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Curtain lifts on decades of forced adoptions for unwed mothers in Canada
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Greegor
Mar 16, 2012, 11:20:17 PM3/16/12
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http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/03/09/curtain-lifts-on-decades-of-forced-adoptions-for-unwed-mothers-in-canada/
Curtain lifts on decades of forced adoptions for unwed mothers in
Canada National Post
Kathryn Blaze Carlson Mar 9, 2012 – 8:25 PM ET | Last Updated: Mar
12, 2012 10:01 AM ET
There is now a growing movement calling on the government to probe
Canada's historic adoption practices after several mothers have come
forward to say they were forced to give up their children
Karen Lynn was 19 when her mother sent her to a home for unmarried
pregnant women in Clarkson, Ont., in 1963. There, she was known as
Karen No. 1 to protect her family’s reputation, and said it was clear
she would not have been allowed to stay there if she did not agree to
an adoption. A year later, Sharon Pedersen was 20-years-old when she
was drugged and tied to her bed during labour and then shown four
different babies through the nursery window at a hospital in Victoria,
she said.
She ultimately signed adoption papers at the local children’s aid
society, she said, but not before social workers held a pen in her
hand and threatened to call the police because she was screaming and
throwing furniture in protest.
Related
Canada’s murky legal world of surrogate-consultants and human-egg
buyers
Australia urged to compensate, apologize to unwed mothers forced to
give up newborns
Similar accounts have begun to emerge across Canada, and there is now
a growing movement calling on the federal government to probe this
country’s historic adoption practices. Many decades have passed, and
many women have since reunited with their sons and daughters, but they
are speaking out against what they say were coerced and forced
adoptions.
Not every unmarried mother was coerced or forced into giving up her
child, but the women going public today are not alone.
Their stories sound eerily like the hundreds of testimonies submitted
to a recent Australian inquiry into adoption from the 1950s to the
early-1980s, and last month an Australian Senate committee urged the
government to apologize to the “many parents whose children were
forcibly removed” from their care.
Karen Lynn was 19 when her mother sent her to a home for unmarried
pregnant women in Clarkson, Ont., in 1963. There, she was known as
Karen No. 1 to protect her family’s reputation, and said it was clear
she would not have been allowed to stay there if she did not agree to
an adoption
..Beyond a push for an inquiry here, Canadian provinces from Quebec
westward will soon be hit with class-action suits accusing the
governments of kidnapping, fraud and coercion, according to the well-
known lawyer heading the pending actions.
“Clearly, this story is a sad and difficult one, and we’re just
beginning to hear more about it,” said Bruce Gregersen, a spokesperson
for the United Church, which co-ran Winnipeg’s Church Home for Girls,
where one woman said she was told she could be criminally charged if
she tried to keep her child. “This will warrant a great deal of
attention.”
Seven women spoke with the National Post, most telling their stories
openly for the first time, in the hopes of airing what some say was
more than a vague societal push for unmarried mothers to consent to
adoption.
‘To the Canadian establishment, this will come as a big surprise’
Teenaged and unmarried, Valerie Andrews said she was unknowingly given
medication to block her breast-milk. Hanne Andersen said her B.C.
hospital records say “Baby for Adoption” even though the teenaged
single mother had planned to keep the baby. Social workers in Sudbury,
Ont., never told Esther Tardif she was eligible for social assistance
and said if she loved her unborn child, she would let him go.
Most of the mothers interviewed for this story said the coercion was
systematic: From the church-run maternity homes where accommodation
was sometimes predicated on adoption and where mothers had to write a
letter to their unborn child explaining the separation; to the social
workers who concealed information about social assistance and who told
single mothers they could be charged with child endangerment; to the
medical staff who called the women “sluts” and denied them
painkillers, and who reportedly tied teenagers to their beds or
obstructed their view of labour with a sheet.
“To the Canadian establishment, this will come as a big surprise,”
said Ms. Lynn, who heads the Canadian Council of Natural Mothers,
which aims to expose the negative treatment of mothers in adoption
practice. “What we hear all the time is, ‘You gave up your baby.’ What
I say is that, at very best, it was a tragic choice.”
