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

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption by Gabrielle Glaser Marianne Novy (bio) Rev. of American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption GABRIELLE GLASER, Viking, 2020 343 pp. $28.00 (hardback) ISBN: 9780735224681 Gabrielle Glaser's American Baby: A Mother, A Child and the Shadow History of Adoption combines the attention to emotion of a memoir (though the memories are found by interviewing) with the big picture research of a journalist to provide a stunning indictment of the procedures of some adoption agencies and maternity homes. She focuses on a 1961 case where the forced relinquishment for adoption is particularly egregious because the birthparents planned to marry but the girl, at seventeen, was threatened by her social worker with juvenile hall if she did not sign relinquishment papers, and where the consequences of sealed records were particularly harmful because of inherited tendencies toward disease that killed the adoptee in his fifties. A science writer with a focus on reproductive issues, Glaser met David Rosenberg when they both lived in Oregon during his long search to locate his birth-parents, and was touched by his story, which included a kidney donation from a friend in the absence of biological kin. They stayed in touch. Years later, after she moved to New York, where he was born and spent much of his childhood, he told her when DNA analysis put him in contact with his still-New-York-resident birthmother, Margaret Katz. Glaser learned in her interviews about the tyranny of Margaret's mother, who signed the papers removing her daughter's legal custody and allowing little Stephen, David's birth name, to be moved to a foster home without her knowledge. While in foster care, he was moved three times before he was given to the Rosenbergs. Margaret had been under surveillance in a maternity home where she was given no information about childbirth or birth control and told to make no friends there and forget everything. The agency, Louise Wise, lied about adoptive parents to Margaret and about Margaret and her fiancé to the adoptive parents. By the time the adoption papers were signed, Margaret and her fiancé were married, but this did not return her maternal rights. Even her attempts to protect her adopted-away child by telling Louise Wise, when his grandparents were diagnosed with three forms of cancer and his birthfather with sarcoidosis and diabetes, were frustrated. She was always told not to call, eventually threatened with police intervention; the information was never passed on to her son. Margaret feared that her next son will be taken and always wondered about Stephen when she saw dark-haired little boys near his age. Glaser puts this narrative, many of its details familiar from birthmothers' memoirs, in a larger frame by her research—Stephen's file reveals that one pediatrician prescribed the addictive drug phenobarbital for sleep problems at six weeks (82)—and she learns other troubling facts about how babies could be treated while in the custody of adoption agencies with no one to protect them. As part of one experiment, newborns and older babies were "shot" with guns made of rubber [End Page 131] bands to test their response to pain, which was supposed to show their intelligence and help place them with "appropriate" adoptive parents. In another experiment, the source of several films and memoirs, Louise Wise separated twins and triplets from each other and placed them with families with varying parental styles (some obviously difficult) to test the relative importance of nature and nurture. In spite of Maternal Care and Mental Health, John Bowlby's book on the child's need for consistency, published 1951 and circulating widely, this agency and others placed children in foster care so their intelligence could be tested before trying to give them a permanent home. But beyond these stories immediately relevant to her central figures, Glaser provides a brief history of adoption in the US, including nineteenth century orphan trains that moved children into indentured servitude, baby farms where ninety-six percent of the children might die, the selling of black market babies, and the beginnings of...