By Sheila Ganz
"Take your clothes off, or I'll cut them off!" My back is against the wall. My feet are trying to find solid ground on top of his bed. It's a narrow little room. He waves an empty wine bottle at me and echoes his demand.
He's blocking my way to the stairs. "Now!" Petrified, I take my T-shirt off. "Everything!" I turn my head away in disgust. He rapes me.
Late that night, safe in my room, I wonder what, if anything, I can do to make sure I'm not pregnant. When my parents told me they couldn't afford to send me back to the Museum School, I was upset. I was away for a year, and now my sister and brother are starting college too. How do I tell my parents I drove into Boston to see this guy because I wanted someone to talk to? I'm 20. It's the end of the summer of 1968. My parents and I haven't been getting along since I hit puberty.
When I don't get my period, I tell my mother. She takes me to a doctor. After a quick examination, the doctor declares, "You're pregnant." I tell my parents I went to see this guy and he forced me. They say, "You shouldn't have been there in the first place."
They take me to look at a home for unwed mothers. I don't want to be there. So I get a job, save my money, buy a car and head out 'cross country to Los Angeles.
On January 19, 1969, just east of Pittsburgh, PA, I skid on some ice at the top of the hill. The car flips over and I am pinned underneath. The impact fractures my pelvis. I'm five months pregnant. I'm in the hospital for two months. With no place else to go, the social worker in the hospital makes arrangements for me to go into the Booth Memorial Home for Unwed Mothers in Pittsburgh for the remaining two months. The home sits alone on a hill by itself and I am still on crutches.
I'm assigned another social worker in the home. Adoption is a matter of paper work to her. She doesn't give me any choices, options, or ask me what I want to do. She tells me I can name my baby, but the adoptive parents don't have to keep the given name. I do name her, but hereafter only think of her as "my baby."
Two days after I give birth to my daughter I get to hold her for about ten minutes. I am
struck by what a miracle life is and how much she looks like me. I want to keep her, but I had to pay to be in the home and have very little money left. I'm in a strange city with no idea what to do, or where to go. I no longer have my car. I don't know about welfare. I don't know I can put my baby in foster care until I get a job and a place to live. I call my parents to ask if I can bring her home. They say, "No."
The nurse tells me to go on with my life. My baby is going to a good home with a two-parent family. It's best for her. When I leave, a piece of my heart rips out of me.
Legitimacy is a major cornerstone of patriarchy. When a person steps outside the traditional father-mother-child family structure they are often shamed and shunned within their family and society. The only way back over the line is to "pretend it didn't happen." But my empty arms know. My broken heart knows.
I lost the most precious thing in the world to me : my flesh and blood, my baby. The shame of being raped, the devastation of having to give my daughter up for adoption and my endless secret grieving conspire to make me feel I am not entitled to any good thing in life. I failed my daughter and I failed myself.
The separate experiences of rape and unwed pregnancy can get twisted in a knot of emotions and societal judgments. Being raped is a private trauma, a disempowering, humiliating violation of one's personhood. When the sexual assault results in pregnancy, it transforms the personal experience into a public display. Being pregnant "shows."
Society's solution to unwed pregnancy was to erase the event through relinquishment and adoption. The unwed expectant mother is hidden until she gives birth. Then she is expected to relinquish her child to a married couple, who will give her child legitimate status through adoption. The wayward girl/woman is "re-virginized" and the couple has a child. Voila! Society's major concern that everything looks right according to traditional standards has been accomplished. As a "kindness" to her, there is no acknowledgment of the trauma of rape, or of relinquishment. Everyone around her denies the truth of her experience and the rape survivor/birthmother is silently reintegrated back into society.
Having no choice but to "surrender" my daughter for adoption cemented my victimhood. It cut deep within my being, impacting my self-esteem and my ability to make positive decisions for myself. I react passively to outside forces. I start believing everything is out of my control. The shroud of victimhood is unshakeable. It follows me everywhere… to unsatisfying jobs, an abusive marriage, into the farthest reaches of my soul. The emotion of passivity freezes me in a kind of ceaseless numbing pain. I live for the day when I will find my baby.
