1The Domestic Suppliers of Infants
In the United States, the nationwide legal right to abortion started with an adoption.
In 1969, twenty-one-year-old Norma McCorvey was pregnant for the third time. Her life had not been easy; she was not parenting either of her two children. She had lost custody of her first daughter to her own mother, Mary, one night when Mary manipulated a drunk Norma into terminating her parental rights. She never laid eyes on her second child, who she relinquished for adoption at birth. Now pregnant again, Norma wanted an abortion. Her doctor refused to perform one and referred her to an adoption attorney who, seeing how much Norma wanted an abortion, referred her to two young lawyers. That was how Norma ended up at Columbo’s Pizza in Dallas, Texas, meeting with Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, signing the affidavit that would turn her into Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade.
Of course, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade would not come until 1973, years after Norma had given birth to her third child. She was furious when she realized the Roe case would not help her get the abortion she wanted and felt like she was “nothing more than just a name on a piece of paper” to Linda and Sarah. Without access to abortion, she felt “hopeless,” “worthless,” and utterly unable to parent. Norma was left with only one constrained choice: adoption.
After a grueling labor, Norma gave birth to a baby girl. She didn’t expect to be allowed to see the baby, but a nurse made a mistake and brought the baby in to breastfeed:
Then she handed me the baby.… Was this my baby? Why were they giving it to me? Should I look at it? Or not look at it? I was too full of pain to say anything.… The nurse must have seen the expression on my face, because she quickly realized that she’d done something awful.… She pulled the baby out of my arms and handed it to an orderly, who left. Then the baby was gone forever.… I turned my face to the wall and wept.
Later in her life, Norma disclosed that the sense of loss lingered: “I spent years searching the faces of children I passed on the streets and in supermarkets. Is that her? I’d ask myself. Could that be my child?” She described her later conversion—to both fundamentalist Christianity and to the anti-abortion movement—through her relationship with Emily, the daughter of an Operation Rescue volunteer who did “clinic rescue” at the abortion clinic where Norma worked: “My heart melted when I saw Emily sitting quietly on the couch.… A maternal side of me that had long laid dormant was being resurrected. You see, though I had been pregnant three times, I was never allowed to be much of a mom.” While Norma would go on to give us plenty of reasons to doubt her motivations for involvement in the anti-abortion movement, her love for Emily is clear throughout her story. The idea that she could be maternal and love a child seems to have been a source of joy for her.
Norma had a great deal of trauma in her life: a brutal childhood in poverty, an absent father, a violent mother, repeated sexual assault, ongoing domestic abuse, alcoholism and drug use, and later, a conservative church that required her to renounce her longtime same-sex romantic partner. Yet her most enduring sorrow seems to be the adoption relinquishments:
I am a rough woman, born into pain and anger and raised mostly by myself. I went to reform school, not high school or college. I have had many jobs, but no professions. I have abused drugs and alcohol. I was married to a man who beat me when I was pregnant. I have sought out and pulled close bad people, and I have lashed out and pushed away the people who love me. I have a bad temper, and oftentimes, at the worst times, I lose it. I am my own worst enemy. I have had three children—but two of them, for better or worse, are unknown to me. Of my many sorrows, this is without a doubt the worst.
Over the course of her life, Norma McCorvey would prove to be an unreliable narrator of her own story.* She wrote two very different memoirs and participated in a documentary film about her life; together, these tell about her role as a Supreme Court plaintiff, her time working at an abortion clinic, her alienation from the abortion rights movement, her conversion to Christianity, her deep involvement in the “pro-life” movement, and her late-in-life confession that her anti-abortion work was entirely financially motivated. Given all this, her accounting at different moments should be considered with a critical eye. But her position as a birth mother seems to have been little understood, even though the constraints that led her to adoption were at the root of the case that bears her pseudonym.
If Norma’s story marks one point in the history of adoption and abortion politics in this country, then the end of Roe, the legal precedent bearing Norma’s pseudonym, marks another. In its June 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned Roe and asserted there was no constitutional right to privacy that protected abortion access nationwide. During the Dobbs oral arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett postulated that requiring women to continue pregnancies was a negligible burden: “In all fifty states, you can terminate parental rights by relinquishing a child.… It seems to me that the choice more focused would be between, say, the ability to get an abortion at twenty-three weeks or the state requiring the woman to go fifteen, sixteen weeks more and then terminate parental rights at the conclusion.” Relinquishment, Justice Coney Barrett argued, would allow women to continue pregnancies while still avoiding the “consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy.” In other words: Who needs access to abortion if adoption exists?
