Tag Archives: Florence Crittenton Association of America

The hidden legacy of separating families through adoption in Detroit

The Crittenton Maternity Home (top) for single mothers, who delivered their children across the street at the former Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, opened in the 1950s. The hospital opened in 1929. Today the former maternity home houses Cass Community Social Services. Most women who stayed here between the 1950s and the mid-1970s gave their infants up for adoption.

Since May 2018, the national dialogue has swirled around the Trump administration’s official policy of separating migrant parents and their children at the U.S. southern border as a form of immigration deterrence. As of mid-June, the number of children estimated to have been separated from their parents was nearly 2,000, for the period from April 18 to May 31, 2018.

As this played out on the national stage, scores of adoptees on the margins of power have observed the political crisis and voiced dismay that the rage leveled against the current administration has never been lifted by liberals, progressives, conservatives, politicians, religious leaders, medical groups, the media, or others to support adoptees in restoring their legal and human rights that are still denied because of the U.S. adoption system.

That system led to nearly 2.7 million adoptions, and thus nearly 2.7 million family separations, between 1945 and 1975. Today there are an estimated 5 million U.S. adoptees, most of whom do not know their kin because of the policies that encouraged adoption and the state laws that still prevent kin from knowing each other.

I sent a guest column to the editorial page of the Detroit Free Press on June 2, 2018, after first pitching the story the month before about Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, where I and many thousands of other adoptees were born before the facility closed in 1974. The paper never followed up on my queries, as I had hoped they might because of the historic significance of the hospital to Detroit and Michigan’s social history and legacy of treating women and children.

Why the Untold Story of a Maternity Hospital Matters Right Now

Nearly three weeks later, I am publishing that column because of intense media and political coverage and, yes, open grandstanding surrounding the detention of young children and the breaking up of families as an official national policy.

I also find it more than ironic to read purported outrage and criticism by groups as diverse as the American Catholic Bishops and the even the American Academy of Pediatrics. For the record, both groups had supported adoption, which ending up separating—and in most cases forever—millions of mothers and their kin. (See the AAP’s statement promoting family separation and the role of the Catholic church in family separation during the boom adoption decades after World War II.)

These uncomfortable historic facts are not lost on adoptees, who have seen almost no meaningful support in their quest for equal rights by law from groups and leaders rushing to “help children.” 

Adoption was envisioned by these and many other groups as a way to address the societal shame and stain of illegitimacy of single-mother parenting while providing stigmatized, “out-of-wedlock” infants to couples unable to produce children. That was my family story and one repeated by the hundreds of thousands of other birth mothers, adoptive parents, and adoptees who moved from one family to another.

Those who bore the brunt of this calculus were the birth mothers, like my birth mother, and their kids, like me. 

My newly released memoir explores the system that promoted this many millions of individual decisions and the laws that still keep kin separated because of lingering bias and outdated ideas that deny most adoptees their rights to be treated equally by law. My book specifically focusses on Detroit, where I and literally uncounted thousands were born and than separated from our biological kin and mothers. 

Crittenton General Hospital in Detroit was one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals, eventually becoming one of the most important maternal health centers devoted to promoting adoption to single mother patients from the 1940s through 1974.

Column Submitted to the Detroit Free Press: The Hidden Legacy of Separating Families through Adoption in Detroit

In April, national media first reported 1,475 migrant children who came to the United State alone could no longer be accounted for by federal officials. A top Department of Health and Human Services official told Congress it had lost track of the youth who were placed with sponsors. [See above how that estimate has risen since I first wrote this on June 2, 2018.]

Attorney General Jeff Sessions then fueled the controversy in early May announcing a new family separation policy, saying, “If you won’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally.” By month’s end, some press reports were linking both issues, pointing to the administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy to stem illegal immigration at the southern border.

Though these development were separate, critics protested them together and expressed outrage at the Trump administration with angry tweets and the hashtags #WhereAreTheChildren and #MissingChildren.

Meanwhile, in Detroit, 1,600 miles from where the policy is being enforced at the Mexican border, most residents remain oblivious of the city’s historic legacy of separating mothers and children through the national system of adoption. The lifelong separation of mothers and their infants took place through a national consensus of doctors, social workers, religious groups, state vital records keepers and maternity homes and hospitals.

Detroit was home to Crittenton General Hospital, one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals for unwed young women. Though it served the health needs of likely thousands of mothers and their infants for decades, it also promoted family separation that was meant to “save” the young mothers from a life of shame and the children from the stigma of illegitimacy.

