The Traffic in Babies: Cross-Border Adoption and Baby-Selling between the United States and Canada, 1930-1972 9781442621145

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THE TRAFFIC IN BABIES: CROSS-BORDER ADOPTION AND BABY-SELLING BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA, 1930–1972

Between 1930 and the mid-1970s, several thousand Canadian-born children were adopted by families in the United States. At times, adopting across the border was a strategy used to deliberately avoid professional oversight and take advantage of varying levels of regulation across states and provinces. The Traffic in Babies traces the efforts of Canadian and American child welfare leaders – with intermittent support from immigration officials, politicians, police, and criminal prosecutors – to build bridges between disconnected jurisdictions and control the flow of babies across the Canada-US border. Karen A. Balcom details the dramatic and sometimes tragic history of cross-border adoptions – from the Ideal Maternity Home case and the Alberta Babies-for-Export scandal to transracial adoptions of Aboriginal children. Exploring how and why babies were moved across borders, The Traffic in Babies is a fascinating look at how social workers and other policymakers tried to find the birth mothers, adopted children, and adoptive parents who disappeared into the spaces between child welfare and immigration laws in Canada and the United States. (Studies in Gender and History) karen a. balcom is an associate professor in the Department of History at McMaster University.

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STUDIES IN GENDER AND HISTORY General Editors: Franca Iacovetta and Karen Dubinsky

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KAREN A. BALCOM

The Traffic in Babies Cross-Border Adoption and Baby-Selling between the United States and Canada, 1930–1972

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto  Buffalo  London

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©

University of Toronto Press 2011 Toronto  Buffalo  London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada



ISBN 978-0-8020-9918-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8020-9613-5 (paper)



Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.



Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication



Balcom, Karen Andrea, 1965– The traffic in babies : cross-border adoption and baby-selling between the United States and Canada, 1930–1972 / Karen A. Balcom.



(Studies in gender and history series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9918-1 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-8020-9613-5 (pbk.)



1. Intercountry adoption – Canada – History – 20th century.  2. Intercountry adoption – United States – History – 20th century.  3. Intercountry adoption – Canada – Case studies.  4. Intercountry adoption – Corrupt practices – Canada.  5. Intercountry adoption – Law and legislation – Canada.  I. Title.  II. Series: Studies in gender and history



HV875.58.C3B34 2011   362.7340971′0904   C2011-902181-1



This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.



University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.



University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

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For Andrew, and my girls (little and big)

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments  ix Introduction: Babies across Borders  3 1  Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  18 2  Border-Crossing Responses to the Ideal Maternity Home,   1945–1947  54 3  The Alberta Babies-for-Export Scandal, 1947–1949  94 4  Cross-Border Placements for Catholic Children from Quebec,   1945–1960  132 5  Criminal Law and Baby Black Markets, 1954–1964  166 6  Promoting and Controlling Cross-Border Adoption,   1950–1972  195 Conclusion: ‘A “No Man’s Land” of Jurisdiction’  232 Notes  247 Bibliography  317 Index  343 Illustrations follow page 148

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Preface and Acknowledgments

This book began as a graduate seminar paper at Rutgers University. In that early incarnation, I used the example of illicit adoptions from Nova Scotia’s Ideal Maternity Home (known to many Canadians as the case of the ‘Butterbox Babies’) to lay out my first ideas about border-crossings and child welfare networks in the history of adoption. At Rutgers, I found a community of dedicated scholars – students and faculty – who introduced me to new ideas, pushed me to my limits, and taught me so much about life as a scholar and a teacher. Alice Kessler-Harris, who directed this project as a dissertation, continues to amaze me with her powerful insight, her wide-ranging knowledge of women’s and gender history and the history of social policy, and her deep, continuing commitment to students and colleagues. A stunningly partial list of others at Rutgers who helped, supported, and influenced me includes Kathleen Brown, Paul Clemens, Nancy Hewitt, Jim Reed, Dee Garrison, Ann Pfau, Stephen Robertson, Delwyn Elizabeth, Kim Brodkin, Jenny Brier, Dina Lowy, Maire Veith, and Sam Elworthy. From Canada, my friend and mentor Joan Sangster worked closely with me on all phases of this project, and I could not have completed it without her help. This project travelled with me from Rutgers to McMaster University, where I was lucky to find colleagues and students in History, Women’s Studies, and now Gender Studies and Feminist Research, who supported both me and my work. Pamela Swett, Michael Egan, Megan Armstrong, Melinda Gough, Ruth Frager, and Nancy Bouchier are the best models of scholars and friends, offering much needed advice on research, teaching, parenting, university bureaucracies, and liquid refreshments, as the situation requires. Wendy Benedetti and Debbie

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x  Preface and Acknowledgments

Lobban make the university and my life run more smoothly than I deserve. A series of dedicated research assistants – Heather Barlow, Angela Graham, Stephannie Bass, Shauna LaCombe, Caleb Wellum, Sara Shamdani, Dana Mount, Jeffrey Pollock, and Jennifer Westlake – added so much depth to this book and saved me from many embarrassing errors. Other friends who encouraged me, housed me on research trips, and generally reassured me that it would all turn out well include Daniel Robinson, Laura Janara, Beth and P.O. Colleye, Marjorie Miles, Leah Vosko, Gerald Kernerman, Sean Gouglas, and the caregivers at Campus Child Care Co-Op in Guelph, Ontario. Sean Gouglas also prepared the maps that appear in this book. Along the way, I received financial support for this project from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Graduate School, Department of History and Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University, the American Historical Association, the State Archives and Records Administration of New York, the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota, and the Arts Research Board at McMaster University. The support, comments, and critiques of colleagues in the emerging community of historians working on the history of adoption in Canada, in the United States, and in other parts of the world – including Tobias Hübinette, Denise Cuthbert, Shurlee Swain, Laura Briggs, Ellen Herman, Veronica Strong-Boag, and Karen Dubinsky – has been equally valuable. This group embodies the ideal of scholarly exchange mixed with personal friendship and support that I always hoped I would find in academe. I have really enjoyed being one of the ‘two Canadian Karens.’ Denyse Baillargeon took time from her own research and writing to help with the chapters on Quebec, and the members of the Montreal History Group helped with material on the Montreal black market. On a much-treasured sabbatical at the University of Melbourne, Pat Grimshaw led the way as the faculty and students of the School of Historical Studies and the wider community of feminist historians and adoption scholars in Melbourne welcomed me, challenged me, and showed me generous hospitality. Eileen Boris offered aid and support at many stages of this project; she commented on both the first and the last conference paper I gave from this work. The ever-patient editors at the University of Toronto Press stayed with me through many delays, and then moved mountains to make this book go forward. My eternal thanks go out to Jill McConkey, Len Husband, Wayne Herrington, and copy-editor John St James, along with series editors Franca Iacovetta