In the majority opinion for Dobbs, Justice Samuel Alito went one step further, offering the thin reassurance to those denied access to abortion under the new court ruling that “a woman who puts her newborn up for adoption today has little reason to fear that the baby will not find a suitable home.” In a footnote citing a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report, he implied that an increased availability of infants would in fact serve a broader social good: “the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted has become virtually nonexistent.” In a way, Alito is right: estimates provided in the same CDC report would suggest that there are at least forty-five prospective families waiting to adopt for every infant relinquished for domestic adoption. But the justices’ arguments that adoption is a meaningful alternative to abortion, that the availability of suitable homes is of consoling relevance to those denied abortion, or that the state has a vested interest in ensuring the availability of children for adoption all ignore not just how pregnancy decisions are made, but how a long trajectory of oppressive and traumatic American history has shaped the practice of adoption today.
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To understand contemporary adoption, it is essential to understand the long and far-reaching tradition of family separation throughout American history. These historical traumas shape how adoption is practiced, which infants and children are valued for what purposes, which communities engage with systems of adoption, and whom adoption aims to serve. It requires visiting the darkest moments in our country’s past.
Many of America’s earliest relinquishing mothers were enslaved Black women whose children were often sold away from them. Of all the core violations of American slavery, including the systemic rape and forced childbearing, these separations were among the harshest losses. The narratives of enslaved people are rife with mothers begging to be bought along with their children or to not have their children sold away. “Still holding me in her arms … [she] honestly and imploringly besought my master to buy her and the rest of the children,” wrote Charles Ball, remembering his own separation from his mother. But the selling away of children from their parents, or vice versa, was systematic—an estimated half of all slave trades separated nuclear families—and intentional, as the ongoing threat of separation was used to induce terror and extract obedience from enslaved parents. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs spoke of this threat: “When my master found that I still refused to accept what he called his kind offers, he would threaten to sell my child. ‘Perhaps that will humble you,’ said he.” The practice of separation incentivized a callous indifference to the family relationships of enslaved people, and it continued after the end of the Civil War, when former slave owners argued that liberated Black people could not care for their own families and took their children into forced indentured servitude.
In this same tradition were the Native American mothers who fled to the hills every day with their children and grandchildren to try to hide from government officials who rounded up the children and sent them to military-run boarding schools. They could rarely hide well enough and long enough. At the schools, the children faced abuse and coercive assimilation into white American culture: their belongings were burned; they were beaten for speaking their own languages; they were physically and sexually abused, involuntarily sterilized, and starved. In an infamous 1892 speech, Colonel Richard Henry Pratt—dubbed the “father of the movement in getting Indians out from their old life into citizenship”—argued that these schools allowed the government to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
Also in the nineteenth century, poor white mothers in eastern cities, many of them immigrants, struggled to care for their children due to poverty, widowhood, illness, or simply having more children than they had the capacity to parent. They surrendered them to foundling homes or institutions that labeled the children “orphans” despite the fact they had living parents. Many of these children became Orphan Train riders, sent west for rehoming. One such child was Hazelle, who fondly recalled trips to the Bronx Zoo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her widowed mother from her early childhood. However, when her mother was hospitalized, Hazelle was sent to Texas. She protested, saying, “I can’t go. I’m not an orphan. My mother’s still living. She’s in a hospital right here in New York,” but the social worker ignored her objections. The Orphan Trains were framed as a benevolent way to move children toward safe Christian homes.* As Charles Loring Brace, founder of the New York Children’s Aid Society, put it: “The best of all asylums for the outcast child is the farmer’s home.” Yet many of these homes were often more interested in fostering laborers than in expanding their families. Accordingly, the Children’s Aid Society often marketed the children as a source of helpful and low-cost labor: “Boys … handy and active … could be employed on farms, in trades, in manufacturing.… Girls could be used for the common kinds of housework.”
These examples were usually focused on older children; they were rarely about infants.* It wasn’t until the twentieth century that a social demand for babies came into existence. As sociologist Viviana Zelizer states, the early 1900s saw a cultural shift: “While in the nineteenth century a child’s capacity for labor had determined its exchange value, the market price of a twentieth-century baby was set by smiles, dimples, and curls.” As children came to be understood as an inherent source of fulfillment and joy for parents, the demand for them soared. This shift does not mean that parents of previous centuries loved their children less; it does mean that the economic incentives around having children—and the motivations for adoption—had changed. Adoption had previously included temporary fostering or kinship arrangements, but now increasingly involved the full and permanent legal transfer of parental rights. Prospective adoptive parents were eager to participate. “The woods are full of people eager to adopt,” a Boston probate court judge remarked in 1919. The supply and demand dynamics of adoption had inverted. By 1927, The New York Times reported that a new challenge was “one of finding enough children for childless homes rather than that of finding enough homes for homeless children.” These early laments about the limited supply of adoptable babies would continue throughout the century and beyond. As gender studies and adoption scholar Laura Briggs describes, “Every generation in the twentieth century faced a ‘baby famine.’”