Adoption records were closed in most states during the 1930s and 40s. It was the Great Depression and thousands of children whose parents were indigent, homeless, unmarried, or dead, needed homes. Closed records were considered an incentive to prospective adoptive parents. This way they didn't have to worry about the birthparents finding their children. Closed records also protected the child from the stigma of illegitimacy and the unmarried mother from the shame of out-of-wedlock pregnancy.
Closed adoption record laws are the third assault on birthmothers who were raped. These laws legitimize the first two traumas by keeping them secret. This "no tell" law protects the victim as well as the abuser. Sealed records keep adoptees on the fringe of society by treating them like second class citizens unable to obtain a universal document, their original birth certificate.
The world has changed since then. Single mothers are a norm. This is the Information Age in which people are can be found on the Internet. Some things persist. There's still the line, that once-crossed brands you as "a bad, abusive, uncaring abandoner." The stigma of being a birthmother is alive and well. Making birthmothers the "bad guy" is the easy way out for society. This way they don't have to deal with us as thinking, feeling people with hearts and souls just like everybody else.
The current argument to keep adoption records closed is to preserve the identity of unwed mothers. Advocates for closed records say that unwed mothers were shamed and they will hide her in her shame. They wrote the Uniform Adoption Act that keeps records closed for 99 years. She will never see her child again. Her child will never call her mother. She will be buried with her shame.
I personally do not believe these lobbyists, paid by adoption agencies, give a hoot about birthmothers. With closed adoption records, adoption agencies don't have to divulge how they conduct their business...to anyone. Society should beware of cover-ups. Where there is no accountability, abuse cannot be far behind. We also need to address the politics of the image that says there is "no difference" between biological and adoptive families. is notion glosses over the fact that the child has a birth family and that they matter. With closed records, birthparents and their children are sealed off from each other.
When my daughter is thirteen, my desire to find her slowly makes its way to the surface of my life. With a friend's help I take the first step to contact the adoption agency and update my file with medical information. After the agency confirms the information was passed on to the adoptive family, my world looks different. For the first time, I know my baby is alive.
Two years later, in graduate school at San Francisco State University, my secret bursts out of its seams. I am inspired to write a play about my experience as a birthmother. I am determined to tell the world the truth about how losing my daughter to adoption has affected my life. It is tortuous to write. When it comes time to present my project in class, I shiver in fear as I tell my story. I am sure they will throw rocks at me. When I finish, a woman comes up to me and tells me that she, too, is a birthmother. She asks me not to tell anyone. An interesting thing starts to happen. In talking to people, it invariably comes up that I am writing a play and they ask, "What's it about?" I shrink for a minute or two and then I tell them. I tell lots and lots of people my story. Most are sympathetic. Gradually, my fear of telling dissipates. Telling my story is healing. At last I feel validated for all that I have been through.
One afternoon, Pat Ferrero, my professor and the head of CEIA, Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Arts, visits me in my studio. We work on the old Navy base in Tiburon, just over the Golden Gate Bridge. I am writing my play on the second floor porch of one of the empty barracks buildings. Looking out over the bay we discuss the play. The perfect blue sky begins to crack when Pat asks, "Why didn't you call the police?" I have no answer. I think back. Why was I so passive? Why didn't I call the police? It is the most logical question in the world.
The rest of the day, I try to answer the question. When I get home, I go to my room and walk to my dresser. I look at myself in the mirror. There's something not right about my hair. I brush it. Maybe I should cut it. I start to get the scissors and stop. I want my hair to grow.
Pat's question won't go away. "I couldn't call the police because… I was afraid my father would go after him and get hurt. The guy said he was in a gang war with rifles the night before. That's when I got up to leave. I didn't want to have sex with him and he knew it!"
"You threatened me. I hate you! Why did you do this to me?!"
I land on my bed. I look at my pillow and hit it.
"You ruined my life!"
I punch it again. "You! You took advantage of me!" I want to scream and rip the heart out of my pillow. I shake it. "You attacked me! You scared me. You used me. I wish you were in front of me right now so I could punch you! Shake you! Kick you!"I pound my pillow over and over again. "NO! NO!"
