Book probes toll suffered by girls sent away to give birth

By Ellison G. Weist

The Portland Tribune, May 23, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

More than 30 years ago, the 15-year-old sister of a classmate of mine suddenly left town. The line was that she had chosen to finish out her sophomore year with relatives up north but everyone knew the real reason. She was pregnant.

Less than six months later she returned, sans baby, and resumed life as a typical Southern teenager. Or did she?

Stories like this one make up the fascinating and disturbing book by Ann Fessler. In “The Girls Who Went Away,” Fessler chronicles some of the stories of the 1.5 million women who gave up children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade.

Fessler, an adopted child herself, knew next to nothing about her biological mother. The agency that facilitated her adoption in the early 1950s supplied very little information to her adoptive parents. As Fessler’s curiosity about her origins increased, she found herself in a life-changing conversation with a woman who had given up a child.

“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.”

In researching this book, the author interviewed more than 100 women who surrendered children out of wedlock between 1945 and 1973. Her book is divided into chapters detailing everything from recollections of the conception, to discovery of the pregnancy, to the surrender itself and life beyond that traumatic event.

Interspersed among Fessler’s data are quotes from the birth mothers. These are the voices that make this book such compelling, heart-rending reading.

Many of the young women had very little or no sexual education and, in several instances, were victims of date rape. Once the pregnancy was discovered, more than a few of the women suffered severe emotional abuse from their mothers and fathers. Embarrassed and terrified of their social standing in the community, many so-called loving parents often turned on their daughters.

“I told my mother and she started screaming at me. É I was told to leave the house and not return.” “My mother was horrified. She called me a slut, a whore.” “I think I did tell them that I was raped É but it was still all about how I disgraced her.”

In many homes, pregnant daughters were kept under virtual house arrest until they could be sent away to one of the maternity homes that warehoused pregnant girls. Often young women in labor were dropped off at hospitals, to endure labor without any assistance or any idea of what was happening. As “Nancy 1” remembers, a doctor walked into her room and ordered her to push. “I’m thinking, ‘Push what?’ I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

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