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Preface and Acknowledgments  xi

and Karen Dubinsky. Errors and omissions remain, of course, my sole responsibility. My final, and most heartfelt, thanks go to my family. My parents John and Alice Balcom and my sister Carla Balcom have given me material sustenance, emotional support, joyful respite from work, and loving care for my children. My partner Andrew Bendall has lived with this book for too many years to count; our daughters Sydney and Caroline have never known a world without ‘mommy’s book.’ I thank the three of them for their love and enthusiasm, for putting up with my obsession, and for teaching me the many meanings of family. It remains to address some potentially controversial uses of language in this book, and to explore my position as a historian crossing borders of nation, language, and historical training. Adoption is a contested social institution with highly personalized and sometimes painful associations for many Canadians and Americans. Scholars must make very careful decisions about the language they use to describe the children and parents of adoption now and in the past. I refer to those who either have adopted children or who are considering, or are in the process of, adopting children as adoptive parents or prospective adoptive parents. I refer to the women who gave birth to children who were subsequently adopted as birth mothers, who are sometimes connected to others as birth parents, or as part of birth families or birth communities. The act of releasing a child for adoption is described here as surrendering or relinquishing a child, words that I believe hint at the deep emotional underpinning of the legal act of formally consenting to an adoption (or being denied any meaningful consent). Where other usages appear in my text or in quotations from my sources, they are intended to reflect the tenor of the times I am describing, a crucial part of recording histories of adoption. My position as a historian writing from Canada about peoples in the United States and Canada, from Euro-American culture about aboriginal peoples, and across the histories of English Canada and Quebec, raises some potential concerns. I generally refer to aboriginal peoples in Canada as First Nations and Métis peoples, while following the dominant US usage of Native Americans when referring to aboriginal peoples resident in the United States. The term ‘Indian’ appears only in direct quotations. This book crosses the divide between the history of English Canada and the history of Quebec. While there are certainly times and places where those histories are shared and can be considered together, historians of Canada must respect the distinctiveness

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xii  Preface and Acknowledgments

of the history of Quebec and its people. This is perhaps particularly important when we talk about language, religion, nation, and social policy, as I attempt to do in this book. I remain acutely conscious that, often, when I write about cross-border adoptions from Quebec, and when I write about the development of adoption policy in Quebec, I am writing about these developments as seen from (evaluated from) outside of the province. In that sense, this book is much more of a history from English Canada that encompasses Quebec examples, than it is a history written from or about adoption as understood within Quebec. The same point must be made with respect to how I talk about the painful history of the adoption of Native American, First Nations, and Métis children by white families. I am conscious that I am telling this story (I hope, with a critical eye) primarily from Euro-American sources. This distinction and the claims that rise from it are important, and I have tried to carry this nuance through my writing. Adoption scholars are often asked what I have come to think of as ‘the question’; that is, the question of how one connects personally with the adoptive triad of birth parent, adoptive parent, and adopted child. I understand the question is asked because adoption is such a personal reality for so many Canadians and Americans, and because so many scholars working in the field are connected to adoption in this way. At its best, this query is meant as a way of establishing community and connection, but I also worry that the question and the answer can be used to assess who may speak or write, or to discount what is said or written from a particular location. That said, I feel I must answer because I know many readers will ask. My answer is that I am neither an adoptee, nor an adoptive parent, nor a surrendering mother. My interest in this topic came initially from my experiences of and reflections on the frequent border-crossings in my own life, and from my commitment to the history of the welfare state, conceived broadly. I recognize that my location outside the triad (and, simultaneously, inside other communities of race, gender, nation, academic institution) shapes the history I have written, just as the social and cultural location of every scholar shapes her or his work. I hope to have told this story of border-crossing adoption – the story traced in these pages – with humility, and with respect for both my historical subjects and my contemporary readers. Karen Balcom Guelph, Ontario 2010

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THE TRAFFIC IN BABIES: CROSS-BORDER ADOPTION AND BABY-SELLING BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA, 1930–1972

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Introduction: Babies across Borders

In the summer of 1945, Canadian Nora Lea (acting executive director of the Canadian Welfare Council) and American Maud Morlock (adoption consultant at the United States Children’s Bureau) were corresponding regularly about the intensifying problem of poorly regulated cross-border adoptions between Canada and the United States. Lea and Morlock were particularly worried about a large commercial maternity home in rural Nova Scotia doing a brisk business – and making a fine profit – placing the infant children of unwed Canadian mothers in unsupervised and uninvestigated adoptive homes in the United States. The Ideal Maternity Home promised American adoptive parents quick adoptions with no red tape and no interference from social workers; prospective parents could travel to Nova Scotia, choose an infant, and return home with their adopted child in as little as ten days. The process was slick, well organized, and very difficult for social workers and government officials working within one province, one state, or one country to control. A frustrated Lea wrote: ‘My chief concern at the moment is this wretched Ideal Maternity Home. I wish a tidal wave would come in from the Atlantic and engulf it. They become increasingly difficult to deal with from a local point of view and seem to be spreading their tentacles further and further into the U.S.A.’1 Canada-to-US adoptions orchestrated from the Ideal Maternity Home were part of a larger phenomenon. Between 1930 and the mid1970s, several thousand Canadian-born children were adopted by families in the United States. The adoptions originated from every province and territory, and children went to almost every US state.2 Most of the children were very young infants, the majority of whom were born to unwed mothers. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, almost all

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4  The Traffic in Babies

these children were (assumed to be) white, although in later years the border-crossing group included a small number of African Canadians alongside hundreds of First Nations and Métis children.3 While most of the adoptions were technically legal, some were definitely illegal, and many others danced the line by playing with inconsistencies in immigration and child welfare law in the two countries. Before the mid1950s, most of the adoptions were contracted extremely quickly and with little or no attention to the careful investigations at the centre of ‘sound adoption practice’ as understood by child welfare professionals in both countries. Some border-crossing adoptions were outright cases of black market baby-selling, where the border crossing directly facilitated the commercial transaction. Child welfare leaders in the two countries were not opposed to all border-crossing adoptions. In some cases, carefully controlled and professionally regulated adoptions across borders provided good homes for children in need of new families. The problem was that border crossing was sometimes used, deliberately, to evade state regulation and professional oversight. As babies crossed borders, they slipped between legal jurisdictions and arenas of governmental responsibility. As they moved between Canadian provinces and US states, child-providers, adopted children, adoptive parents, and birth mothers disappeared into the space between two (or more) sets of child welfare and immigration policies and laws. Indeed, the Ideal Maternity Home operation was explicitly designed to exploit the loopholes and gaps in regulatory authority that opened up when babies and parents crossed borders. In this book, I trace the efforts of national, provincial, and state child welfare leaders, of immigration and consular officials, and of politicians, police, and criminal prosecutors to close the gaps and control the flow of babies across the Canada-US border between 1930 and 1972. I advance two major arguments. My first is that child welfare reformers in the United States and Canada saw the cross-border ‘traffic in babies’ as a dangerous affront to their vision of ‘sound adoption practice’ and as an opportunity to push the adoption reform agenda of professional social work. Babies and parents moved between states and provinces because there were differences in the way adoption was regulated in those separate jurisdictions. The scandal of a fast and loose traffic in babies invited unflattering comparisons between child welfare standards in various provinces and states. Poorly managed or dangerous crossborder adoptions gave child welfare reformers evidence they could use

