A Q&A With Gabrielle Glaser

In 1961, a New York couple sent their seventeen-year-old daughter Margaret to Lakeview Maternity Home on Staten Island, where she gave birth to a boy she named Stephen. In love with her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, George, she was determined to keep the child, but was pressured by her parents as well as social workers at the home and the personnel of the Manhattan adoption agency—Louise Wise Services—to relinquish the baby for adoption. Margaret and George planned to marry, and during the many months when she was separated from Stephen, Margaret held out hope that she and George would prevail against a system that was cruelly stacked against them and regain custody of the child. Ultimately, she was coerced into giving up her parental rights. The boy was adopted and his name changed to David.

Margaret had been advised to move on, to forget about her baby. She never did. She went on to marry George and have a family, and all the while her son was never far from her thoughts. Through the years, as health problems emerged in her family, she contacted the Louise Wise agency to provide medical updates for the boy’s parents. The response was always curt. In the early 1980s, inspired by the rise of adoptee activism, Margaret began to search for her son, both for reassurance that he was well and also so he could know she’d never forgotten him and had always loved him. At one point, after her son’s 20th birthday, she gathered her courage, made elaborate preparations to make herself appear undeniably respectable, and knocked at the door of Louise Wise Services, hoping at most for information about her son, and at least for the opportunity to leave her contact information so that he could find her if he wanted to. Four times she rang the bell and tried to plead her case, and three times she was ignored. When she rang for the fourth time, the receptionist advised her that she’d call the police if Margaret didn’t leave. Devastated, Margaret collapsed to the floor and sobbed.

Meanwhile, David had been adopted by a loving couple, grew up, moved to Toronto and later Israel, finally settling in Portland, marrying and having children. By 2007, his health had deteriorated and he was undergoing dialysis, scheduled to receive a kidney donation from a friend. At the dialysis center in 2007, he met an investigative reporter, Gabrielle Glaser, who planned to write the feel-good story of the kidney donation. But it didn’t end there. In 2014, after having taken a DNA test, David reunited with Margaret shortly before he died. Glaser went on not only to tell their story, but also to exhaustively report on the rise of the adoption system in America, painting a sorrowful picture of an industry based on coercion, cruelty, and deception.

In this extraordinary, rigorously researched book, American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption, Margaret and David become the faces of the Baby Scoop Era, the period between the end of World War II and the early 1970s, when countless women were pressured to surrender their newborns, never to see them again. While Margaret and David’s fascinating story is the through line of the book, Glaser rips away the veil that hid decades of abuse and secrecy, detailing chillingly unethical practices that led to heartache for countless birth parents and adoptees.

Some of the practices and policies to which adoptees were subjected, which are nothing short of barbaric, exceed imagination. Glaser tells of babies subjected to “intelligence” tests conducted by Samuel Karelitz, a pediatrician who snapped newborns’ feet with rubber bands and declared crying to be the hallmark of a smart baby—a strategy he believed would help best match a baby to adoptive parents and which was carried out on babies for the first few months of their lives. She writes about a forensic anthropologist, Harry Shapiro, a one-time president of the American Eugenics Society, who was called upon to determine the race of babies, tasked with ensuring that dark-skinned babies were not placed with white families; about Viola Bernard, a Columbia University psychiatrist whose devious studies separated twins in an ethically dubious effort to study nature vs. nurture for the purposes of better matching babies to adoptive parents—an experiment that was the subject of the shocking documentary Three Identical Strangers; and the university-run “practice homes” where surrendered infants were housed and tended by a rotating group of home economic students so they could practice their mothering skills.

American Baby is an extraordinary achievement that destroys the notion of adoption as a win-win proposition for all members of the adoption triad. It’s an essential text for anyone wanting to learn the true history of adoption in America and understand the often-devastating consequences.

What was it about the Philomena Lee story, told in the book and biopic Philomena, that got under your skin? 

I saw the movie first and read the book later. I’d covered adoption as a beat, so I was aware that adoption begins with loss. That was my fundamental underlying understanding from the beginning, and it’s how I wound up interviewing David in the first place, because he was adopted. His story landed on my desk when was getting the kidney from his friend, because he didn’t have any family members who could give him one. He talked about hoping his birthmother would see the story, so he could learn more about his medical history for his three kids. A few years later, I thought about him a lot when I saw Philomena. I was really struck by the cold, moralistic Irish Catholic church—I’d seen the 2002 movie the Magdalene Sisters, and those stories ricocheted in my brain. Philomena’s portrayal by Judy Dench—the shame she had to endure at the hands of family, at the hands of the community, at hands of the church, but also the loss that she never recovered from—as a mother myself, it just dawned on me that this movie, with one of my favorite actresses, is about a woman’s life as a mother that was ruptured. And of course she didn’t forget her child. Of course she thought of her child every single day of her life. So that really drove it home for me what David’s birthmother’s experience may have been like.

