“The past is another country”devogue wrote:The following is something put together last week by my wonderful wife for her postgraduate certificate in social practice. She chose the subject of forced adoption (by societal and institutional coercion). The assignment was delivered as a 20 minute address to her assessors at Unitec Auckland with powerpoint support.
It is an amalgam of superb prose, the easy going lilt of a born social practitioner, and a breathtaking blend of academic discipline with intense personal experience.
I am incredibly proud of her - this wasn't easy for her to write, but after reading it I realised this was pure gold...
Mrs Dev...you have the floor...
In March 1961 a nineteen year old girl gave birth to her first child, a very large, healthy, screaming boy weighing in at 10lb 12oz (almost 4.9kg). The baby was delivered naturally after 36 hours of labour and the pain relief consisted of two painkillers every now and again.
Three months later the young mother put her son in a pram with two sets of clean clothes and six cloth nappies, and wheeled him to the sunny gardens where she handed him over to a social worker. She wheeled the empty pram back to the building where she had spent the past nine months, sat on her bed and began to scream.
She was sedated and left to sleep until her father came to bring her home in his work van. Numb with grief and shock, she asked where her mother was – her father told her she couldn’t bear the shame of having to collect her daughter from such an establishment as this. She was told never to speak of this episode again; the family needed to get back to normal. The young girl knew that “normal” was gone forever.
She left home eight weeks after that long, strange drive back to where she was born, and her somehow diminished mother. “It was home, but it wasn’t the same”, she recalls. Remembering the months she had spent in the Salvation Army Mother & Baby Home in Belfast, she smiles as she thinks back to the fun she had with the other girls before and shortly after their babies were born. They rose at six, washed, said their prayers, and laundered the clothes of Belfast’s “great and good”. She hated the ironing. Breakfast was at 8am, followed by more laundry until 10am when they were encouraged to lie down for an hour or write a letter to their parents. Lunch was at noon, followed by more work, usually stitching and sewing, then another break at 4pm, dinner at 5 and they were back in their communal dormitory by 7.30 until they rose again at six to repeat the routine.
The mother became more and more scared as her baby grew inside her. She knew what was coming. The social workers had explained she was being a good mother by offering the baby a life she never could. She and the other young mums whispered late in to the night about how they might feel when the day came and they had to say goodbye. She rarely joined in, hoping against hope that her devoutly Christian parents might intervene and say “come home with your baby and we’ll look after you.”. She never saw her parents once during her time at the home – just her father when he came to take her on that long, strange, journey home.
The mother and baby homes (for unmarried mothers) were established in 1886 when a Salvation Army officer in charge of a girls recue home in Chelsea noticed the high volume of pregnant girls coming through the doors. She placed the pregnant girls in an outbuilding away from the “ordinary” runaways.
Later that same year the SA officer and her expectant girls were moved to Brent Road in Hackney. This became the first Salvation Army Mother and Baby Home in the UK.
By 1897 the Salvation Army homes were situated around the country in Plymouth, Devon, Cardiff, Edniburgh, Dundee and Belfast, where our mother was sent almost six months in to her pregnancy.
There appears to be a historical victimization of unmarried (single) mothers. In the 19th century race science (eugenics), the belief that there are distinct human races that can be identified and classified scientifically by judgements of intelligence, emotional and moral capabilities, was widely accepted as fact. Indeed, this pseudo-science also included poor people, criminals and the female gender! In a travesty of science it was determined that women had less intelligence than men and in particular poor women because of “poor moral fibre “ and lesser intelligence, produced children out of wedlock and hence became a problem.
The theory of “ fallen women” and the “ bad blood “ of their illegitimate children would swell the ranks of the poor and the criminal. The powerful of the time determined that not only did the mothers have no rights to keep their children, but that the children would be better off without the mothers.
However, separating mothers from their children, en masse, could only happen in a climate of coercion. The creation of an entire subclass of people, “fallen women “ made coercion possible. The fallen woman became situated in her place of powerlessness in the 20th century. First the prevailing social opinion held that the natural mothers of illegitimate children were inferior and therefore incapable of rearing her children. This as well as terrible shame paralyzed the mother.
The lack of financial sources coupled with this shame allowed adoption laws to claim to act in “the best interests of the child “ and the mother, since secret adoption records also saved her from shame.
