The hidden legacy of separating families through adoption in Detroit

Since May 2018, the national dialogue has swirled around the Trump administration’s official policy of separating migrant parents and their children at the U.S. southern border as a form of immigration deterrence. As of mid-June, the number of children estimated to have been separated from their parents was nearly 2,000, for the period from April 18 to May 31, 2018.

As this played out on the national stage, scores of adoptees on the margins of power have observed the political crisis and voiced dismay that the rage leveled against the current administration has never been lifted by liberals, progressives, conservatives, politicians, religious leaders, medical groups, the media, or others to support adoptees in restoring their legal and human rights that are still denied because of the U.S. adoption system.

That system led to nearly 2.7 million adoptions, and thus nearly 2.7 million family separations, between 1945 and 1975. Today there are an estimated 5 million U.S. adoptees, most of whom do not know their kin because of the policies that encouraged adoption and the state laws that still prevent kin from knowing each other.

I sent a guest column to the editorial page of the Detroit Free Press on June 2, 2018, after first pitching the story the month before about Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, where I and many thousands of other adoptees were born before the facility closed in 1974. The paper never followed up on my queries, as I had hoped they might because of the historic significance of the hospital to Detroit and Michigan’s social history and legacy of treating women and children.

Why the Untold Story of a Maternity Hospital Matters Right Now

Nearly three weeks later, I am publishing that column because of intense media and political coverage and, yes, open grandstanding surrounding the detention of young children and the breaking up of families as an official national policy.

I also find it more than ironic to read purported outrage and criticism by groups as diverse as the American Catholic Bishops and the even the American Academy of Pediatrics. For the record, both groups had supported adoption, which ending up separating—and in most cases forever—millions of mothers and their kin. (See the AAP’s statement promoting family separation and the role of the Catholic church in family separation during the boom adoption decades after World War II.)

These uncomfortable historic facts are not lost on adoptees, who have seen almost no meaningful support in their quest for equal rights by law from groups and leaders rushing to “help children.” 

Adoption was envisioned by these and many other groups as a way to address the societal shame and stain of illegitimacy of single-mother parenting while providing stigmatized, “out-of-wedlock” infants to couples unable to produce children. That was my family story and one repeated by the hundreds of thousands of other birth mothers, adoptive parents, and adoptees who moved from one family to another.

Those who bore the brunt of this calculus were the birth mothers, like my birth mother, and their kids, like me. 

My newly released memoir explores the system that promoted this many millions of individual decisions and the laws that still keep kin separated because of lingering bias and outdated ideas that deny most adoptees their rights to be treated equally by law. My book specifically focusses on Detroit, where I and literally uncounted thousands were born and than separated from our biological kin and mothers. 

Column Submitted to the Detroit Free Press: The Hidden Legacy of Separating Families through Adoption in Detroit

In April, national media first reported 1,475 migrant children who came to the United State alone could no longer be accounted for by federal officials. A top Department of Health and Human Services official told Congress it had lost track of the youth who were placed with sponsors. [See above how that estimate has risen since I first wrote this on June 2, 2018.]

Attorney General Jeff Sessions then fueled the controversy in early May announcing a new family separation policy, saying, “If you won’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally.” By month’s end, some press reports were linking both issues, pointing to the administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy to stem illegal immigration at the southern border.

Though these development were separate, critics protested them together and expressed outrage at the Trump administration with angry tweets and the hashtags #WhereAreTheChildren and #MissingChildren.

Meanwhile, in Detroit, 1,600 miles from where the policy is being enforced at the Mexican border, most residents remain oblivious of the city’s historic legacy of separating mothers and children through the national system of adoption. The lifelong separation of mothers and their infants took place through a national consensus of doctors, social workers, religious groups, state vital records keepers and maternity homes and hospitals.

Detroit was home to Crittenton General Hospital, one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals for unwed young women. Though it served the health needs of likely thousands of mothers and their infants for decades, it also promoted family separation that was meant to “save” the young mothers from a life of shame and the children from the stigma of illegitimacy.

Located at Tuxedo and Woodrow Wilson, Crittenton General operated from 1929 to 1974, and was torn down in 1975. It was among the dozens of maternity homes and hospitals nationwide created by the National Florence Crittenton Mission. Founded in the 1883, the philanthropic group first sought to save prostitutes and then so-called “problem girls,” who were poor, single and pregnant.

During the 1940s, as rates of single-mother pregnancies rose dramatically, the organization’s longstanding official policy to keep mothers and children together changed. It began working with local agencies to promote adoption.

Detroit had three Crittenton homes and hospitals before 1929. Another maternity home was built next to Crittenton General and opened in 1954, keeping the women out of public view before they gave birth at the hospital. The vast majority of moms would relinquish their babies to the agencies that later placed them with other families.