Located at Tuxedo and Woodrow Wilson, Crittenton General operated from 1929 to 1974, and was torn down in 1975. It was among the dozens of maternity homes and hospitals nationwide created by the National Florence Crittenton Mission. Founded in the 1883, the philanthropic group first sought to save prostitutes and then so-called “problem girls,” who were poor, single and pregnant.

During the 1940s, as rates of single-mother pregnancies rose dramatically, the organization’s longstanding official policy to keep mothers and children together changed. It began working with local agencies to promote adoption.

Detroit had three Crittenton homes and hospitals before 1929. Another maternity home was built next to Crittenton General and opened in 1954, keeping the women out of public view before they gave birth at the hospital. The vast majority of moms would relinquish their babies to the agencies that later placed them with other families.

Nationally, groups like the Salvation Army and the National Conference of Catholic Charities ran similar homes and facilities in the post-World War II boom years of adoption. From 1944 through 1975, an estimated 2.7 million infants were separated from their mothers and placed for adoption, according to a U.S. Children’s Bureau study from 1984. This is only an estimate, as there has never been any official system nationally that requires the tracking of all adoption placements.

Today there is still no accurate estimate of all adoptees, in Michigan or the United States, though there are official counts for intercountry adoptees since 1999. Some estimates peg the national number at 5 million. The stigma of illegitimacy and out-of-wedlock pregnancy that adoption was supposed solve also created a cloak of invisibility around the birth of adoptees and their presence in society, even as it became socially acceptable for single moms to raise kids.

On Jan. 24, 1974, the Detroit Free Press ran a story on the closing of Crittenton General just before it last months, due to financial strains, the decline in adoptions and the economic decay of Detroit. The piece referenced how it provided “maternity service” for single mothers, but not the adoptions that followed—for decades. The story fit into a long pattern of hiding adoption from the public and hiding the story of adoptees.

When I contacted Crittenton General’s successor hospital in Rochester—now called Ascension Crittenton Hospital—in 2016 while researching my book as an adoptee born at Crittenton General, its staff said they had no birth records from its Detroit predecessor.

The National Crittenton Foundation, the mission’s successor group now in Oregon, said it had no birth records to share for its former homes and hospitals. The repository of all National Florence Crittenton Mission records, at the University of Minnesota Library, said it did not have records of infants born at the Detroit facilities. The Detroit Public Library also claimed it had no birth records data for the hospital. When asked to estimate adoptee births between 1945 and 1980 statewide, a Michigan Department of Health and Human Services official spokesperson replied, “It would not be possible to determine this number.”

From a policy and public health perspective, it is unthinkable that there is no accurate record of adoptees who were relinquished in Detroit or even Michigan.

Nationally, the U.S. Census in its last two counts failed to count for all adoptees in the way it estimated adoptee and foster children. The method in 2010 missed the generations of adult adoptees who are older and do not live with parents. Not knowing how many adoptees live in each state undermines some adoptees’ efforts to change laws sealing their birth records. Original birth records remain closed in most states, including Michigan in most cases, preventing most adoptees from knowing their family origins.

As many health and public health experts say, “If you aren’t counted, you don’t count.”

About the Author: Rudy Owens (MA, MPH), is a Detroit native, adoptee and one of many thousands of infants born to a single mother at Crittenton General Hospital. He was placed in foster care and adopted five weeks after his birth at the facility in 1965. Owens is the author of a new memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. His book examines the American adoption experience and his years-long efforts to obtain his original birth records and family origins from the state of Michigan.

REFERENCES:

Adoption History Project (website). “Adoption Statistics.” Accessed September 5, 2016. http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/adoptionstatistics.htm.

Harmon, Amy. New York Times. “Did the Trump Administration Separate Immigrant Children From Parents and Lose Them?” May 28, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/us/trump-immigrant-children-lost.html

Carp, E. Wayne. Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Detroit Free Press. “Silent Halls, Empty Beds at Crittenton.” January 24, 1974: 64.

Eisner, Jennifer (Press Officer, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services). Email to author. July 27, 2016. http://www.rudyowens.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MDHHS-Statements-on-Adoption-Records-and-Policy-7-27-2016.pdf.

Fessler, Ann. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.

Florence Crittenton Association of America. “Services to and Characteristics of Unwed Mothers, 1965.” August 1966. Box 67, folder 6. Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, Florence Crittenton.

Kreider, Rose M. and Daphne Lofquist. “Adopted Children and Stepchildren: 2010, Population Characteristics.” U.S. Census Bureau, April 2014. https://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p20-572.pdf.