The face of shame and coercion changed over the years and often involved force which rarely went detected. The language of adoption always marginalized the mother with legal adjectives, to keep them less than whole or full mothers to their children. The “fallen woman” became the “unwed mother” who became the “birth mother”. They became legal non entities upon signing the government forms called consent to adoption. They were no longer mothers. Institutional and governmental practices leading up to and subsequent to their signing the papers ensured their acquiescence.
In her speech to the First National American Adoption Congress, Washington DC on May 4, 1979, Margaret McDonald Lawrence encapsulated the need of the adoption industry to manufacture the demonization of the natural mother as the most pivotal and necessary requirement in the promotion of, and social acceptance of adoption when she stated :
“ In order to bring the issues surrounding the intermediary system into clear focus, it is necessary to examine the myths and motives that surround the adoption experience. Outsiders need to realize that social agencies not only control adoption procedures, but also control the information about the institution which is provided to the courts, the legislature and the public. It is the child welfare establishment that has provided the picture of birth mothers as indifferent – as mothers who abandon their unwanted children with a wish to remain forever hidden from them. They know this is seldom true, but it helps facilitate their work for the public to believe this. Society does not dismiss the importance of the natural family as readily as the social planners, and so it is useful to portray relinquishing parents as different from caring parents.
The birth mother must be different , an aberration, for if it were true that she had the same degree of love for her child as all other mothers, the good of adoption would be overwhelmed by the tragedy of it”
The following is from “ Fallen Women Problem Girls : The Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalisation of Social Work, 1880 – 1945 “ by Regina G. Kunzel ( 1993 ) . It is the basis of how unmarried mothers were treated in the 1960s and the early 1970s.
…” Social workers placed unmarried mothers at the vortex of a constellation of larger social problems : that she was embroiled in this maelstrom, however, was uncontested “.
In the 60s respected US judge Benjamin Lindsey, declared unmarried mothers …” are in society a part of its problem and its filth. They are responsible for many divorce cases, for its broken homes, desertions , sorrow, misery, blighted faith , despair and the great mass of social ills which infect this society “ . In Lindsey’s view, shared by many of his contemporaries, unmarried mothers were not victims but rather agents of larger social problems. Taking up the issue of out – of – wedlock pregnancy, social workers began to see unmarried mothers not as endangered but as dangerous.
Again from Kunzel’s book : “ The task of inventing their own modern, professional identities led social workers to contribute to new sexual discourses that stigmatized working class women’s sexuality as pathological and criminal “ . ( pg 64 )
In the 1940s to the 1960s unmarried mothers were labeled as neurotics. Anne Petrie in “ Gone to an Aunt’s “ ( 1998 ) reports that at a conference of psychologists in 1964 named the “ Out of Wedlock “ conference, they were described as having a deficient ego or an unresolved electra complex as well as being psychically weak. Social workers argued that sex delinquents were unfit to be mothers and neurotic unmarried mothers were considered no more competent to care for their children. “In the 1940s, social workers took a more active role in persuading unmarried mothers to put their children up for adoption”. ( Regina Kunzel , 1993, pg 155 ).
“ In my experience , “ wrote Leontine Young, a prominent psychologist who wrote “ Out of Wedlock “ in 1954, …” The majority of unmarried mothers are not strong, mature, well adjusted people and the reality is that only such a person can assume and carry out responsibly for an out of wedlock child without serious damage to both herself and the child “.
The sixties was a period of extreme change, self help action groups were providing the foundation for members of the community to raise their demands on issues that were important to their lives. Attitudes towards marriage and sexual relationships were changing across all social classes. Many young people were deciding to live together as there was more focus on relationships and sex than marriage. Feminists were loud in their call for economic independence for women.
Instead of unwed mothers being sent away to do their dirty business in the care of religious institutions, single mothers were now at the mercy of the economy. Many parents still refused to house or support their daughters after they had given birth. However the pill became available in the UK in 1961, abortion became legal in 1967, and throughout the 60s and 70s radical social reforms throughout the UK encouraged everyone to participate in the workforce. However if you could not work you received Family Income Allowance Housing Benefit and Food Stamps. For those mothers on their own their children received free school meals, free transport to school, and free milk at break time in school.
All these were available but the badge of shame was never far away. Most single mothers lived in “council houses “ in large estates filled with other unwed mothers and ne’er do wells. Chronic unemployment sickness and disability were rife throughout such neighbourhoods, or sink estates as they were christened decades later. As the children of a single parent family your free school lunch voucher was white, the normal ones bright pink, the free school bus pass was green instead of sky blue. Subtle messages by those in power pointed you out as different, lesser than – the fallen woman and her illegitimate children, still stigmatized, still distrusted.
