American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption by Gabrielle Glaser

American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption Reviews

• 
  Petra loves Miami art everywhere instead of trees

  This book is a history of adoption in the US and all its dirty secrets and misguided paths, woven around the main story of parents whose son had been forcibly put up for adoption, a mother who never stopped searching for him, a father, whom she would later marry and have a family with, who carried his loss silently, in his heart, and a son who was quite content with his adoptive parents, but... still he wondered.
  
  One has to read the book in two minds. The first in the context of the 21st C where most of us who live culturally Western lives - the 17 year old girl who had to give up her baby in this book is Jewish, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, as was the baby father whom she later married - accept sex, contraception and abortion as how life is these days.
  
  Contraception, outside of condoms and we all know how boys, at least before HIV, would say how it spoiled sex and if you really loved me and I'll pull out and all that shite many young girls couldn't stand up to for fear of losing the boy was almost impossible for an unmarried girl to obtain. Abortion was no harder then than now if you were middle-class and had a sympathetic doctor who would get you a D&C for painful periods (exactly the same operation as an abortion), but a legal abortion almost anywhere in the world, that was not possible. Governments owned women's bodies first, secondly the husband did and it would require his consent to do almost anything - even opening bank accounts, and women were politely addressed by their husband's name as in Mrs. Joseph Clarke.
  
  College was for the acquiring of an educated husband, not a career path. Women were presumed to be virgins on their wedding night. Sleeping with a man before marriage, even a fiance was what sluts did, good women 'made' their men wait until they had those pair of rings. So a woman who had a baby and kept it was forever unmarriageable, bosses would very likely not want to employ her, landlords not rent to her, she would have a very difficult life in front of her should she keep her baby.
  
  In this context, which no one ever thought would change (no one ever thinks their times will change), parents sending their daughters to out-of-town maternity homes and having the baby adopted was what they did to preserve the future happiness of their daughters. Records being sealed was so that the family could forever keep the secret of the baby.
  
  It was also to protect the adoptive parents who might not tell the child they were adopted, there was a certain shame to not being able to conceive although it was 'always' the woman's fault. If it was the man's that was covered up and she would take the 'blame' not wanting his inadequacy to be made public to the world. This way no birth mother could come calling to claim their child. The birth certificate would be changed and everyone could pretend the illegitimate baby never happened and the adoption didn't either.
  
  But times changed, very few couples wait to have sex until their wedding night thankfully. Imagine being stuck with someone you just weren't sexually compatible with?, everyone can get contraception and mostly abortion if they want one. Women go to college to get on a career path. They can now earn enough money to live independently and only marry if they feel like it. Getting pregnant outside marriage no longer means shame, often these days it is quite deliberate. A couple want a child, or a woman's body clock is ticking loudly so she wants one whether or not she has a man in her life. And everyone welcomes the child. I am aware that some religions, cults, cultures and immigrant populations still think unmarried mothers are disgusting sluts (and worse), but we are talking mainstream US culture here.
  
  So now there is no shame, women look back on the days when they were forced to give up their babies and now face huge barriers to finding out anything about their child, or the child searching for the parents is just stymied by bureaucracy It is a present tragedy, but sealed adoptions were considered to avert tragedy then by parents who did their best.
  
  Not so the adoption agencies who saw the girls mostly as one step up from whores. Even now pregnant girls are often excluded from schools (certainly here in the West Indies) but the baby fathers aren't, they're Jack the Lad boasting about who they fucked. And to some of the adoption agencies, the babies were commodities. Sometimes they were sold for money, sometimes they allowed them to be the subjects of medical and psychological experimentation - notably identical twins separated by adoption. Sometimes they would give the babies to upstanding members of some community they supported. They had many reasons for placing babies as they did, not all of them good or even fair.
  
  So the mother, Margaret, in the book went through hell trying to find her son. And through her story, the story of adoption in the US is told. It's a very good book, absolutely heartrending, but it is important to read it knowing that 'then' isn't 'now' at all and most parents were not appalling people but tried to do their best for their children.
  
