Newspaper and Other Articles
"Wayward Past"Washington City Paper
March 19, 1999
By Susan Gervasi
Before single motherhood and Roe v. Wade, unwed women rode out their pregnancies at a Northwest D.C. mansion. |
On Easter weekend of 1963, Pollie Wisham Robinson's parents found out she was pregnant. The slender redhead was 16 and had been dating her 24-year-old boyfriend for two years. Her mother called her a whore and forced her to douche with Lysol. Her brother Joe, a military man stationed in suburban D.C., drove home to South Carolina to warn her that since their parents wouldn't consent to a shotgun wedding, the baby would be called a bastard.
"I couldn't go to church Easter Sunday," recalls Robinson, now a South Carolina beautician. "I was soiled goods." Instead, she was exiled some 400 miles away, to a gothic mansion on the edge of Georgetown called the Florence Crittenton Home. On the drive north in his blue 1961 Buick, Joe had explained that Crittenton would secretly shelter her until her baby was born and relinquished for adoption. She knew it was also a hiding place that would spare her livid parents the embarrassment of a ruined daughter.
Back in Spartanburg, her parents were telling friends that Pollie was baby-sitting Joe's little boys for his hospitalized wife. The deception contained a grain of truth. Before entering Crittenton at the appointed time--the pregnancy's seventh month--she spent weeks with the family in their Woodbridge trailer park. But the sense of shame she'd held at bay flooded back the day she walked into the mansion. "There were some girls coming down this stairway in the front hall," says Robinson. "They couldn't or wouldn't make eye contact. They were looking downward, as if they were in a zombielike state. It gave me a feeling of sadness." Her daughter was born two months later. "I named her Jacqueline Hope," says Robinson. "Jacqueline for First Lady Jackie Kennedy, and Hope in the hopes I'd see her again." But after her return to Spartanburg, it would be 20 years before she again laid eyes on Jacqueline Hope.
It was the ending Robinson's family wanted. In sending Pollie to Crittenton, they had banished their daughter to a secret world where the disgraceful were hidden and disgrace disappeared. Between 1925 and 1982, thousands of women--many young, many scared, all pregnant--were sent to spend the final three months of their pregnancies at the home. At Crittenton's height, some 400 women a year passed through 4759 Reservoir Road. Like Robinson, most left with nothing but memories.
Years later, it's hard to understand the depth of the stigma that drove women into places like Crittenton. "My mother mainly did the hysteria trip," recalls Florida nurse Emmy Sanford, in 1967 a pregnant Woodbridge 16-year-old. "'What will the neighbors, family, friends think?'"
Karen Wilson Buterbaugh was 17 when she left the Northern Virginia suburbs to live in a Thomas Circle brownstone while awaiting her seven-month-mark entry into Crittenton. Like many young women slated to enter the home, she took daily classes at the home while working for a D.C. family. At night she slept in a small attic room and studied the menacing spires of a nearby Victorian church.
"I really had no sense of where I was except that I was in D.C.," Buterbaugh says. "I never left that house except to be driven to class at Crittenton and back every day, and I had no idea where that was. At night I served drinks at their parties. I was their 'little unwed mother,' a conversation piece." Life inside Crittenton was no less surreal. Robinson recalls that each morning at 6 O'Clock, residents lined up to get two pills from a nurse--to this day, she doesn't know what they were. They also received regular checkups by George Washington University Hospital residents.
High-school-level clients took classes in a cramped attic. Sanford recalls a labyrinthian journey through endless doors, hallways, and stairs to get there. "I felt like I was being snuck away to the attic where old and discarded objects were placed," she says. "Once I was told to read The Bridge Over the River Kwai. I never did. To this day I have never been able to see that movie or hear that name without being taken back to the attic and with it all the sorrow."
But avoiding sorrow had nothing to do with why people were sent to Crittenton. The $1,000 fee purchased a setup that shepherded babies to adoption while concealing their mothers' identities--even from fellow residents.
