Rudy Owens’ memoir on the American adoption experience
© 2017 Rudy Owens. All rights reserved.
The most suitable plan for the unmarried mother has been found, in most instances, to be the relinquishment of the child so that it may be placed in adoption. A child kept by the mother may suffer from lack of support that a father, family, and other relationships provide.
—American Academy of Pediatrics,
Committee on Adoptions, 1960
When my birth mother relinquished me for adoption in Detroit in 1965, society took little notice. Tens of thousands of other children that year in the United States joined the club of newly born infants who would be relinquished as adoptees. Nearly all of us shared a common story as illegitimate and out-of-wedlock children. Society, families, churches, and social and medical services, created to address unwanted pregnancies, had determined that having this select group of newborns leave their mothers for new families was best for all of us.
My beginning is also the complicated story of my birth mother’s experience giving birth and relinquishing her child. Though a profoundly personal event, her life-changing decisions followed a pattern taking place in every state across the United States and Canada—largely hidden from public view and public debate.
Social historians E. Wayne Carp and Barbara Melosh, as well as adoption legal scholar Elizabeth Samuels, have all documented these major shifts affecting millions of women and their out-of-wedlock children in the decades following World War II. During that time, the practice of adoption underwent a massive transformation. Melosh calls it social engineering, which implies organized efforts to make large-scale changes to society involving groups with influence and political power.
Return to Chapter 1: Meeting my Half-Sister
Read More: Chapter 3: A Place for Unwed Mothers