Ms. Andrews has studied Statistics Canada data on illegitimate births
from 1945 to 1973 and the rough rate of adoption among unmarried women
at the time, and offers what seems to be an astronomical estimate:
that 350,000 unmarried Canadian mothers were persuaded, coerced or
forced into adoption.
But some unmarried women may have been grateful to know their child
would grow up in a secure home and spared the stigma of being an
illegitimate child, said Lori Chambers, who pored over thousands of
archived children’s aid cases for her book, Misconceptions, about
unmarried mothers in Ontario from 1921-1969. And not all ostracized
women suffered in maternity homes — some would have appreciated the
shelter, food and friendships that no one else would provide.
“The question becomes not why unmarried women gave babies up for
adoption, but how some women had the fortitude not to,” Ms. Chambers
said. “Most of them gave up and released their child for adoption.”
Ms. Andrews has spent much of the past four years documenting the
treatment of unmarried teenaged mothers in church-run maternity homes,
hospitals and children’s aid societies, at a time when abortion was
illegal, birth control was not easily accessible, and unmarried
mothers were seen as loose women too feeble-minded to parent.
Teenaged and unmarried, Valerie Andrews said she was unknowingly given
medication to block her breast-milk
Joyce Masselink, a social worker who dealt with unmarried single
mothers in Toronto and B.C. in the 1960s, said Ms. Andrews’ estimate
“does not sound realistic,” and said girls were “treated very well” in
the church-run maternity home she often visited in Vancouver.
When Marilyn Churley found herself alone and pregnant in 1968, the
former Ontario MPP said her social worker in Barrie, Ont., was the
only friend she had — although she said the social worker never talked
about alternatives to adoption and that she endured a “horrific” 24-
hour labour without painkillers.
‘I still feel the shame’ “I didn’t know any social workers who forced
or coerced women into adoption, and I certainly didn’t myself,” Ms.
Masselink said, adding that some social workers were, however,
rigorous in promoting the social values of the day. “I do know that
probably went on, though. Women’s stories attest to that.”
An April 25, 1961, Ann Landers column perhaps best illustrates how
society viewed unmarried mothers. In describing a single mother’s love
for her child, she wrote: “Such ‘love’ is questionable. It is a sick
kind of love turned inside out — an unwholesome blend of self-pity
mixed with self-destruction and touch of martyrdom.”
Most of the mothers interviewed for this story said they kept their
secret for decades, having been “groomed for shame,” Ms. Andrews said.
But with last month’s Australian report, the women said it is time for
Canadian mothers to know they are not alone and for their children to
know they were not unwanted. Ms. Andrews has planned a two-day
conference airing Canada’s history of adoptions this fall in Toronto,
and is hopeful hundreds of mothers and adoptees will attend.
The Australian committee called on the government to apologize —
without reference to the social values of the day — and to compensate
mothers, some of whom “recounted a pregnancy marred by systematic
disempowerment,” according to the report.
“I still feel the shame,” said an Ontario woman named Katie, who asked
that her last name not be used because her daughter does not know she
was conceived in rape. “It wasn’t until I got my hospital records and
saw what they did to me that I could start breathing without this
horrible weight on my shoulders.”
Katie said she was given labour-inducing drugs and was not allowed to
hold the child at a Winnipeg hospital, not far from the United Church
home where she was living. The fair-haired 17-year-old was knocked out
with what “felt like a chemical straight-jacket” and later shown a
black-haired baby who was too big to be a newborn, she said.
‘Nobody will acknowledge this because they don’t believe us’
Katie said she never signed an adoption paper but remembers nodding in
a courtroom where she thinks she made her daughter a ward of the
state.
Ms. Chambers said until Ontario children’s aid societies started
receiving substantial government funding in 1965, they relied mostly
on donations, often from adopting parents. She said the societies were
in a conflict of interest, then, and at times struck a deal with the
father: If he consented to an adoption and paid a small sum, the
society would not represent the woman in a costly child-support
battle.