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Introduction: Babies across Borders  5

to push for adoption reform and the professionalization of child welfare services. Thus, reformers used the transnational traffic in babies to leverage domestic reform inside states and provinces. Adoption reformers knew, however, that separate actions in separate jurisdictions would not on their own stem the flow of babies across borders; they needed to establish ties and cooperative mechanisms reaching across the borders dividing one state from another, one province from another, one country from the other. My second argument is that controlling the traffic in babies required establishing connections and building bridges between private and public social agencies, between states and provinces, and between federal governments and state/ provincial governments. This argument implies a series of questions I address in this text: What did these bridges look like? How did they function? Did informal collaborations between individuals and social agencies work best (in which circumstances)? Were formal protocols between governments more effective? How could governments be convinced to sign on? What legal or constitutional barriers stood in the way? How did professional cooperation and connection work alongside (instead of?) agreements between governments? The adoption reformers in this study made good use of informal collaborations based on their personal and professional connections to each other, but most, ultimately, preferred formal and binding agreements to informal and personalized collaborations. Their model of progress, never fully enacted, was one where state/provincial/federal governments signed on to formal agreements binding across jurisdictions and enforced through the power of the state. The constitutional division of powers between federal and state/ provincial governments in Canada and the United States was a very significant barrier for reformers who wanted to pull federal governments into the active management of cross-border adoption. Both the United States and Canada have federal systems wherein the national government has jurisdictional responsibility over the admission of immigrants and the control of national borders, while the sub-national (state/ provincial) governments are responsible for adoption and other child welfare issues.4 Adoption reformers in the period 1930–1972 found it very difficult to convince key federal agencies (the US Department of State, the Canadian Department of External Affairs, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service) to extend or reinterpret their mandates and join in efforts to regulate adoptions across the Canada-US border. The story told here may serve as a counter-example or caution against

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6  The Traffic in Babies

narratives focused on the centralization of state authority at the federal level in the post–Second World War period. The reformers in this book were negotiating federal–state/provincial authority in cross-border adoption during the same period that international adoption took off as a global phenomenon. Citizens of the United States have adopted more than 450,000 children internationally since the end of the Second World War, while Canadians have added over 33,000 children from other nations to their families since 1978. In the peak year for incoming international adoptions, the United States received 22,980 children (2004) and Canada 2180 (2003).5 The vast majority of these children came to the United States and Canada from poorer, less developed, or politically unstable countries. The political, economic, and racial resonances in transnational adoptions originating from disadvantaged regions are in many ways different from those marking Canada-to-US adoptions. But there are also important points of connection between the Canada-US story and the global story. For example, federal, provincial, and state divisions had to be carefully negotiated in Canadian and American responses to the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, the international instrument that establishes worldwide standards for the regulation of international adoption. Canada met the challenge with a decentralized administrative process that allowed for a central authority in each of the thirteen provinces and territories, coordinated at the federal level through Intercountry Adoption Services at Human Resources and Skills Development Canada. The national system was functioning by 1997, and individual provinces signed on as their regulatory process was enacted. The last province, Quebec, joined in 2006. In the United States, there is one central authority – the Office of Children’s Services in the US Department of State – but most of the regulatory power and supervision of adoption providers is in the hands of two ‘accrediting entities’ contracted by the State Department. Designing and implementing the US system was a highly contentious process, and as a result the Convention only came into force in the United States in April 2008.6 The jurisdictional wrangling and negotiation we see in mid-century efforts to regulate adoptions across the Canada-US border can help us understand the delays, complications, and challenges in the Hague system as it is developing in Canada, in the United States, and across the globe. The movement of children (with or without their families) back and forth across the Canada-US border was hardly a new phenomenon

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Introduction: Babies across Borders  7

in the mid-twentieth century. Large and small migrations across the ‘world’s longest undefended border’ have been a feature of Canadian and American history for as long as the border has been defined.7 By the twentieth century, it was not uncommon for the same family to have branches in both countries, and occasionally children crossed from one country to the other to be formally or informally adopted by family or friends on the other side. Since the 1990s, a steady flow of US-born children going in most cases to non-related adoptive families in Canada (there were 102 such adoptions in 2005, 189 in 2008, and 253 in 2009) has drawn media comment. In these recent cases, most of the children leaving the United States are non-white; it appears, in many cases, that surrendering families are choosing adoptive families in Canada in the belief that their children will experience less racism in Canadian society.8 This recent pattern in US-to-Canada adoptions exactly reverses the dominant characteristics of adoptions between the two nations through much of the twentieth century. Before the late 1950s, almost all the children crossing the border were racially classified as white. When nonwhite children crossed the border from the 1950s onward, almost all went from Canada to the United States. Overall, the most striking characteristic of the border-crossing adoptions between the 1930s and the 1970s was that the movement was almost exclusively north-to-south. The small number of children placed from the United States into Canada were almost always on their way to homes with relatives; there were very few instances of public or private social agencies or other adoption operators in the United States placing their charges north of the border in adoptions with non-relatives over this period.9 Child welfare leaders in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were puzzled by the north-to-south direction. Commenting on the Ideal Maternity Home, Maud Morlock explained, ‘We do not know how many such placements are occurring. Neither do we know why Canadian children are placed here.’10 The ‘why’ question was important; it was difficult for reformers to solve their ‘problem’ without knowing why the crossborder baby trade went from north to south. There were no perfect or complete answers, but mid-century observers identified some contributing factors and we can add to this list. If we look first to the Canadian or ‘supply’ side, lax child welfare laws or negligent enforcement of existing laws in several Canadian provinces – notably Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Alberta, and Quebec – certainly shaped the north-to-south flow between the 1930s and the 1950s, as did the activities of unscrupulous maternity home operators and well-organized black market-

