"The first few weeks at home, I cried all the time. I'd lock myself in the bathroom or go to my room. I cried all night but I didn't let anybody hear me because I felt like I was being bad. I wasn't doing what they said I was supposed to do, which was: "Get over it. Move on with your life and put it behind you." I thought, "Crap, I can't even do this right." - from The Girls Who Went Away

“Public and private agencies and government policies viewed both black and white women as breeders, but with a major and consequential distinction. The former were viewed as socially unproductive breeders, constrainable only by punitive, legal sanctions. Proponents of school segregation, restrictive public housing, exclusionary welfare policies, and enforced sterilization or birth control all used the same issue of relatively high rates of black illegitimacy to support their campaigns. White unwed mothers in contrast were viewed as socially productive breeders whose babies, unfortunately conceived out of wedlock, could offer infertile couples their only chances to construct proper families.” - Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade

"...How many child relinquishments have resulted from something other than a conscious, voluntary decision? The answer is deeply disturbing. For by delving extensively into the matter, it is possible to compile a substantial body of evidence identifying the troubling influence traditionally exerted upon child relinquishment by such forces as punishment, coercion, shamings, biased counseling, legal disenfranchisement of parents from their offspring, and numerous other forms of manipulations and pressure. As the available data is assembled, one very unpleasant conclusion eventually stands out: that the reigning myth of American adoption has been that of the voluntary relinquishment of children by their [natural] parents for placement in new families." p.41-42 Adoption in America:Coming of Age, Hal Aigner (Paradigm Press,1992) Larkspur, California