What took you from that point to the point at which you realized you had to tell this story and why? 

David called to tell me he’d located Margaret and that, as he put it, she hadn’t wanted to give him up, that she loved him all of his life, that she married his birthfather, had gone on to have three more kids, and had done everything she could to maintain custody of him as a powerless teen in NYC in the early 60s. That revelation was such a profound reversal of this narrative that he’d been told, that he’d accepted. It was a narrative of many people from the Baby Scoop Era—the narrative adoption agencies wanted them to believe. What I heard in his voice about all those things was that they were so healing for him, and I imagine that it had to have been healing for Margaret to imagine that her son had had a good life with people who loved him very much. Of course, it was devasting that he had a terminal cancer and was very near death. But there was the power of learning that he’d been wanted, and the healing aspect for her to learn that he’d been loved. Then there was also the deceit that had been perpetrated on him, on adoptees, on birthmothers, and on adoptive families. The fictitious narratives that had abounded for everyone and had been allowed to continue for decades—that was just a shock. As someone who’s not adopted, I was intrigued and saddened and also outraged.

I thought I knew a lot about adoption before I read your book and I was shocked by so much, by the practice babies, and those passages where Margaret went and knocked on the door of Louise Wise Services—it was absolutely shattering.

It was shattering to get to learn about. I love her dearly. She’s an incredibly heroic and courageous woman. It’s astonishing how much she endured and is still standing. And that scene—we went to all those places together, she and I. Someone asked me if I’d fictionalized some details. I did not. She has a crystalline memory of the events that transpired, especially after we visited the sites. As we know, traumatic memories imprint in our brains in a very different way than ordinary stuff. You don’t remember what you bought at the grocery store six weeks ago. But you do remember a baby being taken away. You do remember trying desperately to fight for the right to keep the baby you bore and had been sent away to bear in secret. You remember walking up the steps of Louise Wise Services. You do remember what you wore and how you put on your eyeliner so you could be presentable to this elegant agency. And she was still trusting it up until that moment—she trusted it until she learned that David had never received any of the messages about his health conditions.

I’m amazed by the breadth and depth of the information you present. It’s remarkable that you were able to get access to some of it. What were the biggest obstacles or challenges in your research? Did anyone not want to share because some of the information reflected negatively on them?

The biggest disappointment was with the experiments about the rubber band babies [the Karelitz studies]. I did everything I could—and you may have seen this in the notes—to try to uncover what the motivation was for those studies, what the grant proposals looked like. I wondered if I would be able to uncover documents that had any of the names of the babies, surrendered for adoption and in agency custody, who were part of those experiments. But after 20 years, the federal government destroys grant proposals or studies that do not further scientific inquiry or lead to cures. I went to the National Archives. I think there were nine or ten studies the government paid for, those “induced crying” studies. I contacted all of those journals and asked if it was possible to obtain documentation surrounding those experiments. I got either non-responses or brush-offs from each and every one. And I don’t believe that all [research materials] were “destroyed.” I also flew to Florida to meet face to face with the surviving research psychologist who participated in those studies. On the phone, she’d been forthcoming. I got to her office in a strip mall but she’d clearly lawyered up by the time I got there. I’m an experienced reporter, and I know how to help guide people who want to speak their conscience. I thought that was what would happen. But in person she just absolutely shut down. Interestingly, she had a big rubber band ball on her desk and was tossing it back and forth between one hand and the other. My editor and I weighed whether to put her in the book, but there were so many villains already and she’d been a young 24-year old PhD. She claimed she just crunched the numbers. Induced crying! Really? She had no idea what the research was all about? She clearly had been coached to say that, so that was a little disappointing….

Most of the people who would have wanted to stand in my way are dead. Louise Wise is bankrupt. Karelitz is long dead, Viola Bernard and Harry Shapiro were long dead. What surprised me was the lionization of these people in real time. Nobody was looking behind the curtain about what was happening at that time. Nobody. I was shocked by that—even up until now, even Karelitz’s research on crying is still cited—without so much an asterisk about the brutality of it.