"We were instructed not to ask any personal questions, so no one could identify who we were," says Buterbaugh, now a D.C. legal secretary. At the home, she was known--like all clients--only by her first name and last initial: Karen W. "When you'd talk to other girls, it would be like, 'When's your due date? Do you want a boy or a girl? What's on TV?'"
But whether it was a boy or a girl usually didn't matter. Unwed pregnancy violated "deeply rooted social and religious mores," wrote a social worker in 1957 in one of hundreds of similar papers that guided the values of places like Crittenton. The cure, according to corrupted Freudian theory, involved surrender of one's child to closed adoption.
"One hundred percent of girls entered Crittenton intending to relinquish, and 86 percent did," says Mary Green, a retired Crittenton social worker who was one of about a dozen folks who counseled clients in what mothers called the "gargoyle part" of the complex. "You didn't want to go to the gargoyle part," says a former resident, who dreaded trips from to her social worker. "It was only considered counseling if you talked about the adoption. We were given a piece of paper. On one side you were supposed to write down what you could do for your baby. On the other side you wrote down what they, the adoptive parents, could do for your baby."
"We said, 'You have to look at both sides of the issue,'" says Green. "What it's like to keep and what it is to release....Some girls literally would not talk about it. Sometimes the girls who weren't ready to talk would come in with their knitting, and we'd just sit there and knit." "I remember talking to this social worker once or twice, and I remember me telling her, 'I can give my daughter love,' " says Robinson, who searched for and reunited with her daughter in 1983. "And she said, 'These are the better parents for your child.'
The Crittenton Home may have been all about secrecy, but at least part of its mission was very public. When the first tidal wave of baby boomers reached puberty in the early '60s, thousands of them crowded the nation's nearly 200 homes for the unmarried and pregnant--47 of which bore the Crittenton name. By the mid-'60s, Florence Crittenton Association shelters were housing some 10,000 clients a year--about one in every 30 unmarried and pregnant American females.
Crittenton Homes were the McDonald's of maternity homes. There was one in almost every major city, thanks to the rescue mission launched by grieving gilded age millionaire Charles Crittenton and named for a daughter lost to scarlet fever. The fortress on Reservoir Road joined the network in 1925. In the days before Roe vs. Wade, the home was a cause celebre for philanthropic Washington. Gifts bestowed from the higher reaches of society were key to Crittenton life. Hundreds of volunteers lavished both money and time on the home. "It was like you were a charity case," says 1966 resident Judi Batchelor. "It was somebody with more money and more prestige pretending somebody else was less fortunate."
Cadres of knitters, for instance, churned out blankets and clothes for the newborns. "They would parade us out to raise money, while they knitted these little outfits for our babies--as if we couldn't afford clothes for them," says one mother. "But our parents were paying for us to stay there, and $1,000 was a hell of a lot for a two-month stay in those days. But they got contributions by saying, 'these poor girls can't afford clothes for their babies.'"
Social functions provided a chunk of Crittenton's income, as well--along with public money, endowments, investment income, and United Givers Fund contributions. In 1968, the events included a "champagne fashion show at the Embassy of Belgium," a "luau at the Shoreham Hotel" and Crittenton's annual "Fountain of Flowers Ball." The dances, dinners, and projects netted the home $60,000 that year. For social climbers, being asked to join one of Crittenton's limited-membership circles was a coup. "We used to laugh about it," says Green. "The Florence Crittenton board and circles thought they were equal to the Junior League. I got the feeling the people in the circles were aspiring to be on the board."
Of course, the genteel outside world that kept Crittenton afloat sometimes collided with the socially unacceptable world within. Green recalls the day a board member--"a very elegant lady who lived in Cleveland Park"--was shocked to encounter the pregnant daughter of a neighbor at the home. "She was mortified," recalls Green. "She said, 'Why didn't they send that girl somewhere else?'"
By the time Crittenton closed in 1982, after almost a decade of legal abortion--and at a time when increasing numbers of single mothers were choosing to keep their children--few mourned its demise. The home was sold to the Lab School of Washington, while the home's organization was reborn as Florence Crittenton Services of Greater Washington--a Silver Spring agency that's officially concerned with teenage-pregnancy prevention and with helping youthful mothers.
