Nurses at Crittenton General Hospital in Detroit, my birthplace, handle infants born to single mothers and who would soon be relinquished for adoption in 1965.
In addition to telling my own story as a U.S. adoptee, I wrote my memoir and critical study of U.S. adoption to shed light on how this national system operated to promote adoption as the preferred societal “solution” to single-mother pregnancy. Other books on this topic also examine this controversial legacy, which I reference in my memoir. Despite this solid historic research that is widely available in public and research libraries, the story that is told about the institutions that promoted adoption are mostly scrubbed clean of the larger story how more than 2.7 million women relinquished their infants in the three decades after World War II. That is not even counting the many relinquished before and after these boom adoption years.
Those who promoted adoption include millions of family members, religious organizations like the Catholic Church, the Salvation Army, social service groups that served single mothers, mainstream religious leaders and churches, doctors, some medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, hospitals that delivered the infants, and the profession of social work, whose practitioners managed and promoted the adoption system for decades. Social workers as a newly emerged profession became fierce proponents of separating single moms and kids because they believed most unmarried single others “were unfit and would be better off giving their babies up for adoption.”
Yet the roles of adoption institutions are whitewashed and omitted in most accounts that most of the public will read from these groups’ publications and on online sources. My research that I highlight in greater detail in my book indicates this pattern of historical inaccuracy is intentional, in order to hide their complicity in promoting a system that separated families. For most of those impacted, this has been and remains a lifetime separation because of discriminatory laws sealing adoption records.
Promoters of the U.S. adoption system have never apologized, unlike in England and Australia
Nationally, women were sent away or chose to stay at maternity homes due to societal pressure. The facilities operated in nearly every major city and state, from Alaska to Florida, from California to Maine, and in all places in between. At these homes, single women lived outside of public view until they would deliver their children. They could stay from three to six months until they came to term. The majority of these single mothers relinquished their infants to the system that separated biological family members and placed them with other families. Three of the most prominent operators of these maternity homes in the United States were the Catholic Church, the Salvation Army, and the National Florence Crittenton Mission. (See my story about the Crittenton mission, its history, and my birth hospital founded by the Crittenton mission in Detroit.)
The former Crittenton Maternity Home in Detroit, now run by Cass Community Social Services, was located next to Crittenton General Hospital, which was razed in 1975.
In my current home city, Portland, the Salvation Army ran two maternity homes—one donated by the Florence Crittenton Mission—for decades. However, these homes’ history is forgotten and ignored and their stories are cleansed of references to adoption promotion, except in passing reference. This narrative ignores how both homes promoted adoption to their young female boarders as their core mission.
In Australia, the Salvation Army and the Catholic Church have both publicly apologized for their roles in promoting what Australians called “forced adoptions” of about 150,000 infants. The Catholic Church’s complicity there has been called a “national disgrace.” In England, where 500,000 or more infants were placed for adoption in the three decades after World War II, the Catholic Church made a similar apology in 2016 to birth mothers.
The Australian and English adoption systems from the 1940s through the 1970s were practically identical to the U.S. system. However, in the United States the number of relinquished children exceeded England’s and Australia’s combined total by magnitude of more than 400 percent. No apology has ever been made in the United States to the birth parents, or adoptees, because the organizers of adoption have failed to explain and to own their role publicly. Many U.S. news organizations and institutions equally have failed to share facts about the past that would challenge a myth still promoted by adoption agencies, churches, nearly all media corporations, and especially the Republican Party.
Because I was born at one the largest Crittenton hospitals/maternity homes in the country, at Detroit’s Crittenton General Hospital, I focused my research on this organization. As I describe in my book and as others have documented, this national organization’s mission in dozens of homes nationwide was to help “wayward girls” or single moms from the 1880s through the mid-1940s. Then the official mission changed. Instead of keeping mothers and children together as its core mission, the organization became a major promoter of adoption as the incidence of single-parent pregnancy rose nationally by the mid-1940s.
Despite these established facts, that is not how the story is told.
Adoption scrubbed out of official records
A map of Crittenton Mission hospitals and maternity homes from the 1930s documents how widespread such facilities were in the United States. Not shown here are maternity homes run by Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army.
The well-documented history of the U.S. adoption system should be included in the official historic record, along with the history of the institutions that promoted it, such as the National Florence Crittenton Mission. However, references to adoption are conspicuously left out. This is not accidental. It should be seen as a strategic response to the controversial practices that separated millions of families and changed millions of lives. By today’s standards, these practices read like a dystopian science fiction story. Except, these events occurred, throughout the United States, in every state and in every major city in full view of the public. I am the living, breathing proof of this massive social engineering experiment.
For instance, the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) provides what I can only call a near-Orwellian example of omitting what these places did: warehouse single moms who were shamed by all segments of society and in most cases pressured to relinquish millions of infants. In the NPS’s summary of the Florence Crittenton Home in Charleston, South Carolina, which is on the national historic register, the NPS reported had 10,000 women—yes, 10,000—were served during its operation, starting in 1932. The NPS did not state what happened to those mothers and the infants many of those women gave up for adoption. It is the historical equivalent to writing about a battlefield without saying what happened to the soldiers who fought there.
Another example can be found in the news coverage of the closing of the former Florence Crittenton Home in Lexington, Kentucky, in 2013. The story mentions how it opened in 1894 and was committed to “saving and rescuing the fallen and degraded,” in reference to single mothers who were scorned by society and marginalized by their own families. Yet the home’s busiest years after World War II, when it became a facility to house single mothers who were encouraged to relinquish their kids, are not mentioned.
The National Florence Crittenton Mission’s adoption legacy
As I mention in my book, the majority of women who stayed in these homes made life-altering decisions, with intense pressure from the social workers, doctors, and others to give up their infants. The year I was born, in 1965, a national study funded by the U.S. Children’s Bureau of maternity homes found that of the 1,509 women served by the Florence Crittenton Homes in 1965, 1,151 of the mothers chose adoption for their children, or 76 percent of the total number who stayed in those homes. Only 30 women staying at Crittenton homes that year said they would care for their child independently. My birth mother was among that majority of single mothers who did not wish to confront the painful stigma of society and decided against having an illegitimate baby she would raise alone.
The website of the Nation Florence Crittenton Mission successor, the National Crittenton Foundation, of Portland, Oregon, hides the organization’s historic legacy of promoting adoption (as of June 2019).
As I also describe in my book, the stain of illegitimacy attached to the Crittenton mission persists to this day, even though woman from the mid-1970s on began raising children as single parents in greater numbers as bias toward single motherhood subsided. Even as my birth hospital was shutting down in 1974 after decades of serving as the largest birthplace for adoptees in Michigan, the Detroit Free Press reported its closing in January that year without any reference to the likely thousands of infants who were delivered there and placed for adoption. My article on this same topic calls this bias the “narrative of omission.” That narrative remains a constant today.
The historic whitewashing also continues with the successor organization of the National Florence Crittenton Mission, called the National Crittenton Foundation, located in my home city, Portland. Like so many other organizations who are historically connected to the promotion of adoption as a system, this successor nonprofit has eliminated all references to adoption in its timeline of its organizational history, when adoption was perhaps the most important policy the group helped shaped nationally from the 1940s through the 1970s. It is as if I, my birth mother, the thousands of adoptees born in my Crittenton maternity hospital, and the millions of other adoptees born from 1945 through 1980 simply never existed. Sadly, the erasing of my history from the official record raises little concern with anyone but my fellow adoptees.