And you mentioned Dr. Joyce Brothers—someone so many in this country at a certain time looked up to, and it seemed as if she hadn’t done any due diligence.

She also parroted the Karelitz studies and promoted them as a useful tool for worried mothers who wrote in to her and said “I’ve got baby who’s a crier.” And she said, “Don’t worry, your baby is going to be smart. According to Dr. Karelitz, who does these rubber band studies, your baby will be smart.” Nobody even raised an eyebrow as far as I can tell.

You weren’t a newcomer to the topic. You had already covered a beat of related issues. Still, did you have an inkling of the full scope of abuse, hypocrisy, and deceit before you’d delved deeply into research?

I had no idea. I didn’t really know the breadth and the depth of the treachery and the deceit. As much as I understood from the very beginning—and I’ll get to this—from the very beginning of the first story I ever did about adoption, I just had no idea of the massive transactional history of it. I had no idea of the fact that it was an industry. It was an industry—one that took babies for a fee and placed them with families who weren’t their own. Like in all long projects, you don’t automatically start out knowing everything. It’s a layering process of understanding, and only when you finished and step back and say wow, okay, this is not just a story or a book about adoption, it’s really about our society. It’s about sexuality. It’s about policing women’s bodies. It’s about the paternalism of medicine. It’s about the conservative postwar mores that allowed this to flourish.

Is there any one thing more than any other that surprised or shocked you during your investigation? 

The experiments on ten-minute old babies, the prolonged time in foster care decades after it had been well established that infants needed to be able to rely for their own safety and development in the world on a steady caregiver who was going to be there for them. And the institutionalized cruelty of it.

A recent New York Times piece on your book was titled “Adoption Used to Be Hush-Hush.” Is it fair to say it still is in some ways? A lot has changed, but it still is legalized deception, isn’t it? I believe four-fifths of people don’t have access to their records and it’s still transactional.

No, you’re 1000% correct. And as much as I may have thought things were improved, since the publication of this book, I’ve been deluged with stories of fraud; deceit; current transactional, flat-out sale of babies; and I’m going to need to find a home for some of this stuff I’m uncovering. It’s ongoing. Yet adoption is still celebrated. We see these celebrity adoptions, and people say “Look how wonderful it is, Hoda may adopt a third child!” Remember that viral video of a little boy who’d been adopted and he’d invited the whole kindergarten class to come to his finalization celebration? And everyone said, “Oh, what a heartwarming story!” But whoa, wait a minute! What about what that little boy lost? Okay, great that he has a family now that’s going to care for him and love him and cherish him in the manner all children deserve, but we just run right over that initial foundational truth, which is he lost something. He lost his kin. That’s the title of your magazine. It’s a rupture.

And I wanted to throw a zucchini at the screen of Three Identical Strangers. I hated it. The other day I watched a talk about the movie by Harvard psychologists and psychiatrists and I was so dismayed that they didn’t raise any of the questions that any sentient person would raise after watching that film. They didn’t even broach the meaning of the original trauma. Greg Luce, founder of Adoptee Rights Law Center, was also observing the talk. He texted me halfway through and said, “I can’t watch this. They’re talking about adoptees as if we’re just subjects.” He and the adoptee community have opened my eyes to the ongoing infantilization of adoptees and the prurient interest in them as subjects. It’s outrageous.

Does the adoption industry remain predatory in any way? Is it still an industry? Does coercion remain a factor at all or is that a thing of the past?

Oh, absolutely. I’ve got several stories I’m trying to pursue and even some lawsuits that are being filed on trying to stop these predatory, coercive fraudulent promises made to families in the name of open domestic adoption. Such arrangements are rarely legally enforceable, and promises are made that are not kept. It all depends on the good will and intention of the adoptive parent, and in some cases, birthparents, too. I’ve heard from birth families who are told by adoptive parents, “Sure, of course we’re going to be able to get together.” But then they move to another state, or even another country, and the birth families never see their children again.

Adoption is widely described in our culture as a selfless act of love and generosity. Do you believe most Americans at this time have a realistic view of past or present-day adoption practices?