Ms. Andrews, who heads Origins Canada supporting people separated by
adoption, is urging the federal government to follow Australia’s lead
and launch an inquiry here. She said roughly 100 mothers and adoptees
have so far registered with the organization for a future inquiry, but
said Justice Minister Rob Nicholson’s office told her this is a
provincial matter. A spokesperson for the minister confirmed this is
the government’s position.
Ms. Andrews said a July, 2011, letter written by her Ontario MPP, Reza
Moridi, to the Minister of Children and Youth Services has so far gone
unanswered.
“Nobody will acknowledge this because they don’t believe us, just like
for years they didn’t believe the women in Australia,” said Ms.
Andersen, who today heads Justice for Mother and Child, an advocacy
group for those “unlawfully separated” at birth.
She plans to file a police report this month to prompt an RCMP
criminal investigation into women she said were “targeted” for their
babies, many of whom were white, healthy and in high demand, she said.
Ms. Andersen, who became pregnant at age 15 in 1982 and said she was
allowed to hold her baby just once, will also be the lead plaintiff in
a class-action suit expected to be launched against the B.C.
government in the coming weeks or months.
‘I said, ‘Stop! Where are you going with my baby?’
“My feet were still in stirrups and I had a sheet over my body so I
couldn’t see the baby,” said Ms. Andersen, who claims her consent to
adoption was invalid because she said she never actually had
possession of her daughter in the first place. “They wrapped her up in
a blanket … I said, ‘Stop! Where are you going with my baby? I asked
three times and had to yell, ‘Bring me my baby now!’”
A draft of the statement of claim says the class action will cover
women affected by the “Baby for Adoption (BFA) protocol” and seeks
general and special damages for the lost opportunity to parent,
medical treatment without consent, and mental distress.
“I don’t think there is any question there was a policy where, if a
child was born outside of a marriage, that child was not to remain
with the mother,” said Ms. Andersen’s well-known Saskatchewan lawyer,
Tony Merchant, whose firm secured a $2-billion settlement in the 2006
Indian Residential School class action.
In Australia, the inquiry heard the “BFA” policy often led to
treatment in line with the then-popular “clean break theory,” which
said it was in everyone’s best interest to avoid contact between the
natural mother and her child after birth.
A spokesperson for the B.C. Ministry of Children and Family
Development said ministry staff “don’t know of any concerted policy in
the government back in the 1960s and 1970s that would have forced
women to give up their babies.”
Mr. Merchant said the class-action suits will attempt to saddle the
provinces with responsibility for the wrongdoings of church-run
organizations because they were provincially funded agents.
John Murray, a spokesperson for the Salvation Army, said the
government-funded maternity homes it ran — such as Maywood, the B.C.
home where Ms. Andersen said she was starved, verbally abused and
never told of any available social assistance — helped pregnant teens
in a time of need.
“I can’t specifically comment on how the organization managed its
operations 40 or 50 years ago,” said Mr. Murray. “That’s not to say
there weren’t perhaps isolated situations … but certainly, I think
historically the Salvation Army was welcomed and valued by people in
the community.”
A spokesperson for the Presbyterian Church in Canada, which owned the
maternity home where Ms. Lynn stayed, said “there’s no one here now
with any kind of living memory of what went on 40 years ago.” The
Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said it is up to each specific
diocese to comment separately. Neither the Canadian Medical
Association nor the Canadian Pediatric Society would comment. The
Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies passed an interview
request to the Toronto Children’s Aid Society, which did not respond
to a separate request for comment.
Mr. Gregersen, meantime, said the United Church will now comb through
its archives to find out what happened at its maternity homes, but
said he invites mothers to come forward so researchers know where to
focus their efforts.
“Canada is so far behind on this,” said Ms. Pedersen. “I’ve been
breathless ever since the Australian report came out. It’s about time
it was acknowledged that these were forced adoptions.”
Curtain lifts on decades of forced adoptions for unwed mothers in
Canada National Post
Kathryn Blaze Carlson Mar 9, 2012 – 8:25 PM ET | Last Updated: Mar
12, 2012 10:01 AM ET
There is now a growing movement calling on the government to probe
Canada's historic adoption practices after several mothers have come
forward to say they were forced to give up their children
Karen Lynn was 19 when her mother sent her to a home for unmarried
pregnant women in Clarkson, Ont., in 1963. There, she was known as
Karen No. 1 to protect her family’s reputation, and said it was clear
she would not have been allowed to stay there if she did not agree to
an adoption. A year later, Sharon Pedersen was 20-years-old when she
was drugged and tied to her bed during labour and then shown four
different babies through the nursery window at a hospital in Victoria,
she said.