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8  The Traffic in Babies

ers. But there were also US states with weak child welfare systems and many examples of black market operations south of the border. Some Canadian and American child welfare professionals speculated that the root of the problem lay in overly strict adoption regulations in some US jurisdictions that effectively ‘“choked off” applicants in such large numbers that they have forced them into a black market for babies, and that this securing of Canadian babies is part of the pattern.’11 But there were also Canadian jurisdictions where very strict adoption regulations were in force, and this does not seem to have sent Canadian parents to the United States in any consistent way. The pairing of specific sending and receiving regions was significant. For example, children sent out from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick via the Ideal Maternity Home and other adoption operations often found homes in New Jersey, New York, and states along the New England coast (see figures 2.1, 2.2, 3.2) in the 1940s. For the most part, these states had strong adoption laws, and professional adoption practices were well entrenched. There were, however, long-standing traditions of trade, communication, and north-to-south (or more accurately eastto-west) migration connecting these two regions. In the west, most children adopted from Alberta in the 1930s and 1940s ended up in western states, especially in California, Montana, and Utah (see figure 3.1), while children from British Columbia found homes in the US northwest from the 1930s forward. Similarly, many children leaving Quebec between the 1940s and 1960s were adopted by families in the border states of the US north-east (see figure 4.1). In effect, the flow of babies followed long-established cultural and transportation links between Canadian and American regions. In the case of adoptions from the Maritime provinces and Quebec, patterns of religious affiliation and religious concentration were a crucial variable conditioning the flow of babies from north to south. The distribution of population by race, and differing patterns of race relations and discrimination, influenced the placement of First Nations and Métis children and of African Canadian and other non-white children in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.12 If differing child welfare laws, regional ties, religion, and race all shaped north-to-south flows, the expectations and desires of American adopters were also important. By mid-century, both Canadian and American families could expect a lengthy wait when they tried to adopt a healthy, white infant through a professional social agency. The much larger American population meant, however, that there was a vastly

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Introduction: Babies across Borders  9

larger pool of waiting adoptive parents south of the border. This was particularly evident in large urban centres. Parents living in the greater New York City area, for example, feature prominently in cross-border adoptions from Canada. There also seemed to be a persistent belief on the part of American parents that white, healthy, adoptable infants somehow existed in superfluity across Canada. Child welfare leaders tried to dispel this myth – it was only true with respect to Catholic babies in Quebec and then only for a limited period – but it would not go away.13 The fact that some US parents successfully secured children in Canada strengthened the belief that Canada was an ‘easy’ source for babies. Thus, the list of Canadian natural resources available for export and development seemed to extend from fish and lumber and minerals to a plentiful supply of infants for adoption.14 For some politicians, community leaders, and child welfare professionals, this raised a significant nationalist issue. These were Canadianborn children; what of the child’s right to retain her or his Canadian, Québécois, or First Nations heritage? And, what of the right of the First Nations, the Canadian state, or the Québécois nation to retain the contributions these children might make as adult citizens and members of communities? The role of nationality, religion, and race in Canada-toUS adoptions leads us to a broader consideration of borders and border crossing.15 Throughout this work, I use ‘borders’ to refer first and most literally to the cartography of states, provinces, and nations. The story, from this perspective, is about the complicated intergovernmental logistics involved in the regulation of adoption. But what of the borders and boundaries separating one religion from another, one race from another, and one nation (in the sense of a linguistic and cultural group) from another? Often, the children travelling from Canada to the United States in adoption traversed many kinds of borders. How did these border crossings layer on each other? How did the meaning of these borders – in the sense of which were important, which easily crossed, which crossed only with difficulty – change over time? Did crossing geopolitical borders make it easier for parents and children to cross borders of race and religion? My answers to these questions about overlapping borders, and to my longer set of questions about professionalization and collaboration across jurisdictions, are shaped by research sources that emphasize the concerns of professional social workers and government officials framing adoption law and policy. My major sources in this study were the institutional records of government agencies (the United States Chil-

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10  The Traffic in Babies

dren’s Bureau, state and provincial departments of public welfare) and of large umbrella organizations in professional child welfare (the Canadian Welfare Council and the Child Welfare League of America).16 These organizations or bureaucracies were interested in the development and implementation of adoption policy on a broad scale, and their records emphasize negotiations between the priorities of professional social workers (inside and outside of government) and the regulatory power of the state. The narratives about border-crossing adoption that are related in this book would look quite different if the questions were asked and answered from sources emphasizing the perspective of relinquishing mothers and families, of adoptive families, or of adopted children, as in the important work of other scholars in adoption history.17 Child adoption is a critical field of public policy, and a deeply personal experience touching the lives of millions of Canadians and Americans. My way into this history is through the policy, and especially through the policymakers in government and professional social service agencies reacting to the particular challenges they saw in the movement of babies across borders. I do not argue, and certainly do not mean to imply, that adoption policy is more ‘important’ or conveys more of a ‘truth’ about adoption than is found in the adoption histories of parents, children, and wider families. Nor do I see a firm and fast division between the policymaking process and the experiences of parents and children. Indeed, the policies and the people are directly intertwined. Although I sometimes use the term ‘policymakers’ as shorthand for government officials and social welfare professionals, parents, children (or adults claiming to speak for children), and members of the wider community were often also ‘policymakers.’ Their assessments of adoption policy and of adoption practitioners were important components in the policy discussions, planning, and negotiations I trace. Consequently, the voices and experiences of children, adopting parents, and relinquishing mothers appear in this text to explain, critique, and contextualize the policy process. This book stands in conversation with other work in adoption history, a field that includes adoption stories told from many viewpoints.18 The growing body of work in North American adoption history includes overviews of adoption across the twentieth century in the United States and in English Canada, alongside US-based studies written from the perspective of adoptive parents, of birth mothers, and of social workers and other adoption professionals.19 There is also Canadian and American work on openness and secrecy in adoption, on the human

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Introduction: Babies across Borders  11

science of modern adoption, on the relationship of the foster system and international sponsorship to adoption, and on the domestic and international dynamics of transnational and transracial adoption.20 One consistent theme in this literature is that the seemingly private decision to relinquish or adopt a child is in fact a highly charged and often deeply contested public act. Adoption is, literally, the site of construction of one family, paired with the de-construction, or at least attenuation, of another potential family. Consequently, adoption as a social, cultural, and legal practice has been a site of continual debate about the nature of family, the meaning of belonging, and the appropriate role of the state and social welfare professionals in the regulation of intimate life. Following historian Ellen Herman, I see the efforts of social welfare professionals to extend their authority over the adoption transaction as a key theme in adoption history in the period 1930–1972. Professionals, argues Herman, were developing a model of adoptive ‘kinship by design’ where social workers’ training and skills were used to ‘predict and control the ingredients of intimate solidarity’ in order to produce the best possible outcomes in adoptive placements.21 As several scholars have noted, the effort of social workers to extend their authority over adoption was, in part, a self-conscious strategy to solidify the status of social work as a profession.22 One key method in this campaign was to lobby for reformed adoption laws that would extend the legal authority of the state (to be enacted by professional social workers) over adoption. With this connection, the history of social work and the history of adoption are entwined as part of the wider history of the expansion of the welfare state in mid-twentieth-century Canada and the United States. Exploring cross-border adoptions allows me to trace the relationship between professionalization and state building across and between US states and Canadian provinces. Before the 1950s, most of the leading child welfare professionals in Canada and the United States working on adoption reform and in child welfare more broadly were women. Thus, the efforts of female adoption reformers to respond to the traffic in babies can be connected to the transnational historiography on the role of women in the creation and expansion of welfare states.23 As in much of that literature, the personal relationships and intimate connections between key reformers are an important part of the story told here, particularly in the period before 1950. Through the mid-decades of the twentieth century, child welfare professionals worked to convince the public (including relinquishing mothers and adoptive parents), legislators, and less progressive col-