  The secrecy promised to adoptive parents, to the parents of the pregnant girls, to the sperm donors, has been removed. By and large I agree with it, but still I wonder how many mothers who gave up their babies do not want to be found, who kept it a secret from everyone but their parents? And how their lives might be shattered by an adult child turning up after 40 or 50 years? And how, the children, having traced their mother, and found they were a secret that the mother doesn't want revealed and they don't want to communicate with them, how that child's life might now be shattered too? It's not all clear cut at all, and the book doesn't want to go into that at all.
  
  I watched a tv program from Australia about IVF children tracing their fathers through DNA. Naturally you only here about the ones who want to see their children. One man had been traced by 24 of them all of whom are now in contact and wondering how many more half-brothers and sisters they have. These 'fathers' had almost nothing invested compared to the mothers who gave birth, yet now they are expected to be real fathers to children searching for connection. The science of DNA has done many wonderful things, but it's also opening a can of worms.
• 
  Stephen

  This book resonated deeply with me. I connected with it on many levels. My story parallels with the boy in the book. I was an adopted child. Born in 1959. My birth mother came to the US from Eastern Europe when she was a teen. She was 17, still in high school, when she got pregnant after her first time having sex. Her immigrant Old World parents banished her to the Florence Crittenden home in San Francisco. Her parents were too ashamed to drive her there. She had to get herself there alone, on the bus. After she gave birth to me, she took the bus back to her parents' house, forbidden to speak of it. I was placed in foster care, then adopted by a loving family, where I thrived. As an adult, I searched for my birth mother for many years. A search assistant helped me locate her. My birth mother and I remain in touch, to this day.
  
  This entry is less a review of the book and more a sharing of my personal story. An indication of how the book affected me. It is a very moving read. I cared a great deal for the people involved and turned page after page, hoping for a happy reunion between mother and child (I won't spoil if that happens or not). I also learned a lot about the mainstream system of adoption underway in our country at that time (1950s-60s). That was eye-opening and gave me a clearer (and disturbing) understanding of what my birth mother went through at the "home for unwed mothers."
• 
  Lindsay Nixon

  
  “Adoption doesn't guarantee a better life. It only offers a different life."
  
  Non-fiction Book of the year for me! I sobbed through the end; A must-read for feminists.
  
  If you enjoyed reading the fictional
  Before We Were Yours This is an absolute must.
  
  ORIGINAL BIRTH RECORDS SHOULD NOT BE SEALED. ADOPTEES HAVE THE RIGHT TO THEIR RECORDS.
  
  I'm ever grateful PA unsealed theirs a few years back and through a petition, I was able to get my original birth certificate.
  
  I am sure there are good adoptions; my story isn't one and for most people born/adopted before the 90s it probably wasn't. This book also took me out of my own story and gave me insight into what it was like for my mother. It is terrible how we treat women as a society.
  
  I don't know that I'll ever believe in adoption. I had a negative view about adoption before this book and the facts and history here did little to sway my mind.
  
  What I do know is that mothers who want their babies should be given every ounce of help and support to be able to keep them, and for mothers who do not want to be pregnant, that abortion is safe and available.
• 
  Alexis

  This is a heartbreaking story of American adoption. Glaser focuses on the story of Margaret Erle (later Katz) and the son she was forced to relinquish for adoption, David Rosenberg (ne Stephen Mark Erle). Through their story, she looks at the history and workings of the Baby Scoop Era of American adoption and adoptees' push for information.
  
  In 1961, 17 year old New Yorker Margaret became pregnant by her boyfriend, George Katz. Her Holocaust-survivor parents were horrified, and both sets of parents refused to consent to marriage. Instead, Margaret was sent to Lakeview, on Staten Island, run by Louise Wise Services.
  