But the changes that put Crittenton out of business bothered some of its elderly volunteers, says Betsy Houston, a consultant who was on the board of directors when the home folded. "They were disillusioned that the girls didn't seem to think it was a shame to be coming there," says Houston.
Behind the arts and crafts classes, the knitting, and the card games lurked the inevitable and terrifying unknown of birth. Crittenton in the '60s provided no prenatal education, though it did emphasize diet and health. The end of the pregnancies was the mansion's final mystery. By the '60s the 14-bed hospital adjoining the home was used only for mothers and babies after their return from George Washington University Hospital, no longer for actual deliveries.
But a 1958 client has vivid memories of a bizarre chore she performed there while it was still a real maternity hospital. "There was a kitchen sink with a garbage disposal," she says. "When the girls gave birth, we had to grind up the afterbirth in there."
New mothers occupied a large curtain-divided ward. Babies were tended by nurses in a glass-walled nursery across the hall. Batchelor remembers secretly unwrapping her son's blanket to peek at his arms and legs for the first time. "We sat in a little circle holding our babies, trying to feed them. Somebody would fall apart at every feeding, start crying. We would have to ask the nurses, Joanie and Barbara, to take the children back to the nursery....I was trying not to bond with him, which was stupid because I already had."
Emmy Sanford watched her parents as they got their first glimpse of her baby through the nursery window. "The woman held Aaron up for them to see," remembers Sanford, who like most mothers gave her baby a name knowing it probably wouldn't stick. "I saw my father smile and laugh. He said, 'Oh, look at those big feet!' My mother swiftly gave him a light slap on his forearm as if to say, 'You are not to enjoy this.'"
Catholic mothers often had their babies baptized at a nearby church, while Protestants could partake of an optional blessing given by a Lutheran chaplain in a dark-panelled makeshift chapel. They were "a very healing kind of thing, something that gave myself and the girl a lot of satisfaction," says the Rev. Donald Piper of Silver Spring, now retired, who regularly visited the home in the decades before it closed. Robinson has kept the white Bible given to her by Piper for the ceremony, though she somehow lost photographs taken that day of herself, a friend, and their babies by the friend's mother. "The only way she would take the picture was for us to switch babies," says Robinson. "For me to hold Chris's baby, and her to hold mine. So we wouldn't have pictures of the evidence."
Like Robinson, some mothers signed legal papers and left while their babies stayed behind. Buterbaugh rocked her daughter for an hour, alone in a room, until a nurse came to retrieve the infant. Others placed their babies directly into the arms of adoption workers. "I tried to give her a teddy bear," recalls one mother. "I was told, 'No, dear, you can't do that. It has your scent on it, and we want her to bond with her new parents, don't we, dear?' We had to give the babies out by the loading dock, by the garbage cans. Was that to send us a message? That we were garbage? I gave her to the lady and started to cry. Then I ran upstairs to the attic and watched that car disappearing until I couldn't see it anymore."
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"As a minor, she is legally under her parent's control . . Thus, although biologically about to become a mother, she is socially a dependent child, prevented from making decisions that are ordinarily considered part of parental rights and responsibilities." HELPING UNMARRIED MOTHERS, by Rose Bernstein, copyright 1971 | | |
Not By Choice
by Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh
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For some time, I have wondered how in the world I got to this place. I have always tried to do the right thing in life, yet the results from making wrong choices were constantly staring me in the face. An example, and granted it is a huge one, was getting pregnant at the age of seventeen, which caused the loss of my child to adoption.
Sitting at my desk one day, pondering this question, I was struck with an idea. Since I knew virtually nothing about what had happened to me and why, I decided to search for answers. After logging onto the Internet, I searched for out-of-print books. My thinking was that reading books written by social workers, historians, and sociologists at that time might shed some light on the subject of the surrender of babies to adoption. So, not only have I spent the past five years doing some serious soul searching, I've also done some very important reading.
Let me share with you a small part of what I've learned since then.
