She Gave Up Her Baby for Adoption, Then Fought to Find Him
Read full article
Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty
Author’s introduction: Months after giving birth to her firstborn son as an unmarried teenager in 1961, Margaret Erle Katz became one of an estimated three million young women in the decades after World War II and before Roe v. Wade who was forced by her family; by society; and even New York State law, which until 1971 criminalized premarital sex to surrender her firstborn son into an adoption system designed to keep the identities of birth families, adoptees, and adoptive families a secret. Margaret, the 17-year-old daughter of Jewish refugees in Manhattan, did all she could to maintain custody of her son. She pushed aside the shaming admonitions of her parents, maternity home officials, and social workers, who told her she would “forget”
Renee Ghert-Zand is a reporter and feature writer for The Times of Israel.
Stephen Mark Erle (later David Rosenberg) at age six months in 1962. His birth mother Margaret Erle was coerced into signing away her parental rights. This photo was taken during the first of just two meetings Margaret and the baby s father birth father George Katz were allowed with him while in foster care prior to his adoption. (Courtesy of Margaret Erle Katz)
George Katz and Margaret Erle, when Margaret was six months pregnant and about to be sent to the Lakeview Home for Unwed Jewish Mothers on Staten Island, 1961. (Courtesy of Margaret Erle Katz)
Adoption Used to Be Hush-Hush. This Book Amplifies the Human Toll.
Credit.Golden Cosmos
By Gabrielle Glaser
Much has been written recently about what went wrong in the adoption world between 1950 and 1975, a period known as the “Baby Scoop Era” when the number of domestic adoptions exploded to, by some estimates, nearly four million. One agency receiving particular scrutiny in the post-mortem is Louise Wise Services, a now-defunct entity that promised to match “blue-ribbon” Jewish babies with “good” Jewish homes in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The 2018 documentary “Three Identical Strangers,” about triplets deliberately separated as part of that agency’s nature-versus-nurture “research,” is the most visible example of the growing realization that old-style adoption was not always what it seemed.