Catholic adoption policies

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 5, 2003 by Frances G. Scalise

Between 1949 and 1972, 6 million single, white, middle-class women lost their babies to adoption. I was one of these women. Although we did not have Magdalene laundries (NCR, Aug. 15) here in the United States, we had homes for unwed mothers throughout the country, many run by Catholic Charities. I was an unwed, pregnant, 20-year-old college junior when I lived at St. Vincent's Orphanage in Philadelphia in 1959.

I was not deliberately humiliated by anyone during my time at St. Vincent's, but I was deliberately misinformed. I wasn't told about any "option" except adoption. I didn't know I was entitled to welfare. I didn't know I could sue my child's father for support. Daily I was told how I was "giving some poor childless couple a wonderful gift." Daily I was told, "Never say 'my baby.' Always say, 'the baby' so you won't become attached to it." But I had wanted my child from the moment of his conception.

If I had had a year of financial aid from his father, my family or Catholic Charities, I could have raised my son. At the time I was forced to surrender my son, I had more educational and economic potential than the couple who adopted him.

I remember a nurse entering my ward after my arduous delivery with my son in her arms. Out of nowhere a nun stepped in front of her. "She can't have that baby," she shouted and took my son back to the nursery. I never held or touched my child. I would have never even seen him if I hadn't crawled out of bed in the middle of the night to peer at him through the nursery glass.

No, we didn't have Magdalene laundries. Instead we had social policy that dictated that unwed equaled unfit in order to justify the transfer of babies from "unwed," powerless women to more affluent, childless, married women without consideration of the long-term repercussions on the "natural" mothers or their children who grew up believing they were "unwanted."

Since the Catholic church, Catholic Charities, priests and various orders of nuns are now apologizing to the "victims" of their misguided ministrations, perhaps they can now send official condolences to those of us who were coerced into surrendering our babies to strangers for the sake of the multimillion-dollar adoption industry and have lived with disenfranchised grief ever since.

FRANCES G. SCALISE

Hudson, Ohio