The Once and Future Maternity Home
An Abortion, Every Day guest column
By Gretchen Sisson, author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.
Are maternity homes back? Reporters have been asking this question long before the Dobbs decision — from the Associated Press proclaiming a “new beginning” for maternity homes nationwide, to The Washington Post’s glowing coverage of Texas “maternity ranches,” to The New York Times’ critical look at the “oppressive sanctuary” of Florida maternity homes.
Histories like Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away and Gabrielle Glaser’s American Baby increased many advocates’ awareness of the complicated history of pre-Roe maternity homes, and this summer’s addicting Liberty Lost podcast (from reporter TJ Raphael, featuring Abigail Johnson) showed many listeners that that history is far more recent than they believed.
I’ve studied domestic adoption in the U.S. for over fifteen years, and I’ve done hundreds of interviews with mothers who have relinquished their infants. I know the harm this system inflicts on tens of thousands of American women every year, and I know their stories intimately. I also know that most of what Americans believe about adoption, and about maternity homes today, is wrong. Adoption isn’t the benevolent system we’re taught it is; it doesn’t exist because we have “so many babies” in need of homes; it’s not the “common ground” we should concede in abortion debates. To understand today’s maternity homes, we have to first reframe what we think we know about adoption.
Maternity Homes Before Roe
Maternity homes were not the start of family separation in the United States—they weren’t even the start of domestic adoption in the United States. This history runs from the forced separation of enslaved children from their parents, to the coercive removal of Native children to state-run boarding schools (and later through the Indian Adoption Project), to the deceptive removal of poor and immigrant children on Orphan Trains, to the taking of white children for the purposes of profitable private adoption.
Within the trajectory of this traumatic history, maternity homes emerged as the primary conduit for domestic adoptions between the end of World War II and Roe v. Wade in 1973—the “baby scoop era.” These years had the highest rates of private domestic adoption in U.S. history—adoptions that were often coercive, and always secretive.
The most frequent resident of a maternity home was a young, white, unmarried, middle class pregnant woman. She would be sent away—usually by her parents—to keep her pregnancy concealed. Often, the homes were church-run. They might be staffed by Catholic nuns, indifferent or abusive physicians, coercive attorneys, and Aunt Lydia-type managers who shamed the resident women and girls for the “sin” of becoming pregnant outside of the racialized and classed norms of their time.
After the babies were born, they were taken from their mothers—their names were changed, their birth certificates were sealed, and they were given new legal identities. Their mothers were told to move on, get married, have more children, and never search for the babies they had lost. Most of them carried life-long trauma.
The baby scoop era ended in the 1970s, partially due to the increased accessibility of birth control and legal abortion, but also to shifting norms around single motherhood. As women began to have greater control over their reproductive lives and pregnancies, they also began to claim this autonomy by parenting on their own terms—with or without a partner. Domestic adoption rates fell rapidly and have never again come close to baby scoop era-levels.
Maternity Homes Today
Maternity homes today seem similar to their pre-Roe predecessors: they’re heavily religious, and many require church attendance or regular Bible study from residents. Some also closely police residents, requiring them to download location-monitoring apps on their phones or turn over their food stamps.
But present-day homes are fundamentally different in two crucial ways. First, women were sent to baby scoop era homes because they were being hidden, not because they needed housing. Today, expectant mothers most often enter homes because they need a stable and affordable place to live. They seek out homes because they’re in crisis; they’re seeking safety, not secrecy.
Second, once a young woman entered a baby scoop era home, there was virtually no possibility that she would be allowed to parent her baby: the child was taken, the papers were signed (always without counsel, often coercively, occasionally fraudulently), the adoption was done. Today’s maternity homes will hand out some adoption materials, but they assume, correctly, that most of the mothers will parent their babies.
In other words, maternity homes are best understood as residential crisis pregnancy centers. They are able to exist for the same reason CPCs do: because our country has no social safety net. In the same way pregnant women will go to CPCs because they need pregnancy tests or free diapers, they go to maternity homes because they need housing.
