Rudy Owens’ memoir on the American adoption experience
© 2017 Rudy Owens. All rights reserved.
To each of you who were adopted or removed, who were led to believe your mother had rejected you and who were denied the opportunity to grow up with your family and community of origin and to connect with your culture, we say sorry.
—Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Apology from the Government of Australia to Australian Birth Mothers and Their Children, 2013
Adoption has been many things. It was a grandiose scheme to reform “fallen” and mostly white women, who could be redeemed by relinquishing their infants and hiding the outcomes of unprotected sex. It has been a means of creating a family, among kin but also among strangers. It was, in the United States and to a lesser extent Australia, England, and Canada, a massive experiment never before tried in the mid- and late-twentieth century, to place infants from single mothers with parents with whom they had no natural connection. It was a large-scale vital records and public health undertaking that created new identifies for adoptees, while hiding original birth records after the 1950s. It was a means of wiping away individuals’ pasts and their sense of place in history with their tribal, blood kin. It was a way of addressing horrific public health issues seen in the first decades of the twentieth century, due to mostly Christian-based religious prejudice and social stigma, which allowed infants to be placed in baby farms that were often recipes for early mortality.
In the United States it was an odd public, medical, private, religious, and charitable partnership. Leaders in each of these fields created the large national system that moved children from one parent to other parents or guardians through a large network of maternity homes for mothers, foster homes for infants, and hospitals. It was also a maternal and child welfare system that involved the full participation of public health, health care, and social work professionals.
Above all, adoption has always been a bureaucratic process. . . .
Return to: Chapter 12: After the Discovery: Figuring out a New Identity