This Is What No One Tells You About Adoption We have been trained to see adoption as a fairy-tale ending to a tragic story.
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I was adopted at three weeks of age and grew up in a loving family. My parents told me from the very beginning I was adopted, but I had no access to information about my origins because closed adoption was the norm in the United States well into the 1970s.
Back then, most birth parents signed away their rights to contact their child (often unwillingly), and the child’s original birth certificate was amended, with the adoptive parents’ names replacing the birth parents’. As a baby, my origins were literally erased.
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Listen to Jennifer Havlik as she recommends American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption by Gabrielle Glaser. This is Jennifer Havlik with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today I’m recommending
American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption by Gabrielle Glaser. This recently released work of nonfiction tells the story of Margaret Erle who falls in love and becomes pregnant with her first child at the age of sixteen. Unfortunately for Margaret and many young women like her, she came of age at a time when birth control was difficult to obtain, abortions were illegal, and young, unwed mothers were deemed pariahs. With the threat of eternal shame looming over her family, Margaret is sent to a home for unwed mothers where she discreetly gives birth. While she dreams of marrying her boyfriend and keeping her son, she doesn’t realize the battle she’s up against.
Letter from the Editor: The Nora story evolves into book project msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Letter from the Editor: The Nora story evolves into book project
Updated Mar 07, 2021;
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From time to time, a newspaper story is so compelling it becomes a book. But not without a lot of work.
And, now, this month, it will hit the shelves. The book project arose from his coverage of Nora, the polar bear cub that lived at the Oregon Zoo for a time and, now grown, is due back there soon.
Williams’ five-part series for The Oregonian/OregonLive, featuring photography by Dave Killen, won numerous journalism prizes but a full-length book treatment wasn’t really on his mind.
Renee Ghert-Zand is a reporter and feature writer for The Times of Israel.
Stephen Mark Erle (later David Rosenberg) at age six months in 1962. His birth mother Margaret Erle was coerced into signing away her parental rights. This photo was taken during the first of just two meetings Margaret and the baby s father birth father George Katz were allowed with him while in foster care prior to his adoption. (Courtesy of Margaret Erle Katz)
George Katz and Margaret Erle, when Margaret was six months pregnant and about to be sent to the Lakeview Home for Unwed Jewish Mothers on Staten Island, 1961. (Courtesy of Margaret Erle Katz)