The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe V. Wade

This book floored me. Ann Fessler brings forth the secret stories of an event that affected over a million women in the decades before Roe v. Wade: the surrender of their babies for adoption due to familial, religious, and social pressures.

She presents mother after mother who, having gotten impregnated young, in an environment where sex and pregnancy were almost never discussed, were sent away to have their babies in private, and then forced to relinquish their babies. The mothers recount the agony, loneliness, and fear of this experience, and how it marked the rest of their lives.

Fessler also details the history of this time–the desperate need to conform, the fear that the mother’s parents felt, the “maternity homes,” and the social and religious scorn inflicted upon them but not the young men with whom they had conceived. The stories are gut-wrenching and the pain is palpable. Their lack of consent at this separation is apparent, and so was their ability to do anything about it, forced as they were by parental and religious figures, and social stigma.

It is not entirely accurate to call it a memoir, but it thoroughly relays the most devastating and significant events of so many women’s lives, and captures a massive historical event that few have ever studied.