Some Adoption History of the 60's

Note:  My gratitude to Reuben for his insight, wisdom, compassion, incredible expertise in adoption concerns.

FOREWORD

BY REUBEN PANNOR    (To Gift Wrapped in Sorrow)

                This is the story of Jane Guttman’s journey.  Eighteen, away from home, in college, embarking on a professional career, Jane discovers she is six months pregnant.  The year is 1963.  What to do?  Where to go for help?  She is lost and alone.  Her journey takes her through a hasty marriage that is quickly annulled.  She describes her parents as “devastated” by her pregnancy.  No one but the immediate family is to know.  Jane is sent to a maternity home to further ensure that the shame of the pregnancy will be kept secret.

                In the maternity home, Jane feels lost and frightened, separated from her family and any support system she might have had.  She feels like she is with strangers living in a space that is decorated with shame and guilt.  The year Jane relinquished her baby, the country was blanketed with maternity homes that primarily served to hide and protect birth mothers from the shame and lack of acceptance of out-of-wedlock pregnancies.  Years later, when Jane contacted the maternity home, she learned from them that most homes have ceased to exist and that many have changed their functions to helping birth mothers to find ways of keeping their children.

                Her journey continues as she goes through the physical and emotional trauma of giving birth.  As she vainly struggles with her options, she finds that adoption becomes her only solution.  Thirty-four years later, Jane searches and finds the son she relinquished, only to discover that he is not ready to meet with her.  She must continue her long wait and hope that a time will come when she will have a reunion, knowing that the years lost can never be recovered.  Hence, the title Jane gives to her book, “The Gift Wrapped in Sorrow – A Mother’s Quest for Healing.” 

                In order to understand her dilemma, one needs to know the climate of the times and the theory and practice of adoption when Jane relinquished her son.

                The reunion that Jane sought was the product of the closed system in adoption, characterized by secrecy, anonymity and the sealing of records.  By the late 1940’s, not only had closed adoptions become the prevailing practice, but statutes were passed to provide for the sealing of all adoption records and for denying everyone access to these records.  In these statutes, the identity of the birth parents and the adoptive parents were to remain secret, even from each other.  Social agencies during this time would rigorously adhere to this practice, justified by the widespread acceptance of psychoanalytic theory following World War II that led psychologists, and ultimately social workers, to conclude that birth parents were emotionally disturbed and therefore, were not to be trusted with information about the whereabouts of children they had placed for adoption.  Birth parents were also to be shielded from the stigma of illegitimacy and promised secrecy and anonymity.  Adoptees who wanted information about their origins were instead referred to therapists to work out their problems. Birth parents were also discouraged from contacting agencies for information following the relinquishment.  In effect, this meant that adoptive parents received only brief descriptive information about the birth family that they could share with their children as they asked questions about their adoption.

                As a result of these policies, birth parents, like Jane, lived with continuing pain and feelings of loss and emptiness.  For Jane, thirty four years have passed with no information from the adoption agency about him.  Jane asks questions buried in her heart that kept surfacing.  What kind of person did he grow up to be?  What kind of life has he had?  Is he married?  Is he alive?  These are questions that birth mothers ask who relinquished children under the “closed system.”  Is this not fundamental information that every human being has a right to have about oneself.  Yet they have been denied to birth parents and adoptees.

                It was with these feelings in her heart that Jane decided to search for her son, but was not prepared for the magnitude of the event.

                Many birth parents who have had to wait years before a contact could be made, found the reunion a bitter-sweet experience with a great deal of happiness at the beginning combined with unrealistic expectations.  This was followed by a more sober, realistic appraisal as more time elapsed.

                Jane speaks for many birth parents as she describes the joy and happiness she feels as she exchanges pictures by mail with her son and his family.  She is grateful for the knowledge that he is alive and well and that she can picture him as a real person.  Yet, they have not met and Jane fears that this may not come to pass, although she has not given up hope.  To further understand reunions, we need to see how adoptees experience them.  In a study of reunions that Dr. Joe Davis and I recently completed, the overwhelming majority of adoptees expressed satisfaction with being able to have medical and genetic information about themselves and to fill the empty gaps in their lives.  Yet many spoke of the pain and sadness their birth parents must have felt not knowing what had happened to the children they had relinquished.  They would have wanted to be able to tell them that they were alive and well and had been raised in caring families.  A number of adoptees felt that the reunion meant more to their birth mother than to them, while others may carry deep feelings of anger and hostility for being rejected and abandoned.  Most adoptees who searched were not looking to replace families they already had, but to hopefully build new relationships with their birth mothers.  The adoptive families, on the other hand generally acted casual, but felt apprehensive and threatened about reunions.  This is not surprising since adoptive parents were usually told that it was not important to have information about birth parents, that the birth parents would move on to a new life and put this experience of the pregnancy and relinquishment behind them.  The adoptive parents would then raise the child as though the child had been born to them.  The adoptive parents were not expecting, nor were they prepared for, a reunion.  Post adoptive services to help adoptive parents to understand the many complex issues in adoption were non-existent.

                Jane’s remarkable journey took place in a time when little was understood about the many complexities inherent in the practice of adoption or of the long trail of emotional and psychological problems that were subsequently left behind.  Yet, we must acknowledge as we enter the 21^st century that we have witnessed and participated in bringing about important changes in the institution of adoption, changes that practice openness and honesty and thereby permit a healthier and sounder adoption practice.  In this book, Jane moves us a step further in that direction by helping us to understand feelings that are shared by many birth mothers.  The reader who embarks on this journey will also be rewarded by the richness of her prose and poetry and by her insights into the very depths of the adoption experience.

Reuben Pannor...Author, Adoption Reform Advocate, Social Worker, Humanist