By: Sarah Boesveld
For Bev Colasimone MacDonald, it was a comfort to be in the same room with several other mothers who surrendered their children to Canadian maternity homes decades ago.
But even so, as she listened to their stories and spoke about her 16-year-old self — alone in a home for unwed mothers in Scarborough, Ont., where she remembers one nurse chiding her, saying this was good punishment for getting pregnant — it all flowed back.
“It triggers everything,” she said. “It was so painful, it was so life-altering, it was so wrong. The day I die is the day I’ll find peace because I won’t have to feel anymore. And I can guarantee 99% of the women [here] feel the same way.”
More than 70 mothers and adoptees from across Canada, the United States and even Australia gathered in a Vaughan, Ont., hotel Friday for the first Canadian conference for those who have been separated by adoption — a gathering organizers hope will raise public awareness about coerced and forced adoption and pressure the federal government to call an inquiry.
Since the National Post launched an investigation this spring into historic coerced and forced adoptions that targeted unwed mothers, dozens of Canadian mothers, fathers and adoptees have spoken out about what happened to them. They told of church-run maternity homes that would take in young pregnant women only if the child was put up for adoption, of social workers withholding information about a mother’s social assistance options and of women signing adoption consent forms while recovering from childbirth or on powerful drugs. The United Church recently announced it will strike a task force to look into these practices, and a church representative at the conference said a 35-page archival report on the church’s role is now complete.
“I think for us coming together this way, from across the whole country … this makes a statement that we’re starting to talk, we’re starting to come together and we want that national inquiry,” said Valerie Andrews, the executive director of Origins Canada, which organized the conference. “We want a national inquiry, we want the answers and we want the federal government to acknowledge and validate the illegal, unethical and human-rights abuses that happened to women post-World War Two and continuing after that through their adoption policies and practices.”
Ms. Andrews studied Statistics Canada data on illegitimate births from 1945 to 1973 and the rough rate of adoption among unmarried women at the time and estimated 350,000 Canadian women lost their children during this so-called “Baby Scoop Era.”
Between 1945 and 1975, 1.5 million women in the United States lost babies to coerced or forced adoption, according to documentarian Ann Fessler, who showed her new film A Girl Like Her at the conference.
Workshops and discussions spanned from the alleged cross-border trafficking of Montreal-born babies to Jewish families in New York City to the challenges and merits of “coming out” as an unwed mother — a presentation led by Barbara Estabrooks of New Hamburg, Ont., who became an advocate for speaking out after her appearance in a documentary 10 years ago helped reconnect her with the son she had given up.
Even after reuniting with her son 38 years later, “the grief and scars are still there,” she told the audience. “We both have missed so much. I expected to find my baby but instead I found a grown man.”
Beverley Smith and her daughter, Lynn Newmeyer, flew from the Prairies to seek guidance on how to dig up the truth about the boy Ms. Smith gave birth to at 18 — a seemingly healthy child she was told by staff at the Edmonton creche had died at five days old of complications from spina bifida.
“I don’t really believe my baby died,” Ms. Smith said Friday. “I think I was deceived.”
She never signed his death certificate, which Ms. Newmeyer managed to track down. (It had been signed by a nun at the creche.) Just two weeks ago, Ms. Newmeyer presented Ms. Smith with that documentation. They’re hoping an adoptee — born at the same maternity home around the time of the baby’s date of death — who is now searching for his birth mother may be her son.
National Post on October 22, 2012
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