Isabel Heinemann. Journal of Modern European History. Volume 17, Issue 3. 2019.
When President Ronald Reagan announced the National Adoption Week of 1987, he hailed ‘single women’, who, ‘under the most difficult circumstances […] have rejected abortion and given their babies the gifts of life and of a loving adoptive home’. For him, these women were ‘brave women who heroically choose life’. However, he considered those who had chosen abortion—legal in the United States since the crucial Supreme Court decision Roe vs Wade of 22 January 1973—criminals guilty of infanticide. The President—since his early days as Governor of California an ardent adversary of abortion rights—emphasized adoption as the more ‘humane’ solution to a woman’s unwanted pregnancy. He deliberately ignored women’s agency and individual capacity to make informed decisions in the realm of reproduction. In doing so, Reagan implicitly criticized the pro-choice movement, which since the 1960s had claimed that women were not only able to make responsible choices but also should enjoy the right to make their own reproductive choices as a central part of their universal human rights.
However, the President’s praise of women who surrendered their newborns for adoption was a rather new phenomenon. Until the 1960s, it was common—especially in white middle-class families—for pregnant single women, college students, or teenagers to secretly carry their pregnancy to term. They then gave birth clandestinely in a maternity home and relinquished the child for adoption—often persuaded or even coerced by their parents or guardians. Although rather unintentional, the legalization of abortion brought a change to this practice. While anti-abortion forces shifted the perspective towards the unborn, the birthmother appeared as a person who had made the ‘right decision’, and could thus claim respect. Karen Kottmeier, herself a birthmother, explained,
But I could not help but notice, that nobody cared about unwed mothers’ relationship to their children until abortion was legalized in 1973. Suddenly, we were carrying a valuable person. Everyone in the pro-life movement jumped on the bandwagon to convince unwed, pregnant women to carry their children to term and then relinquish them to adoption—the ‘non-violent alternative’. At this time, it was still assumed that the birthmother had no value to her child, once it was born, and that she should just ‘go on and forget’ knowing that she ‘had done the right thing’.
During the 1970s and 1980s, public debates about reproduction in the United States centred on the question whether a woman had the right to decide about her own body and reproductive capacities. While pro-choice activists emphasized the right of the woman to decide, anti-abortion activists sought to protect the right to life of the unborn at all costs and presented themselves as ‘pro life’ advocates. During his two terms in office (1981-1989), President Ronald Reagan actively engaged in the controversy. He considered abortion substantial danger to the ‘nation’ and sought to promote adoption as a morally superior alternative. In return, feminists and abortion rights activists claimed their right to decide, as did women who had relinquished their children to adoption in the years prior Roe vs Wade. While both pro-choice advocates and birthmothers considered giving an unwanted baby up for adoption a part of a ‘woman’s right to decide’, birthmothers went one step further and emphasized adoption as the more ‘moral’ alternative to abortion. They thus incorporated a decidedly ‘conservative’ claim (adoption as an alternative to abortion) into a more liberal agenda which envisioned open adoption records (allowing adoptees to search for their birthmothers and enabling birthmothers to trace their adopted sons and daughters) and ‘adoption rights’ as central to informed reproductive decision-making. From this perspective, birthmothers were responsible decision-makers who deserved public respect instead of scorn because they had had an unplanned pregnancy or were unwed mothers.
Comparing the position of the president with that of Karen Kottmeier, the birthmother, a couple of questions arise: How—and why—did the perception of women’s capacity to make informed and responsible reproductive decisions change in the aftermath of Roe vs Wade? In how far did the fact that anti-abortion activists, conservative Republicans, and the Christian Right framed giving birth as a ‘national duty’ and abortion as a ‘national disaster’ determine the way women were perceived as reproductive decision-makers? Which arguments did members of the women’s movement and abortion rights activists employ to claim that women were capable of making responsible decisions? How did birthmothers like Kottmeier succeed in having their voices heard and how did their position on adoption differ from that of the President or the women’s movement? In how far did assumptions on race and class shape the debates and determine the decision-making options of birthmothers and birthparents? Finally, did Reagan’s intended conservative revolution succeed in channelling women’s reproductive decision-making?
