The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

by Ann Fessler

  You could always get married to give the baby a name and then get divorced afterward. That’s what was done. That’s what many, many, many girls did.

  —Maureen II

  For many girls, however, marriage wasn’t an option and the reasons varied. In some cases the young men walked, or ran, away from their pregnant partners. Many simply said they weren’t ready for marriage. In other cases, the young couple wanted to get married but parents or clergy discouraged or prevented their plans from moving forward. Those who were not yet of legal age—which could range from fourteen to twenty-one, depending on their state of residence—needed their parents’ permission to marry.

  When I told him I was pregnant, he asked me what the heck I thought he should do. And the next thing I knew he was gone. I was devastated when he just hit the road. I felt so violated, so stupid, so used. I never told anybody. I couldn’t even get it out of my mouth because to say I was pregnant might have made it real. I don’t know whether I thought an angel would appear and tell me what to do or, better yet, maybe a truck would run over me. I just thanked God that 1967 was the era of big tent dresses. I never heard from him again except for when I had the baby. I wrote him a note and he called me and said, “You sound so bitter, Lynne. You were never bitter.”

  —Lynne

  I had been dating the father of the baby for probably a year and a half or two years. He was in Vietnam and he came home to Minnesota on leave and that’s when we started up a more serious relationship. I got pregnant when he came home for good. In the beginning, I sort of fantasized that we would get married. I remember looking through the Sears catalogs at curtains and kitchen tables and things like that. Then it became clear that he didn’t want to get married, so that was that.

  —Susan I

  I was seventeen when I found out I was pregnant and I was actually not too worried because I had gone out with my boyfriend for four years and we had talked about getting married. I was graduating from high school in a few months and I had gotten a job. My boyfriend had gone into the National Guard because his draft number was something like three. I called him and told him that I was pregnant, and he didn’t say anything. I was just so sure that everything was going to be fine. A week later he came home, but he was still evading it. Then he said, “I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready for this.”

  I thought, “Well, he just needs time.” In the meantime, he moved into his own apartment with a couple of his buddies and he still wasn’t talking about what we were going to do. I was just hoping that he was going to call and say that he cared about me and about our baby. But at that point I didn’t really care if he loved me. I just wanted some way to be able to keep this baby.

  —Cathy I

  I grew up in St. Mark’s parish and later we moved to St. Ann’s. Everything is parishes in Dorchester if you’re familiar with Boston at all. They don’t ask where you’re from in Boston; it’s from what parish. My boyfriend came from a similar background and we met in the fall of 1967 at UMass in Boston. He was my first real boyfriend. We were inseparable. We had been together all summer and didn’t have sexual relations that whole year until December. I suspected immediately because I had never been late in my life. When I told him, he cried. He said, “It’s not happening, it’s got to be something else.” But he said he would stand by me and we would get married.

  You have to go through this Pre-Cana stuff with the Catholic Church and they have to talk to you for weeks on end. So we made our first appointment with the priest. I remember him being very suspicious. The next time we went back together, the priest wanted to see my boyfriend by himself. He talked to him for about half an hour and the next day the priest called my father and said, “There is not going to be a wedding. This boy isn’t ready for marriage.”

  Then my boyfriend told me about this church for people who are outcast Catholics, or if you’re divorced or some kind of sinner you can go there. There was a long corridor with little counseling rooms and my boyfriend went in and talked to the priest and then he came out and said, “He wants to see you now.” He wasn’t like my parish priest, who wore a black robe and a white collar. He was a Franciscan. He had a brown robe, and sandals, a real rope belt and I think he had a big crucifix and beads hanging around his waist, too. I was a little bit fascinated just by the look of him.

  He immediately pointed out to the corridor and said that he was worried about my boyfriend. He started talking about my boyfriend’s mother and about him being her only son, and making me feel that this was all about him. He said he was sure that my boyfriend was a good boy and had strong feelings for me, but I was doing the wrong thing by trying to arrange a marriage. He said, “You must know from your twelve years of Catholic education that you need to take responsibility for yourself.”

  —Diane I

  It was not always parents or boyfriends who were against marriage as a solution to the dilemma. Some young women were determined not to marry, despite pressure to do so.

  Mothers can tell that something’s wrong by the look on your face. Mine said, “What’s wrong?” “Nothing.” She called me into the bedroom, “What’s wrong?” I said, “I’m pregnant.” She said, “You’re the only one in the family that has ever gotten pregnant out of wedlock,” which was a lie. My mother made me feel like a bag of shame. She wanted me to marry him. She said, “Marry him, marry him. Get us out of this mess.” But I didn’t want to marry him.

  My father said, “Get out of the house—I want you out of the house.” So my mother bought a Greyhound bus ticket so I could go to my grandparents in Brooklyn. They’re from the old Yiddish world, from Poland. I was their first grandchild and my grandmother loved me very much, but she could not look at me.

