Adoptee Voices from the Baby Scoop Era

Q:   You talk about shedding light on the "Baby Scoop Era," a period marked by controversial adoption practices. How did the societal norms of that time shape the emotional landscape for adoptees like yourself?

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Janet:   The societal norms of the Baby Scoop Era built a house of silence that adoptees were expected to live in without complaint. Unwed mothers were shamed, hidden away, and coerced into relinquishing their babies. Adoptive parents were told to raise us as if we were "born to them." And we, the adopted children, were raised on a single, simplified story: You were chosen. Be grateful.

What that fairy tale erased was the grief. As an adoptee, I grew up feeling that any curiosity about my origins was a betrayal of my adoptive family. Any sadness about my first mother was met with "But you have a real family now." The message was clear: my pre‑adoption life didn't exist. And if I felt otherwise, I was somehow broken or ungrateful.

The emotional landscape, then, was one of disconnection and secrecy. We learned to perform happiness. We learned to silence our own questions. Many of us, myself included, carried a deep, wordless sense of loss—a primal wound that we couldn't name. We were taught that adoption was a clean transaction, a happy solution. But the truth is that for the adoptee, adoption begins with loss. And the social norms of that era gave us no room to mourn that loss.

So we internalized it. Some of us turned it inward—anxiety, depression, a feeling of being a ghost in our own lives. Some of us, like me, acted it outward—addiction, chaos, a search for something to fill a hole we couldn't even describe. The Baby Scoop Era didn't just shape adoption policies; it shaped souls.

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Q:  Secrecy and sealed records play a central role in your search for self-identity; how does the ongoing denial of access to one's own origins impact a person's sense of self over a lifetime?

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Janet:   Imagine building a house without a foundation. You can make the walls straight, paint them pretty colors, hang pictures, fill the rooms with people you love. But deep down, you always feel the ground shifting beneath you. That is what sealed records do to an adoptee.

Being denied access to my own origins meant growing up with a fundamental question I could never answer: Who am I really? Not in a philosophical sense—in a literal, biological, historical sense. What is my medical history? Where did my nose come from? What is my ethnic background? Why do I react to stress the way I do? These are not idle curiosities. They are the building blocks of identity that most people receive as a birthright.

When those answers are sealed away—treated as if they belong to the state or to adoptive parents, but not to me—the message is clear: Your story before us doesn't matter. Your origins are a secret you aren't allowed to know.

Over a lifetime, that denial shapes everything. It creates a persistent feeling of being incomplete. I learned to perform wholeness—smiling when asked "What are you?" or shrugging off medical forms I couldn't fill out. But inside, I carried a hollow space. That hollow space drove me to search, to research, to write an entire memoir just to feel like I existed before I was "chosen."

Sealed records don't protect anyone. They wound. They tell adoptees that our truth is dangerous, shameful, or simply irrelevant. And that wound doesn't heal on its own—it echoes through every relationship, every career move, every quiet moment of wondering where do I really come from?

The irony is that knowing my origins didn't destroy my adoptive family or my sense of belonging. It completed me. Denying that knowledge didn't protect anyone—it just kept me in a cage of not knowing. And I spent decades rattling the bars, trying to become whole.

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