Monday, June 12, 2006
In Trouble
Kathryn Harrison in The New York Times reviews The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler.
Assuming that's the case, I note the subtitle of the book is "The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade." Yet Fessler never explains why that case is relevant as a dividing line. It would seem that girls who found it "a horrible, horrible, horrible loss" to let their newborns be adopted would be even more horrified at the prospect of killing their children rather than let them be born. ¶ 6/12/2006 06:58:00 AM
one of the women who agreed to be interviewed by Fessler were able to follow the advice of parents, pastors and social workers who told them to put their "mistakes" behind them and move on, pick up their lives at the point at which they'd hurriedly exited them to wait out their confinement in a maternity home. Whatever private fantasies Fessler may have attached to the idea of reunion with her birth mother, they were informed by what she'd learned from other women who, like her mother, had suffered what one called "a horrible, horrible, horrible loss."
Assuming that's the case, I note the subtitle of the book is "The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade." Yet Fessler never explains why that case is relevant as a dividing line. It would seem that girls who found it "a horrible, horrible, horrible loss" to let their newborns be adopted would be even more horrified at the prospect of killing their children rather than let them be born. ¶ 6/12/2006 06:58:00 AM