When an adoption takes place, there are three parties involved: the couple who adopts, the child and the child's natural parents. This is called the adoption triad. Society as a whole prefers to forget the third side of the triangle, the natural parents--especially the natural mother of the child. Sadly, even today, the triad is represented by only two sides of that triangle.
Thirty or forty years ago, before readily available contraception, many unmarried, pregnant girls were forced into hiding. We spent months in "wage homes" as unpaid servants, unwed maternity institutions or both. In 1966, I spent three months in two different wage homes prior to being admitted as a resident of the Florence Crittenton maternity facility in Washington, D.C.
Unlike the fathers of our babies, most of whom quietly walked away, we couldn't hide the visible evidence of our participation in socially unsanctioned sexuality.
For decades mothers of the closed adoption era have been shrouded in secrecy and misunderstanding. Negative fantasies have marginalized us from the rest of society. The general perception is that we are deviant women who callously discarded our babies. This is one of many myths that surrounds and intensifies the pain of my personal experience and that of hundreds of thousands of other mothers who surrendered.
Coercion, Thought Reform, and Maternity Homes
We hear about mothers who "made the decision to give up" their babies to adoption. Is it true that we made informed decisions without pressure from social workers (often referred to as "caseworkers") who worked in maternity homes and adoption agencies?
Felix Biestek, in The Casework Relationship (1957), Loyola University School of Social Work, states that:
Caseworkers have differed in their evaluation of the capacity of unmarried mothers... to make sound decisions. Some feel that unmarried mothers are so damaged emotionally that they are incapable of arriving at a good decision themselves. These caseworkers have expressed the conviction that they must guide, "steer," and "take sides in" the final decision. (Emphasis added)
Like me, many other young mothers didn't know what a "home for unwed mothers" was until we suddenly found ourselves deposited at its front door with our suitcase in hand. These institutions were thought to offer safety and shelter from society's scorn. In reality, they were punishing in nature and have been referred to as "baby factories."
What effect did the environment of a maternity "home" have on us? Could brainwashing, more commonly known today as thought reform, have played a part in the surrender of our babies to adoption?
According to Margaret Thayler Singer and Richard Ofshe, respected psychologists and leading experts on thought reform:
...the effectiveness of thought reform programs did not depend on prison settings, physical abuse or death threats. Programs used... the application of intense guilt/shame/anxiety manipulation... with the production of strong emotional arousal in settings where people did not leave because of social and psychological pressures or because of enforced confinement.
Drs. Singer and Ofshe provide six conditions that are required to put a system of thought reform into place. Below follows a comparison of thought reform conditions to the maternity "home" experience.
Thought Reform vs. the Maternity "Home" Experience
- Keep person unaware.
Girls were not instructed about pregnancy, labor, delivery; were left totally alone during labor and delivery; were not allowed contact with new mothers; not provided information about welfare and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), child support and other government programs.
- Control their environment and time.
Girls forced to live in maternity "homes"; made to use fictitious names or first names and last initials only; allowed no contact with friends and boy-friends by letter, phone or in person; kept away from everything familiar; made to follow strict daily routines.
- Create a sense of powerlessness.
Took away our money (pay phones only); no personal (familiar) clothing; not allowed freedom to come and go; removed everything that would remind us of who we were.
- Rewards and punishments to inhibit behavior reflecting former identity.
Called "neurotic" if we said no to "relinquishing"; told we were "out of touch with reality" and "selfish" if we kept our babies; told our pregnancy was "proof of unfitness."
- Rewards and punishments promoting group's beliefs or behaviors.
Allowed no television, phone, visitation or radio privileges if not following rules; scolding and de-meaning lectures for disagreeing; harangued when speaking up against "counseling" (reasons why we should "choose" adoption); praised for agreeing to surrender.
- Use logic and authority which permits no feedback.
Director, caseworkers and housemothers enforced strict rules and rigid schedule: wakeup, bedtime, meals, chores and approved visitation; censored mail (both incoming and outgoing); no legal counsel; no support system.
It seems clear that all of the thought reform conditions were present during the many months we were forced to hide away in maternity homes.
