Ann Fessler

Today’s open adoptions give birth mothers a degree of peace of mind, as well as provide their children with a sense of identity that so often proved elusive to previous generations. But for much of the twentieth century, pregnant women were spirited off to strange and sometimes cruel places where they delivered and relinquished their babies, often against their will. This engrossing study of the million and a half adoptions that occurred between World War II and Roe v. Wade features interviews with a hundred birth mothers. Their stories reveal the hidden world of unwed mother’s homes, the psychological damage that the experience caused many of them and their children, and the process by which many of these mother-child pairs have attempted to reunite.