She ultimately signed adoption papers at the local children’s aid
society, she said, but not before social workers held a pen in her
hand and threatened to call the police because she was screaming and
throwing furniture in protest.
Related
Canada’s murky legal world of surrogate-consultants and human-egg
buyers
Australia urged to compensate, apologize to unwed mothers forced to
give up newborns
Similar accounts have begun to emerge across Canada, and there is now
a growing movement calling on the federal government to probe this
country’s historic adoption practices. Many decades have passed, and
many women have since reunited with their sons and daughters, but they
are speaking out against what they say were coerced and forced
adoptions.
Not every unmarried mother was coerced or forced into giving up her
child, but the women going public today are not alone.
Their stories sound eerily like the hundreds of testimonies submitted
to a recent Australian inquiry into adoption from the 1950s to the
early-1980s, and last month an Australian Senate committee urged the
government to apologize to the “many parents whose children were
forcibly removed” from their care.
Karen Lynn was 19 when her mother sent her to a home for unmarried
pregnant women in Clarkson, Ont., in 1963. There, she was known as
Karen No. 1 to protect her family’s reputation, and said it was clear
she would not have been allowed to stay there if she did not agree to
an adoption
..Beyond a push for an inquiry here, Canadian provinces from Quebec
westward will soon be hit with class-action suits accusing the
governments of kidnapping, fraud and coercion, according to the well-
known lawyer heading the pending actions.
“Clearly, this story is a sad and difficult one, and we’re just
beginning to hear more about it,” said Bruce Gregersen, a spokesperson
for the United Church, which co-ran Winnipeg’s Church Home for Girls,
where one woman said she was told she could be criminally charged if
she tried to keep her child. “This will warrant a great deal of
attention.”
Seven women spoke with the National Post, most telling their stories
openly for the first time, in the hopes of airing what some say was
more than a vague societal push for unmarried mothers to consent to
adoption.
‘To the Canadian establishment, this will come as a big surprise’
Teenaged and unmarried, Valerie Andrews said she was unknowingly given
medication to block her breast-milk. Hanne Andersen said her B.C.
hospital records say “Baby for Adoption” even though the teenaged
single mother had planned to keep the baby. Social workers in Sudbury,
Ont., never told Esther Tardif she was eligible for social assistance
and said if she loved her unborn child, she would let him go.
Most of the mothers interviewed for this story said the coercion was
systematic: From the church-run maternity homes where accommodation
was sometimes predicated on adoption and where mothers had to write a
letter to their unborn child explaining the separation; to the social
workers who concealed information about social assistance and who told
single mothers they could be charged with child endangerment; to the
medical staff who called the women “sluts” and denied them
painkillers, and who reportedly tied teenagers to their beds or
obstructed their view of labour with a sheet.
“To the Canadian establishment, this will come as a big surprise,”
said Ms. Lynn, who heads the Canadian Council of Natural Mothers,
which aims to expose the negative treatment of mothers in adoption
practice. “What we hear all the time is, ‘You gave up your baby.’ What
I say is that, at very best, it was a tragic choice.”
Ms. Andrews has studied Statistics Canada data on illegitimate births
from 1945 to 1973 and the rough rate of adoption among unmarried women
at the time, and offers what seems to be an astronomical estimate:
that 350,000 unmarried Canadian mothers were persuaded, coerced or
forced into adoption.
But some unmarried women may have been grateful to know their child
would grow up in a secure home and spared the stigma of being an
illegitimate child, said Lori Chambers, who pored over thousands of
archived children’s aid cases for her book, Misconceptions, about
unmarried mothers in Ontario from 1921-1969. And not all ostracized
women suffered in maternity homes — some would have appreciated the
shelter, food and friendships that no one else would provide.
