“I had marched for abortion rights. I had done volunteer clinic defense at my local Planned Parenthood . . . I knew the phrase “back-alley abortion,” and I understood the significance of the coat hanger image,” writes author and activist Kate Schatz in the author’s note of her new novel, “Where the Girls Were.” “And yet I had never heard of pregnant girls being disappeared, sent away from their parents and friends and schools, to give birth, to surrender their babies and then return to their lives like nothing had happened.”
As private adoption took shape as an industry, exploiting girls’ shame was a crucial tool for social workers and psychiatrists who diagnosed maternity home residents with depression, mental instability and the vague but damning label “unfit.”
This was among the reactions Schatz had when her mother tearfully confessed a long-held secret: As a teenager, she had gotten pregnant twice; each time, she was sent by her parents to a maternity home for the duration of the pregnancy — just one of the 1.5 million girls who “went away” during the Baby Scoop era. Raised with no information about their bodies, sex, or pregnancy, they also had no say in what happened to the babies they carried. “Where the Girls Were” is set in one such home, a rambling San Francisco Victorian where a group of pregnant girls lived in near-total seclusion. (On the rare occasions they were allowed to be in public, they were given fake engagement rings to wear.) Schatz, the author of feminist primers “Rad Women A–Z” and “Rad Women Worldwide,” and coauthor (with W. Kamau Bell) of “Do the Work: An Antiracist Activity Book,” found that becoming a mother herself stoked a need to know more about her mother’s invisible, silent sorority.
Some homes for unwed mothers (or, more euphemistically, “wayward girls”) were, like Ireland’s infamous Magdalene Laundries, run by the Catholic Church as workhouses where punishment was recast as atonement. Others were just nondescript houses, like the rambling San Francisco Victorian that Schatz set her novel in. The girls were cut off from their parents, who created cover stories for their absence (just, you know, going to visit an aunt upstate) and dissuaded from sharing details of their lives to other girls. They weren’t told that they were expected to give up their newborns to more appropriate, deserving parents; when the time came to “go over,” they gave birth in twilight sleep and were pressured to sign away their parental rights in the disoriented hours that followed. Many never saw their babies at all.
For Schatz, it felt important to depict some of the camaraderie that could be found in this liminal space where they were not children but also not adults. “The story I created [is] not what happened to my mom,” she clarifies. “There are similarities that I drew from, but I wanted to create an entirely fictional account.” She put the girls in conversation (and, more frequently, arguments) with each other and with the culture, the insular secrecy of the maternity house shrinking in what Schatz calls the “tie-dyed shadow” of the Summer of Love.
“I wasn’t interested in showing the [maternity home] as an evil place. It was traumatic for a lot of people, but I also read accounts from women who felt cared for there. They had people to talk to. I wanted to show the importance of that community.” But “Where the Girls Were” is also clear-eyed about the routine dehumanization of teen mothers by maternity-home staff, social workers, and psychologists. There was no differentiation, for instance, between girls who had become pregnant via consensual sex and girls who hadn’t. They were told how lucky they were to have a chance to start their lives over after, how easy it would be to forget their mistakes — to, as “Mad Men”’s Don Draper would later put it,” “Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.” Women like Schatz’s mother, she says, “went back into a world that wanted to silence them.”
As private adoption took shape as an industry, exploiting girls’ shame was a crucial tool for social workers and psychiatrists who diagnosed maternity home residents with depression, mental instability and the vague but damning label “unfit.” Pregnant teens were told they were incapable, both emotionally and materially, of being good mothers; this pathologizing was necessary to keep a supply of almost exclusively white infants aligned with the thriving demand for them. “[There were] all these men coming back from war who were traumatized,” says Schatz, “and there was pressure to have children.” There was also infertility, itself a source of shame for women who experienced it, just as America was proudly reshaping itself for the nuclear family. “All of a sudden, it was like Wait. We could make money with these babies.”
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This was far from the only ethically shaky aspect of Baby Scoop times. Gabrielle Glaser, author of 2021’s “American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption,” wrote about for-profit adoption as a “massive experiment in social engineering;” one now-notorious placement agency used relinquished children as test subjects, with identical twins and triplets placed with separate families for long-term study. Generations of adoptees, Glaser writes, “were brought up to think their biological parents hadn’t wanted them, and that — regardless of how cherished they were — they were their adoptive parents’ ‘second choice’ to biological offspring.”
