Adopted or abducted? Veil of secrecy lifts slowly on decades of forced adoptions
Source: news.yahoo.com
Most women describe giving birth to a child as a life changing experience – in a word – “challenging”, “joyous”, “miraculous.” But generations of young, unwed women describe their experience of giving birth to a child as a nightmare – and decades later their suffering has yet to end.From Australia to Spain, Ireland to America, and as recent as 1987, young mothers say they were “coerced”, “manipulated”, and “duped” into handing over their babies for adoption. These women say sometimes their parents forged consent documents, but more often they say these forced adoptions were coordinated by the people their families trusted most...priests, nuns, social workers, nurses or doctors.
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Last month, a Dan Rather Reports producer and crew were in Canberra, Australia as Parliament released the findings of an 18-month-long investigation revealing illegal and unethical tactics used to convince young, unmarried mothers to surrender their babies to adoptive homes from the late 1940s to the 1980s. And we interviewed some of the victims -- adoptees and mothers separated at birth.
“Devastating” states Shawn who was a sophomore in college in 1974 when at age 19 she gave birth to a son she has yet to see in person or touch. During the delivery, she says her doctor forcibly grabbed her foot and said, “I hope this has taught you not to get in trouble again.”
“Horrifying” states Lily who was 17 in 1967 when she says she was “held in slavery for nearly 10 months” in a home for unwed mothers before she says she was forced to give her son up for adoption.
“Traumatic” states Fran from Pennsylvania, who says in 1959 at age 20 she did not give informed consent before her son was placed for adoption. “It was not a choice…it was social policy.”
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“One of the happiest days of my life, most proudest achievements, is giving birth and holding my newborn child,” says Senator Rachel Siewert, who oversaw the Australian Senate Committee Report. “These women didn’t have that experience. And I can’t imagine it.”
Siewert added, “There was a lot of testimony from people that were associated with Catholic institutions. And Catholic Health Services here issued an apology and I understand they’re gonna be putting in place some grievance procedures.”
In some cases, mothers in Australia were drugged and forced to sign papers relinquishing custody. In others, women were told their children had died. Single mothers also did not have access to the financial support given to widows or abandoned wives, and many were told by doctors, nurses, and social workers that they were unfit to raise a child. Siewert says, “We heard practices that were either illegal or unethical and downright cruel.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me to hear the same thing happened elsewhere,” continues Siewert, “...the U.K., the U.S., Canada and Ireland. So you could, I think, expect that those countries also had these sorts of practices.”
Two weeks ago, a prominent Canadian law firm announced that it would file a class-action lawsuit against Quebec’s Catholic Church accusing the Church of kidnapping, fraud and coercion to force unwed mothers to give up their children for adoption.
Attorney Tony Merchant represents several hundred women who claim that when they were in maternity homes in the 1950s and 1960s, social workers, nurses, doctors, and even men and women in the employ of the Catholic Church cooperated with government officials to force or, even coerce, young women to sign away their rights to keep their child never knowing they even had a choice.
Merchant was quoted in the Montreal Gazette as saying, "The beliefs the Catholic Church (in Quebec) had about premarital sex and the judgmental approach the church had, made it particularly aggressive in pressuring women into putting their children up for adoption."
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