Fessler is a professor of photography at the Rhode Island School of Design who exhibited an art installation titled The Girls Who Went Away.
[6] At the same time, a liberalization of sexual morals combined with restrictions on access to birth control led to an increase in premarital pregnancies.
[7] The dominant psychological and social work view was that the large majority of unmarried mothers were better off being separated by adoption from their newborn babies.
As such, for unmarried pregnant girls and women in the pre-Roe era, the main chance for attaining home and marriage rested on their acknowledging their alleged shame and guilt, and this required relinquishing their children, with more than 80% of unwed mothers in maternity homes acting in essence as "breeders" for adoptive parents.
This problem was thought to be caused by female neurosis, and those who could not procure an abortion, legally or otherwise, were encouraged to put up their children for adoption.
In Canadian maternity "homes" and hospitals, up to 100%[vague] of newborns were removed from their legal mothers after birth and placed for adoption.
[24] "Sixties Scoop" refers to the Canadian practice, beginning in the 1950s and continuing until the late 1980s, of apprehending unusually high numbers of Native children over the age of 5 years old from their families and fostering or adopting them out.
[25] A similar event happened in Australia where Aboriginal children, sometimes referred to as the Stolen Generation, were removed from their families and placed into internment camps, orphanages and other institutions.
It is generally understood that a decline of adoption during the 1970s was linked to a 1973 law providing for financial assistance to single parents.