The Infants Taken in Silence Are Now Adults Breaking It: Voices from the Baby Scoop Era
Content note: coercion, family separation, adoption trauma, and lifelong grief.
To most Americans, the Baby Scoop Era isn’t a familiar phrase. But for millions of families, it was one of the most defining and devastating chapters in adoption history.
The phrase is widely recognized in adoption scholarship, adoptee communities, and advocacy spaces, and is used to describe the sheer scale and swiftness with which babies were “scooped up” from their mothers and adopted between the mid-1940s and the early 1970s.
Why It Was a Crisis?
Mass Separation. Between 1.5 and 4 million babies were taken from their mothers during this period—a surge unlike any before or since. In 1970 alone, an estimated 80,000 newborns were placed for adoption. Each statistic represents a rupture: families separated not because mothers didn’t love their children, but because society deemed them unfit.
Closed Records. Nearly all were closed adoptions, where birth certificates were sealed, identities erased, and both mother and child were expected never to know each other again. For adoptees, this meant growing up without access to their histories, identities, or even basic medical information. For mothers, it meant being told to forget the child they had just birthed.
Coercion and Control. Adoption wasn’t simply “structured” during this time; it was enforced. Maternity homes, hospitals, agencies, and churches worked together to separate mothers from their babies as quickly as possible. It was common for women to be forbidden to see or hold their newborns. Consent was rarely informed, and often it was coerced.
The “Scoop” Mentality. The very name—Baby Scoop—captures the speed and scale of the practice. Infants were removed en masse, as though society had already decided they belonged elsewhere before their mothers even had a chance to process what was happening. That swiftness was part of the violence: it denied mothers time, space, and agency, and denied babies the chance to remain with their families of origin.
How Did This Happen?
The Baby Scoop Era didn’t just appear out of nowhere — it was created by the culture, politics, and systems of the time. After WWII in America, birth control was limited, abortion was illegal in most states until 1973, and public support for single mothers was almost nonexistent. Young women were sent to maternity homes, hidden away, and forced or coerced to relinquish their child. Adoption agencies, social workers, hospitals, religious institutions, and lawmakers all played their part in removing babies from their mothers. These systems valued reputation and control over consent and care, treating family separation not as a tragedy but as a solution.
Why Haven’t You Heard of It?
For decades, the Baby Scoop Era was hidden behind sealed records and silenced voices. The mothers who lived it were told to “move on.” The children were told to be “grateful.” The only adoption story that was accepted was one packaged as a fairytale ending.
Even today, many Americans know little to nothing about this chapter of history. And even less is known about the survivors themselves: the mothers who never recovered, and the adopted people who are still living with the consequences.
But they are speaking. Adoptees and first mothers are fighting for open records, telling their stories, and challenging the myth that adoption is always a happy ending. We owe it to them to listen.
Voices from the Baby Scoop Era
A childhood shaped by secrecy often became a lifelong search for identity. Adoptees found themselves scanning strangers’ faces for resemblance, studying cultures in hopes one might feel like home, or retreating into themselves when there were no “genetic mirrors” to reflect them back.
“I was always searching for my first family… trying to see a resemblance… I studied many cultures trying to find one I clicked with. I always felt lost.”
Closed records deepened the wound. Original birth certificates were sealed, amended documents replaced them, and adoptees were left without access to family history or critical medical information. For some, finally seeing those records decades later was as painful as it was necessary.
“It made it much harder to access my birth information — and when I did it was traumatic. This trauma could have been so different if the information was not a secret, sealed, or hidden.”
With the Baby Scoop Era remaining largely unknown, few have heard directly from the people it impacted. Here’s what they want you to know:
These brave adoptees’ reflections show what statistics can’t. They describe what it meant to grow up with their identities erased and their histories kept from them. Questions about their origins were discouraged or dismissed, while grief was hidden behind expectations of gratitude.
In addition to the secrecy and silence, adoptees were also expected to carry the weight of the “happy-ending” myth of adoption. They were told they’d been given “a better life,” and any expression of grief or longing was seen as ingratitude.
“They severed the ties, and you were to be grateful… there was another standard for adoptees — you had to be the perfect child.” — Lisa Peña Humes
“The secrecy in a closed adoption only adds to the shame and the feelings of being someone’s mistake.” — Dr. Lisa Chism
“Being adopted then meant growing up without truth, without roots, and without a voice.” — Lorah Gerald
And the impact didn’t stop with one generation. Survivors describe adoption as a “butterfly effect” that rippled through families: trauma carried by mothers, passed on to children, and still visible in grandchildren and great-grandchildren today.