Kunzel, Regina. Fallen Women, Problem Girls. Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Maza, Penelope L. “Adoption Trends: 1944–1975.” Child Welfare Research Notes, no. 9, U.S. Children’s Bureau, August 1984. Child Welfare League of America Papers. Box 65, folder: “Adoption—Research—Reprints of Articles,” Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota. (See: http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/archive/MazaAT.htm.)

National Public Radio. “Following Up On 1,500 Missing Immigrant Children In The U.S.” May 29, 2018. https://www.npr.org/2018/05/29/615079848/following-up-on-1-500-missing-immigrant-children-in-the-u-s.

Rochester Clarion. “A Salute to Crittenton Hospital (supplemental).” August 3, 1967.

University of Minnesota. National Florence Crittenton Mission Records. Accessed September 5, 2016. http://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/11/resources/736#.

Wang, Amy B. Washington Post. “The U.S. lost track of 1,475 immigrant children last year. Here’s why people are outraged now.” May 29, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/05/27/the-u-s-lost-track-of-1500-immigrant-children-last-year-heres-why-people-are-outraged-now/.

Wilson, Otto, Robert South Barrett, and National Florence Crittenton Mission. Fifty Years’ Work With Girls, 1883–1933: A Story of the Florence Crittenton Homes. Alexandria: The National Florence Crittenton Mission, 1933. (See: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000977186)

Crittenton General Hospital: A rare photo and its meaning

(Author note: Since first publishing this article in July 2017, I have updated my research on Crittenton General Hospital, my birthplace. See my essay Crittenton General Hospital’s Forgotten Legacy Serving Single Mothers and Promoting Adoption in Michigan, published in March 2019.

One of the unexpected outcomes of the American adoption experience is how the stigma of illegitimacy and out-of-wedlock pregnancy created a virtual cloak of invisibility around the birth of adoptees and their presence in the general population. That shame and stain of illegitimacy lives on in the form of laws that discriminate against adoptees who are denied the human right to their birth records and equal treatment under the law.

Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit is shown on Jan. 24, 1974, in this photo from the Detroit Free Press, two months before its closure. I was born here, as were thousands of other babies who were placed for adoption. (Click on the photo to see a larger image.)

I was born at Detroit’s Crittenton General Hospital, one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals that served unwed mothers and ultimately where thousands of infants were relinquished into the adoption system. The facility opened at Tuxedo and Woodrow Wilson in 1929, at a time when Crittenton homes and hospitals served the needs of “problem girls” and gave them a place to give birth and bond and stay with their children. 

By the late 1940s, the Florence Crittenton Mission, later Florence Crittenton Association of America, had transformed its maternity homes and hospitals into temporary residences for thousands of single moms, who gave up their children at these facilities across the country. The infants today sometimes call themselves Crittenton babies, and I am one of an uncounted group who today still face legal discrimination accessing their birth records.

The photo seen here was taken on Jan. 24, 1974, two months before the hospital closed permanently on March 22, 1974. The building was demolished a year later. It closed due to financial strains, the decline of adoptions, and the gradual economic decay of Detroit.The story in the Detroit Free Press that accompanied this photo that I bought failed to mention the hospital’s historic role serving unwed mothers and then relinquishing those infants to new families.

The story from Jan. 24, 1974, in the Detroit Free Press, makes no mention of the hospital’s pivotal role delivering thousands of infants like me for adoption. (Click on the image to see a larger picture of the text copy.)

I was one of those infants, born about a decade before this picture. This journalistic oversight was not accidental—it fits into a larger pattern of hiding adoption from the public and erasing the story of adoptees from American history.

In 1967, the Crittenton General Hospital opened a new facility in Rochester, Michigan, in the suburbs, and became a general hospital that did not serve single birth moms and their children like all previous Crittenton missions and maternity homes. The two operated under the same names, but only the Rochester facility remains, still bearing the Crittenton name. Nationally, it is a name tied forever to the service of single, pregnant women, and later adoption.

Today, the Crittenton Hospital Medical Center in Rochester also has whitewashed its past and does not acknowledge who it once served, how that hospital helped to hide illegitimacy from the public, and its pivotal role transferring babies from a birth mothers to adoptive parents during the boom adoption years after World War II, through 1975.

The stigma surrounding illegitimacy drove the institution of U.S. adoption in the decades after the war and helped turn it into one of the largest social engineering experiments ever in U.S. history. That stigma is deeply woven into how state laws impact birth parents and adoptees today.