Rickie Solinger, in Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (1992), gives us a sense of the maternity home environment:
The world of maternity homes in postwar America was a gothic attic obscured from the community by the closed curtains of gentility and high spiked fences. The girls and women sent inside were dreamwalkers serving time, pregnant dreamwalkers taking the cure. Part criminal, part patient, the unwed mother arrived on the doorstep with her valise and, moving inside, found herself enclosed within an idea...
Maternity homes... served to further stigmatize pregnant young women by removing them from their families, friends and neighbors... these "homes" could create an austere and frightening atmosphere for the birth mother, whose freedom of movement was strictly curtailed by these instant chaperones and guardians. Typically, birth mothers were expected to help out in these homes with chores such as cleaning, dishwashing, and so on... while the birth mother's physical needs were met, seldom were her emotional needs addressed...
Parental Pressures:
What occurred between the time we revealed our pregnancy to our parents and the surrender of our child? What role did our parents play in our confinement?
In many cases, our parents sought advice from local churches that directed them to church-affiliated or county adoption agencies. Those agencies usually referred our parents to maternity homes. Wake Up Little Susie spells out the enormous social pressure parents felt:
Parents embraced the idea of maternity homes partly because in the postwar decades, parents themselves needed protection as much as their erring daughters... If the girl disappeared, the problem disappeared with her.
And what was the role of adoption agencies? How much influence did they exert in decision-making? Did they allow us free choice or did they have a bias toward adoption?
Social worker Barbara Hansen Costigan, in her dissertation, "The Unmarried Mother--Her Decision Regarding Adoption" (1964), claims:
The fact that social work professional attitudes tend to favor the relinquishment of the baby, as the literature shows, should be faced more clearly. Perhaps if it were recognized, workers would be in less conflict and would therefore feel less guilty about their "failures" (the kept cases).
Marcel Heiman, M.D. in "Out-Of-Wedlock Pregnancy In Adolescence," Casework Papers 1960, provides evidence of social workers' bias towards adoption:
The caseworker must then be decisive, firm and unswerving in her pursuit of a healthy solution for the girl's problem. The "I'm going to help you by standing by while you work it through" approach will not do. What is expected from the worker is precisely what the child expected but did not get from her parents--a decisive "No!" It is essential that the parent most involved, psychologically, in the daughter's pregnancy also be dealt with in a manner identical with the one suggested in dealing with the girl. Time is of the essence; the maturation of the fetus proceeds at an inexorable pace. An ambivalent mother, interfering with her daughter's ability to arrive at the decision to surrender her child, must be dealt with as though she (the girl's mother) were a child herself. (Emphasis added)
Economic Coercion
Those of us who wanted to keep our babies were warned severely by social workers that, if we did so, we would be responsible for paying the entire hospital bill, doctor fees, lawyer fees and the costs of foster care.
Yvonne, who lost her child to adoption in 1968, shares her experience with an adoption agency social worker:
My son was taken from me at birth, against my will. I was allowed no contact with him in spite of my pleas because the people in charge were sure that I was going to eventually be forced to give him up for adoption even though I had not given them any definite promise to do so.
I finally was taken back to my parent's house when my son was 12 days old. I went to work almost immediately with the plan to make some money and raise my son. My mother eventually agreed to baby sit while I worked. I called the social worker to tell her the great news and find out where and when we could pick up my baby. She icily informed me that she would call me the next day to give me the details. I remember being thrilled that this was finally going to be over, that life was going to go on at last, that there would be no more badgering by this woman about my decision.
The following day the social worker called and informed me that if I thought I was going to pick up my son I would have to show up with money to pay my hospital bill, his hospital bill, [our] doctor bills, the maternity home bill, the charges for the "counseling" she had given me and all costs for my son to be in foster care. The meter would continue to run until everything was paid in full, at which time I could finally bail out my poor little baby. She said this knowing full well that on her advice my father had taken me to the county welfare office to apply for welfare to pay these expenses and the application was approved.
I cannot remember the exact amount she demanded but remember it being more money than I could ever imagine making.