  My boyfriend sent me a ticket to come back. He picked me up and had arranged for a justice of the peace to marry us. I was in high school and I’m thinking, “This is not the way I pictured my life.” I mean, I was supposed to go off to college and do better than this. I think he was working in a snack shop. I remember thinking, “This is supposed to be the happiest day of my life and I feel trapped.”

  Then there was a knock at my boyfriend’s door and it was my father and mother. My father said, “Sheryl, I don’t want you to rush into this. If you still want to marry him in a year, yes, but don’t do it now.” I thought, “Daddy, just get me out of here.” I don’t remember exactly what happened in the next few days or weeks but my mother kept saying, “Are you sure you don’t want to marry him? That’s what women do.”

  —Sheryl

  I had this idea that I couldn’t tell anyone. I thought I would be arrested, or they would contact my boyfriend’s family and I would be forced to marry him and I didn’t want to marry him. I didn’t know if I ever wanted to marry anyone. I had not seen that marriage had done much for my mother.

  —Toni

  I had graduated and I was going with this guy. My mother and father knew his whole family and everybody thought he was Mr. Wonderful. He’s the one who got me pregnant. But he had slapped me and I didn’t want to be with him if he could be that mean. I told him the baby wasn’t his. I knew that my mother would make me marry him and his family would make him marry me and I didn’t want that kind of a marriage.

  —Bonnie

  Although the discovery of a daughter’s pregnancy was a shock for every family, for the women who were not going to get married the ordeal was all the more traumatic. Those young women were made to suffer a latter-day version of social shunning. Once private sexual behavior was made visible and public by pregnancy, it could not be denied. Given the social stigma of unwed pregnancy at the time, members of the community who wanted to be perceived as maintaining a higher moral standard had to refrain from associating with a pregnant girl. Accepting her condition or helping her keep her child might be perceived as condoning her actions. Most members of society felt they must distance themselves in order to make their position clear. In one of the strictest forms of banishment, high schools and most colle
ges required a pregnant girl to withdraw immediately. It was not until Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 that federally funded high schools and colleges, by law, could not expel a pregnant girl or a teenage mother.3

  I got called down to the office at school and the principal said, “There’s a lot of gossip about you being pregnant. We figure that you’re about three to four months and you may not return to school until you have a doctor’s note saying that you’re not pregnant.” The gym teacher helped me clean out my locker and drove me home, and the school called my mother and told her at work.

  I had been this girl who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t do anything wrong. I took care of my kid brothers and sisters, and everybody’s parents wanted their daughters to be with me. Now, when I walked down the street, all the parents made their daughters cross the street. They couldn’t walk on the same side of the street as me. A sense of shame and humiliation permeated the entire family.

  —Margaret

  For every woman I interviewed—even those whose parents showed them a great deal of compassion—the news of their daughter’s pregnancy was a wrenching shock. Many girls’ parents were overtly disgusted or infuriated with them. But perhaps even more disturbing, many would not even discuss the situation with their daughters. Some families made their daughters hide in the house so their pregnancy wouldn’t be seen, drawing the drapes and making them duck down when they were in the car. The girls were made to feel that they had shamed, if not ruined, their entire family.

  I called my dad and said, “I’m pregnant.” And he said, “Oh, no.” We lived about an hour and ten minutes from my college, and he came to get me. I remember vividly that we did not say one word to each other the entire trip. Not one single word. A block from home he said, “We still love you.” And the minute he opened his mouth I started bawling.

  I went in the house and my mother was nowhere to be found. I just sort of wandered around and put my stuff away and I remember going upstairs and walking in her bedroom and she was ironing with her back to me. The TV was on, so I sat on the bed and chitchatted a little bit, but she wouldn’t turn around. She just ironed away. Finally she turned to look at me and her lip and her chin were kind of quivering and she said, “I don’t know how this happened. We took you to church.” I just looked at her and said, “I wasn’t thinking about church.”

  —Linda III

  My mom took me to her ob-gyn. After the exam the doctor said, “Do you want to tell your mother or do you want me to?” About thirty minutes later, my mother came out. She was teary-eyed and said, “We’ll get through this. We’ll talk to your daddy.” I was crying and hysterical, thinking, “Oh, my God. What am I going to do? I’ve just ruined my whole family.” My dad came home at five-thirty, and I guess my mother told him. He came in and he had tears in his eyes and…this is very hard for me to talk about because it still hurts. He said, “We’re going to take care of this. You don’t to have to worry about a thing.” My dad had been commuting back and forth from Fort Worth to Dallas and he made the decision that this would be a good time for us to move to Dallas so that nobody would know.

  During the time I was at the maternity home, my mother would come and take me to Dallas to see the new house they had moved to while I was gone. When we got to the neighborhood, I would have to get down on the car seat and hide. Mother would come down the alley, open the garage door, pull the car into the garage, close the door, and then I could get up. All the curtains would be closed in the house so nobody could see me. My sister and brother were told that I was staying in Fort Worth to finish my schooling and everybody in Fort Worth thought I was in Dallas.