The new hospital in Rochester claims, after many efforts to contact its communications team in 2016, that it has no records of the number of adoptee births at the Crittenton General Hospital in Detroit—its predecessor. The hospital spokesperson did not return multiple calls and repeated emails for interviews and records. The only two documents the hospital shared were photocopies of short institutional histories, which did not outline the hospital’s important historic role as way station for birth mothers and adoptees. The summary documents did not offer a count of patients served or babies delivered by single mothers.

There are no records of the number of adoptee births kept by the National Crittenton Foundation, the mission’s successor group now located in Portland, Oregon. The official repository of all National Florence Crittenton Mission records, at the University of Minnesota Library, also did not have any documents that showed how many babies were born in Crittenton General Hospital in Detroit or in the multiple maternity homes in the city that opened first in 1900.

From a public health standpoint, it is practically scandalous that we still, to this day, have no accurate record of the number of adoptees who were relinquished in the United States. The U.S. Census in its last two counts failed to account for all adoptees in the way it counted adoptees and foster children, which missed entire generations of adults like me. The lack of data ultimately undercounts adoptees, and thus undermines their efforts to restore adoptees’ rights to receive copies of their original birth records in most states, where they are denied access unlike all non-adoptees.

Where Detroit adoptees were born and ‘relinquished’

The Florence Crittenton Maternity Home, at 11850 Woodrow Wilson, in Detroit, was located next to the Crittenton General Hospital in Detroit. The maternity home, as shown in in this photograph, was under renovation and construction. Women who stayed in the home would deliver their infants next door, at the hospital, located at 1554 Tuxedo Avenue.

I was born in Crittenton General Hospital, one the nation’s largest hospitals created to serve unwed mothers and their infants and later a major health center delivering infants relinquished for adoption. It was located at 1554 Tuxedo Avenue, and closed in 1974. This photo dates from 1929.

This week, I finally received a copy of one of the few pictures that may be publicly available of the former Florence Crittenton Maternity Home of Detroit from the 1950s. This was the third Crittenton maternity home that the national organization opened in Detroit. It was located adjacent to the Crttenton General Hospital, where I was born. 

The hospital provided both maternal health services and boarding for single, pregnant mothers. I and literally thousands and thousands of other adoptees were born in such facilities during the boom years of American adoption, from the 1950s through the early 1970s. 

The National Crittenton Foundation of Portland, Oregon, in my home town, provided me the image of the maternity home, and I am grateful for their support and for meeting with me to discuss my upcoming book and the larger story of this foundation’s predecessors.

I have written at length about the original Florence Crittenton Mission and its successor agencies on my blog, documenting how this benevolent and originally Christian group that first served prostitutes and “fallen women” became an organization that sought to help abused, vulnerable, and single-parent women. Part of its original core mission was to fight and eradicate the stigma associated with illegitimacy and to keep mothers and their infants together.

The issue of illegitimacy, ultimately, drove the booming adoption system into which people like me were placed.

Most bastards born into this system–the word “bastard” accurately describes my status in life and my life story–were told we did not have the equal legal rights of all non-adopted U.S. citizens to know who we were by so-called “adoption professionals” and state agencies and legislatures. This inequality and human rights issue remains to this day, without much public interest outside of adoptee advocates themselves.

The national Crittenton organizations that succeeded the original mission evolved into adoption placement centers, starting in the late 1940s, as so-called “adoption professionals” such as social workers assumed greater control of maternity facilities that were ubiquitous in most large U.S. cities (see Regina Kunzel’s study of this movement: Fallen Women, Problem Girls). The Crittenton facilities, like my birthplace in Detroit, became essential facilities in a national movement to promote adoption as the “most suitable plan” to separate bastard babies like me from their birth mothers and biological kin and place them in new families.

According to the Child Welfare League of America, 98 percent of all babies, like me and thousands of others, who were born in Crittenton facilities or served by them during the peak adoption years were placed for adoption.

This story is my story, and also the story of thousands of others like me who passed through the halls of this building and its earlier maternity home facilities and maternity hospitals in Detroit and dozens of other cities. My forthcoming memoir and critical examination of the American adoption experience, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, offers a detailed look at the history of this now demolished hospital and how its legacy still remains today.

The former maternity home building is now run by Cass Community Social Services. You can see photos of the old maternity home, as it appears today, on Google maps

(Editor’s note: I have updated this post on July 14, 2017, to reflect new information shared with me that the photo of the maternity home, seen on this page, was incorrectly identified as the hospital. I have updated this page to now include an image of the original Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, dating from 1929.)