How have the survivors of such institutions, as the Magdalene Laundries and their Protestant counterparts faired in the brave new world that was the 1960s and 1970s? Did they “get over it?” and thank the social workers, priests, nuns, clergy their parents and the powers that be for removing the burden that was their illegitimate child – some did but the vast majority of young girls who were incarcerated, forced to work, often up until they gave birth, received no comfort from family or friends and lived in a climate of institutionalized fear and shame, were so badly damaged that they never recovered fully, never felt whole again.
The families of the unwed mothers who sent their daughters to institutions where they gave birth and subsequently handed over their babies, were in collusion with the authorities, they accepted the great shame heaped upon their child and themselves by society and expelled their daughters. The mothers to be found themselves living punitively in an institution filled with unfamiliar faces, noises, removed from all of their support systems, friends, relatives, school, work, the baby’s father if he chose to be supportive. The church and the state ruled supreme. In these ways families reinforced feelings of unworthiness towards the unborn child. Having your baby removed according to one such mother is a trauma unlike any other. It is a sentence of endless unresolvable loss and grief for most. Some 30 – 50% of such women become unfertile, drug and alcohol abuse is rampant, as are suicidal tendancies, destructive behaviours, such as numerous violent relationships abound.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is chronicled by Karen Wilson Buterbaugh in her paper entitled “ The Baby Scoop Era, Research Iniative “ she claims that between 1945 and 1973, a period described as the “ The Baby Scoop Era “ many hundreds of thousands of unmarried mothers in the US, Canada, NZ, Australia, Ireland and the UK were separated from their infants for adoption. ( United Nations, 1971 pg 101-103 ).
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is defined as being a disorder linked to having experienced a traumatic event and characterized by symptoms such as hyper vigilance, flashbacks, emotional numbness, avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, difficulty sleeping and concentrating and persistent anxiety and the list goes on.( American Psychiatric Association, 2000 )
Many mothers of adopted babies have gone through these symptoms and in the case of “ our mother “ marrying and having another “ legitimate “ family of her own only compounds the grief and guilt so her next three children unknowingly grow up in the shadow of the son she gave away.
Wilson Buterbaugh further claims that in the US at least, maternity homes sprang up to service an industry whereby almost exclusively young white girls – who fell pregnant outside of marriage ( and just as importantly their families ) were brain washed by social workers, family priests and pastors to go to a mother and baby home, have the baby, give it a wonderful life that she never could, then continue your life as though none of this had happened.
Historical records show ( according to Wilson Buterbaugh ) that by 1957 adoption had become entrenched in social policy. Social work students were instructed to “ achieve the greatest good “ and uphold “ certain human values and standards “ in order to faithfully follow the policies of their employing agencies that in turn were carrying out the wishes of the community and society in general.
Social workers were trained to hold judgemental social work “ values” of the profession and trained to impart to the clients “What he knows and thinks to be good” ( Perlman, 1957, pg 44 – 52 ).
Bye analyzes social case workers of the day as a group of predominantly women …” And almost exclusively working in the problem area of the unwed mother. They are consciously or unconsciously, in spite of their technical training, reacting with fear to their societies concept in relation to words like out of wedlock, unlawful, bastard, promiscuous, prostitute, sinful “ (Bye,1959 pg 5 ). According to Bye “ The single mothers days are punctuated by admonititons from staff and social workers about the meaning of her pregnancy. The meaning they impose upon the pregnant girl is a newly created psychoanalytical theory that casts unwed mothers as sexual deviants, neurotics, delinquents and sinners, with surrender of the child for adoption as the only possible path to health, salvation and rehabilitation”.
Wilson- Buterbaugh’s study further claims “ As pregnancy advances, the intensity of the directive counseling increases, emphasizing what an adoptive couple can give the “ The Baby “ that she is not. She is not advised of resources available to her as a single mother. Government assistance ( Aid to Families with dependent children ) to unmarried mothers is not mentioned. She is not advised to seek independent legal advice, she is not told about Child Support from the father of her soon to be born baby. In fact, these resources and all of this information, is withheld from her. If she asks, her thoughts are redirected to the social workers suppositions of pathology about unwed mothers. This creative theory is substituted for accurate information” ( Costin, 1972 , pg 233 and Bernstein, 1962, pg 53 ).