While current scholarship on reproductive decision-making and abortion rights in the United States is extremely rich, the perspective of birthmothers, birthparents, and adoptees merits more attention. The same holds true for President Reagan’s adoption campaign which has not played a major role in the large body of scholarship on the 1980s. Addressing Reagan’s emphasis on adoption as well as the self-positioning of birthmothers and adoptees in the 1980s will thus provide a fresh perspective on the political and normative struggles on reproductive decision-making in the period. This article will first briefly investigate President Reagan’s critique of abortion rights and his related pro-adoption campaign, then look at the pro-choice camp’s counter-strategies and finally analyse more broadly the claims made by the national organization of former birthparents in the United States, Concerned United Birthparents (CUB), founded in 1976. Thus, it will argue that focusing on abortion and adoption as the two poles of reproductive decision-making during, the 1980s will significantly enlarge our perception of the way women’s agency was framed in public debates and expert discourses on reproduction. Furthermore, this approach will add to our understanding how women challenged moral prejudices and gender boundaries even in most unconventional ways. Source material for this analysis comes from the Reagan administration, the pro-choice movement (National Organization of Women [NOW], National Abortion Rights Action League [NARAL], Mass Choice) and the oldest national organization of birthparents, CUB.
Ronald Reagan: ‘brave women who heroically choose life’
‘Since 1973, more than 15 million unborn children have had their lives snuffed out by legalized abortions. That is over ten times the number of American lost in all our nation’s wars’. When Ronald Reagan wrote these lines on occasion of the 10th anniversary of Roe vs Wade, he explicitly compared the aborted foetuses to the rank of soldiers killed in combat, regarding them as individuals who had died for the nation. The quote appeared in an article titled ‘Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation’, published in the anti-abortion journal Human Life Review. The article provided the base for a small monograph by the same title, published in 1984 and containing further articles by members of the anti-abortion movement.
In his text, Reagan neither acknowledged women’s right to choose nor women’s interest in preserving their health. Arguing exclusively for a right to life of the foetus, the President used terms like ‘Holocaust’ or ‘infanticide’ to refer to abortion. Although during the 1980s about 90% of legal abortions were performed in the first trimester, Reagan equated the procedure with ‘late-term abortions’ performed on already viable foetuses. He closed his pledge to repeal Roe vs Wade by stressing the ‘right to life of all human beings’:
My Administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.
The only President who ever published on the issue of abortion, Reagan positioned himself strongly against abortion and a women’s right to choose. While, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Roe vs Wade in 1983, he had emphasized the right to life of the embryo as the primary value in his address to the nation, he used the 11th anniversary in 1984 to proclaim the National Sanctity of Human Life Day. This day was observed annually during his presidency and also under his successor George H. W. Bush. In his corresponding proclamation, Reagan lamented the fate of aborted foetuses to which he referred as ‘children’: ‘These children […] will never laugh, never sing, never experience the joy of human love; nor will they strive to heal the sick, or feed the poor, or make peace among nations’. Reagan’s criticism of abortion as morally wrong and even dangerous to the family—the foundation of the nation—did not come as a surprise. Already as Governor of California and then as presidential candidate, Reagan had underscored his ‘pro-life’ stance. During his first term in office, Reagan had assigned many posts in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) to outspoken adversaries of legal abortion and appointed conservative judge Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. He also supported the ban on federal funding for abortion services and women’s health care introduced by the Hyde-Amendment of 1976 and favoured initiatives such as a Human Life Amendment that sought to overturn Roe vs Wade by declaring human life to begin at conception which would make abortion murder.
Besides fighting legal abortion, Reagan started to promote adoption as a viable and morally superior alternative from his early days as governor on. In 1975, he used one of his weekly radio addresses to argue that no child needed to grow up ‘unloved’ since many couples across America were seeking babies and children to adopt. He reiterated this idea in ‘Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation’ and proclaimed the first ‘National Adoption Week’ in November 1984 (around Thanksgiving), to be held annually under his presidency—with the explicit aim to curb the abortion rate: ‘One aspect of the tragedy of the 1.5 million abortions performed each year is that so many women who undergo abortions are unaware of the many couples who desperately want to share their loving homes with a baby. No woman need fear that the child she carries is unwanted.’ In 1987, Reagan created a Federal Adoption Task Force, to further foster adoption as a viable alternative to abortion. The accompanying ‘Fact Sheet on Adoption’ described ‘infant adoption as an alternative to pregnant women’. Pregnant women appeared as uninformed about their alternatives and hence limited in their capacity as decision-makers: ‘Also, many birthmothers who would prefer to place a child for adoption are unaware of how to exercise that option and therefore do not do so’.
The November 1987 report of the task force, ‘America’s Waiting Children’, insisted on the potential birthmother’s need for ‘good counselling’—not on her capacity and right to decide. Couched in emotional rhetoric and accompanied by photos of happy families created by adoption, the text sought to present ‘adoption as an alternative for a crisis pregnancy’. Besides broadening the range of potential adoptive parents (including single parents, parents with disabilities, ethnic minorities) and turning foster children into potential adoptees, the task force suggested extending counselling to pregnant teenagers—the preferred target group for adoption. The task force also noted that ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers’ (counselling centres operated by the anti-abortion movement that discourage women from considering abortion) should systematically alert pregnant women of the possibility of adoption. With this, the report wanted to reduce two developments perceived as undesirable by the Reagan administration—rising abortion rates and single motherhood, especially teenage motherhood. Finally, adoption support seemed a smart way to court the Religious Right which traditionally was against abortion and for adoption—and all the big adoption organizations in the United States were Christian evangelical enterprises.