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12  The Traffic in Babies

leagues that professional regulation of adoption was necessary and should, wherever possible, be mandated as law. This work took place in public and private social agencies, in professional organizations, in the professional literature, and in conversations with the public, politicians, prosecutors, and judges. Social workers gathered allies and made progress, but the professional project in adoption reform faced considerable resistance. Social workers in both countries faced extensive public criticism of their adoption practices in the period 1930–1960 from those objecting to ‘red tape and runaround’ in adoption.24 Their pre-adoption investigation and post-adoption supervision of adoptive parents, birth mothers, and children were seen as overly intrusive, and social workers were sometimes accused of deliberately slowing down or blocking adoptions in order preserve their own jobs in child welfare. By the early1970s, there was a new and forceful critique from Native American, First Nations, and African American communities who saw social workers encouraging transracial adoptive placements as enacting racist and colonialist agendas.25 Such contemporary critiques of adoption workers echo in historical analyses of adoption, where social workers are often portrayed as paternalistic, judgmental, or rigid in their work with birth mothers and adoptive families.26 There is certainly historical justification for such criticisms, but there is also a danger that the genuine commitments of dedicated workers to the welfare of children, birth mothers, and adoptive parents (understood, of course, through the lens of professional precepts) can be lost. Canadian historian Veronica Strong-Boag provides a useful caution when she reminds historians that social workers and other officials in child welfare often lacked the resources they needed to provide better, more flexible, more creative support for families and children.27 I have tried to understand social workers’ goals and objectives from within their logic and their genuine concerns about how best to protect children and parents, but also to be critical of the blind spots and unchallenged assumptions shaping their world views. Inevitably, my read of professional social workers in the history of adoption is shaped by the fact that I enter this history at those border-crossing moments that social workers viewed as particularly dangerous. These were moments where it was easier for social workers, following their own logic, to make the case for increased professional supervision and state intervention in adoption. There are two chronological arcs in this book, related to changing priorities in the adoption reform agenda of professional social work-

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Introduction: Babies across Borders  13

ers, and to changing approaches to the management of cross-border adoption. The two arcs overlap in the crucial decade of the 1950s. Before 1950, the most important cross-border collaborations were informal and were directed by senior child welfare and adoption reformers at the United States Children’s Bureau (USCB) and the Canadian Welfare Council (CWC). This group included Americans Katharine Lenroot, Maud Morlock, and Elsa Castendyck, alongside Canadians Nora Lea and Charlotte Whitton. Whitton was the key figure connecting the Canadian and American welfare networks, and as a consequence, her very personal odyssey in adoption reform is a central theme in chapters 1 and 3. The story told in these chapters cannot be separated from Whitton as an individual, who cast a long shadow over the history of child welfare in Canada. The Canadian and American women leading the USCB and the CWC understood cross-border adoption as dangerous, and their explicit goal was to curtail such adoptions. They used their personal and professional ties to each other – and to a wider community of social welfare professionals – to publicize the problems they saw in cross-border adoption, and to urge collaboration between child welfare professionals (inside and outside of government) in sending provinces and receiving states.28 As they promoted cooperation and collaboration across jurisdictions, they also lobbied for changes in adoption law and practise inside individual states and provinces. This section of the book provides concrete examples of how reformers used transnational forums and transnational comparisons to leverage domestic reform.29 Chapters 1 through 3 explore the pre-1950 period. Chapter 1 examines how Charlotte Whitton put cross-border adoption on the agenda of Canadian and American child welfare leaders in the 1930s. The chapter opens by introducing the United States Children’s Bureau and the Canadian Welfare Council and exploring the personal and professional connections between the two bodies. The CWC-USCB connection was critical to inter-jurisdictional bridge building before 1950s. Chapter 1 also introduces us to the professional adoption reform agenda we will trace through subsequent chapters. Through the 1930s, adoption reformers in Canada and the United States came to a common understanding of why adoptions across borders were dangerous, and why they needed agreements and procedures linking provinces, states, and national governments. Cross-border adoption emerged as an international child welfare problem requiring a connected response and as an opportunity to advance domestic adoption reform.

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14  The Traffic in Babies

In chapter 2, the focus is on the Ideal Maternity Home (IMH) in the period 1945–7. The IMH story unrolled inside Nova Scotia in a series of confrontations between the maternity home operators and provincial officials, and outside the province in communications and collaborations between provincial and state officials channelled through the senior women at the USCB and the CWC. The IMH provides perhaps the best example of ‘what could go wrong’ in border-crossing adoption, and how an informal model of collaboration could effect change. The IMH introduces us, as well, to the slippery problem of defining a black market in adoption. Just when, and under what circumstances, can we say that babies are for sale and why is this determination important? Overlapping religious and jurisdictional border crossings are also critical to the IMH story. The IMH was, largely, in the business of placing the children of Protestant and Catholic unwed mothers in the homes of Jewish families in the United States, in contravention of adoption law and/or practice in most states and provinces. In the case of the IMH, border crossing was an explicit strategy to evade religious placement restrictions and other forms of professional oversight. In chapter 3, the scene shifts to the province of Alberta in the late 1940s. Charlotte Whitton reappears as a welfare investigator working on a privately sponsored survey of welfare services in Alberta. In her Welfare in Alberta (1947), Whitton condemned almost all aspects of provincial welfare services, but she saved her most scathing criticism for the ‘trafficking of the Provincial Child Welfare Department in adoptions across the United States border.’30 The Alberta case forced adoption reformers to confront a government agency (the Alberta Child Welfare Department) as the source of unprofessional and potentially dangerous cross-border placements. Government officials were not allies in the bridge-building and professionalizing process. They were, rather, opponents who actively resisted any effort to change their practices. Whitton and other reformers tried to reach over the heads of provincial officials by enlisting the federal government, through the passport-issuing responsibility of the Department of External Affairs. The reformers argued there was no way to fully control inter-jurisdictional placements without intervention from the federal government, but federal politicians and bureaucrats saw adoption (across borders or not) as a strictly provincial responsibility. Thus, the Alberta case also lets us explore how the federal-provincial division of powers complicated (in most ways, blocked) the use of federal power to control the traffic in babies.

