. Women who had not discovered “birth parent” support groups felt very alone. They had been told they would move on and forget and they saw their inability to do so as yet another personal failure. Often at the end of an interview, a woman would say to me, “Have you interviewed any other women who feel the way I do?” That question made me want to weep. After all these years, so many women were still suffering in silence. I receive e-mails every day from women who are just learning that they are not alone in their feelings and are deciding it may be safe to “come out” about their experiences to friends and family. The shame and blame that was thrust upon these women has proven to be very effective at silencing them.
The second big surprise was that so many of the women never had another child. About 30 percent of the women I interviewed surrendered their only child for adoption.
Q. The staff these girls encountered at the maternity homes ranged from coldhearted (unsympathetic doctors) to tenderhearted (the motherly African American cook). Have you spoken to anyone who worked at one of the homes? What were their feelings regarding this issue?
A. I have spoken to several retired social workers who worked in maternity homes or adoption agencies in the 1960s. Some are now assisting in searches to help reconnect adoptees with lost kin or working to pass legislation in their state to allow adoptees access to their original birth certificates. Over the years these social workers have encountered parents, siblings, adoptees, and adoptive parents who returned to the agencies in search of information. These experiences have helped to change their thinking about what constitutes the best practice in adoption. They have seen the damage done by keeping secrets.
I have to add that I think many of the changes that have occurred in adoption have come about because surrendering mothers, not social workers, have demanded changes and more openness. Women have learned to be more assertive than they were in the ’50s and ’60s.
Q. New York City recently announced its plan to close its P-schools—specialized schools for pregnant students. Do you view this as a sign of progress in attitudes and policies with regard to teenage pregnancy? In what areas has the United States made strides? What challenges does it still face?
A. The women I interviewed became pregnant at a time when schools routinely expelled a girl as soon as her pregnancy was detected. High school girls often continued, or finished, their schooling at a maternity home. College students who became pregnant often dropped out for a semester and some never returned. Quite a few of the women I interviewed returned to school in their fifties, after their subsequent children were raised, to finish school and pursue their educational dreams. It was not until Title IX of the Education Amendments Act in 1972 that high schools and colleges were prevented from expelling a young woman because she was pregnant or raising a child. Allowing a young mother, married or unmarried, to continue her education while pregnant or parenting is incredibly important, no matter the school. I’m not familiar enough with the difference in curriculum between the schools for pregnant girls and the regular public schools in New York City to make a judgment about the advantages either might provide. The Title IX Amendment was a monumental stride toward equality for women since, needless to say, the father of the child was not asked to withdraw from school.
You asked about teen pregnancy today. I have not interviewed young women who became pregnant after 1973—neither those who raised nor those who surrendered their children, so this question does not fall within my area of research—but I’m sure that today there are just as many myths about pregnant teens and about teens who parent as there were in previous decades. I will say I believe the challenges this country faces related to teen parenting may lie in providing all young people the kind of quality education available to those raised in affluent homes; providing opportunities for meaningful, challenging, rewarding work that rivals the rewards of motherhood; and providing opportunities for financial and educational growth that may delay parenting until achievable goals are reached.
Other challenges we face are those having to do with a woman’s ability to control decisions regarding pregnancy and/or parenting. I find the push toward “abstinence-only” sex education extremely troubling. Call me crazy, but I think it is unrealistic to expect most people to wait until they are married to have sex. Withholding information about sex and pregnancy prevention did not deter the majority of young men and women in the ’50s and ’60s from having sex before marriage and it is unlikely to deter them now. I think abstinence-only sex education probably works best within specific communities where there is peer, family, church, and community pressure to delay sex, but I have my doubts as to whether the majority of these young people actually delay until marriage—unless of course they marry young. To apply the abstinence-only sex education strategy in the general population is misdirected at best, and a waste of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.
The stories in the Girls Who Went Away provide a backward glimpse into an era when sex education and birth control was largely unavailable and everyone was to abstain until marriage. The result was millions of crisis pregnancies. Once pregnancy occurs the decisions only become more difficult. Pregnancy prevention is the first line of defense for those who are not ready to parent. Once pregnancy occurs—and it will if couples engage in unprotected sex—the decisions will only become more difficult and life altering.
As far as adoption practice is concerned, there are several challenges to be faced. Like all other citizens, adoptees should be entitled to information about their genealogical and medical history, not just adoptees that live in particular states with “open records.” Adoptees should be given access to their original birth certificate when they reach eighteen or twenty-one if they desire. If birth parents do not want contact they should be given an opportunity to file a “no contact preference form” with the Bureau of Vital Statistics in the state where the birth occurred. This system is in place in several states at present and it has worked extremely well. All states need to follow suit.