Reagan’s anti-abortion and pro-adoption stance met criticism from many sides: Many comments carefully weighed a woman’s right to decide and the embryo’s right to life and decided in favour of the woman’s bodily integrity. Not surprisingly, feminists and supporters of the pro-choice movement rallied against any attempt to restrict abortion rights—their arguments will be presented in the following section.
NOW, NARAL, Mass Choice: abortion rights and women’s right to decide
‘Ronald Reagan is disaster for women’. Setting the tone for their (unsuccessful) campaign to defeat Reagan’s re-election, the NOW argued that by reducing women’s health care and access to abortion, the Reagan administration strove to regulate the most private decisions of American women:
‘The Reagan Administration actively promotes policies to deprive women and girls of access to adequate family planning services and safe, legal abortions. While rhetorically promoting “getting government off our backs,” President Reagan advocates increasing government interference in our bedrooms’. Similarly, the country’s oldest and most influential abortion rights organization, the NARAL labelled Reagan the ‘most anti-choice President in this country’s history’. NARAL was founded in 1969 (first named the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) to fight the state-laws that criminalized abortion and to lobby for legal abortion on a national level. The organization counted many New-York-based feminists and birth control activists such as Betty Friedan, Carol Greitzer, and Lawrence Lader among its early members and developed a strong supporter base on the American East Coast, especially in Massachusetts and New York. Although civil rights activist Perry Sutton had helped found the organization and black congresswoman Shirley Chisholm acted as honorary president, most NARAL members were white middle-class women. In 1983, NARAL and the birth control organization Planned Parenthood commissioned a study on abortion rights, which revealed that supporters of the two organizations perceived (1) abortion as ‘matter of choice’ which the state should not regulate, (2) abortion rights as not limited to a ‘feminist issue’, and (3) the anti-abortion movement as extremely well organized.
The perceived effectiveness of the ‘pro-life’ forces was further underscored during the heated debates on the popular 1984 anti-abortion film The Silent Scream. The film was not only aired by various TV-networks but also made its entry into high schools and colleges. Narrated by the New York obstetrician Bernhard Nathanson, former director of an abortion clinic and co-founder of NARAL, who had become an ardent critic of abortion, the film galvanized supporters as well as opponents of abortion rights. Using ultrasound pictures, the film claimed to show an abortion in real time while Nathanson narrated the procedure. The documentary purported to show an abortion of a living foetus, although the blurred black and white images needed the expert’s comments to educate viewers on what they saw. Nathanson claimed that it was the President himself who had inspired him to produce the film when he declared in a speech that the foetus could experience pain during the abortion procedure.
Feminists and supporters of the pro-choice movement considered ‘The Silent Scream’ a largely successful attack on women’s reproductive decision-making. Activists of NARAL, NOW, and Planned Parenthood (PPFA) argued that the documentary distorted the abortion procedure and made false claims about embryonic / foetal brain activity. In addition, they deplored the absence of women and their decision-making processes as the film focused exclusively on the embryo/foetus. PPFA’s Vice President of Medical Affairs, Louise Tyrer, wrote in a Memo to PPFA’s partners: ‘No woman’s voice is heard at any time during the film. The movie simultaneously elevates fetuses to people and lowers women to speechless and senseless objects’.
The popularity of the film inspired one of the most effective NARAL campaigns ever. In the spring of 1985, NARAL launched its Silent No More-campaign, meant to ‘end the silence on abortion’ (as the film had excluded women’s voices and perspectives) and invite women to articulate their individual abortion decisions. The opening statement by NARAL-director Nanette Falkenberg described women seeking abortions as ‘real and good women who are making difficult but moral choices’.
NARAL asked its more than 150,000 members as well as members of affiliate organizations and supporters to write letters to the organization describing their personal decisions and experiences with abortion. During a speak-out in Washington, D.C. in May 1985 and countless parallel events all over the country, volunteers read select statements and then handed them over to the President. NARAL emphasized that women considering abortion were both ‘normal’ and capable of making responsible choices: ‘We are your mothers, your sisters, your daughters, your friends and we have chosen abortion. […] We are decent, caring, intelligent women making responsible choices. […] We will end the silence about abortion. Our stories must be heard’.