An expectant mother will take the proselytizing and policing because she has no better choice. If we had a social safety net that gave pregnant people other paths to healthcare, housing, food stability, and living wages, then the deceptive, strings-attached support of both types of institutions would hold little appeal.
While anti-abortion policymakers want to make adoption the “solution” to abortion, it’s never truly been one. Most women who have abortions are not interested in adoption (in one survey, exactly 0% said they were), and most women who relinquish didn’t try to get an abortion. Even among women denied abortion, over 90% will choose to parent the children they have as a result of that denial.
And here’s the thing—the anti-abortion movement doesn’t need to rebuild maternity homes to facilitate adoptions. They already have a national network of government-subsidized institutions that do just that: adoption agencies.
Inheriting the Maternity Home Legacy
Adoption agencies have inherited the legacy of pre-Roe maternity homes—deploying tactics ranging from the merely manipulative to the explicitly fraudulent.
You can see this legacy throughout their work.
It’s in the language that frames adoption as empowering, while the majority of relinquishing mothers are not offered counseling, do not have their own legal representation, and are not informed of their rights.
It’s in the geofenced marketing that targets women visiting abortion clinics, public hospitals, and methadone treatment facilities with advertising for agencies and prospective adoptive parents.
It’s the private adoption agencies that target mothers who have lost older children to foster care, telling them private adoption will give them more “control” over their loss.
It’s the Utah-based adoption agencies that routinely move expectant mothers across state lines to take advantage of the state’s “adoption friendly” laws that have turned Utah into the country’s premier marketplace for human beings — and then refuse to pay for travel home if the mothers change their minds.
It’s the mothers who remain silent about their traumas because they don’t want to risk alienating their child’s adoptive parents and losing all contact.
The legacy of maternity homes is clear in story after story that I have heard from mothers who have relinquished infants for private adoption, who have been impacted by a predatory, anti-abortion industry that targets vulnerable and poor pregnant people in order to commodify their children. Roe may have changed the shape of the industry—and Dobbs may have drawn attention to it once again—but it never truly went away.
Shifting the Conversation
More and more advocacy is taking root in this space.
Reproductive Justice in Adoption is an essential collaborative of adopted people and birth/first parents who are working to bolster conversation around adoption in reproductive justice spaces—starting with a rewrite of the adoption materials on Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s website. Utah Adoption Rights, led by birth mothers Ashley Mitchell and Kelsey Ranyard, fights to inform women trafficked to Utah of their legal rights and to inform Utah legislators of the impact their state’s laws are having. The Family Preservation Project—founded by Katie Burns, who relinquished a child after being lied to by a CPC—seeks to connect expectant parents with the publicly available resources they need to parent.
The work of impacted people will and must shape the path forward to resisting family separation and ensuring expectant parents have access to the agenda-free support that they need to raise their families.
Thank you for featuring this. My aunt, G-d rest her, was sent to one of those places (they'd called them "homes for unwed mothers") when she was a teenager, completely against her will and wishes. She wanted to keep the baby, but my grandfather wasn't hearing it. She was barely conscious during the birth and when she woke up, the baby had been taken away. She never got to see it, they wouldn't even tell her if it was a boy or a girl. Then she was sent home soon after and I guess she was just expected to go back to her normal life. She was never the same after that, developed first a dependency on alcohol and later heroin. She finally got clean in her early 30s I believe and was on methadone the rest of her life. Never had kids, and my suspicion is that she had possibly been sterilized without her consent, based on things she said here and there during her life. She passed by suicide a decade ago, and I think about her all the time, wonder what her life would have been like if she'd been allowed to govern it herself when she got pregnant. My heart breaks for her constantly.
I highly recommend reading Gretchen’s book. I read it a year or two ago and it was eye-opening and thought-provoking. Now every time I hear the virtues of adoption extolled, I think back to this book and think of the other side of the story no one really hears about - the injustice, pain, and long term trauma suffered by these mothers who who were taken advantage of by the adoption industry. Thanks for this post, Gretchen!