Into this opportunity for profit stepped Georgia Tann, who served as director of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society beginning in 1924, but who impacted the practice of adoption far beyond her tenure. As chronicled by reporter Barbara Bisantz Raymond in her book The Baby Thief, thousands of women had their children stolen by Tann. There was Irene Green, who after groggily waking from anesthesia was told by a labor and delivery nurse that she’d delivered a stillborn baby. When Green protested that she’d heard the baby cry, the nurse told her she was wrong. When she asked to see her newborn’s body, she was told they had already disposed of it. In fact, Tann had taken the baby. There was Grace Gribble, a poor widow who signed papers at the behest of a social worker employed by Tann, believing they would help her children get health insurance, only to realize they were adoption relinquishments. Her children were sold for adoption in three different states; by the time she found a lawyer to take her case, the judge ruled: “This is one of the sad tragedies of life that even a mother must endure for the best interests of her children.” There was Mary Owens, who wrote to one of Tann’s agents: “Please help me git my baby back. I am so heartbroken about the way it has bin taken from me.… I would gladly lay down my life just to see her one time.” Tann would take sick children from doctors’ offices and tell their parents they had died; she would remove children from nursery schools while their parents were at work. Over the course of her career, she would facilitate over 1,000 adoptions and earn over $1 million. To protect herself, Tann facilitated adoptions for prominent celebrities, authors, and politicians, including actress Joan Crawford, writer Pearl S. Buck, and New York governor Herbert H. Lehman. These connections made those at the highest levels of society complicit in the secrecy of her work. Tann lobbied for sealed birth certificates, meaning that adopted people would never have access to their original parents, and this secrecy was legally issued in nearly every state—including New York, where Governor Lehman closed access himself. Adopted people had only one legal identity, and it was as the children of their adoptive parents.
After World War II, the United States embraced a Cold War conformity that centered value around the traditional white heteronormative nuclear family. In that society, parenthood was a path toward the constructed ideal of middle-class stability, and thus adoptable infants continued to increase in market value. In contrast to baby farmers of the 1870s, who were paid by desperate families to assume custody of their babies, by the 1950s, a healthy baby would cost adoptive parents up to $10,000. Given the social value of parenthood and the sentimental value of children, what price could be too high? However, the same cultural forces that made parenting so desirable for white married couples also worked to categorically exclude and stigmatize variations of parenthood that did not conform to this ideal. Thus began the “baby scoop” era, a time of extractive, coercive, and secretive adoptions that lasted until 1973.
During this time—from the end of World War II to the legalization of abortion—about 4 million American infants were relinquished for adoption, including 1.5 million to unrelated adoptive parents; there were between 33,000 and 89,000 adoptions to unrelated petitioners per year. These dramatically high adoption numbers were the result of a collision of social factors: an increase in nonmarital sexual relationships, the inaccessibility of contraception for unmarried couples, and the illegality of abortion. These social forces intersected with strictly enforced cultural ideas about appropriate femininity, sexuality, and motherhood. Unmarried pregnancy was viewed as deeply shameful, not just for the pregnant woman, but for any child born, who would be branded with the stain of illegitimacy and the label “bastard.” Many women were desperate to avoid this outcome, and as we’ll examine in more detail in the next chapter, most of them did. However, for many young women and their parents, immediate marriage, unmarried parenthood, and abortion were all unthinkable. These expectant mothers were sent to maternity homes, where they were given no choice but to relinquish their infants. Sue, one of the many mothers included in Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away, shared:
One of the questions that come up when you go to court and relinquish is they ask you if you have been coerced in any way, and I thought it was the height of hypocrisy. Of course, you’re coerced. You’re coerced by your parents, who said, “Don’t come home again if you plan to keep that child. We’re not going to help you.” You’re coerced by everyone around you because of the shame and the lack of acceptance by society and your community. You’re not acknowledged as a fit mother because you had sex before marriage. The judge congratulated me on how courageous I was. I was furious that he would tell me it was about courage. It was about defeat. It was about total shame and defeat.
These adoptions were closed—mothers had no say in where their children would go, and they were told never to search for them. But they were framed as a path toward redemption for white women, who, it was argued, would be able to move past the shame of the pregnancy, maintain a guise of virginity, and resume their intended journey toward marriage and more appropriate motherhood.