On the state level, NARAL affiliates approached local congressmen and senators. In Massachusetts, for example, women asked their representatives to ensure that government would respect the most private decisions of citizens. ‘We feel strongly that the government should not be the “third person” in bed with the couple’, a couple from Lexington, MA, wrote to their representative. ‘Reproductive freedom is a vital part of personal freedom’. A woman from Brighton informed her Senator: ‘Abortion is not a wonderful choice, but it is one of the few choices that this world currently affords us, and, often, it is the best choice, given the situation’. And another one declared, ‘Too many people these days seem to regard women as merely disposable containers for fetuses instead of as persons in their own right’.
Some statements balanced the issues of adoption and abortion. A medical student at Harvard University, for example, wrote to the President ‘that the danger of outlawing abortion are [sic] immense’. He voiced particular concern about the fate of children born unwanted:
Furthermore, the damage caused to children born of parents who did not want them is widespread and severe. These children are frequently mentally deranged due to lack of parental attention. They are also often beaten and abused. The sad truth is that most unwanted children are also unadoptable because they are of the ‘wrong’ color or social position. These children ruin the lives of their parents, and theirs are in turn ruined.
While the student did not stress the suffering of birthmothers after adoption, but contemplated that ‘unwanted children’ might suffer and even ‘ruin’ the lives of their parents, he nonetheless reminded the President that an extended adoption programme would not solve the problem of unwanted pregnancies. Specifically, his letter clearly exposes the race and class discrimination that characterized both the foster care system and the adoption market: poor and black children counted as largely unadoptable, even in 1985.
Although the Silent No More-campaign produced only 45,000 letters rather than the 100,000 originally intended, organizers considered it a big success. The public speak-out in Washington, D.C., showcased several women who told their individual abortion stories. Reagan, however, continued to promote adoption as the moral alternative to abortion and promised—in his proclamations of National Adoption Week in 1985 and 1986—to offer support to ‘single women facing crisis pregnancies’. In contrast to the NARAL-campaign which had capitalized on women’s informed decision-making, Reagan insisted that women with unwanted pregnancies were unable to make their own reproductive choices. While he was otherwise decrying poor (and minority) women as ‘welfare queens’ and seeking to dismantle the country’s only welfare programme for single mothers and their children (Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC), the President’s promise of financial aid and well-conceived adoption programmes appeared mainly as lip service. No one knew better than the birthmothers themselves that they were pawns in a political game called ‘strengthening of the traditional family’.
Adoption as a painful experience: birthmothers enter the national discourse on abortion and adoption
Since the late 1970s, members of a new social group raised their voices in the abortion debate: birthmothers (and, to a lesser extent, birthfathers) who had either chosen or had been forced to relinquish their children for adoption after birth. Their organization, CUB, formed by birthmother and teacher Lee Campbell of Cape Cod, quickly grew into a national organization with branch offices in many states and regions. Originally white middle class in membership and outlook, the organization actively sought to broaden its focus to include women of colour and welfare mothers during the 1980s—but with little success. In the early 1990s, CUB counted around 2000 members and published two journals, the Communicator and the Family Advocate. Besides sharing information and supporting each other in the search for their relinquished children, CUB members asked for the opening of adoption records to facilitate the search for lost family members. The organization also lobbied for reform of abortion legislation and, finally, recognition of ‘the forgotten people in the adoption process’—birthmothers (and birthparents). Far from conceiving themselves as either ‘helpless’ or ‘heroic’, birthmothers stressed that adoption was always a painful experience and demanded respect for their decision to place their children for adoption. As CUB-member Karen Kottmeier of Denver explained in retrospect,
I am a birthmother. I relinquished my son almost 25 years ago. Not a day has gone by, since then, that I have not thought of him, missed him, and loved him. […] I gave him up because I was an unwed mother, under age and under duress, at a time in history when unwed mothers were deemed ‘unfit’ to raise their own children. I had no support, and, from what I already knew of life at that time, no way to provide a decent life for my child. I believed that both of us would have been stigmatized, and even destroyed, by the fact of this ‘illegitimacy’.
It was no surprise that birthmothers like Kottmeier started to organize and publicly voice their concerns during the late 1970s and 1980s. The new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s (especially the student movement and second-wave feminism) had revealed gender discrimination and fundamentally challenged patriarchal family structures. Many birthmothers, especially if they had decided to place their child for adoption under difficult circumstances, were critical of President Reagan as he publicly favoured adoption, but did not attribute any agency in reproductive decision-making to women. The heightened pressure on young women who became unintentionally pregnant is clearly mirrored in a letter birthmother and CUB-member Mary Ann Cohen wrote to her friend Carole Anderson, who then edited the CUB Journal The Communicator in 1981:
There’s a lot of very heavy pressure again for young mothers not to keep their kids—the pendulum is swinging back to where it was when we had ours […] Repression, coercion, + punishment of unwed mothers are back, + any young woman pregnant now desperately needs to know the truth, not a bunch of pretty lies about how adoption is supposed to be + feel.
