This is my third blog on the powerful book, The Girls Who Went Away: Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption During the Decades Before Roe v. Wade.
One disquieting aspect of the book is a letter written to the author about a 2003 adoption. The writer was a friend of the adoptive parents, who had supported and housed the young mother during her pregnancy, then felt betrayed when she didn’t sign the papers right away. She did end up placing but the letter writer was still uneasy. She felt that the girl would have parented her baby given the right resources.
I can feel for the adoptive parents too, having both emotionally and financially invested so much in this young woman and her baby. I know it is common for people adopting infants to pay for prenatal care and living expenses. It just seems there must be a way that doesn’t make people so dependent on each other before the baby is even born.
Many things are different now. Nevertheless, as the letter writer reminds us, it is too easy for there to be pressure or a sense of obligation pushing the mother to place the child for adoption.
I am also uneasy with the book’s very title. It seems to imply that Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision affirming a woman’s right to an abortion, is the solution and that these things don’t happen anymore.
Yet people who’ve had abortions as well as placed babies for adoption have reported symptoms resembling post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). And why wouldn’t they? Even under the best of circumstances, being separated from your child is a huge grief.
One thing the book reminded me of was how terminology affects people differently. Today we are told to say that birthparents make an adoption plan for their children, not “put them up” or “gave them away” for adoption.
However, some birthparents, such as many of those in Fessler’s book, were not really allowed to “make a plan”. They really did surrender, the term Fessler uses, to the relentless hopelessness everyone around them had about their being a parent. So the term “make a plan” is offensive to them.
The touching title of Fessler’s book refers both to the euphemism “she went away” for girls who went to another place where no one knew them to have their baby—often telling people she was caring for a sick aunt, visiting a relative, etc. But the phrase also comes from one mother quoted in the book, describing how she felt since surrendering her child:
“It’s as if part of you went away when that happened. A really big part of you went away and you pretend that it didn’t. You don’t know who you are anymore. It’s like suddenly you got cut in half. So what you really end up being is half a person who pretends she’s whole.”