“ Some mothers were drugged so heavily they don’t remember the birth experience. Some were given no pain relief at all. All of these tactics were meant to be punitive, intended to break any sense of self she may, by some miracle, still have “ ( Rickarby, 1998 ).
Stiffler describes the emotional condition of a post surrender mother :
“ She experiences her loss as an emptiness, a freezing , a wound that never stops bleeding, as arms eternally aching to hold the lost baby, or as a limbo, loss similar to that felt by families of soldiers missing in action. Her experience of grief is inhibited and prolonged … She has spent a lot of psychic energy keeping a secret of this magnitude and repressing her feelings, which are invariably manifested I guilt, anger, an unconscious fear of sex, tenseness and uneasiness around children, a vague fear of discovery, depression, social anxiety, agrophobia, chemical dependence, eating disorders and other anxiety – phobic states “ . ( Stiffler, 1919, pg 250 ) .
“ Mary “ in the same article says “ In the ensuing decades it has become ovious that I suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. When I am awakened from sleep I scream. I have nightmares about being pregnant and being locked up … I have been unable to plan a career because I fear having my life suddenly, disastrously interrupted again. I struggle daily with deep feelings of worthlessness and guilt and I have flashbacks of my incarceration several times each day. Coping strategies for these such as gripping ice cubes in my hands are partially successful in cutting them short. I take medication for clinical depression … I avoid the city where I was incarcerated and people who remind me of that horrible experience, especially family members “ (Mary, personal communication, Sept 11 2009 )
A national apology to the mothers who were coerced into having their babies adopted was issued in Australia on the 18th of July 2012. It followed similar apologies to these women and their missing children by the Catholic Church and numerous governmental agencies also involved in the removal of babies from young, vulnerable women.
After an extensive enquiry into forced adoption the Australian government published its findings. Submissions from some of the children who were forcibly removed detail how it wasn’t just the mother who suffers when such a bond is broken.
Most of the adopted people who submitted to the enquiry did not have positive experiences with their adoptive families.
Some speak of physical abuse :
No.1 :“ I am an adoptee who was abused and exploited by the adoptive parents. I was working in charcoal pits from the time I was five. I have memories of beatings with a belt, being suffocated by my adoptive father, set alight by my adoptive father and being kicked with heavy work boots “.
No. 2 : “Although my adoptive father was kind, I was sexually abused by him and later by other people while I was in the care of family members. In my teens, my adoptive mother began to call me slave and later my adoptive father also called me that, until in my adulthood, I told the, to stop “.
In other cases submitters described the consequences of the death of one of their adoptive parents, or the adoptive parents divorce. Many described the irony of being raised by a sole adoptive parent when the reason their natural mother had been forced to consent to adoption was that she was unmarried.
“ My adopted mother died in 1977 ( when the submitter was 14 ) and my adoptive father was an alcoholic who abandoned me. Better off not being with my adoptive mother?”
Natural fathers, who are largely ignored in most literature regarding forced adoption were also asked for submissions by the Australian government. Described as “ The Silent Dispossessed “ A father describes how his name was excluded from his newborns birth certificate and cited anecdotal evidence that social workers avoided seeking the fathers name so as to simplify the adoption process.
Another father recounts how he was threatened with the police action when his then girlfriend became pregnant. He says “ I was going to visit her but was warned never to see her again by her father and a male friend who threatened assault and more should I see her, so naturally I kept my distance so as not to cause any more trouble than I had already brought on her. This predicament caused me great stress and I went through a bad time with alcohol abuse and generally not taking care of myself as I should”.
Another father quotes “ As a direct consequence of being completely shut out of my child’s adoption and welfare, I and my mother ( the child’s grandmother ) have suffered a life time of grief. My mother and I searched endlessly for the whereabouts of my daughter and were thwarted by the South Australian government at every turn. My mother searched until her dying day often in tears. After 40 years I finally made contact with my lost daughter, she was mistreated by her adoptive mother and sexually abused by her adoptive brother. I am unable to write anymore as it is just too painful” .
Submissions are further given by mothers about their treatment at the hands of doctors, nurses and social workers.