The vast majority of relinquishing mothers during the baby scoop era were white: while nearly 9 percent of all infants born to unmarried mothers were relinquished during that period, that included nearly 20 percent of infants born to white unmarried mothers and only 1.5 percent of infants born to Black unmarried mothers. This disparity is often attributed to traditions of single motherhood and extended kinship care in Black communities, and the fact that Black single mothers faced less stigma and shame from their immediate families and communities. This explanation is likely true—but there was also less of a market for Black babies, and most maternity homes would not accept Black women. (Most white prospective parents would refuse to consider adopting a Black child, even if that meant forgoing parenthood.) During the 1940s, not a single Black child was placed for agency adoption in Florida and Louisiana. Efforts to promote adopting to families of color were often fruitless, as Black parents were alienated from the process by income requirements, proof of infertility, and predominantly white agency staffs. But Black families were not protected from family separation. Those separations were more rooted in punishment, rather than in facilitating adoptions. For example, in 1960 Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis responded to school desegregation by cutting thousands of Black children off from public assistance programs. When the federal government intervened and said that states could not deny aid to families living in suitable homes, Louisiana responded by deeming the homes of Black families “unsuitable” and removing their children. Faced with the possibility of losing their children, Black mothers were effectively deterred from seeking the benefits that would have allowed them to better support their families.
The 1950s and ’60s also saw the systematic removal of Native children reemerge as the Indian Adoption Project (IAP). Whereas Black children were deemed “unadoptable” because of the exclusion of prospective Black adoptive families and a lack of interest in transracial adoption, Native infants and children were specifically targeted for adoption by white families who believed the children could more easily pass as white. This transfer would continue the destructive assimilative work of the Indian boarding schools. Anthropologist Susan Devan Harness, herself an IAP adoptee from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, describes how she and her fellow adopted people “became lightning rods for beliefs and attitudes rooted deep in a history of extermination.” In her memoir, Devan Harness writes about reuniting with her birth family and trying to understand her mother’s inability to parent her: “I am now in my homeland, where it all began. I could make a lot of people uncomfortable with my experiences laid out, boned and fileted for all to see. This is what happens, the wind whispers, as if agreeing with me, when you let your children go.”
The dislocations and fractures of these decades shifted by the 1970s and through the 1980s, as the legality of abortion lowered unintended birth rates—and, consequently, adoption rates. By this time, transracial adoption was becoming not just more acceptable to white families, but even aspirational, in vogue. Adoption historian Ellen Herman chronicles how the “love makes a family” ideology was prolific, and transracial adoption was a “longed-for symbol of national progress” and “a triumphal narrative in which bright lines separate the eras of Jim Crow and old-fashioned empire from our own age of multiculturalism and postcolonialism.” However, the earlier rarity of transracial adoption broadly (specifically the adoption of Black children) was rooted not just in white racism and a deep desire to credibly pass adopted children as biological offspring (though those factors played a role), but also in communities’ desire to defend their rights to raise their own children. In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers issued a statement that read in part: “We affirm the inviolable position of Black children in Black families where they belong.” A few years later, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was enacted to require Native children to be kept within their tribal communities; advocates argued: “We know that our children are our greatest resource, and without them we have no future … we have been here many times before with the same message: ‘we know what is best for our children.’”
By the 1990s, the domestic adoption rates were at an all-time low: relinquishment rates for private adoption were only 1.7 percent among white women, and virtually zero among Black and Latina women. But demand for adoption remained high, and if American mothers were relinquishing at far lower rates than in previous generations, there were still means by which their children could be made available for adoption. The increased acceptability of transracial adoption meant that these children could come via the foster care system (which disproportionately impacts families of color) and international adoption.
Black mothers were increasingly targeted to have their children removed, not because of abuse or real risk, but for parenting within the constraints of poverty. These efforts were reinforced federally: in 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (known as “welfare reform”), which replaced categorial aid to families with temporary aid tied to work requirements; in effect, the law pushed more families into economic vulnerability. Soon after, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA), which fast-tracked the termination of parental rights for families with children in foster care. While this policy was intended to move children to permanency more quickly, it also framed adoption as preferable to reunification with their families; its aim was to double the number of foster care children available for adoption. It worked. The position the National Association of Black Social Workers had advanced in 1972 was rendered moot in these acts. Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts tells the story of Valerie, a Black mother trying to parent her young children in a cold, roach-infested apartment in 1998—just a year after ASFA was passed. Her children were sick, her housing was unstable, her utilities were cut off, and her mental health was wavering. She turned to the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) for help, hoping to place the children in foster care temporarily while she worked to build a safer and more stable life. But even after successfully completing parenting classes, Valerie was not reunited with her children. After more and more delays and escalating mental distress, DCFS changed the goal from reunification to termination of parental rights and adoption. The child welfare system (or family regulation system, as it is often referred to by critics) had always been used to police Black families with the threat of child removal, but this now involved children being made available for adoption.
Copyright © 2024 by Gretchen Sisson