  I was aware that girls and women of that era were coerced into giving up their babies and sent away to erase the shame. I did not know the level of force placed onto them. Margaret never wanted to give up her baby and refused to sign papers; she and George wanted to get married and raise him. Instead, he was taken into foster care, and when she tried to get him back, she was threatened with juvenile hall if she did not sign him over.
  
  On their side, as well as lying to and coercing the birth mothers, Louise Wise lied to adoptive parents and permitted unauthorized research to be undertaken on adoptive children (famously the Three Identical Strangers triplets). Glaser draws back into the history of adoption to contextualize this era in American history and how social mores developed into a culture of turning teenage girls into a source of babies for infertile couples. She also looks back at how agencies engaged in illegal and immoral practices.
  
  Above all, this is the story of Margaret and David. Margaret never forgot about her baby, and tried to get information from Louise Wise and other sources after her initial attempts to get him back. David, though he was raised by adoptive parents who cared for him and loved him deeply, still suffered from knowing he had been given up without knowing why or how. Glaser is an excellent journalist and tells their story with great sympathy and emotion.
  
  Although many of the laws surrounding adoption have changed, even today not all adoption agencies or lawyers act ethically.
  
  A personal note: This book was particularly important to me because my own mother was one of the women sent to Lakeview by Louise Wise in 1968. If she hadn't been forced to give up my brother--if she had had the choice--I would not exist today.
• 
  Lori

  I first heard about the new book "American Baby" by Gabrielle Glaser when I read a review by Lisa Belkin in the New York Times last weekend. By the time I was barely a few paragraphs into the article, I knew I wanted to read this book, and I downloaded a copy to my e-reader as soon as it became available (yesterday morning). I finished it this afternoon. I also listened to the author being interviewed on the Times's Book Review podcast.
  
  "American Baby" uses the story of David Rosenberg (born in 1961, the same year as me) & his birth mother, Margaret Erle Katz, to tell a broader story about the history and ethics of adoption in America, and its impact on all three members of the adoption triangle -- birth parents, adoptive parents and the adoptees themselves. And, linking them all, the adoption agencies, social workers and lawyers, who sometimes pressured, coerced and threatened the mothers into relinquishing their babies, often falsified the few details they provided to both birth mothers and adoptive parents, and profited from their losses and pain.
  
  In this case, the adoption agency was Louise Wise Services in New York City (and its affiliated maternity home on Staten Island, Lakeview), which provided babies used in the infamous "twins experiment," in which at least 11 sets of twins and one set of triplets (whose stories have been told in the book "Identical Strangers" and the documentaries "Three Identical Strangers" and "The Twinning Reaction") were deliberately separated and then studied.
  
  Essentially, Glaser argues, the history of adoption in the 20th century was "a massive experiment in social engineering" fraught with shame, fear, secrecy and lies, in an era before second-wave feminism, sex education, modern birth control, safe and legal abortions, and modern infertility treatments. The book is full of fascinating details and historical context. We learn about life in a maternity home (a basket of gold wedding bands was kept by the door for the girls to put on when they went out in public), about the sometimes horrific experiments conducted on babies in foster care before they were finally adopted, about how the practice of sealing original birth certificates came about, about the rise of the adoption rights movement in the 1970s, and about how modern DNA testing is making once-unimaginable family reunions possible.
  
  This was an absolutely riveting book -- I could not put it down. The story of naive teenaged parents Margaret & George, who desperately wanted to marry and keep their baby, was sweet and heartbreaking. I shed tears at several points in the story.
  
  It's a book that deserves to be widely read, and should be required reading for anyone considering adoption -- or perhaps for anyone who dares to ask an infertile couple, "Why don't you just adopt?" Things may be different today, yes -- but perhaps not different enough -- not yet. The old attitudes, myths and misconceptions about adoption linger. While greater openness is increasingly common, adoption records remain sealed in many jurisdictions around the world, and many adoptive parents still request "traditional" closed adoptions. And there are echoes of the past in the growing use of eggs and sperm from anonymous donors in fertility treatments, and in the questions of the children conceived this way. Apparently, we still have lessons to learn...
  