Nationally, groups like the Salvation Army and the National Conference of Catholic Charities ran similar homes and facilities in the post-World War II boom years of adoption. From 1944 through 1975, an estimated 2.7 million infants were separated from their mothers and placed for adoption, according to a U.S. Children’s Bureau study from 1984. This is only an estimate, as there has never been any official system nationally that requires the tracking of all adoption placements.

Today there is still no accurate estimate of all adoptees, in Michigan or the United States, though there are official counts for intercountry adoptees since 1999. Some estimates peg the national number at 5 million. The stigma of illegitimacy and out-of-wedlock pregnancy that adoption was supposed solve also created a cloak of invisibility around the birth of adoptees and their presence in society, even as it became socially acceptable for single moms to raise kids.

On Jan. 24, 1974, the Detroit Free Press ran a story on the closing of Crittenton General just before it last months, due to financial strains, the decline in adoptions and the economic decay of Detroit. The piece referenced how it provided “maternity service” for single mothers, but not the adoptions that followed—for decades. The story fit into a long pattern of hiding adoption from the public and hiding the story of adoptees.

When I contacted Crittenton General’s successor hospital in Rochester—now called Ascension Crittenton Hospital—in 2016 while researching my book as an adoptee born at Crittenton General, its staff said they had no birth records from its Detroit predecessor.

The National Crittenton Foundation, the mission’s successor group now in Oregon, said it had no birth records to share for its former homes and hospitals. The repository of all National Florence Crittenton Mission records, at the University of Minnesota Library, said it did not have records of infants born at the Detroit facilities. The Detroit Public Library also claimed it had no birth records data for the hospital. When asked to estimate adoptee births between 1945 and 1980 statewide, a Michigan Department of Health and Human Services official spokesperson replied, “It would not be possible to determine this number.”

From a policy and public health perspective, it is unthinkable that there is no accurate record of adoptees who were relinquished in Detroit or even Michigan.

Nationally, the U.S. Census in its last two counts failed to count for all adoptees in the way it estimated adoptee and foster children. The method in 2010 missed the generations of adult adoptees who are older and do not live with parents. Not knowing how many adoptees live in each state undermines some adoptees’ efforts to change laws sealing their birth records. Original birth records remain closed in most states, including Michigan in most cases, preventing most adoptees from knowing their family origins.

As many health and public health experts say, “If you aren’t counted, you don’t count.”

About the Author: Rudy Owens (MA, MPH), is a Detroit native, adoptee and one of many thousands of infants born to a single mother at Crittenton General Hospital. He was placed in foster care and adopted five weeks after his birth at the facility in 1965. Owens is the author of a new memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. His book examines the American adoption experience and his years-long efforts to obtain his original birth records and family origins from the state of Michigan.

REFERENCES:

Adoption History Project (website). “Adoption Statistics.” Accessed September 5, 2016. http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/adoptionstatistics.htm.

Harmon, Amy. New York Times. “Did the Trump Administration Separate Immigrant Children From Parents and Lose Them?” May 28, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/us/trump-immigrant-children-lost.html

Carp, E. Wayne. Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Detroit Free Press. “Silent Halls, Empty Beds at Crittenton.” January 24, 1974: 64.

Eisner, Jennifer (Press Officer, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services). Email to author. July 27, 2016. http://www.rudyowens.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MDHHS-Statements-on-Adoption-Records-and-Policy-7-27-2016.pdf.

Fessler, Ann. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.

Florence Crittenton Association of America. “Services to and Characteristics of Unwed Mothers, 1965.” August 1966. Box 67, folder 6. Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, Florence Crittenton.

Kreider, Rose M. and Daphne Lofquist. “Adopted Children and Stepchildren: 2010, Population Characteristics.” U.S. Census Bureau, April 2014. https://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p20-572.pdf.

Kunzel, Regina. Fallen Women, Problem Girls. Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Maza, Penelope L. “Adoption Trends: 1944–1975.” Child Welfare Research Notes, no. 9, U.S. Children’s Bureau, August 1984. Child Welfare League of America Papers. Box 65, folder: “Adoption—Research—Reprints of Articles,” Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota. (See: http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/archive/MazaAT.htm.)

National Public Radio. “Following Up On 1,500 Missing Immigrant Children In The U.S.” May 29, 2018. https://www.npr.org/2018/05/29/615079848/following-up-on-1-500-missing-immigrant-children-in-the-u-s.

Rochester Clarion. “A Salute to Crittenton Hospital (supplemental).” August 3, 1967.

University of Minnesota. National Florence Crittenton Mission Records. Accessed September 5, 2016. http://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/11/resources/736#.

Wang, Amy B. Washington Post. “The U.S. lost track of 1,475 immigrant children last year. Here’s why people are outraged now.” May 29, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/05/27/the-u-s-lost-track-of-1500-immigrant-children-last-year-heres-why-people-are-outraged-now/.

Wilson, Otto, Robert South Barrett, and National Florence Crittenton Mission. Fifty Years’ Work With Girls, 1883–1933: A Story of the Florence Crittenton Homes. Alexandria: The National Florence Crittenton Mission, 1933. (See: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000977186)