'You don't want her - she's an awful scrawny thing," said the nun to the married woman who stopped in front of my crib. The woman was invited to choose a baby from a large number of young children in cribs that filled a big room in Saint Patrick's Home in Dublin in September 1963. The woman began to cry. She felt she couldn't make such a choice. She and her husband expected the nuns would have handed them a baby to adopt and she was overwhelmed when told she must choose a child from all the babies in front of her.