ABSTRACT
One of the difficulties that anyone writing about adoption today confronts is that with the psychological knowledge that reader now possess, they can have greater confidence in claiming that a mother who gives up her baby at birth suffers an emotional trauma. It not only ensured their survival but at the same time it increased the legal birth rate and freed the young unmarried mother from her burden. Since that optimistic beginning some jagged edges have appeared as it has gradually become apparent that this solution has caused life-long suffering to the birth mother; or in the words of Triseliotis, Feast & Kyle: ‘Rather belatedly, it wasn’t until the 1980s that curiosity and concern were expressed about the fate of the birth mothers whose children were adopted.’ An attitude of shame surrounding illegitimacy was also to be found in working-class families, though the solution might be different.
