Fact Sheet #15: REJECTED BABIES

Neither God nor Nature could guarantee married couples or unmarried mothers the perfect baby they hoped for. There was no guarantee that mother or baby would survive the birth. Nor was there a guarantee that baby would not be born handicapped, seriously ill, deformed, or dead. If baby turned out to be twins, there was no question of selecting one and abandoning the other.

Adopters however enjoyed a considerable advantage over natural selection and prayer. They selected baby’s sex and hair colouring and were guaranteed doorstep delivery of the perfect baby they asked for.
Baby arrived with a signed and dated clean bill of health. If adopters were offered twins they could reject one and take the other. However, if for any reason the adopters were dissatisfied baby could be returned and a replacement arranged.

• Adopters refused babies that did not meet their specific requirements.
  
• Adopters who believed in the ‘bad blood’ theory refused to accept an illegitimate baby in the belief it would inherit immoral tendencies from its unknown father and morally inferior unmarried mother.
  
• Twins, even identical twins, were separated when adopters refused to accept both babies.
  
• Adopters refused the babies of mothers or fathers in prison, borstal or approved school on the grounds it would be criminally inclined.
  
• Babies born as a result of rape, incest or prostitution were virtually unadoptable.
  
• In 1965 The Western National Adoption Society reported that 27 babies were rejected for adoption ‘because of the irregular and immoral life of the mother’.
  
• A baby whose mother had given birth to more than one illegitimate child was rejected by those who believed in Telegony, on the grounds it was tainted. The bizarre theory claimed that if a woman mates with more than one man the subsequent offspring are flawed because the blood of the first male mingled with the mother’s blood during the first mating.
  
• Babies classed as backward were impossible to place with adopters, but Mr Kenneth Brill Children’s Officer for Devon found a solution:
  ‘In my kind of county a good proportion of the labouring families are dull and backward. We have villages deep in the southwest where we put our backward children into School and no one notices'.
  
• In 2000, a Roman Catholic Nun personally involved in infant adoption since 1959 expressed her firmly held conviction that: ‘Birth is man’s way – adoption is God’s'.

Copyright © Patricia Basquill, 2002 - 2008