Margaret Erle, the 16-year-old daughter of refugees from Nazi Germany, fell in love with George Katz, 17, the son of two Viennese Holocaust survivors in Upper Manhattan in 1960.
At the time, there was little birth control, no sex education, and abortion, of course, was illegal. Like more than 3 million other young unwed women in America, Margaret got pregnant. Her family pressured her into seclusion at Lakeview, a maternity home on Staten Island run by Louise Wise Services, the go-to adoption agency of the era for Jewish families. New York State back then required that the religion of a birth mother had to match that of the prospective adoptive parents.