  —Nancy II

  The couple times I did go with my parents somewhere, I had to lie down in the backseat. We had a three-car garage and my father would take the car from where it was parked on the left-hand side, he would back it up to the porch, and I would go right down the stairs and get in the backseat of the car. I had to lie down until we got out of my neighborhood because my parents didn’t want anyone to know I was home. I couldn’t answer the door. I couldn’t answer the phone. It was all “What are the neighbors going to think?”

  —Cathy II

  We lived in a typical Michigan two-story home with a basement. I got to be downstairs on the main level with my mom during the day and eat dinner with my father and mother, but if a neighbor came, or any company, I had to go upstairs and stay out of sight. We lived in an old house with wood floors and they creaked, so I couldn’t move. I had to go upstairs and be still. I spent most of my pregnancy upstairs. One day the little neighbor lady next door came over unexpectedly and I was downstairs and I couldn’t get upstairs soon enough. So I was hiding in the downstairs bathroom for two hours waiting for her to leave while she visited with my mother.

  —Barbara

  Meanwhile, the young men who had fathered these children largely escaped social condemnation. They were not expelled from school, and they were generally not treated with scorn, not stigmatized, and not considered a disgrace to their families. Most parents supported the double standard by holding their daughters, but not their sons, accountable, and school administrators reinforced the notion by allowing the young men to proceed as if they were not involved. Their role in the pregnancy wasn’t publicly visible, thus they were not publicly condemned. Tens of thousands of girls were asked to drop out of sight, while their sexual partners, who had been so eager to couple, escaped recrimination. Some of the young men did, however, suffer emotional consequences. Several of the women I interviewed relayed stories about how their boyfriends’ lives had been adversely affected by the pregnancy and breakup.

  Last summer I heard from my son’s father and he had a terrible life, spiraling downward from this experience. He ended up cutting himself off from his entire family. He felt like he was a screwup and couldn’t do anything right. He ended up in Vietnam and he’s one of those people who were adversely affected by it. That set the tone for his whole life.

  —Laurinda

  I lived in a small town in North Dakota. I was just about to turn seventeen and my boyfriend was nineteen and a freshman in college. We had been dating for about a year and talking about getting married after we both finished school. Then we realized that I was pregnant and we decided we’d just get married right then. He went out and bought an engagement ring and a wedding ring for me. But our parents wouldn’t sign the necessary papers to allow us to marry.

  He said he went through two years of pure hell. He started drinking very heavily and did things during those two years that he won’t even talk about. He went through a period of extreme rage. He would not accept money from his parents or go visit them because he was so angry. He said at that time I was his whole life and that had been taken from him and he didn’t know how he was going to go on.

  —Connie III

  The insidious nature of the double standard, which continues today, has even been apparent in the studies that try to determine why teens become pregnant. Many studies over the years have tried to identify the predictors of teen pregnancy and most have looked for answers in the young woman’s psyche or personal circumstances, rather than looking equally at both parties responsible for conception. Studies have examined factors such as the young woman’s psychology, her economic conditions, her age at first menses, her relationship to her parents, her religion or lack thereof, her educational aspirations, her history of sexual abuse, her love for her partner, and her use or nonuse of birth control. And though these indicators offer insight, they are only half of the picture. Little attention has been directed toward the young men who are equally responsible. Few have speculated that a young man impregnating a girl is a sign of his neurosis, his low self-esteem, his need for affection or attention, or a sign of his need to prove his virility. In fact, several of the young men implicated in these stories impregnated more than one girl who was subsequently sent away.

  When I had been divorced from my second husband for a couple of y
ears, I contacted my daughter’s birth father. I was feeling strong: “I am woman, hear me roar.” I was out in the working world again, I was making money, I was supporting my family, I was taking care of business and, damn it, I was going to take care of that, too.

  I looked him up and I called his house. I pretended I was JC Penney’s and I needed to speak with him. I got him on the phone and I said, “This is Barb and I’ve got some questions to ask you. I want to talk to you—when can you meet with me?” This is embarrassing now.

  It was the first time I’d seen him in all those years. I said, “You know, we have a daughter together somewhere out there and you never acknowledged it. You walked away, you never talked to me again, you left me. Why?” Well, turns out he had two other women pregnant at the same time. One was a girl I used to go to Brownies with when I was a little girl; the other one was married to somebody else. The girl I had been in Brownies with was further along than I was, so he married her. The babies were about three months apart. He was a nineteen-year-old boy with three pregnant girlfriends.

  —Barbara

  The standards of the day dictated that a young woman was responsible for stopping the advances of a young man. Thus she was ultimately responsible both for his behavior and for her pregnancy if it occurred. It was “her own fault” if she got pregnant. Occasionally, the young man’s family took the blame a step further, suggesting that the girl was trying to trap their son. Perhaps their son wasn’t even the responsible party.