I do believe the narrative we have is the one we’ve always had, that this is the best solution for everyone involved and everyone ends up happy, happier. It’s very difficult to present a counter narrative. The first story I ever wrote about adoption was the early 2000s, and I had seen in my coffee shop in Portland, where I lived at the time, a flier of what appeared to be a racist depiction—stick figures filled in with yellow highlighter with Asian features and straight black hair, and I thought “What’s this? How can this be in socially conscious Portland?” Then I looked up and saw the words,  “Are you an angry Korean American adoptee? So are we!” I called the number on the tear-off sheet, and became aware of the history of HOLT International, which was founded in Oregon and was the first adoption agency to facilitate international transracial adoptions on a big level. I spent some time learning about the agency’s roots in Cold War politics, and interviewed four women who’d been adopted through Holt. My editor at the time was a really smart intuitive guy who had his own history in this realm—his Black serviceman father had married his Japanese mother in Japan after the war—and so he’d lived through a lot of similar experiences growing up in rural Oregon after coming from Japan at an early age, being orphaned and then raised by white foster parents. So we just had the voices of these adoptees, and I didn’t get in the way—the story was in their own words, like what you and I are doing, with moving portraits of them. And it was before social media, so no one posted it, but my email was at the bottom of every story, and the next morning I was deluged with responses from transracial international adoptees and from adoptive parents. The response from adoptees was, “This is my experience, appreciate this.” But the adoptive parents were furious. “How dare they! How dare you? We rescued these kids. These ingrates!”

That piece is what really changed my entire view of adoption. It was David’s experience, of course, that prompted me to write this book. But my background came from that original story. It’s been almost 20 years, and I don’t think that much has changed. Do you?

I don’t see the change. I’m neither adopted nor the scholar you are, but I don’t see any evidence of it. I just still see a lot of pain. I’m not even sure—I guess it remains to be seen—how well open adoption works.

There’s no regulation. And there’s still resistance to the idea that it’s traumatic. An academic with personal experience with adoption once told me he didn’t believe there was evidence that birthmothers suffer. “Where’s the evidence/ Show me the evidence?” Which I presented.

This was recent?

Yes, four years ago. My internal response was, well, show me the evidence that people in Middle Passage suffered. We can’t interview them, but of course they suffered. I didn’t say that, but it was my knee jerk reaction. I did present the evidence.

There was a Cyprus-born British researcher, Sir John Triseliotis, who studied adoption for decades, and his research shows that among women who had reunited with their children there was an enormous sense of relief and decreased feelings of guilt, and for adoptees there was an enormous reduction in anxiety and depression.

Many readers are likely to be shocked by much of what they read in American Baby. And many will think much of what shocked them either no longer exists or, if it in fact no longer exists, could never happen again. How would you respond to them? 

We’re still battling this ongoing rubric with which we see this social engineering experiment.

In what way do the lessons of American Baby pertain to, or serve as a cautionary tale to, the artificial reproduction industry, which remains almost entirely unregulated?

This is just another realm of the unregulated creation of new families, and, if you want my honest opinion, maybe one of the reasons people don’t want to look too deeply at adoption is because they may be consumers or future consumers of artificial reproductive technology, so they’ve got their heads down, they’re not interested.

So much of your subject matter is heartbreaking, traumatic, and rage-inducing. I imagine it could be overwhelming and deeply disturbing. Can you tell us about your own emotional journey in writing this?

Thank you for asking that question. I had a lot of anger. On one hand, I could channel it onto the page, but the weight of it was great. Sometimes after a day with Margaret, I’d sob in the car on the way home.

You began this project as a reporter. Do you now consider yourself an advocate or do you see that as a conflict?

No, once I became aware of the duplicity, the lying, the experimentation—it’s an impossibility as far as I’m concerned to look at this and remain unmoved or objective. It’s wrong, and yes, I’m a journalist, but in this case, I have a duty and a moral right to speak out and draw attention. Someone referred to me as an activist, which I’m not, but I am an advocate. One of my first jobs was as a reporter at the Associated Press in Baltimore, and if you reported on something you had to get a critic from the other side—and I didn’t really find critics—how could you be supportive of experiments on ten-minute old babies? How could you be supportive of adult men and women not having access to their original documents? Their own history? How could you be supportive of that?

What would you most hope could come out of having told this story? 

I would hope the larger public recognizes this hidden chapter in social history is still happening, still in plain sight. The legacy of secret or closed adoptions persists today for so many people and their families, and not just the adopted men and women—also their birth and adoptive parents; their spouses; their children; their siblings. At the end of the day—not even at the end of the day—family matters, who you are matters, your kin matters. That’s why we have DNA testing, why genealogy is the second most trafficked realm of the Internet, after porn. There’s a natural curiosity to know where you come from, what your origin story is, what your first days were like.

Gabrielle Glaser is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist whose work on mental health, medicine, and culture has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and many other publications. 

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