“Our adoptions were a tool of the patriarchy… Many of us were taken from women who would have been excellent mothers, solely because they did not have a wedding ring. Adoption has its own butterfly effect: it causes intergenerational trauma and grief that reach up, down, and across family lines.”
The silence imposed during the Baby Scoop Era didn’t just wound individuals; it reshaped entire family trees. And for many, the healing didn’t begin until they started breaking those silences themselves.
What Justice Could Look Like
For survivors of the Baby Scoop Era, justice is not about punishing individuals. It’s about truth, access, and repair.
Adoptees point to three urgent needs:
Truth and transparency. Open records nationwide. Every adoptee should have unconditional access to their original birth certificate and full adoption file.
Regulation and oversight. Adoption remains a largely privatized, profit-driven system. Survivors call for stricter oversight of agencies, transparency in fees, and ethical standards that prioritize the child’s rights over an inhumane market’s demand.
Support for those separated. Trauma-informed care for adoptees, first mothers and fathers, and adoptive parents—funded as lifelong supports, not short-term charity.
Globally, we know accountability is possible. Australia issued a national apology in 2013, with Prime Minister Julia Gillard acknowledging the harm of forced adoptions. Ireland investigated its Mother and Baby Homes and issued a formal apology in 2021. Scotland followed in 2023, with the First Minister publicly apologizing to mothers and adoptees for “a shameful, coercive system.”
The United States has never done the same.
“Justice is listening to adopted people, believing us, putting our voices first… answering our questions fully and truthfully, taking responsibility for the harms caused, apologizing—as the Scottish Government did in 2023.”
Has Anything Changed?
In some ways, yes. In many ways, not nearly enough.
The maternity homes that once warehoused young mothers have largely closed. “Open adoption” began gaining traction in the 1980s, allowing for varying degrees of contact between birth and adoptive families. And in the past two decades, some states have finally begun to restore adult adoptees’ right to their original birth certificates. New York, for example, opened access in 2020 after decades of advocacy. South Dakota followed in 2023. Kansas and Alaska never sealed records at all.
But access is to critical files is still limited. As of 2025, adoptees in more than 20 states still face sealed records, court petitions, or bureaucratic hurdles to obtain documents that belong to them by birthright. In effect, adults are still being treated as perpetual children under the law.
Meanwhile, the myth that adoption is automatically “a better life” persists. Agencies continue to frame it as an altruistic solution for infertile couples, with less attention to systemic inequities that push families toward separation in the first place. Promised openness is not always honored; birth parents report being cut off from contact despite agreements.
“There is much more openness now… but so much is still the same—the narrative that adoption is all good and always creates a better life for the adoptee still prevails.”
Why We Must Keep Listening
Because the Baby Scoop Era isn’t over. Its echoes live in law, in culture, and in people.
Millions of adoptees from that era are now middle-aged or older adults—still navigating incomplete records, still piecing together family histories, still carrying grief that was denied for decades. Many of their mothers are elderly, their time to reconnect slipping away.
Research shows that adoption-related loss is not confined to one generation. Psychologist Pauline Boss describes it as ambiguous loss—grief without closure, absence without clarity. Studies have linked adoption secrecy to identity struggles, depression, and intergenerational trauma. The “blank slate” myth never held true; what was denied resurfaces in other ways.
“Being adopted during the Baby Scoop Era wasn’t what was best for the baby. It was a severance of our roots, created in shame and systemic erasure. We weren’t ‘chosen.’ We were taken, renamed, and expected to be grateful for surviving a wound no one would acknowledge.”
Listening matters because silence was the original wound. It was silence that allowed maternity homes to operate unchecked. Silence that sealed records. Silence that told adoptees to smile through their questions.
Breaking that silence is itself a form of justice.
And if other countries can apologize, investigate, and begin to repair—U.S. lawmakers and institutions remaining silent feels like compliance.
Your Voice Matters
If you were adopted during the Baby Scoop Era, if you are a first mother or father from that time, or if your family was shaped by it—we invite you to add your voice.
How has this era affected you? What does accountability look like to you? What do you want people to understand now, that you couldn’t say then?
The silence was forced. The truth doesn’t have to be.
Acknowledgment
Deep gratitude to the voices of Lisa Peña Humes, Lorah Gerald, Dr. Lisa Chism, and Heather G. Marshall—for your courage, your words, and your work to break the silence.
