HIDDEN GIRLS

MacDonnell discusses the social and personal pressures that led to her giving her son up for adoption in this memoir.

Ten years ago, an email changed the author’s life. Among the spam was an inquiry from a man originally named Angus John MacDonnell asking if she could confirm that she was his birth mother. Indeed, she was; back in 1966, while in college, MacDonnell conceived a child with a casual boyfriend and was sent to the St. Mary’s Infant Asylum for unwed mothers to carry out her pregnancy and birth. She immediately signed away her parental rights, and the religious organization Catholic Charities handled the closed adoption. This message from her son opened a door that MacDonnell’s family, the staff of St. Mary’s, and her teenage self had done their best to seal shut. The author grew up in a strict Scots Irish Catholic family as the second of eight children, and her domineering parents treated her pregnancy as a grave and shameful offense. MacDonnell shares some aspects of her reconnection with her son (which never achieves the kind of cinematic varnish often seen in media treatments of such narratives), but the book is largely an account of how the various sociopolitical stigmas and the lack of resources available to unwed mothers at the time affected her. Despite later marrying and having a “legitimate” family and fulfilling career, MacDonnell couldn’t heed the “incessant declarations that I’d soon forget” her son. Despite the fraught nature of their relationship now, her love for him was immediate and enduring.

Chilling excerpts from her diary of that time woven throughout the text show a woman barely out of girlhood shouldering not only imminent loss, but also deep, systemic ostracization: “In my mind’s eye, I see the nurse who is approaching…She is bringing me my son, but she will not look at me or speak to me. She does not approve of me and makes sure I know this. Like the other nurses and nuns and doctors and social workers and counselors who poke me and prod me, berate me and humiliate me, she believes I should be banned from seeing or feeding my own baby.” Beyond her personal narrative, MacDonnell also adroitly addresses the enduring failures of the American adoption system, such as the post–Civil War Orphan Trains, on which hundreds of thousands of orphaned children were trafficked into new families who largely exploited them for labor, and the way post-WWII prosperity leveraged the disgrace of disadvantaged unwed mothers to funnel white babies into middle-class families who “deserved” them more. Even as new laws allow adoptees more agency in connecting with their birth parents, as was the case with MacDonnell and her son, domestic adoption (never mind the foster system) remains a thorny problem in American society. Though MacDonnell takes no explicit stance on abortion, she makes multiple mentions of how Roe v. Wade and the advent of hormonal birth control gave women the bodily autonomy and choice to avoid the hydra of shame, abandonment, and grief that she and millions of other women have experienced throughout history.

A visceral, moving account of adoption and the systems that prioritize profit and propriety over people.