In the United States, adoption has been a way of creating and re-creating families since the early days of settler colonization. But before 1850, adoption was not legally recognized in most states. People gave their children away—mostly to relatives—without formal contracts. And families took orphans or abandoned children into their homes to demonstrate Christian benevolence and charity. In the first half of the 20th century, children were transferred predominantly for economic reasons, for example, to help on farms or in larger households. As the country industrialized, adoption gradually changed and social or religious motivations replaced economic motives. Childless couples started to look for babies to adopt to form their own families. After the Second World War, but long before Roe vs Wade and modern contraception, the growing demand for healthy white infants led to the development of an ‘adoption market’: adoption agencies emerged to offer their services to childless couples, often for considerable fees. The total number of adoptions climbed from 50,000 in 1944 to 93,000 in 1955. Adoption agencies approached young pregnant women—preferably White and unmarried—who considered giving their babies up for adoption. This practice was also a response to the social stigma of unwed motherhood which often meant that parents wanted to conceal the pregnancy of their unmarried daughters and hence encouraged or forced them to deliver in secret, and then give the baby up for adoption. During the 1940s and 1950s, a system of sealed records developed, allowing the state to protect the privacy of the young pregnant women to enable them to marry and form ‘proper’ families later in life. ‘Sealed records’ meant that once the birthmother or birthparents had signed the adoption papers and the baby had been placed with adoptive parents, the baby was issued a second birth certificate identifying the adoptive parents as his or her parents. The first birth certificate containing the names of the birthparents was then ‘sealed’, that is, stored with the State registrar or the office of vital statistics.
During the 1970s, this practice of coerced and semi-coerced adoption and sealed records gradually changed. The number of adoptions in the United States had peaked at 175,000 in 1970, when the sexual revolution loosened sexual mores but single women still lacked easy access to birth control, and abortion was illegal in all but two states. But as soon as the pill and Roe vs Wade offered women access to contraception and legal abortion, Caucasian births dropped precipitously and the domestic adoption market dried up. By 1975, the number of adoptions had fallen to 129,000. Until the mid-1980s, roughly 50% of these adoptions used to be domestic unrelated adoptions, another 50% were adoptions between relatives. However, since 1985, the percentage of unrelated adoptions is continuously growing, comprising a strong increase in international unrelated adoptions.
The repercussions of the social reform movement of the 1960s and 1970s and its quest for civil rights and women’s rights also placed the question of adoption reform on the agenda. Women whose babies had been taken away in the 1950s and 1960s started to organize and fight for adoption reform and open records. Since 1978, CUB promoted the nation-wide opening of adoption files to allow birthparents and adoptive children to search for one another. Through its regional chapters and publications, the organization provided much needed information to searching birthparents and adoptees. The pages of the two CUB journals Communicator and Family Advocate were full of search ads and personal stories of loss and reunion.
Alongside these developments, the growth of private (agency-organized) over public (state-coordinated) adoption further fuelled the push for adoption reform. While the ratio of private to public had been 50:50 for domestic adoptions in 1973, 10 years later, 70% of all domestic adoptions were organized by private adoption agencies. This commercialization of adoption did not only turn adoptive parents into consumers who sought their preferred commodity, the healthy white baby, but also had implications for the birthmothers whose reasons for adoption had changed significantly. While a quarter of all children born outside marriage had been placed for adoption during the 1950s and 1960s, by the 1980s less than 5% of such babies ended up as adoptees—even though the number of out-of-wedlock births increased continuously. This development signals a crucial shift: while birthmothers of the 1950s and 1960s—presumably white and middle class—had relinquished their children to conceal perceived ‘moral deviance’ such as pre-marital sex, working-class and/or non-White birthmothers of the 1980s looked to adoption because of economic duress.
The statements of CUB’s birthmothers offer a complementary perspective to those of NARAL’s abortion rights activists and women who sought abortion regarding the dimensions of reproductive decision-making. Having chosen adoption (or having been talked into or even forced into adoption), birthmothers considered the long-term effects of reproductive decisions and the immense impact of gender norms and family values from a different angle. This is revealed in a letter of a birthmother from Pennsylvania, associated with CUB, to the editors of the women’s health movement handbook ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’ (OBOS). She argued that adoption was a painful, albeit important reproductive decision which some women preferred over abortion:
As a personal experience, you will readily understand that giving up a child is one of the most devastating passages a woman can undergo. There is of course some rhetoric implied on this in the pro-choice campaign: No woman should have to bear a child she can (or will) not raise. But even the availability of abortion will not settle it all. For various reasons women will always bear children into nearly impossible situations. And poor women, as affluent, will continue to want and to bear children. Furthermore, most women […] bore a child they did not want to give up, and only gave up under pressure (economic, social, legal, moral, educational) and for the child’s sake to give him/her a better future than the (apparently) impossible one otherwise faced in the natural family.