“The question becomes not why unmarried women gave babies up for
adoption, but how some women had the fortitude not to,” Ms. Chambers
said. “Most of them gave up and released their child for adoption.”
Ms. Andrews has spent much of the past four years documenting the
treatment of unmarried teenaged mothers in church-run maternity homes,
hospitals and children’s aid societies, at a time when abortion was
illegal, birth control was not easily accessible, and unmarried
mothers were seen as loose women too feeble-minded to parent.
Teenaged and unmarried, Valerie Andrews said she was unknowingly given
medication to block her breast-milk
Joyce Masselink, a social worker who dealt with unmarried single
mothers in Toronto and B.C. in the 1960s, said Ms. Andrews’ estimate
“does not sound realistic,” and said girls were “treated very well” in
the church-run maternity home she often visited in Vancouver.
When Marilyn Churley found herself alone and pregnant in 1968, the
former Ontario MPP said her social worker in Barrie, Ont., was the
only friend she had — although she said the social worker never talked
about alternatives to adoption and that she endured a “horrific” 24-
hour labour without painkillers.
‘I still feel the shame’ “I didn’t know any social workers who forced
or coerced women into adoption, and I certainly didn’t myself,” Ms.
Masselink said, adding that some social workers were, however,
rigorous in promoting the social values of the day. “I do know that
probably went on, though. Women’s stories attest to that.”
An April 25, 1961, Ann Landers column perhaps best illustrates how
society viewed unmarried mothers. In describing a single mother’s love
for her child, she wrote: “Such ‘love’ is questionable. It is a sick
kind of love turned inside out — an unwholesome blend of self-pity
mixed with self-destruction and touch of martyrdom.”
Most of the mothers interviewed for this story said they kept their
secret for decades, having been “groomed for shame,” Ms. Andrews said.
But with last month’s Australian report, the women said it is time for
Canadian mothers to know they are not alone and for their children to
know they were not unwanted. Ms. Andrews has planned a two-day
conference airing Canada’s history of adoptions this fall in Toronto,
and is hopeful hundreds of mothers and adoptees will attend.
The Australian committee called on the government to apologize —
without reference to the social values of the day — and to compensate
mothers, some of whom “recounted a pregnancy marred by systematic
disempowerment,” according to the report.
“I still feel the shame,” said an Ontario woman named Katie, who asked
that her last name not be used because her daughter does not know she
was conceived in rape. “It wasn’t until I got my hospital records and
saw what they did to me that I could start breathing without this
horrible weight on my shoulders.”
Katie said she was given labour-inducing drugs and was not allowed to
hold the child at a Winnipeg hospital, not far from the United Church
home where she was living. The fair-haired 17-year-old was knocked out
with what “felt like a chemical straight-jacket” and later shown a
black-haired baby who was too big to be a newborn, she said.
‘Nobody will acknowledge this because they don’t believe us’
Katie said she never signed an adoption paper but remembers nodding in
a courtroom where she thinks she made her daughter a ward of the
state.
Ms. Chambers said until Ontario children’s aid societies started
receiving substantial government funding in 1965, they relied mostly
on donations, often from adopting parents. She said the societies were
in a conflict of interest, then, and at times struck a deal with the
father: If he consented to an adoption and paid a small sum, the
society would not represent the woman in a costly child-support
battle.
Ms. Andrews, who heads Origins Canada supporting people separated by
adoption, is urging the federal government to follow Australia’s lead
and launch an inquiry here. She said roughly 100 mothers and adoptees
have so far registered with the organization for a future inquiry, but
said Justice Minister Rob Nicholson’s office told her this is a
provincial matter. A spokesperson for the minister confirmed this is
the government’s position.
Ms. Andrews said a July, 2011, letter written by her Ontario MPP, Reza
Moridi, to the Minister of Children and Youth Services has so far gone
unanswered.
“Nobody will acknowledge this because they don’t believe us, just like
for years they didn’t believe the women in Australia,” said Ms.
Andersen, who today heads Justice for Mother and Child, an advocacy
group for those “unlawfully separated” at birth.
She plans to file a police report this month to prompt an RCMP
criminal investigation into women she said were “targeted” for their
babies, many of whom were white, healthy and in high demand, she said.