The Aftermath
In the aftermath of surrender, when we returned home, we strongly felt the absence of our baby. Alone, our arms empty, we grieved deeply for our lost child. No one ever spoke of our baby again, no one acknowledged our painful and lonely experience and no one offered comfort. We knew we were never to speak of what occurred. We were so shamed and blamed that we obeyed this dictate for many decades.
In an American Adoption Congress newsletter article, "Disenfranchised Grief and the Birth Mother," Nathalie Troland describes our experience; she says, "The birth mother was not recognized as a legitimate mourner; the loss of her child was not considered real." Troland continues:
She lives in a world in which some mothers are rewarded and others punished for their fertility; that most people failed her, that she failed herself; that she did the right thing; that she did the wrong thing; that she grieves, that grief is not appropriate; that she is un-natural in her ability to take such a course; that she is natural in thinking of her baby before herself or conversely of thinking of herself before the baby; that she was, and still is, isolated in her experience; that her grief cannot be resolved and must somehow be lived with alone.
In the years following surrender, how did the we fare without our babies? Was our grief a short-term problem or did the adoption have lasting ramifications? According to Birthmothers, Women Who Have Relinquished Babies for Adoption Tell Their Stories by Merry Bloch Jones:
... most birthmothers lost their innocence, self-esteem, and prospects... many relinquished their trust in others and their sense of identity within society... many felt that their most important relationships... were damaged beyond repair. More than one in five became involved in abusive relationships... Under the influence of anger and depression, some set out on paths of self-punishment and self-destruction... Many became emotionally estranged from everyone who had been involved... About one fifth developed eating disorders... More than one in five developed secondary infertility. Most... remained permanently incapable of trust and intimacy.
The Injustice Continues
I am incredulous as I reflect on what happened. How could we have allowed the horrific act that separated us from our children? It is difficult for us to convey to people, who now live in a society that values and enforces an individual's civil and human rights, how it was when our babies were born and taken from us simply because we were young, vulnerable and without resources.
I believe we have a right to copies of everything relating to the loss of our babies. This includes original birth certificates and other agency records that confirm the births of our babies. Adoption agencies across the country are withholding these documents, even though we were still the legal guardians of our children at the time those documents were drafted. This withholding of documentation occurs even though it appears to be at odds with the official policy of some agencies. For example, Patricia Martinez Dorner, in "Adoption Search: An Ethical Guide For Practitioners," a 1997 Catholic Charities USA searching manual, states:
Birthparents also seek information about their children and their adoptive families through the years. Being able to obtain file information pertaining to the time of the pregnancy, is reality basing and healing...
Among the documents found in agency files is the original birth certificate, which in most states is sealed at the vital statistics level when adoptions are finalized. It is appropriate to provide a copy of this document to a birthparent, (as long as it is a named birthparent), at any time. The information pertains to her and her child and in no way violates confidentiality. (Emphasis added)
In light of this statement, we wonder why we are repeatedly refused copies of the original birth certificate and other agency records, especially after reunions with our grown children.
Mothers, Not Birthmothers
Many of us reject inappropriate terms, such as "birthmother," that have been forced upon us by the adoption industry. We view "birth" prefixes as offensive and demeaning. We feel they diminish and devalue our relationship to our children. We are not breeders nor live incubators whose only function was to give birth.
Many of us are taking back our rightful title--we are the mother of all of the children we have given birth to, whether lost to adoption or not. Although we were not allowed to parent our lost children, we have always loved them and have the same concerns for them that any other mother would. We surrendered our children to adoption--we did not surrender our motherhood.
Society should eliminate stigmatizing labels and misleading terminology. Mothers who have lost children to adoption are deeply wounded and have walked long and lonely roads. We are searching for answers and seek understanding. We are asking society to acknowledge the truth of our experience and honor our motherhood.
The author, Karen Wilson Buterbaugh, is co-founder of Mothers for Open Records Everywhere (M.O.R.E.) and a mother who lost her daughter to adoption in 1966. |
Copyright © 2001-2010 Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh
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