Reply #11: Many "orphans" are children of unwed mothers ... [View All]

[Hekate]

... and in more "traditional" cultures shame and social ostracism are pretty powerful incentives for a mother to relinquish her infant for adoption. In previous generations many Irish babies made their way to the US under those circumstances -- life back in Ireland would have been pretty grim for both mother and child, as recent memoirs have attested.

In the US the entire adoption industry was fueled by white, teenaged, unwed mothers. I have two cousins and any number of friends born between 1935 and 1965 who were raised as adoptees -- there was absolutely no shortage of healthy and available blue-eyed babies. It was almost unthinkable for an unwed woman to keep her baby -- in spite of the heartbreak of giving away a child, the social consequences were just too severe. And abortion? Criminal, dirty, and dangerous -- it could kill or sterilize a woman.

What changed? Why is there a shortage of available healthy white newborns in the US now? Several things: first, the Pill became widely available in the 1960s, though not yet for teenagers, and that cut deeply into the number of unwanted pregnancies. Second, abortion became legal in 1973, reducing the number even further. And finally, an unintended consequence of both of these: both the sexual revolution and the Right to Life movement made it much, much, easier for a woman to decide to keep an out-of-wedlock baby -- the first because of the relaxation of social mores, and the second because it proved that at least the woman had not had an abortion.

So what I'm saying is that we here don't know enough about the social strata of South American or Irish cultures of 2005 to be able to judge whether a white woman or girl in those presumably traditional Roman Catholic cultures would be induced by social stigma to give up an out of wedlock child. Certainly, though, the importance of "contacts" to making the transaction cannot be overestimated. It was important in the US in the past, and it is important on the world stage in the present.

In something as intimate as this, I prefer to cut the Roberts family some slack and withold judgment. Call it "presumed innocent until proven otherwise."

Hekate