Ms. Andersen, who became pregnant at age 15 in 1982 and said she was
allowed to hold her baby just once, will also be the lead plaintiff in
a class-action suit expected to be launched against the B.C.
government in the coming weeks or months.
‘I said, ‘Stop! Where are you going with my baby?’
“My feet were still in stirrups and I had a sheet over my body so I
couldn’t see the baby,” said Ms. Andersen, who claims her consent to
adoption was invalid because she said she never actually had
possession of her daughter in the first place. “They wrapped her up in
a blanket … I said, ‘Stop! Where are you going with my baby? I asked
three times and had to yell, ‘Bring me my baby now!’”
A draft of the statement of claim says the class action will cover
women affected by the “Baby for Adoption (BFA) protocol” and seeks
general and special damages for the lost opportunity to parent,
medical treatment without consent, and mental distress.
“I don’t think there is any question there was a policy where, if a
child was born outside of a marriage, that child was not to remain
with the mother,” said Ms. Andersen’s well-known Saskatchewan lawyer,
Tony Merchant, whose firm secured a $2-billion settlement in the 2006
Indian Residential School class action.
In Australia, the inquiry heard the “BFA” policy often led to
treatment in line with the then-popular “clean break theory,” which
said it was in everyone’s best interest to avoid contact between the
natural mother and her child after birth.
A spokesperson for the B.C. Ministry of Children and Family
Development said ministry staff “don’t know of any concerted policy in
the government back in the 1960s and 1970s that would have forced
women to give up their babies.”
Mr. Merchant said the class-action suits will attempt to saddle the
provinces with responsibility for the wrongdoings of church-run
organizations because they were provincially funded agents.
John Murray, a spokesperson for the Salvation Army, said the
government-funded maternity homes it ran — such as Maywood, the B.C.
home where Ms. Andersen said she was starved, verbally abused and
never told of any available social assistance — helped pregnant teens
in a time of need.
“I can’t specifically comment on how the organization managed its
operations 40 or 50 years ago,” said Mr. Murray. “That’s not to say
there weren’t perhaps isolated situations … but certainly, I think
historically the Salvation Army was welcomed and valued by people in
the community.”
A spokesperson for the Presbyterian Church in Canada, which owned the
maternity home where Ms. Lynn stayed, said “there’s no one here now
with any kind of living memory of what went on 40 years ago.” The
Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said it is up to each specific
diocese to comment separately. Neither the Canadian Medical
Association nor the Canadian Pediatric Society would comment. The
Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies passed an interview
request to the Toronto Children’s Aid Society, which did not respond
to a separate request for comment.
Mr. Gregersen, meantime, said the United Church will now comb through
its archives to find out what happened at its maternity homes, but
said he invites mothers to come forward so researchers know where to
focus their efforts.
“Canada is so far behind on this,” said Ms. Pedersen. “I’ve been
breathless ever since the Australian report came out. It’s about time
it was acknowledged that these were forced adoptions.”
Geopelia
Mar 17, 2012, 9:16:26 AM3/17/12
to
"Greegor" <gree...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:7c61b30a-66ec-44b2...@i2g2000vbv.googlegroups.com...
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/03/09/curtain-lifts-on-decades-of-forced-adoptions-for-unwed-mothers-in-canada/
Curtain lifts on decades of forced adoptions for unwed mothers in
Canada National Post
(Snipped)
Curtain lifts on decades of forced adoptions for unwed mothers in
Canada National Post
It was much the same in New Zealand, before the Domestic Purposes Benefit.
That was supposed to be an emergency benefit, but some girls treat it as a
permanent allowance. Of course, it is far too little to raise a child on,
once they grow past the baby stage and start school.
Now the government is going to force the mothers to go out to work. All very
well, but childcare is expensive and the jobs just aren't there.
Adoption seems to have gone out of fashion now, and doesn't seem to be
offered as a choice. But abortion is legal, and widely used.
Everybody loves a baby, but babies grow into tiresome toddlers. I wonder if
the girls realise how difficult it will be in the future, when reality sets
in and they find themselves trapped.
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