The familiar mass of sharp dark pain fills my heart and chest. Tears stream down my face. "You forced me." It feels like razors pointing into my breasts. "Get out of me!" I punch my soggy mangled pillow. I collapse onto it. A thick silence hangs in the air. I gurgle, "My baby…I wish I could tell you a better story for your beginning." I open my eyes and see shards of the dark pain floating out of my body. "Is this real?" I barely breathe. The pain is leaving me. I touch my heart. "It's not there." "It's gone. Fifty, seventy-five, ninety percent of the pain is gone!"
I feel light and sleep deeply that night. The next morning I realize that mass of pain was my suppressed anger. Finally expressing my anger after all those years released me from the pain. I couldn't get angry because I thought it was my fault. I was ashamed of what happened and didn't want people to know. I was afraid to even say the words.
As unwed mothers we are treated as though we are a menace to society. We are not supposed to be angry. We are supposed to be repentant. We were told, "If you love your baby you will give her away, because someone else can better raise your child than you." They're married and they have money. They are still saying this to single and poor mothers today. Having money doesn't automatically make you a better person.
I believe that everybody's soul weighs exactly the same, from the bag lady on Sixth Street to the Queen of England. We may be on different paths and different stages of growth, but our Souls weigh exactly the same. Who's to say a single mother can't raise a child to be an astronaut, a scientist, an artist, a gold medal athlete, or president?
So I say to birthmothers, "Lift yourself out of your particular situation for a moment and take the high view. By affirming rather than denying the existence of your child, you allow her/him access to their original birth certificate. When adoptees are given the same rights as other citizens, it acknowledges they do have a whole birth family ‘out there.' Open adoption records validate the existence of birthmothers and birthfathers as the original parents of their relinquished children."
To birthmothers who were raped I say, it would be helpful to get some help in dealing with this trauma. That would give you the perspective to separate your experience of being raped from the child you bore and to whom you gave birth. Supporting the rights of your child, now a grown adult, to obtain his or her original birth certificate and adoption information will de-stigmatize his or her origins and integrate them as full citizens with the same rights and privileges as everybody else. To punish a person for a life time for the accident of their birth is inhuman.
I know many birthmothers who support open adoption records. If you don't feel safe meeting your grown child, you can put your story and important medical information in a letter in case they find you. It's your responsibility as the mother to give your child information that no one else can provide. Everybody has the right to know the story of one's origins. It's part of our birthright as human beings. I never doubted I would find my baby. I never doubted that I should find her. As her mother, I felt it was my responsibility and my way of making things right.
My search was stalled when the director of the Catholic Charities adoption agency told me that my daughter's family had moved out of state. With the help of the Adoptees' Liberty Movement Association I found her when she was 19 years old. She was living in the same zip code as the agency. We met once, but she was very reserved. A couple of months later, she broke off contact. Maybe she's not ready. I send her a birthday card every year. Even if she doesn't want a relationship, I feel that letting her know I love her and think about her especially on her birthday is important. I do have hope for the future.
I remember when I was in high school and struggling to learn how to draw trees, I told my art teacher, Miss Sparks that I felt like a failure. She said, "You're only a failure if you quit."
I am a rape survivor. I am a relinquishment survivor. I am a reunion-on-hold survivor. Being a survivor is not quitting on yourself. It's time for birthmothers to throw off the oppression of pretense and secrets. To step out of the shadows and tell their stories. To stand up for the rights of their children and to be counted. There are millions of us.
Together we can show the world We nurtured our children in our bodies and gave birth to them. And we will hold them in our hearts, forever.
Sheila Ganz recently completed the one hour documentary "Unlocking the Heart of Adoption." This film explores the lifelong impact of adoption on adoptees, birthparents and adoptive parents in same-race and transracial adoptions, against the historic backdrop of adoption in America. For more info go to www.unlockingtheheart.com
(This feature appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)
Copyright 2002 Sheila Ganz
All Rights Reserved