  (My one (relatively minor) quibble with the book (the e-version that I read, anyway) is that I wish the notes at the back were accessible through clickable links. There's a lot of great information there.)
  
  5 stars.
• 
  Leah Tyler

  "They gave birth alone and were then pressured or forced to surrender their newborns to strangers who hadn't explained that in doing so, many of these young mothers would never see or hear about their children again."
  
  A nonfiction expose about the unmarried young women, over 3 million in number, who became pregnant after World War II and were forced to surrender their children for adoption.
  
  Ripping off the lid on one of the secrets in American history nobody talks about, Glaser uses impeccable research and follows the personal narratives of a woman named Margaret and her son David. Diving deep into the story of how in the face of rising infertility rates after World War II, the American government and religious institutions created a social, moral, and legal solution by forcing unmarried women to surrender their (mostly white) infants to married couples desperate for a child to contribute to the baby boom.
  
  But that's not all. Pain experiments were conducted on some of these infants during the time they spent in foster care prior to adoption. Oregon State University operated a "practice home" for their Home Ec department using surrendered babies as human dolls. Mixed race babies had their ethnicity changed and birth certificates falsified if they were able to "pass" as white. The adoptive parents were lied to about the pedigree, mental health, or religion of the unmarried couple. The young mothers were shipped off to maternity homes and threatened with juvenile detention if they didn't sign away their parental rights. Amended birth certificates were reissued stating the adoptive parents were the natural-born parents and the original birth certificates were sealed into perpetuity. Adult adoptees found themselves unable to discover who their birth parents were. And all of this was perfectly legal.
  
  None of this came as a shock to me, for it is a major theme in the fiction book I am writing, but most people do not know this happened. It's time to start talking about all the dirty little secrets America is hiding in her closet and this is one that impacted millions of people and caused outrageous pain.
• 
  vanessa

  If you like learning about social mores in the post-WWII American baby boom, this book will be fascinating to you. I knew some bits of this story. If you've watched the documentary Three Identical Strangers for example, this covers similar ground but is much more detailed. It focuses on closed adoption by following an unwed teenager being forced to give up her child in 1961, and what happened to that child after he was placed in a home with a couple that was unable to have a baby. I thought the story of Margaret and David was sad and heart-wrenching, but also inspiring and touching. The author specifically focuses on Margaret and David's story - which is tied to their race and religion - so there are a lot of discussions of Jewish family makeup at that time and how orthodox Judaism + many folks' survival of the Holocaust informed their decision-making. The book also interjects lots of insightful tidbits about general adoption history in America, the lack of sex ed/contraception/abortion, and how teenagers of the 1960s were existing in a brand new America their parents did not understand. By the end I was googling "baby farms" and "Neubauer trials".... let's just say ethics was not at the top of anyone's concerns a few decades ago. The audiobook was also well-narrated.
• 
  Jill Meyer

  “American Baby”, by Gabrielle Glaser, is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read in a few years. The subtitle, “A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption”, neatly summarises the book’s premise by looking at the adoption triangle from all three facets.
  
  I’ve not experienced any part of adoption first hand. I’m not adopted, I haven’t adopted a child, and I have not given a child up for adoption. But I’ve read with interest the stories by women who have made the heart wrenching decisions to give up a child and those stories about parents and children who reunite after many years. Glaser in her book traces the lives of Margaret and David, mother and son separated at birth, and how they lived during the years. It’s not a spoiler to say upfront that their reunion, when made, was definitely bittersweet.
  
  Margaret was 17 in 1962 when she became pregnant by her high school boyfriend, George. They did marry a few years later and had three more children. But she always wondered what happened to their first born. Glaser goes into detail about Margaret’s time in a home for unwed mothers on Staten Island and the baby’s adoption through the Louise Wise adoption agency. (As described, the Wise agency is definitely the villain in this story). She also recounts the years Margaret spent looking for her baby - looking at dark eyed-dark haired children on the streets of New York City, wondering if this child or that was her “Stephen Mark”, the child of her heart she was forced to give up.
  