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Introduction: Babies across Borders  15

Chapters 4 and 5 explore two kinds of cross-border adoptions originating from Quebec between the 1940s and the 1960s. In chapter 4, we move into the second chronological arc in the book. By the 1950s, the reformers were thinking about carefully controlled, professionally regulated cross-border adoptions as a positive resource for children who could not be matched to appropriate adoptive homes inside their own province, state, or nation. Concurrently, the personalized, female-dominated reform networks of the earlier twentieth century were weakening in the face of large, more bureaucratized child welfare systems in both countries. As these networks faded, it became more difficult to sustain the earlier model of informal and personalized collaboration across jurisdictions. Chapter 4 examines cross-border adoptions made by church-run Catholic adoption agencies in Quebec such as La Société d’Adoption et de Protection de L’Enfance (SAPE). Adoption reformers in both countries agreed that these adoptions did not follow professional protocols, and they worked (again, through methods of informal collaboration) to prod the Catholic placement agencies to improve their practices. But, by the 1950s, the personalized networks connecting the USCB and the CWC were less effective. On both sides of the border, adoption reformers advanced their own plans to reform cross-border placements with less consultation and connection with cross-border partners and with more emphasis on formalized protocols or policies. Chapter 5 examines a series of black market adoption rings operating out of Montreal in the 1940s and 1950s, selling the children of white, unwed, French Canadian mothers to Jewish adoptive families from the New York City area. Child welfare leaders at the CWC and the USCB were certainly aware of the Montreal black market, but they did not develop a joint response. The key actors in this story were police and criminal prosecutors in Montreal and New York who tried to use Canadian and American criminal codes to stop the cross-border black market, alongside Canadian and American politicians expressing outrage at the blatant selling of children. In 1955, US senators heard testimony about the Montreal-to-New York black market in their wider investigation of the interstate black markets in babies. Through the 1950s and 1960s, there were several unsuccessful attempts to pass federal black market legislation in the United States, which would invoke federal authority over interstate commerce to control the cross-border baby black market. In these efforts, we see the increasing use (or attempted use) of formal expressions of federal power to control the flow of babies across jurisdictions, a goal long desired by the adoption reformers

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16  The Traffic in Babies

of the pre-1950s period. The controversy surrounding the black market revealed that the reformers’ earlier efforts to exert influence had wrought some changes in passport policy at the Canadian Department of External Affairs. In chapter 6, the focus is on formal protocols and intergovernmental agreements designed to promote adoptions across borders for children who could not find the families they needed within their home jurisdictions. From the late 1950s, New York legislators pushed for an Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC) to govern the movement of children across state borders in adoption and foster care. The Compact was designed to facilitate professionally controlled and regulated adoption placements across borders, and to discourage black market baby trafficking. It was also a part of the mid-century search for effective ways for states to govern collectively across borders. New York enacted the ICPC in 1960, and other states slowly signed on through the 1960s and 1970s. Canadian provinces did not join the Compact, although from the beginning the Compact included language envisioning this kind of expansion. The Compact both supported and reflected the new emphasis among adoption professionals on finding homes for the hard-to-place child. Hard-to-place children were those of non-white or mixed-race heritage, or children with mental and physical disabilities who had only recently come to be included in the social work definition of the adoptable child. Adoption professionals often needed to actively look outside of local areas – across borders – to find homes willing and able to take on these children. Now, cross-border placement was clearly a tool of professional adoption practice. By the 1960s, the children most likely to cross the Canadian-American border in adoption (or, at least to cross under the watchful eye of adoption professionals inside and outside of government) were hard-to-place children with an African-Canadian or, especially, a First Nations or Métis heritage. Public and private adoption agencies and child welfare administrations in Canada and the United States joined forces in formalized adoption resource exchanges in the 1960s and early 1970s, most notably the Indian Adoption Project and the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America administered by the Child Welfare League of America. At the same time, minority communities raised increasingly loud protests against adoptions that crossed borders of race and culture, as well as geography. The book’s conclusion reflects back over the period 1930–1972, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of informal and formal collab-

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Introduction: Babies across Borders  17

orations across jurisdictions, pausing to consider the ways in which combating cross-border adoption advanced the (changing) agenda of professional adoption reform inside Canada and the United States. I reflect, briefly, on what this history might contribute to the wider study of the Canadian-American border and the increasing challenge of governing across borders. Finally, I return to the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption and connect the lessons from this study to contemporary efforts to regulate transnational adoption.

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1 Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s

In the spring of 1934, a social worker from the Buffalo, New York, Children’s Aid Society complained to Charlotte Whitton (executive director of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare) about the safety and legal status of several adoptive placements of Canadian children with New York families. In one case, the Girls’ Home in Hamilton, Ontario, had placed a young girl for adoption with a Mr and Mrs Seymour of Akron, New York. This placement was illegal under New York law (which required that any agency placing a child in the state hold a state licence), and the Seymours were far from ideal adoptive parents. Within a few months, the child was reported to our society [the Buffalo CAS] … as being neglected. The Seymour home had been used as a pig-pen. It was cold, damp, and filthy. Sleeping facilities were inadequate. Mrs Seymour was mentally abnormal, filthy about her person, and utterly incapable of rearing a child. Mr Seymour was uncouth and an alcoholic. The child was badly neglected. Our Society returned her to the Girls’ Home in Hamilton. The Seymour home had not been investigated before placement.1

This description of the Seymour family sounded every alarm in the lexicon of social workers assessing the fitness of adoptive parents. The Seymours were destitute, dirty, unstable, and immoral, and Mrs Seymour lacked even basic maternal skills.2 The fault for this dangerous placement lay with the Hamilton agency, which had ignored both New York law and the most basic tenet of professional adoption practice: investigation before placement. The CAS worker who reported this case to Whitton worried there might be other Canadian children in equally poor New York placements who had not been discovered.

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Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  19

Of course, similar concerns could well be raised with respect to illadvised or dangerous adoptive placements contained within Ontario, within New York, or within other states and provinces in this period. In the early 1930s, the legal regulation of adoption differed substantially from one jurisdiction to another, and the placement practices of child welfare agencies and independent child placers were yet more variable. Whitton and other child welfare officials argued, however, that in a border-crossing (jurisdiction-crossing) adoption it was much more difficult to track children and parents and to monitor children who might be in difficulty. The difference border crossing makes is perhaps clearer in another case reported from Buffalo. In 1932, a young Canadian boy was placed with a Toronto family by the Children’s Aid Branch of the Ontario Department of Public Welfare. The child was abused in the Toronto home, and his foster parents ‘gave’ him to friends from Buffalo. J.J. Kelso, the leading light of Ontario child welfare reform, helped the New York family – the Franks – secure a legal consent for adoption from the child’s birth mother. Ontario authorities did not investigate the new adoptive home. The Buffalo CAS became involved when the Franks tried to adopt the child under New York law. The consent to adoption secured in Canada did not satisfy New York law, and the Buffalo workers were rebuffed when they asked for help from Ontario officials. The Buffalo CAS eventually agreed to approve the Frank home for adoption, but noted that because of ‘serious financial, physical and personality problems’ they would never have approved this placement had they known of it in advance.3 The Frank adoption reveals just how the separation between legal jurisdictions (between states, provinces, and nations) could leave children without protection. Commenting on this case, an officer with the Ontario Children’s Aid Branch noted that ‘no investigation was made by our Department respecting the home of Mrs Frank as this was a private placement outside of the province of Ontario.’ Ontario authorities gave the United States consul in Toronto a letter authorizing the American parents to remove the child from the province (although such a document had no legal standing in the province) and the consul made arrangements for a visa authorizing the child’s entry into the United States. As to the legal consent to adoption, the Ontario official noted only that ‘the consent to adoption is on our prescribed forms.’4 In other words, the Ontario Children’s Aid Branch accepted no responsibility towards the child beyond facilitating his removal from the province; this office was unconcerned with how differences between the laws of

