Birth mothers speaking out

Sociology: The most loving and unselfish act a mother can carry out is to surrender her child to parents who can give it the social, educational, moral and economic advantages it deserves. For the mother, this act of redemption allows her to resume her life as though the birth had never taken place. That is the comforting rationale behind adoption.

The reality, for natural mothers, is far from comforting. "I was put in (the mother and baby home) because of what the neighbours thought, you know you were evil, you were wrong, you know Litany of Saints was put on to you as well," a mother tells Ruth Kelly in her dispassionate feminist study of 20 natural mothers who were eventually reunited with their children, Motherhood Silenced.

In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands of women were coerced into giving their babies up for adoption. Two-thirds of single mothers relinquished their babies in the 1950s, three-quarters in the 1960s and a little more than half in the 1970s. Contraception was illegal and there was no lone parents allowance.

Coercion is a strong word, but the pressure which Church and State placed on women to surrender their babies was nothing less than that, argues Kelly. "Looking back, I did have the choice. People who were in professional areas, they didn't tell the choices that could be there for a girl," one mother told her.

Adoption and the toxic silence surrounding it were life-long punishments that the shamed natural mother was expected to endure as she kept her secret even from future husbands and children.

"It was 20 years for me, I mean every single year. I was in bits every September, all through the 20 years, every September was terrible, every Christmas was terrible," one relinquishing mother said of her loss.

There was a grief like mourning, yet the child was still alive. No one acknowledged the loss and there was never any closure. For the most part, time did not heal and the pain of loss intensified. Many adoption agencies handled the mothers in unemotional, dictatorial ways that disempowered them psychologically, leading to depression for many.

These young women absorbed the social judgement that they were fundamentally bad and incapable of properly mothering.

The view that adoption is the ultimate self-sacrifice of an unconditionally loving mother is a gender construct used by a patriarchal State and Church to justify what was nothing less than an emotional holocaust for women, Kelly argues.

Kelly's feminist analysis, which reveals the lived experience of women rather than looking through a patriarchal lens, concludes that natural mothers were exploited and oppressed victims whose voices were silenced by a conspiracy to control and punish women.

Other women colluded, both as family members and social workers, in encouraging mothers to sever their connections with their babies because adoption, at the time, was regarded as socially farsighted and humane compared to the previous approach of putting single mothers in workhouses and laundries and their babies in orphanages.

Kelly's feminist perspective is valuable because while we have heard much from adoptive parents and adopted children in public discourse, we have heard little from the natural mothers due to a collective conspiracy of silence.

But does Kelly's book tell the whole story? Her small study group of 20 mothers - all of whom had either looked for reunion, or agreed to reunion after being sought out by their children - is small and the context verges on bias.

Adoption is not placed in the current context, where it is no longer seen as an option for Irish women other than in exceptional cases.

Nor does she discuss international adoption, where economic disadvantage (or even economic gain) is the motivation for mothers relinquishing their children to couples from other countries.

To be fair, Kelly's research claims to be no more than a revelation of the experience of Irish natural mothers during an oppressive period of Irish history.

The voices of her study subjects are heartbreaking and it is essential that we listen to them. Reunion wasn't a panacea either. Some mothers drove their children away again following reunion because they , the mothers had unrealistic expectations, believing they would get their babies back, when in reality they were faced with an adult stranger whose motivations were not always clear.

Natural mothers who gradually assumed a friendship role and accepted that they would never be the "real" mothers of their biological children, fared best.

The reader is left in no doubt that what was done to women in the name of the Church and the Constitution was a cruel form of social cleansing, the like of which we hope never to see again in this country. Today we have lone parents allowance, but single mothers are still punished with inadequate social welfare, a lack of affordable childcare and social stigma.

We are still punishing women for having babies outside marriage - something another feminist researcher may force us to acknowledge in 30 years' time.

Kate Holmquist is an Irish Times journalist. She is the author of A Good Daughter (Raven Arts Press, 1990)