  And as the years passed and “Stephen Mark” became David, he looked for his mother. He became a famous cantor in Portland, Oregon, married well, and had three lovely children. He also lost his good health, which made finding her and learning about his health history even more urgent.
  
  Gabrielle Glaser met up with David when she was writing about his search for a kidney transplant and the book soon turned into the story of his adoption. She’s an excellent writer and brings the main characters into focus for the reader. It was a pleasure to read her book. Another book, not about adoption but of interest In family dynamics, is “Home Fires”, by Donald Katz. Look it up if you’d like a good picture of a family in the post WW2 era. Both Katz and Glaser’s books are superlative.
• 
  Susan

  As a Jewish Baby Boomer with friends who were adopted, this book made a big impression on me. I knew the basics of how adoptions worked in the 1950s-60s but hadn't really stopped to think how cruel the process was to both birth parents and their children. The fact that the children were frequently placed in foster care limbo for months while a "perfect match" was sought for their personalities and intelligence is just horrifying to me considering what we know now about attachment, and the damage that can be caused when that process is disrupted. And the shame and grief that the birth mothers had to bear, while being told to "forget about" children they carried for nine months, is inconceivable in today's world where single parenthood is no longer a stigma.
  
  Glaser does a good job balancing the portrayal of Margaret and the son she was forced to relinquish, with the larger picture of how the adoption process evolved over time and the unethical, immoral practices that were carried out, frequently in the name of "science." I wish she had delved a little deeper into the macro issues; while Margaret and David's stories were poignant, there was nothing unique about them. Also this book might speak less to readers who are not white and Jewish like me; Glaser admits that there is a very different history of adoption in the black community that she is not capable of telling.
  
  I had a childhood friend who was adopted, with a biological younger sister who was frequently referred to as the parents' "real" daughter. My friend never discussed how much that must have hurt her, but years later after both parents had died, she found her biological parents through genetic testing. Now in her late 50s, she has half siblings, nieces and nephews who have enriched her life. If her adoption had been open, how would her life had been different? Glaser's book shines a spotlight on Margaret, David, my friend, and thousands of other individuals whose pain was minimized unjustly. American Baby rightfully speaks for them by acknowledging a shameful part of American history.
• 
  Laurie Bridges

  According to American Baby, 1/3 of Americans are connected to adoption through an immediate family member (as an adoptee, adoptive parent, or birth parents). At first this number seems large, but then I thought about, and it must be true. Although no one in my immediate family is connected (that I know of), I’ve had many friends over the years who were adoptees, many friends who are siblings of adoptees, and I have extended family members who are connected. In addition, last year I was contacted through a DNA database by the granddaughter of an adoptee - because I was her closest relative from the “unknown” side of the family (3rd cousins). This book is an illuminating feminist investigation into the history of adoption in the US...how did it evolve? Why did it become such a huge “system”? What are the ramifications of closed adoptions for adoptees and their birth mothers (and even their grandchildren - as evidenced by the granddaughter who contacted me. And yes, I was able to share some information with her). And finally, how have the ethics around adoption evolved (and where is considerable work still needed?)
• 
  Panda Incognito

  This well-written, expertly researched book shares the story of a white Jewish birth mother and adopted child that the author became connected with late in their lives. She tells their story while grounding it in the specific historical and cultural context of post-WWII America and Jewish immigration, and addresses the experiences of people caught up in the changing social forces that led to rising numbers of unplanned pregnancies during the Baby Boom.
  
  This book is full of well-cited, clearly explained information about the history of domestic adoption in America, and the various ways that doctors, Freudian psychologists, maternity homes, social workers, and adoption agencies manipulated mothers and operated at the expense of children's well-being. Although this book does not demonize adoption, and supports it as a valid and appropriate option when a child cannot be with their birth family, the author reveals how often women were coerced to give up their children through barrages of manipulative tactics, threats, and lies.
  