“Where the Girls Were” joins a canon of both fiction and nonfiction set during the Baby Scoop era, much of it authored by people who, like Schatz, don’t want its history wiped away. (“[I]t kind of blew my mind, the idea that these women I loved very much had children and were expected not to know them or see them or think about them,” horror novelist Grady Hendrix said in 2025 about the inspiration for his novel “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls.”)
In her author’s note, Schatz recalls accompanying her mother to see “A Girl Like Her,” a documentary based on Ann Fessler’s 2006 oral-history collection “The Girls Who Went Away,” whose audience was filled with women who were once those girls. “I watched as my mom made eye contact with these total strangers, paused for a moment, then walked right into their arms . . . They didn’t need to say a word: for the first time in their lives, their secret was understood, their grief validated.”
“Where the Girls Were” joins a canon of both fiction and nonfiction set during the Baby Scoop era, much of it authored by people who, like Schatz, don’t want its history wiped away.
“I feel really proud of her,” Schatz tells me. “She went from having such enormous shame and not even telling me or my sister until we were adults to being able to have a conversation about it.” At a moment in which the importance of shame changing sides is ascendant, this feels monumental. But Schatz is also aware of how painfully timely her book is for the girls and women living in states with restrictive, often punitive laws.
Reading “Where the Girls Were,” it’s queasily clear that the Baby Scoop era is exactly the America that a Christian-nationalist GOP hungry for more white babies wants to make great again. As difficult as it is to imagine the generations now growing up with the world at their fingertips letting a new conservative order reduce them to penned-up breeders, that is the vision described, if not stated outright, in Project 2025. “It’s such a horrific trope that happens in those Congressional hearings,” says Schatz. “It’s always like, ‘If your 10-year-old daughter was raped, would you want her to have the baby?’ And then the anti-choice person has to say yes [to this] horrific scenario trotted out as proof that abortion will never be OK.” The idea of maternity homes making a comeback might seem unlikely, Schatz thinks, but so did the repeal of Roe v. Wade. “Anything feels possible. If it can be privatized and monetized, I think [it’s] on the table.”
Because the majority of modern adoptions are open ones, compelled silence is no longer the norm, though open adoption has its own set of challenges. The birth mothers and adoptees of the Baby Scoop era who want to find one another, meanwhile, have been among the enthusiastic users of consumer DNA test kits like 23andMe. A footnote to Schatz’s experience is that banking her own DNA sample led to connecting with her mother’s relinquished children, a story she calls “good, and kind of wild.” She found first one brother (“his daughter had done 23andMe, so when I did it she popped up and was like ‘Oh my god, I think you’re my aunt’”) and then the other (“He waited until his adoptive parents passed to look for his biological mother”) — it turned out they both lived in another state, within 10 miles of one another, two “old rocker dudes who play guitar and collect vinyl.”
Reading “Where the Girls Were,” it’s queasily clear that the Baby Scoop era is exactly the America that a Christian-nationalist GOP hungry for more white babies wants to make great again.
One thing that the novel’s central figure, Elizabeth “Baker” Phillips, does share with Schatz’s mother, she notes, is the incongruity of smart, studious young women who were nevertheless completely cut off from the information they most needed. “That felt like such an important thing to convey. My mom didn’t come from a super-conservative family. She had a relatively Bay Area liberal upbringing. I’ve asked her so many times: Did you consider abortion? Did you try to argue? Did you want to do something else? And she just told me over and over how little she actually knew,” Schatz says. “She didn’t know how her body worked. She didn’t know what other options there were. It was profound for me to realize that, yes, she wasn’t raised in a fundamentalist religious household where this was all totally kept from her. But it also wasn’t available information.”
More girls and women have that information today, but it’s clear that a powerful minority would prefer they didn’t. That alone makes “Where the Girls Were” a historically resonant story, but Schatz still finds herself wondering what might have helped her mother avoid the shame she carried for so long. “I think a lot about her copy of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’ that I would sneak off the bookshelf and read as a kid,” she says. “The edition she had came out in, I think, 1972, after she had already gone through this. It’s wild to think: What if her pregnancy happened 10 years later? What if she had had access, just to that book?” That things could have been so different for so many women and the children they lost makes standing for bodily autonomy right now more necessary than ever.
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