Pregnancy before Roe: I thought I was alone...but I wasn't

Lorraine

How many of us got pregnant during the years when mores were changing in fact but not in public acceptance--the years after World War 2 and before abortion became legal? When I read about the various states--North Dakota, Texas, Missouri, to name a few--which are making abortion increasingly difficult and expensive, I am reminded of the time back when...I got pregnant. This is a excerpt from my memoir, hole in my heart:

While I felt completely alone in my catastrophe, I actually had a lot of company. We women who got pregnant when we weren't supposed to in the Fifties, Sixties and early Seventies were trapped in the transition era that has come to be known as the Baby Scoop Era, a period that began after World War II and continued on through the Seventies. [1] 

However many babies were given away during this time is impossible to pin down with any accuracy. The estimates vary from a low of one and a half million to four million, which may or may not take into account the babies born to women who relinquished in what was called the “black market.” Babies were delivered by doctors who passed them onto to people for whom birth certificates were written as if the woman had given birth, and so an accurate birth certificate was never even written, and thus the number of babies relinquished that way is lost for all time. In short, there simply are no reliable statistics as to how many babies were kept by single white women, how many relinquished. Only three states had laws requiring a hospital to notify a state agency of the mother’s plan for her illegitimate child, and that would not include those trafficked on the black market, which, according to one estimate, was nearly forty percent of all babies born outside of marriage in the Fifties and early Sixties.[2]

THE 'RHYTHM' METHOD

In 1966, my daughter was one of more than 86,000 children adopted by non-relatives; by 1970, that number would rise to 89,200.[3] By and large, black women kept their babies, for losing them was too close to what happened in the slave era, when families were split willy-nilly, without feeling, and there was not a ready market of couples willing to adopt non-white babies. Surrendering a child during that era has been dubbed the “white woman’s disease,” as the number of white unmarried mothers who gave up their children is thought to be around 70 percent—some estimates put it at 80 percent, [4] and some as high as 95 percent.[5] I was merely one of the crowd--a crowd that was quite Catholic in number. The advice we got about birth control ("rhythm" was the rule, even for marrieds) was nil, and the presumption was virginity until marriage, no exceptions. Even in the supposedly swinging sixties.

The rhythm method? One was supposed to abstain from sex on the days when you were fertile; today oddly enough, it's a reverse rhythm that is followed by those desiring to get pregnant, taking their temperature and charting their periods to figure out the most advantageous time to have sex. The rhythm method for non-pregnancy back then was notoriously faulty, and anyway, I tried to not have sex the day I got pregnant. He pleaded; I was naive and in love and had already fallen away from the Church. I acquiesced--and Bingo! I was pregnant. 

Wake Up Little Susie was one of their big hits

It was the rare parent who was sympathetic to a daughter who got “in trouble,” one of the euphemisms of the day. Girls not so lucky to have someone who was willin’ were sent to live with relatives in another town, shipped off to homes for unwed mothers, where they sometimes were encouraged not to use their real names—even with each other—or they hid at home and bore the ignominy of their parent’s scornful, hurt, why-did-you-do-this-to-me? gaze. Teens thought too young to marry were encouraged to give up their babies, and then figure out when it was a proper time to marry--after that first embarrassing child was gone. Neighbors whispered, fathers held their heads down, and you, the sinner, prayed for this purgatory to be over and knew your life was ruined. 

Unlike the girl in the next bed to me at the hospital, most teenagers who wanted to keep their babies 
were offered zero support and otherwise threatened if they did not give up their babies. Some teenagers had their babies taken from them in the hospitals; their parents did all the arranging and the young teenager realistically had no choice. If parents were not willing to let an unmarried teenager bring her baby home, she had no alternative but to sign the termination of parental rights and give up her baby, despite what she felt in her heart, regardless of how much her body was telling her to keep her baby close. 

A 'RIGHT' TO TWO PARENTS

The pressure to relinquish a child went like this: every child had a right to two parents, people who could supply a better layette, and the life that went with that, than you, poor wretch, could. If the child were to be raised by a single woman, people would gossip, the child would be ostracized lest he infect a neighborhood with the poor morals of his mother. Married motherhood was idealized, and fatherhood was a sign of virility and solid citizenship. Though the sexual mores were shifting the ground below, the image of two-parent family was still paramount, and that is what I held in my weary breast. At the same time, the demand for babies kept rising as adopting became increasingly acceptable. I understood that I was supposed to do the right thing, and the right thing was giving up my baby.[6] Society told me so. Patrick insisted. My parents would never know. 

No consideration was given at all to the proposition that a child might prefer to grow up with people who looked and acted like her. Nurture trumped nature, if nature meant single mother.

By 1970, the number of adoptions by non-relatives would start dropping. Contraception as well as legal abortions became increasingly available as prohibitions against premarital sex dropped away. Sex education in schools began to include contraception; fewer parents forced their daughters to relinquish their children as cultural attitudes towards single mothers became more accepting. The negative connotation of  “unwed mother” shifted to a more neutral “single mother.” 

Today nearly half of all babies in the U.S. are born to single mothers.[7] But all that would come later, far too late for me and my baby.

---

[1] Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh, director of the Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative. Buterbaugh originated the phrase Baby Scoop Era (BSE) that has become popular usage for the period of high adoption in the U.S. that began declining in 1973. For a further explanation see the Adoption History Project at the University of Oregon: http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/adoptionstatistics.htm

[2] Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie (New York, 1992), pps. 32-33.

[3] Encyclopedia of Social Work, 1977, John B. Burner, Editor-in-chief, p. 8.

[4] Mink, Gwendolyn and Solinger, eds., Welfare: A Documentary of History of U.S. Policy and Politics, 2003. p. 177.

[5] Ellison, M., ibid. Authoritative Knowledge and Single Women's Unintentional Pregnancies, Abortions, Adoption,and Single Motherhood: Social Stigma and Structural Violence, 2003, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17(3): p. 326. 

[6] A tipping point in the baby/adoptive parents equation would be reached in the late Sixties, when agencies began to scramble to find adoptive parents for the number of babies being relinquished. Roe v. Wade in 1973 solved that problem, and today there are many more people seeking babies than there are infants available for adoption. It has become such a “problem” that many agencies are going out of the adoption business.

[7]  "Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America, National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and the RELATE Institute. Information was compiled from a number of studies and government surveys. http://twentysomethingmarriage.org/in-brief/

RECOMMENDED READING

Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade
By Rickie Solinger
"A stunning but troubling book that illuminates the deeply racialized terrain on which the politics of women's reproductive capacities and decisions have been played out. Contributing mightily to contemporary social policy debates, this rich history of single pregnancy from 1945 to 1965 warns us that reproductive rights must not only guard each woman's choice to contracept or to terminate a pregnancy, but also must win honor and social support for each woman's choice to become a mother."–Gwendolyn Mink, author of Welfare's End
If only Solinger were nicer to mothers and adoptees...it seems a bit condescending to quote me only as a "young birth mother," when at the time she quotes me I was nearly 40 and had published two books and a stack of magazine pieces. I once asked her why--she blew me off. It feels as if we are simply fodder for her research--and I've seen her dismiss adoptees the same way. If you don't have academic creds up to hers, you are toast. Yet her book and the one that follows, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States, are founts of information.