  This book is very eye-opening and touching, and the author did an amazing job of listening to her subjects' stories and recreating the diverging threads of their lives with accuracy and sensitivity. The birth mother, Margaret, shared in vivid, vulnerable detail about her experiences and emotions, and the book is deeply moving. It is also utterly enraging, since the system worked against her so completely, even when she was planning to marry the baby's father, eventually did, and could have provided her child with a stable home.
  
  I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in adoption, family-related history, and information about sexual double standards in postwar American society. This is an excellent work of history and investigative reporting, and even though some people have critiqued it for focusing too much on white experiences, the author clearly distinguishes the limitations of her focus, and does not claim to offer the whole story of American adoption. She repeatedly brings up ways that her work isn't all-inclusive, and simply tells the white, Jewish adoption story that she stumbled upon while interviewing David, the adult adoptee, for another story that she was reporting.
  
  The only thing that is wrong with this book, and the reason why I am not giving it five stars, is because the author is intellectually dishonest about abortion. She mostly sidesteps this controversial topic, and only brings it into her narrative as touchstone in social history, but she never acknowledges how patterns of coercion continued after Roe v. Wade. Near the end, she writes about the staggering number of women who "opted" for abortion after it was legalized, and addresses how this changed the field of domestic adoption by vastly limiting the number of available babies. She never once acknowledges the possibility that some of these women wanted to keep their babies, but were pushed into abortion as any easy solution that appealed to their partners, families, and the medical establishment.
  
  Are we really supposed to believe that an entire, entrenched system of coercion disappeared overnight once abortion was legal? She writes so clearly, and so well, about the social forces that made it impossible for Margaret to keep her baby, and mentions experiences from other girls and women who were emotionally devastated about giving their babies up for adoption. However, she doesn't acknowledge that the same people who pushed, urged, and coerced these mothers into signing adoption papers would have also pushed, urged, and coerced later mothers into "choosing" abortions that they did not want.
  
  All of the same arguments continued, just to a different end. You can't possibly be a mother! You can't give a child a good life. No one will want to marry you if they know that you've already been pregnant. Do you really think that your boyfriend still wants you? You'll shame your entire family. What about your future? What about your education? You have to get rid of this, and you have to keep it a secret. Someday, you'll have another baby. You'll get married someday and have kids when it's the right time, so just let this one go. We'll pay for it. We'll keep it a secret for you. No one ever has to know.
  
  We will never have true statistics on how many women really, truly chose abortion after Roe v. Wade, and I wish that this book acknowledged that. It is naive and intellectually dishonest to move from telling stories about coercion in adoption to asserting that once abortion was an option, the number of adoptable babies dramatically dwindled by the mothers' choices. If so many mothers were used and abused by the system of adoption when they wanted to keep their children, why should we believe that as soon as abortion was legal, so many women in the same situation no longer wanted their babies at all?
  
  Obviously, throughout time, there have been lots of women who have actively chosen abortion because they did not want to have a baby. However, I never fully thought about how deep coercion must have gone until this author's cognitive dissonance brought it to the forefront of my mind. The social situation cannot have shifted that quickly, from many women being forced to give up their babies for adoption, to women not wanting to have them at all. It's a complex issue, and we can never have adequate data on it, but I wish that this author had acknowledged that not every woman who had an abortion truly "opted" for one.
  
  She can't tell us how many women felt coerced versus truly chose abortion, because we don't know, but I wish that she had acknowledged that unknown numbers of women aborted their babies because other people withheld social support, badgered them into it, and wore them down with the same kinds of arguments that left so many women in the 1950s and 1960s with no choice but to sign adoption papers. It is much easier to sidestep this subject than to truly engage with it, but because this book was so well-researched, accurate, sensitive, and even-handed the rest of the time, it disappoints me that the author glossed over this aspect so completely.
• 
  Amy B