Mothers who are considering an adoption plan must be able to do so without coercion, and with full knowledge of services and support available to them. I think most people imagine a very young teenager when they picture a surrendering mother, but the majority of surrendering mothers today are in their twenties, only about a quarter are in their teens. Women must be given adequate time following the birth of their child to decide whether or not to follow through with the adoption, and a reasonable time afterward to revoke consent. I understand the eagerness of adoptive families who are waiting to take a child home, but a mother cannot understand the full weight of her decision until after her child has been born, and she must be given a reasonable time after she signs the relinquishment form to revoke consent. In some states today a women can sign an irrevocable consent of relinquishment within twenty-four hours of giving birth. Women who have had children know that giving birth changes you and there is no way for a woman who has never given birth to understand how she will feel afterward. A woman must be a fully informed and willing participant in the surrender of her own child.
Q. The women you interviewed represent various religious backgrounds. Between religion and societal convention, what was more of a motivating force in sending these girls away? Where religion is concerned, did you pick up on any pattern in the way parents reacted to a pregnant daughter?
A. I interviewed women raised in Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish households who resided in every region of the United States. I did not find a significant relationship between the way the daughters were treated and the religious beliefs of the parents or the geographic region of the country.
Most parents treated their daughters in precisely the way they feared they would be treated by their neighbors. Of course, I only interviewed women who surrendered, not those who may have raised their child with the help of their parents. In the ’50s and ’60s about the worst thing a middle-class girl could do was become pregnant outside of marriage. For those who were aspiring to, or of middle-class status, the worry was they would be perceived as “low class” by their friends and neighbors—they would be harshly judged and ostracized. Certainly, religion was a major force in shaping these values but economics seemed to be the driving force at the time. The mothers who had admitted to experiencing single pregnancy themselves, and families who were less upwardly mobile, generally did not react as harshly.
It’s important to point out that not all of the “girls who went away” were sent by their parents. Many women became pregnant in college or after they were out of school and working. Of the women I interviewed, the average age at the time of their child’s birth was nineteen. Many checked themselves into a maternity home and never told their parents that they gave birth. The stigma was so great at the time that raising a child as a single mother—especially a never-married mother, but also a divorced woman—was socially, financially, and emotionally difficult and some simply felt they could not cope with the stigma or do it alone. The image of an unwed mother did not fit the image they had of themselves. Of course they fit the profile of many unwed mothers, but they did not fit the stereotype. In part, this was because the middle-class girls could afford to go away, so they were invisible.
Q. You mention the 1951 Life magazine story about a teenage girl surrendering her child. What are some other depictions of this subject in the media? What is the most honest portrayal you encountered?
A. The confession magazines like True Story, Modern Romances, and True Confessions, which were popular from the late 1920s through the 1960s, were filled with stories of unwed mothers. Unwed pregnancy and motherhood is also the subject of films of the era. One notable film is a 1946 melodrama To Each His Own, in which Olivia de Havilland plays a young woman who falls in love with a fighter pilot. She becomes pregnant, he dies in battle, and to avoid scandal she surrenders her son for adoption to someone she knows and watches him grow up with another family. I believe To Each His Own was the highest grossing film in 1946 and de Havilland won an Oscar for her performance.
Despite the melodramatic quality, I was struck by the fact that the surrendering mother was portrayed as a woman who cared deeply and longed to stay connected with her child, whereas later depictions generally portrayed the mothers as eager to be rid of their “problem.” The portrayal of a surrendering mother who loved and spied on her child as he grew up would likely not have been as popular in the 1950s and ’60s when the number f adoptions increased dramatically and agencies needed to reassure adoptive parents that the child was surrendered willingly.
Q. Are you and your own birth mother still in contact? How did meeting your mother affect your research?
A. My interviews and research for the book were complete when I contacted my mother, so meeting her did not affect either. Actually, quite the opposite—my interviews and research prepared me to meet my mother. We are still in contact, though our contact is infrequent. She is still trying to decide whether she can tell her family about me. She has been keeping her secret for fifty-seven years. It will not be easy to explain to her siblings why she kept this secret from them, or to explain to her children why she has not told them they have a half sister. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to make the reunion process for surrendering mothers easier by educating the communities that will receive this new information from them, and allow families, husbands, subsequent children, and adoptees to better understand what these mothers were up against.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- A couple of women the author interviewed explain the difference in grieving for a child that was taken and grieving for a child that died. Explore and discuss the two scenarios. How are they different? How are they similar?
- What recollections do you have of girls who became pregnant before marriage, whether or not they were sent away?
- Several of the interviewees recall maternity home staff using mind-control techniques (assigning pseudonyms, isolating “clients,” etc.). What are some other examples of how psychology and coercion were used with these young girls?
- Are teenage girls today more likely to stand up and make decisions for themselves? If so, what is the source of this empowerment?
- Discuss how public schools in the ’50s and ’60s handled sex education. How has this changed today? In your opinion, is there too much, or not enough, of a focus on sex education in schools? How has the Internet affected access to information about sex and sexuality?
- Was there a particular interviewee with whom you felt closest (similar education background, socioeconomic status, family makeup, etc.)? What was it about her story that you most identified with?
- Discuss how reliable paternity testing has changed how we look at premarital pregnancies. Is there still a sense of “boys will be boys”?
- What are the pros and cons of unsealing adoption and birth records? Is it in an adopted child’s best interest to meet his or her birth mother? Is it in the best interest of the birth mother to connect with her child later in life? Why?