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20  The Traffic in Babies

Ontario and New York would complicate the child’s adoption and, it seemed, unconcerned with the child’s fate after he crossed the border. There were several issues at play in the cross-border cases reported from Buffalo: the differing placement standards of (more or less) professional social agencies; the assumption (or not) of legal and social responsibility for a child’s welfare after placement across borders; the legal requirements for adoption in various jurisdictions; and the respect due from one professional child welfare organization to another. Between 1933 and 1941, Charlotte Whitton tried repeatedly to negotiate an international agreement that would address these and related issues. Her goal was to establish best principles in inter-jurisdictional child placement and force public and private child-welfare agencies in Canada and the United States to abide by these principles when they placed children outside their borders or received children into their areas. As the executive director of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare (CCCW), Whitton was at this time the central figure in Canadian child welfare. She also enjoyed valuable professional and personal ties to the leaders at the United States Children’s Bureau (USCB) and planned to use the USCB’s prestige and authority to back her own in her cross-border campaign. Unfortunately for Whitton, this strategy was weakened by the restricted operating space of both the CCCW and the USCB; neither agency had direct enforcement power in child welfare. The two bodies could suggest and lobby – they might facilitate an agreement between states and provinces – but they could not compel. Ideally, Whitton wanted more than a voluntary agreement. She wanted an institutionalized and formal pact binding across borders and backed by the enforcement power of state, provincial, and federal governments. Her attempts to develop such an institutionalized agreement raised difficult-to-resolve conflicts over the relative benefits of informal collaboration versus formalized/enforceable protocols, and over state/ provincial versus federal responsibility for border-crossing babies. In both Canada and the United States, child welfare was (and remains) the constitutional responsibility of the state/provincial level of government; these are decentralized and divided federal systems built around the principle of state/provincial control over most social welfare standards and procedures.5 This chapter traces Whitton’s campaign for a cross-border agreement in the 1930s. The chapter begins by introducing the United States Children’s Bureau and the Canadian Council on Child Welfare (later,

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Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  21

the Canadian Welfare Council or CWC) and exploring the shared understanding of ‘sound adoption practice’ developing in the two organizations.6 USCB–CCCW/CWC ties, and the common commitment to professionalized ‘sound adoption practice,’ were the foundations on which Whitton hoped to build a cross-border agreement. She identified at least three positive outcomes from such an agreement: children placed across borders (and adoptive parents acquiring children from outside their home states/provinces) would be better protected in the adoption transaction; Canadian and American child welfare agencies would be guided towards better practices for adoption placements both inside and outside of their borders; and a new spirit of ‘good neighbourliness’ in child welfare would develop across the Canadian-American border.7 Cross-border adoption, Whitton insisted, was a serious child welfare problem that could not be solved within any one jurisdiction. ‘Almost as Our Other Selves’: The Canadian Welfare Council and the United States Children’s Bureau Whitton’s approach to cross-border adoption relied heavily on the influence of the USCB inside and outside of the United States and on ties between the USCB and CCCW/CWC. In 1944, Canadian Nora Lea (then acting executive director of the CWC) expressed her appreciation of the strong connection between the Canadian and American organizations: ‘Indeed,’ noted Lea, ‘so warm is the relationship, and so much have we depended upon your very generous sharing of information and advice that we have come to regard the staff and publications of the Children’s Bureau almost as our other selves.’8 Lea’s comments reflected the common projects and common perspectives linking CCCW/CWC and USCB as partners and collaborators in a trans-border professional community. But Lea alluded, also, to more intimate connections between senior women at the two agencies. Her comments were addressed to USCB consultant Maud Morlock, whom Lea considered a close personal friend as well as a professional colleague. Charlotte Whitton, also, enjoyed deep and sustained personal connections with key figures at the USCB, including founding chief Julia Lathrop, consultant Elsa Castendyck, and, most important, chief Katharine Lenroot.9 Founded in 1912, the United States Children’s Bureau was the branch of the federal government responsible for promoting and protecting the health and welfare of children and, by extension, of their mothers. It was located (until 1946) inside the Department of Labor.10 As Kriste

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22  The Traffic in Babies

Lindenmeyer has argued, the idea that the federal government should take active responsibility for the well-being of the nation’s children reflected pragmatic concern over the potential damage to children (and hence to the nation’s future strength) posed by the urban poverty, massive immigration, and shifting social mores that accompanied America’s transition to an industrial society. At the same time, as Viviana Zelizer has noted, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Americans identified childhood as a distinct and sacred phase of life, deserving of protection.11 Leading maternalist reformers in the United States were at the centre of the broad-based campaign to establish the Children’s Bureau. The bureau, once in place, was described as an extension of their reform network or as the ‘nest’ of female reformers in the federal government.12 The reformers in and around the Children’s Bureau were also linked to a concurrent push to develop social work as a skilled profession requiring specialized training, a move designed to improve services to children and parents, but one which also helped secure professional status for female social workers.13 The bureau quickly became a highly influential and well-respected centre for research, providing up-to-date information and advice for governments, social welfare workers, and mothers on a wide range of child welfare issues.14 In Canada, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw the emergence of progressive coalitions of largely middle-class reformers demanding that governments at all levels take responsibility for the regulation of business and for the welfare of citizens. Canadian reformers shared with their American counterparts a deep concern for the health and well-being of children who would become the next generation of citizens, workers, and soldiers.15 In 1919, the Canadian federal government established a Department of Health. But when it became clear the new department would focus narrowly on the medical aspects of maternal and child health, Canadian reformers were forced to abandon the model of a USCB-style government agency with a broader child welfare agenda.16 In 1920, a national child welfare conference led to the establishment of the Canadian National Council on Child Welfare, later shortened to the Canadian Council on Child Welfare. The CCCW was set up as a membership organization for private and public social agencies, in some ways more similar to the Child Welfare League of America than to the USCB. From the beginning, however, there were ambitious plans to develop a national research and advocacy body in child welfare that would mirror the work of the USCB and, eventually, expand into other arenas of social welfare activity.17

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Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  23