  Adoption stories have always interested me...then, thanks to Ancestry DNA, 2 1/2 years ago I found out I have an older brother. This is a very touching book and closely mirrors my own mother's experience as an unwed teen mom in the early 70's...being sent to a home, baskets of wedding rings to wear during outings, the secrecy, etc. So, even as the reunion was happy, the specifics of what this girl went through are infuriating! Fortunately there is much less stigma today.
• 
  Klmondragon

  As an adoptee from the ‘60’s, this book was a sad and informative read. I recently found my birth parents and felt lucky they were still alive into their eighties and could answer questions that followed me around for all of my life. My adoptive parents have both passed away but this book provided me information that helped me see them in a different light. I guess I always thought that the adoption agencies were transparent with the adoptive parents but now I know that wasn’t true and the agencies would tell the adoptive parents anything to move a baby. This explains a lot regarding what my parents told me about my adoption which I know now wasn’t true.
  
  A good read about adoption history in the U.S.
• 
  Krisette Spangler

  This was a shocking look at the adoption process in the 50's and 60's. It chronicles the story of a young Jewish woman who gets pregnant at 17 and is forced to give her baby up or go to juvenile detention. It was a very interesting read, and I had no idea that for many years adoptees were not allowed to access their original birth records.
  
  I did not agree with all of the authors opinions on adoption or single mother parenting, but the book was a page turner. It really broke my heart to read about this poor woman who thought of the baby she was forced to give up every day.
• 
  Courtney

  Though I don't know if I would read this a second time, I have to give it 5 stars. Engrossing, well-researched, and framed by a story of birth mother and her son. Though this is mostly the story of shady adoption practices in the 20th century, as an adoptive parent, I listened intently to every word about the emotions, thoughts, and experiences of adopted children, their birth families and adoptive families to better understand what my daughter may experience as she grows older.
• 
  Kazen

  3.5 stars
  
  American Baby is a book that I would have never picked up on my own, but ended up reading for the Booktube Prize. It's well written, well researched, and well done overall... but isn't a book for me, mostly due to the subject matter.
  
  For more in depth thoughts check out my
  vlog for the Booktube Prize Octofinals, Part 1.
• 
  Sarah

  Absolutely tragic account of the “Baby Scoop” era in which scores of unwed teenage mothers were coerced into giving up their children. This book makes me grateful for birth control, feminism, and the destigmatization of unwed motherhood. I am grateful Margaret had a chance to tell her story!
• 
  Anna

  I have several cousins who joined my family through adoption and have always believed that adoption was a universally positive thing. This opened my eyes to truths that I had not understood about how adoptions once happened in the United States, and I have much more complex feelings about adoption. And I was horrified by what some of these babies went through at the hands of scientists.
  I was bothered by how often the author talked about how many of these adoption practices continued until Roe v Wade as if that solved the problem. Would Margaret really have been happier if her family had forced her to get an abortion rather than forcing her to give up her baby for adoption? It seems unlikely to me.
• 
  Lynn

  Absorbing account of a single mother forced to give her son up for adoption even though she wanted to keep it and tried to, married the child’s father and was never able to get him back. A son adopted about age 3 to loving parents who always wanted to know about his birth parents. The mother finally is able to contact him just before he dies of cancer. It provides many truths about the secretive adoption system that controlled single parenting in defense of protecting the mother and the child that are more unnerving that helpful.
• 
  Raegan

  The history of adoption in America is so much more convoluted and tragic than I had realized. This particular biographical/historical book follows the lives of a mother, father, and the son they were forced to surrender. Glaser, and the family whose story she is telling, hold nothing back in the recounting of their secrets, emotions, thoughts, wishes, and losses. I may or may not have cried at the end.
• 
  Sandra Stein

  As an unwed teen mom in the sixties, I experienced the shame and shunning so genuinely reported in this book. So much of this story hit home. This book is one of those that will stay with me. Somehow reading it has relieved me of much of the negative feelings I have carried about myself. The author did an excellent job of research and weaved in a story that will tug at the readers heart.
• 
  Jessica

  Beginning was gripping but went down hill from there; thought the personal story was better done than the general history/commentary.