When Julia MacDonnell's relinquished son found her just a few years after Massachusetts opened its sealed adoption records to adult adoptees, she was jubilant. Not only would he forgive her for signing away her parental rights to him nearly a half century before, he'd join his much younger half-siblings in a big happy blended family. She'd be able, at long last, to emerge from the secret that had controlled more than two thirds of her life. But that is not what happened.
“Hidden Girls: A Birth Mother's Story of Reunion and Reckoning” brings readers into the emotional heart of adoption loss, showing how the secrets and silence of closed adoption permanently twist kinship histories and undermine the compassion of those involved in it.
MacDonnell, the award-winning author of two novels and a collection of short stories, was astounded when the son she'd relinquished as a teenager reached out to her via email after nearly 50 years. Mad with grief when they took him away, she'd kept the secret required by her parents in order to come back home. She'd accepted this humiliation and degradation as a kind of penance, a necessary offering. That is, until her son's sudden and unexpected reappearance in her life.
Writing about her experience, MacDonnell soon realized that the secret about her bastard son contained a host of other secrets, evasions, and equivocations in her family and the culture at large. Hence, her story was not only hers. Rather, it reflected the stories of countless other girls and women who'd lost their babies to secret adoption in the decades after World War II. Her story reflects the century's feminist battles for reproductive rights and healthcare. In answering the questions about what had happened to her, MacDonnell also shows what happened to as many as four million unmarried females during the years surrounding World War II and which may happen again with the overturning of Roe v Wade and the seemingly endless to struggle to hold onto reproductive choice.
Julia MacDonnell puts flesh on the bones of one of the most shameful parts of recent U.S. history: the Baby Scoop Era, when untold numbers of women were shamed, coerced and forced into relinquishing children born out of wedlock for secretive adoptions, then ordered to return to their lives as though nothing had happened. For far too long, our society has pretended nothing did. “Hidden Girl” is an important, beautifully told accounting of that terrible history, and a timely warning that we not repeat its mistakes.