In the same vein, CUB-member Mary Ann Cohen—who had collected statements of both women who had chosen abortion and those who had opted for adoption—reported that ‘all found that the pain of abortion grew less with time, while the pain of adoption continued or increased as the years passed’.
Three incidents serve to illustrate how CUB members sought to change the terms of the discussion on reproductive decision-making since the late 1970s: the debate on national adoption reform in 1979, a confrontation with the feminist Ms. Foundation over teenage pregnancies in 1982, and CUB’s reaction to Reagan’s adoption task force in 1987.
When, in 1979, the Model Adoption Legislation and Procedures Advisory Panel suggested changing the term ‘birthparent’ (‘birthmother’, ‘birthfather’) into the term ‘biological parent’, protest letters flooded CUB. Members asked to keep the term ‘birthparent’, which for them signified respect and visibility at the same time. Most letters recounted heartbreaking stories of teenagers being forced to surrender their infants against their wishes. Barbara K. Pritchet from Ogema, Wisconsin, recounted how as a 16-year-old she was forced by her father to give up her child:
For almost 20 years now I have searched for my daughter, taken away from me at birth because I was ‘too young and immature’ to care for her. I had nothing to say and knew none of the rights I had as her natural mother.
Sarah Mussner from Merchantville, New Jersey, noted,
We have never forgotten the child we had to relinquish. Many of us were actually forced by our parents, the social worker, the doctor, the lawyer, and others in authority. We were too young or too poor to fight back.
These accounts underscored that adoptions were by no means always desirable. CUB women insisted that they had been suffering from the loss of their children for all of their life. Some even dealt with the tension between abortion and adoption—both of which were perceived as potential reproductive decisions available to young women after 1973. Mussner argued that denying birthmothers their ‘dignified name’ would rather encourage pregnant women to choose abortions:
Unfortunately, many are choosing abortion rather than part with a part of themselves society says they can never know. And why not? Why go through the 9 months, the pain, the heartache, only to turn your child over to strangers? Tell me—why?’
In the same vein, Nannette L. Nichols explained that upon availability of legal abortion, many pregnant women would seek to avoid the pain and suffering of giving up one’s child and would either keep their children against all odds or
decide to abort the pregnancy, for many reasons granted, but high on the list is having to look forward at a life with a part of you missing in limbo, and having to go on living and dealing with that.
Carole J. Anderson, after 1986 president of CUB, claimed that she consciously decided to place her son for adoption—instead of opting for an abortion early in pregnancy—and thus insists on the term ‘birthparent’:
Had I chosen to terminate my pregnancy, neither I nor my son’s birthfather would now be birthparents, for there would be no child. It is because I chose to give birth to our son that his birthfather and I are now birthparents. […] Please, call me what I am—a birthparent.
Anderson’s letter reveals how the abortion discourse allowed birthmothers to frame their decision to carry their pregnancy to term not just as a humane alternative to abortion but also as an informed decision ‘to become a birthparent’. Her case also illustrates that women could distance themselves from past experiences of being coerced by parents and adoption agencies and from the social stigma of illegitimacy by insisting on having actively chosen adoption—even when there was more coercion than choice to it. In the same letter, Anderson recounts how she was ‘exploited by the adoption agency, which felt that only women who are married (“owned” by men) are worthy of raising their much-loved children’—an experience that turned her into a feminist, social worker, and later CUB activist. Nichols, however, insists that she actively chose adoption over abortion after having made a rational inventory of her options and then having decided in the best interest of the child. To explain her decision in favour of adoption, she uses rather emotional rhetoric and strong images:
We all love our children, we chose to give life, not to take it. And above and beyond that decision, we had to take a searching and fearless moral inventory of our predicaments and situations, then rise above our natural loving and nurturing and maternal, and paternal instincts, our own selfish ties and wishes and dreams; and physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually separate from that child. […] We all, in part, had to commit emotional suicide in order to assure to the very best of our ability, our children’s futures.
As the letters show, in the new social climate of the late 1970s and 1980s, adoption appeared as a moral decision meriting respect, not as a desperate attempt to conceal an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. And it could be framed as a conscious decision, reached both emotionally and rationally—just as the decision to end a pregnancy.
