... but I doubt the one distributed was any saner than the people writing/distributing it.

they would undoubtedly be printing glossy brochures and giving Power Point presentations now.

They knew damned well most of the girls were innocents, victimized by the church and by the sperm donors. They didn't care, they had people to abuse, work like slaves, and torture. And they did.

But luckily not me.

I remember at the age of 10 or so recognizing that the some of the Catholic Church's precepts were insane.
Another 10 years later, the words sexist and patronizing and provincial came to mind.
Then I saw them even more close up during the Abortion law battles.....yuck.

My Mom was not perfect, but I do like the fact she did nto shove us kids into an organized religion.
Sadly, her 16 year old niece was sent to stay with us for a summer, because she was pregnant,
a crime that my ever so straight laced aunt could not bear to have her town knowing about.
The poor girl was then shipped off to a Protestant
"Home for Unwed Mothers " ( yep..it had that name).
wonder if they advertised that baby as having a "good background"?

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who Went Away tells a story not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up for adoption. Based on Fessler's groundbreaking interviews, it brings to brilliant life these women's voices and the spirit of the time, allowing each to share her own experience in gripping and intimate detail. Today, when the future of the Roe decision and women's reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies.

In 2002, Fessler, an adoptee herself, traveled the country interviewing women willing to speak publicly about why they relinquished their children. Researching archival records and the political and social climate of the time, she uncovered a story of three decades of women who, under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced or outright forced to give their babies up for adoption. Fessler deftly describes the impossible position in which these women found themselves: as a sexual revolution heated up in the postwar years, birth control was tightly restricted, and abortion proved prohibitively expensive or life endangering. At the same time, a postwar economic boom brought millions of American families into the middle class, exerting its own pressures to conform to a model of family perfection. Caught in the middle, single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy.

The majority of the women Fessler interviewed have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing and important look into a long-overlooked social history, The Girls Who Went Away is their story.


http://www.thegirlswhowentaway.com/

This is an important era in women's history that is not taught. I worry that the history will die with us.

placed in one in the early 70s in Iowa by her parents because she was pregnant with her boyfriends child - he happened to be Native American and her parents wanted nothing to do with him. I have no idea what happened to the baby.

Several years ago the parent was dying and the daughter asked me if I knew where he was. I suppose they wanted to tell him they were sorry.

did the 2 year old end up dead in the septic tank?

As a long gone Catholic I learn to despise the church more as I get older.

I know how you feel. The real Philomena still attends mass regularly, I don't know how she does it.