Spring Blossom described her experience in 1968 : “My next stop within the hospital was a visit to the social worker. They were located within the premises of the hospital. It was my desire to question her about what to expect from birth and how to look after my baby. From our first contact the social worker insisted that I would be unable to look after my child and myself, and would have to give him up for adoption if I really cared about him. As I was brought up to respect authority, and the social worker was presented to me as an authority on children and family her advice caused me great internal conflict and distress. I visited the hospital once a month for physical examinations and each time I was sent to see the social worker. She continued to reaffirm her position , that I would be an inadequate mother to my baby , repeatedly using the phrase If you really love him you will give him up … I awoke from the birth very confused and disorientated I found out later I had been given heroin and pethadine, I had also been given something to dry up my breast milk. I began to wail as I realised I would be able to feed my baby. I asked to see him and was told he was being sent away for adoption and I could not see him. For three days I asked to see him continually and began to cry, beg and eventually scream when I was denied him. I was told I would be disciplined for being selfish and disturbing the other patients. I was given no information about his progress or well being. Many years later I received a letter saying that although I had not signed an adoption consent, nor is there any record of my having given permission for him to be removed from hospital, still he was taken with no authority, no consent, no permission “.
One nurse who worked in the same hospital in the 1960s and 1970s, while both remorseful and supportive of an apology from the Australian Government, also indicated that staff believed they were acting professionally:
“Yes, we had taken babies form their mothers at birth, without them holding or even seeing their child. The mothers were then admitted in to wards without their babies and ostracized in many different ways, finally being discharged about one week later, never having seen or held their baby or the “new” parents who adopted them…I felt very sorry for what I had done even though at the time we believed what we were doing was “right” for the child and the mother. However, I now believe that the process was very cruel, unjust and dehumanizing to both mother and child”.
The Australian Department of Social Welfare reported on benefits available to single mothers in 1968. Allowances for children, section 27, explicitly stated that: “Not all married mothers wish to have their children adopted and in many cases have no family at hand to help with the care fo the child. This embryonic family group has an important mother-child relationship. That needs both support and nurturing and the department assists the mother by acting for her in affiliation proceedings by the granting of regular allowances once the mother’s eligibility has been established. The services of the Social Aid Branch are also used in special cases to supply a layette, special foods and milk. Many unmarried mothers call on the services of the department to act for them in court to obtain an affiliation order. There is no charge for this service.”
As this excerpt makes clear, material resources in the form of housing and monetary entitlements should have been offered to to the women prior to and/or at the time of birth by social workers and others entrusted with their “care”.
However, alternatives to adoption were not mentioned and vital information with regard to state housing and pensions was withheld.
Furthermore, by law mothers should have been told about the thirty day revocation period during which time consent could be revoked, thus enabling them to retain custody of their babies.
Although there were similar alternatives in the UK, none were offered to our young mother in Belfast, not by her social worker, the reverend who held church services every Sunday, nor the nurses and doctors who cared for her. Over and over again she was told that it would be better for all concerned, especially her baby, if she gave him away to people who “deserved” him – married couples with careers and their own houses and savings; “decent” people who just couldn’t have their own children.
Although the removal of new born children en masse has ceased, its legacy lives on. Children who were not in any danger were forcibly removed, only to find themselves ostracized, different, unable to fit in or to understand why they were abandoned in the first place.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and if in the middle of the twentieth century a host of young social workers who were involved in the adoption of newborns could read the apology of the Australian government in 2012, to the hundreds and thousands of separated mothers and children, would they have behaved any differently?
According to Harry Ferguson, our faith in the social services has been rocked. Priests, doctors and social workers are no longer authorities who cannot be questioned. They, like any other public service provider, can be held accountable when something in the system goes wrong and childrens lives are put at risk or lost.
However, when dealing with issues such as adoption I believe that for whatever reason a child is taken away from the natural parents/parent it should have provisions included so the child can have regular contact with the natural Parent/parents. This, I feel, would prevent secrecy, the negativity of loss, and the spiraling of detrimental mental and physical health issues for both the natural parent(s) and child. This openness, especially if carefully managed over time as the child matures, would answer many questions for the child – where he came from, the reasons for his adoption, who he looks like. No one is so naïve as to believe that in cases of child abuse the child should have to face their parents if they don’t wish to, but child abuse is never simple. People don’t always hurt their children because they are evil. Sometimes it happens unexpectedly, in a moment that is forever regretted but forever impossible to ignore.
As a child who was removed from my mother by the state, it was what I wasn’t told that frightened me. Not knowing if I would ever see her again, or if I had been so naughty that I was going to prison, I can only remember the trauma of being taken and the relief of being returned. I can identify very strongly with Ted and Desiree’s son Dion in the case study we recently worked on, especially his seemingly illogical desire to return to an environment that from the outside looks unacceptably risky.