Interestingly, CUB’s insistence that adoption, abortion, and even motherhood all merited respect as potential reproductive decisions in the case of unwanted pregnancy led to a confrontation with the Ms. Foundation, spinoff of the feminist Ms. Magazine, in 1982. Since 1973, the organization had sponsored various activities in the field of women’s rights, women’s health, and economic justice. After the Ms. Foundation decided in 1982 to cancel its funding of CUB’s ‘Program to reach younger pregnant women’ on the grounds that ‘CUB appears to give more support to the teenager who chooses motherhood than one who chooses abortion or adoption’, a storm of protests among CUB officials broke loose. President Lee Campbell wrote a long letter to Judy Sutphen of the Ms. Foundation, stressing that CUB women conceived of themselves equally as feminists, which for them meant accepting women’s reproductive decisions—even if they were still teenagers:
If we grant adult status to younger women who select reproductive protection, why is it that we deny adult status to younger sisters who select reproduction? Are we saying they are adults only if they use abortion or contraception, but children if they continue their pregnancies?
The chairwomen of CUB’s Public Awareness Committee, Mary Ann Cohen, went even further and claimed that the Ms. Foundation clearly privileged abortion as the best choice for pregnant teenagers:
It seems to me that Ms. Foundation’s philosophy about choice is just as rigid as any other Right to Life platform, but in the other direction, especially if a young mother is beneath some unspecified age that you define as adult. You give lip service to ‘presenting all the options’, yet you make it clear that you feel the ‘right’ choice for teenage mothers is abortion. You criticize CUB for being in favor of mothers keeping their babies, and not equally promoting adoption or abortion, and yet you make a blanket statement that most young mothers who refuse abortion are acting on ‘immature self-destructive motivations’.
Cohen felt, however, that CUB’s concept of ‘choice’ was more inclusive than that of the Ms. Foundation as it also comprised the option to keep the baby:
What we are trying to tell you is that our cause is about choice, just as yours are, although perhaps we have made choices different than those you feel are mature or profitable. We help young mothers who keep their babies, not to spite or exclude those who have chosen abortion or adoption, but because young mothers raising their children are in the most dire need, and as long as people like you look down your noses at them, we are the only people that will help them.
As Carole Anderson clarified, the level of help individual women might need depended considerably on their reproductive decisions:
After all, if a mother chooses abortion, what special services does she need? She can fit back into the mainstream, without radical changes in lifestyle. If a mother chooses adoption, too, she does not need special help with where to live or how to make a living after the surrender of the child. She probably will need help in dealing with lifelong feelings of loss and pain, which CUB does provide. It is with the woman who chooses to raise her child that services are needed.
To provide such services and enable women to decide freely, the relatively small CUB needed powerful funding partners like the Ms. Foundation. CUB president Lee Campbell concluded
I know, and other CUB members know, that personal choice must be respected. Well-meaning others thought we were too young to know our minds, too. We will go to our graves paying the price. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty years after the fact, our inability to select the fate of our pregnancies for ourselves has calcified into a conviction that our younger friends must.
In the debate about women’s decision-making, the confrontation between CUB and the Ms. Foundation was emblematic: while Ms. feminists clearly privileged abortion as the prime choice for teenagers and under-age women, CUB members found Ms. feminists patronizing. As Campbell put it, ‘We are each feminists and feel our sisters have adopted values that are anti-choice’. CUB claimed to present all potential options to young women in need—adoption and abortion, as well as keeping the child. CUB did not conceive of its position as a conservative one nor did they identify with the pro-adoption campaign of the Reagan administration. Instead, CUB members insisted on a more inclusive approach to women’s reproductive decision-making that comprised support and help after the decision had been made.
When Reagan’s task force on adoption presented its final report in 1987, CUB became one of its ardent critics. According to the new CUB President, Carole Anderson, the government’s pro-adoption stance vastly overlooked birthmothers. For CUB, the campaign’s central claim ‘that abortion was worse on women’ was just wrong. A simple juxtaposition of adoption as ‘positive’ and abortion as ‘negative’ reproductive decision seemed false as it benefitted adoption agencies and adoptive parents while neglecting the suffering and loss felt by birthparents, especially birthmothers. To them, it was abortion legalization in 1973 that caused a shift in perspective—suddenly birthmothers were not just women with a deviant sexuality but life-givers carrying a sought-after commodity. Specifically, CUB did not agree with Reagan’s depiction of potential birthmothers as incompetent, insecure, and in need of assistance. CUB vice-president Jane Fenton explained to Mary Gall, the chairwoman of Reagan’s task force on adoption in 1987:
We are easy to overlook because birthparents come from all social and economic classes. We are housewives, lawyers, social workers, teachers, plumbers, doctors, electricians, administrators and probably your neighbors. The vast majority of birthparents continue to love and care for their children, and none of us have forgotten either our children or the experience of being young, vulnerable and temporarily without the resources we needed to keep our families together.
