"American Baby" by Gabrielle Glaser

I first heard about the new book "American Baby" by Gabrielle Glaser when I read a review by Lisa Belkin in the New York Times last weekend. By the time I was barely a few paragraphs into the article, I knew I wanted to read this book, and I downloaded a copy to my e-reader as soon as it became available (yesterday morning). I finished it this afternoon. I also listened to the author being interviewed on the Times's Book Review podcast. 

"American Baby" uses the story of David Rosenberg (born in 1961, the same year as me) & his birth mother, Margaret Erle Katz, to tell a broader story about the history and ethics of adoption in America, and its impact on all three members of the adoption triangle -- birth parents, adoptive parents and the adoptees themselves. And, linking them all, the adoption agencies, social workers and lawyers, who sometimes pressured, coerced and threatened the mothers into relinquishing their babies, often falsified the few details they provided to both birth mothers and adoptive parents, and profited from their losses and pain.  

In this case, the adoption agency was Louise Wise Services in New York City (and its affiliated maternity home on Staten Island, Lakeview), which provided babies used in the infamous "twins experiment," in which at least 11 sets of twins and one set of triplets (whose stories have been told in the book "Identical Strangers" and the documentaries "Three Identical Strangers" and "The Twinning Reaction") were deliberately separated and then studied. 

Essentially, Glaser argues, the history of adoption in the 20th century was "a massive experiment in social engineering" fraught with shame, fear, secrecy and lies, in an era before second-wave feminism, sex education, modern birth control, safe and legal abortions, and modern infertility treatments. The book is full of fascinating details and historical context. We learn about life in a maternity home (a basket of gold wedding bands was kept by the door for the girls to put on when they went out in public), about the sometimes horrific experiments conducted on babies in foster care before they were finally adopted, about how the practice of sealing original birth certificates came about, about the rise of the adoption rights movement in the 1970s, and about how modern DNA testing is making once-unimaginable family reunions possible.   

This was an absolutely riveting book -- I could not put it down. The story of naive teenaged parents Margaret & George, who desperately wanted to marry and keep their baby, was sweet and heartbreaking. I shed tears at several points in the story.    

It's a book that deserves to be widely read, and should be required reading for anyone considering adoption -- or perhaps for anyone who dares to ask an infertile couple, "Why don't you just adopt?" Things may be different today, yes -- but perhaps not different enough -- not yet. The old attitudes, myths and misconceptions about adoption linger. While greater openness is increasingly common, adoption records remain sealed in many jurisdictions around the world, and many adoptive parents still request "traditional" closed adoptions. And there are echoes of the past in the growing use of eggs and sperm from anonymous donors in fertility treatments, and in the questions of the children conceived this way. Apparently, we still have lessons to learn...

(My one (relatively minor) quibble with the book (the e-version that I read, anyway) is that I wish the notes at the back were accessible through clickable links. There's a lot of great information there.) 

5 stars on Goodreads. 

This was Book #5 read to date in 2021 (and Book #5 finished in January), bringing me to 14% of my 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 36 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 3 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2021 tagged as "2021 books."