Much better, I think, would be daily visits for “at risk” children by social workers. Financially this wouldn’t be less cost effective than placing children with foster carers, but at least the the child in question is at home in familiar surroundings, still seeing their friends at school and sleeping in their own bed at night. Furthermore, I believe that extended family members should be given advice in saying how their kin should be helped. This is evident in New Zealand within the Maori culture, but unfortunately it has not reached the place where I grew up. Grandparents especially, if given financial and emotional support, would make fantastic overseers or foster carers for their grandchildren – they should receive all the support of foster carers who are not related to the children at risk. The involvement of grandparents or other close family will often generate the feeling of support and help for the troubled natural parent/s rather than the natural isolation and feeling of punishment for all concerned by placing the children with carers outside of the family (this is not to negate the wonderful and vital support offered by extra-familial foster carers in cases where there is no other option).
Adoption has been around for centuries and sometimes it is better for children to be raised by someone who is not their natural parent if that is known and accepted by the mother and eventually understood by the child. It very special circumstances, it is both an invaluable service to both the childless and the needful child. But it must happen openly and with transparency at all times.
In 2006, forty five years after she pushed his pram through the sunny garden of the Salvation Army Mother and Baby Home for the last time, our mother received a phone call from a middle aged man saying he was her son.
If this was Hollywood, the story would end happily, with mother and son wreathed in smiles and hugs which instantly healed decades of hurt and pain, but this is real life and the lost son’s return hasn’t brought the mother peace or replaced the years they lost forever. His natural father, his mother’s first boyfriend, died shortly after his son returned. He refused to meet his firstborn, saying he had never told his wife and family about the boy because he had never been allowed to be part of the process of his birth and adoption. “Let sleeping dogs lie” was his take on the matter, thanks all the same…
The mother and son see each other three or four days a week. She claims to feel stifled by the frequency and duration of the visits, but can’t tell him this in case he feels abandoned again.
The mother feels some peace in knowing her boy, but he too bears the scars of that broken bond.
He has been unemployed since the age of thirty nine, claiming to suffer from ME; he has had a nervous breakdown, is not married and has no children. Until he found his birth mother and siblings (including me) he had no family for many years. He left his adoptive parents at the age of sixteen, citing cruelty at their hands as the reason. He refuses to have any contact with them. Instead of his return bringing joy and reconciliation with his mother, he feels he has become a source of disappointment. The siblings are also adults with families of their own, and see him more as a cousin they would see from time to time at family visits. The time needed to build a full and close relationship is no longer there, so there is no strong family connection and once again he finds himself “on the outside”.
It is hard to think of a more punitive government process than the forceable removal of babies from frightened young women, a whole generation of lost souls wandering through the years, not knowing who they are or where they come from is a damning indictment of the welfare system of the time. The Australian government has issued an apology this year; it must herald a time of reflection by other countries in the world where such practices were rife. Justice for the mothers, fathers, siblings, grandparents and babies has to be seen to be done and processes must be put in place so nothing like it ever happens again.
The last Magdaleine Laundry in Ireland closed on 25th September 1996. Four years before the new millennium, girls were still being “sent away” to have their babies in institutions and have them taken away shortly after their birth. It is as cruel as it is unbelievable that this was happening a few miles from where I was growing up.
In conclusion I will quote Karen Lynn, president of the Canadian Council of Natural Mothers (CCNM):
“We do not accept the definitions which ripped our children from our breasts and damaged ourselves and our children under the hypocritical guise of “the best interests of the child”. We claim our place as mothers of our children who were taken from us by deceitful acts of coercion.”
Selected references :
1. American Psychiatric Association ( 2000 ) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( 4 th Edition ) Text Revision. Washington DC – Author.
2. Bernstein, R. ( 1971 ). Helping Unmarried Mothers, Association Press. 15.
3. Bye, L. ( 1959 ). Profile of Unwed Pregnancy Today : Private Agency Point of View. Presentation to the National Conference on Social Welfare, San Francisco, CA.
4. Costin, L. B. ( 1972 ). Child Welfare : Policies and Practice. McGraw – Hill Book Company. Pgs. 224, 232 – 233.
5. Pearlman, H. H. ( 1957 ). Social Case work : A Problem Solving Process . Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press.
6. Stiffler, L. H. ( 1991 ) Adoption’s Impact on Birth Mothers : Can A Mother Forget Her Child? Journal of Psychology and Christianity, IO, (3 ) Pgs. 249 – 259.
