Denise

In my tiny world of 3,000 Catholics, I got pregnant during my first sexual encounter. It was 1970. Before Roe vs. Wade. Before I’d heard of the pill. I didn’t know any other girl who’d ever faced what I was facing. I didn’t tell my best friend. I didn’t tell my favorite teacher. I didn’t tell my mother or my sister. I didn’t even tell my boyfriend.

“Shame should never be part of any woman or girl’s reproductive history.”

What I did was keep quiet and make a plan. I would save my allowance and take the Greyhound bus to Chicago. Pretending that I had amnesia, I’d walk to the nearest convent and ask the nuns for help. Maybe they’d make me give the baby away. Or maybe they’d keep us both and let me work in the kitchen.

Six weeks before the due date, my father noticed the bathroom cabinet had an unusually large supply of Kotex. He asked my mother to ask me what was going on, so when she walked into my room one June morning, I confessed. Within days I was hustled out of town and hidden with a foster family in the countryside 60 miles away. I gave birth to my son in secret without the support of the baby’s father or family. The doctors and the nurses at the hospital treated me as if I was filth.

I begged the social worker to let me place my baby in a foster family so I could get him back. He wouldn’t hear of it, so I signed the adoption papers and told no one for almost 21 years when I decided to search for my son.

I write frequently about my story these days and whenever it’s appropriate, I tell anyone and everyone what happened to me. Sometimes people tell me that I’m kind and generous and did a selfless thing that was best for the baby. I tell them that’s not how adoption works. I tell them I did what I did because I was desperate, that one of my back-up plans was suicide.

Shame should never be part of any woman or girl’s reproductive history.