Based on their own experiences of loss and humiliation, CUB members pledged to strengthen women’s right to decide, not to curtail it. In their focus on women’s agency within reproductive decision-making, however, CUB met with members of the women’s movement and abortion rights activists—but on rather different grounds.
Two other groups of people started to raise their voices in the framework of CUB and express their concern regarding the practice of sealed records and the adoption system in general during the 1980s—birthfathers and adoptees. For example, CUB’s executive director John Ryan, published his story in the CUB Communicator after joining the board of directors in 1984. He had given up his daughter for adoption in 1969 while he was in the army, assigned for a command in Vietnam. While his wife was the driving force behind the adoption, John felt exploited and betrayed:
The agency offered no help or alternatives, even though they knew Susan had problems dealing with her pregnancy and her feelings about her mother. The agency knew my situation yet said nothing. […] The agency let us walk unknowingly into the surrender because they wanted our blond, blue-eyed, healthy baby girl—choice merchandise in the adoption baby market. This system has to be changed.
Ryan voiced concern as a birthfather who suffered from the loss of his daughter. He described from a male perspective the sentiment of being exploited by the adoption agency—a feeling many birthmothers had expressed before. Finally, he clarified that the ‘adoption baby market’ was clearly raced and classed: healthy white babies were what most people sought. This accelerated the pressure on prospective healthy white birthparents. To give voice to birthfathers, Ryan introduced the column ‘The male perspective’ to the CUB Communicator in September 1984—a venture that apparently did not have much success at it was discontinued after a short time. In CUB’s reporting as well as in the background activism that kept the organization alive, birthmothers’ experiences and losses seemed key.
In 1986, the Communicator published the story of Kathy Bishop to further promote adoption reform. Kathy had traced her birthmother Charie Spooner after 25 years of separation. Both women described their feelings of anxiety, loss, and even trauma: While the birthmother, Spooner, remembered her own powerlessness at age 13 when being forced into adoption by her parents in 1958, the adoptee narrated how liberating it felt to finally meet her birthmother:
When I was growing up, I always felt that I did not fit in. I was very insecure and am still working on that. I had a need inside for answers. […] I do realize that during the time I was growing up, that I might have needed protection, but I am no longer a child. I should have the same rights as all others do. The rights to know who I am and why I am.
Still, adoption records in most US states remain sealed to date. Nevertheless, most states have developed procedures to grant adult adoptees and birthparents at least partial information—and CUB’s activism was central to this.
Conclusion
In his attempt to curtail adoption rates, President Ronald Reagan turned the argument of abortion rights activists upside down. For him, women contemplating abortion were ‘single women facing crisis pregnancies’. A broad adoption programme should spare these women the decision of whether or not to abort. At the same time, this new emphasis on adoption should protect the unborn, families formed by adoption, and the nation as a whole.
Abortion rights activists, however, insisted that women were making conscious and informed reproductive decisions—especially when it came to abortion. For them, the state should not interfere with these most private decisions.
Birthmothers of CUB judged matters of abortion and adoption against the background of their personal stories. Mostly, they had experienced adoption as a great personal loss or even trauma that required healing. Consequently, they considered legal abortion an important alternative in the case of an unwanted pregnancy which should not be abridged or devalued. However, legal abortion figured as one possible choice—besides keeping the baby or consenting to (open) adoption. Their insistence on a broad concept of ‘choice’ brought them to confront the feminists of the Ms. Foundation for their lack of empathy regarding teenage mothers’ decisions to give birth and keep the child.
As a consequence of the social change and pluralization of gender norms and family concepts brought about by the 1960s and 1970s, many women defied as simplistic the solutions proposed by Reagan in the field of reproductive decision-making. Instead of accepting attempts to curtail abortion rights, they insisted on their right to decide. Just these liberal transformations paved the way for former birthmothers, not only to organize but also to claim respect and legitimacy for their own reproductive decision-making which society had denied them for so long. Ironically, their own painful experiences brought them not only to criticize the pro-choice activists’ insistence on abortion as the only legitimate decision in the case of problem pregnancies but also to confront the President and support access to legal abortion. This last aspect, that CUB birthmothers in the 1980s defied the President‘s attempts to integrate them into his national pro-adoption strategy and, in contrast, demanded respect for their individual decisions, reveals a wide-ranging process of social and normative change in the field of reproductive decision-making. In sum, CUB’s activism not only complicates our perception of debates on abortion and adoption, motherhood, and women’s rights in the 1970s and 1980s but also clearly demonstrates the limits of Reagan’s ‘conservative revolution’ for the American family.