Practice Babies: Unnatural Mothering

Jane

Reaction to recent news reports about Practice Babies is much like the response to Ann Fessler’s account in The Girls Who Went Away of young pregnant women sent to hide out in maternity homes or with distant relatives, delivering their babies in secret, and surrendering them for adoption.


We dismiss these now discredited but formerly widely accepted practices by saying “what were they thinking? Look how far we’ve come; we don’t do that anymore.”

Yet Americans continue to accept large scale infant adoption which has its roots in the practices we decry. At the turn of the 20^th century, reformers turned to science to solve social problems. Whether you believed in the primacy of nature or nurture, those boys in white lab costs had something for you. Eugenics would keep defects out of the gene pool.

Behaviorists like Dr. John B. Watson could then take over. He boasted: “‘Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and yes, even into a beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.’” Watson advocated infant farms with rotating caretakers not unlike the orphanages that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich promoted 70 years later. (Raising America: Experts, Parents, and A Century of Advice About Children, Ann Hulbert, 2003)

To test the new child-raising theories and to train future mothers, college home economics programs brought “practice babies” to their campuses and eager students set upon rearing these children for their first year or two of life. These practices, disclosed in Lisa Grunwald’s novel, The Irresistible Henry House, based on Cornell University’s program, began in the early 1900’s and continued as late as 1969. I recall reading an article about 15 years ago about a similar program at Oregon State University. Infants surrendered by their mothers for adoption were taken by the adoption agency to OSU (likely unbeknownst to their mothers). At the end of a year, the children with no defects were placed for adoption; the less desirable were placed in an orphanage run by the adoption agency.

Eventually universities stopped practice baby program because according to Cornell “new research in child development pointed to the need for a primary bond with a single caregiver.” While media accounts treat these practice baby tales as a relic of the past, long gone like air raid shelters and saddle shoes, they fail to note the enduring legacy of these experiments in social engineering: infant adoption.

Dr. L. Emmett Holt, another leading proponent of scientific child-rearing (the term “parenting" came along later) developed infant formula freeing mothers from the time-consuming and demeaning task of feeding their offspring. To Holt mothers were managers – “scientific professionals, or semi-professionals, charged with the care of delicate specimens whose health was under their control....” (Raising America) The logic became inescapable: If children did as well on formula as breast milk, if children were largely the product of their environment, and if good parenting was based on scientific training rather than instinct, it followed that children could – and should be raised by the best parents possible rather than those who gave birth to them. It also followed that an adopted child was as much a part of a family as a child born into the family.

While we decry or laugh at the practice of practice babies, we’re not ready to give up completely the theories supporting the practice. Those with resources scour the globe for infants, (kin, color, and culture are irrelevant), think tanks promote “the adoption option,” and states allow vague notions of “the best interests of the child” and “psychological parents” to strip parents of their children. We continue to keep original birth certificates sealed, reinforcing the popular notion that origins are irrelevant.