In 1920, the young, ambitious Charlotte Whitton (1896–1975) was appointed secretary of the fledgling CCCW.18 The 1921 CCCW budget listed income of only $4822, although by 1928 the Council had a membership that included 25 national organizations, 35 provincial groups or agencies, 108 municipal bodies, and 661 individuals. By 1931 the budget had increased to $29,930. In 1928, a French-language secretary was added to extend the council’s work in Quebec and other Frenchspeaking regions of the country, although the council remained an organization rooted in, and shaped by, social welfare currents in English Canada. In the 1930s, the council added new divisions beyond child welfare, and changed its name to the Canadian Welfare Council. This growth was impressive, but the council still had a very small resource base. In 1935, the council staff consisted of only five full-time executive members, plus two part-time consultants and a small secretarial support unit. By way of comparison, the USCB had a staff of 230 in 1937.19 While the CCCW/CWC was a private and voluntary body, it was not entirely separate from the federal or provincial governments. The council received funding from the federal government and was often treated by the public and by some government agencies as if it were an extension of the government. The CCCW/CWC filled an ‘in-between’ role that Tamara Hareven has described as providing a uniquely Canadian ‘bridge between private organizations and public policy.’20 Most of the provincial departments of child welfare or public welfare were members of the council, and thus looked to the CCCW/CWC as an advisory body. Because the CCCW/CWC was not a government agency, the council was relatively free to challenge the child welfare programs of the provinces, to develop direct relationships with local agencies, and to actively promote national standards in social welfare. A government agency, constrained by the constitutional division of powers, would have had to tread more warily. But if the council’s ‘in-between’ status meant it could sometimes push at the issue of constitutional limits, this important advantage was severely circumscribed by its consequent lack of statutory authority and financial resources. Significantly, the USCB has also been described as both a public and a private body because of its strong ties to private and voluntary social service groups.21 The crucial difference between USCB and the CCCW/ CWC, however, was that the USCB was a branch of the federal government with specified legislative responsibilities and a far larger budget than its Canadian counterpart. Nonetheless, critics of the Children’s Bureau underlined that the US federal government had no constitutional authority in the field of child welfare, and argued that the bureau

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24  The Traffic in Babies

would infringe on states’ rights. Ongoing scrutiny of the bureau’s actions meant that its leaders had to keep a careful eye on the constitutional restrictions of their actions.22 In 1935, USCB leaders failed to secure administrative control over Title IV of the new Social Security Act, the Aid to Dependent Children program (ADC).23 This was a significant defeat with long-lasting consequences. Still, USCB leaders were more successful when it came to Title V of the act, which gave the bureau control over three grant-inaid programs designed to develop child welfare initiatives at the local and state level: the Maternal and Child Health Program, the Crippled Children’s Program, and the Child Welfare Services program. States made proposals for projects to be funded under Title V, but these projects were developed in consultation with the USCB staff, which participated directly in program delivery. Thus, the Title V granting programs allowed the USCB to prod state departments of public welfare and even private social welfare agencies to follow its recommendations for modern child-welfare services. In 1936, the total budget for the three Title V programs was $7,950,000. By 1958, the budget for Child Welfare Services projects alone (funds earmarked to help hire and train professional child welfare staff working in predominantly rural areas) was $17,000,000. In the 1940s and 1950s, Child Welfare Services funds were often used to upgrade adoption services and train adoption workers.24 A series of administrative reorganizations in the US federal government, beginning in 1946, diminished the autonomy and profile of the USCB within the expanding federal apparatus.25 Nonetheless, the bureau retained its position as the leading voice in American child welfare well into the post–Second World War period, directly and indirectly shaping child welfare services throughout the United States. The USCB also developed an international reputation in child welfare research and expertise. In the international arena, the bureau’s closest partner was the CCCW/CWC. This connection is hardly surprising. There were important links between Canadian and American social welfare leaders, who connected with each other in US-based professional associations, in the pages of professional publications, and at conferences where (Canadian historians insist) the Canadians thought of themselves as ‘full members in … the “transnational” process of building the structure of knowledge and creating the procedures and practises in each field.’26 By the 1930s, Charlotte Whitton was an established child welfare expert in the United States. Prominent Children’s Bureau figures, including Lathrop, Abbott, and Lenroot, regularly

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Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  25

spoke at Canadian meetings.27 Through to the middle decades of the twentieth century, it was common for Canadian social work professionals to receive some part of their training in the United States (even as Canadian schools of social work expanded), and to work there for part of their careers.28 Travels back and forth across the border facilitated professional exchange, and built important personal connections between key figures at the USCB, at the CCCW/CWC, and in Canadian child welfare more broadly. It is tempting to assume that the much larger USCB dominated the relationship between the CCCW/CWC and the USCB. But, at least in the period before 1950, it is more accurate to think of the two national bodies as partners in a respectful and personalized collaboration between two organizations with shared priorities in child welfare. The give and take of the relationship can be seen clearly in the joint efforts of the CCCW/CWC and the USCB at the League of Nations in the interwar period. At the League, both the CCCW/CWC and the USCB were represented on the Child Welfare Committee of the Advisory Commission on the Traffic in Women and Children (after 1935, the Advisory Commission on Social Questions). Although the United States was not a member of the League, the Advisory Commission requested US participation. Both USCB chief Grace Abbott and her post-1934 replacement Katharine Lenroot represented the United States in an ‘unofficial and consultative capacity’ on the advisory commission. From 1924, former USCB chief Julia Lathrop sat on the Child Welfare Committee of the Advisory Commission as an assessor (a non-voting representative of a voluntary agency expert in the appropriate field) from the US National Conference on Social Work.29 Canada gained a place on the Child Welfare Committee in 1924, when Whitton was appointed as assessor representing the CCCW and the Social Service Council of Canada. In 1935, Canada secured delegate status on the Advisory Commission and Whitton became a voting national delegate, giving her a more formal influence on the commission than her US allies.30 Whitton, Lathrop, Abbott, Lenroot, and USCB consultant Elsa Castendyck (who attended League meetings on behalf of Lenroot) were the core members of what Lathrop once called ‘a little offensive and defensive alliance based on a mutual admiration society’ at the League.31 Originally, these allies believed the Child Welfare Committee could set standards for child welfare that might improve the lives of children around the world and contribute to the larger cause of securing world peace.32 The North Americans were sometimes proud of the commit-

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26  The Traffic in Babies

tee’s work, but more frequently they were frustrated and even embarrassed by the committee’s lack of focus and by the poor quality of its studies and publications.33 Whitton, for example, was horrified when a committee-sponsored study of neglected children praised the institutional childcaring institutions of the Catholic church in Quebec, which she viewed as the most backward and embarrassing example of Canadian child welfare practices.34 It was upsetting to Whitton that a League report publicized an obvious weakness in the Canadian system just as she and her American allies were presenting themselves as the representatives of a ‘New World’ philosophy of progressive and scientific child welfare.35 This is not to argue that either the Canadians or the Americans thought of Canada and the United States as having identical goals in child welfare. Child welfare policy and practice must take different forms in two countries (not to mention forty-eight states and nine provinces) with separate histories, cultural mixes, and legal and constitutional systems. Nonetheless, when the field of comparison was the world of child welfare, the similarities between Canadian and American goals in professionalized child welfare work stood out. The New World alliance at the League led to close personal as well as professional ties between the Canadians and the Americans. These ties deepened as the women planned for and participated in League meetings.36 Whitton and Lathrop became close at the 1926 League meetings, but the strongest bonds were formed between Whitton and Lenroot when the two worked together in Paris and Geneva in connection with the 1936 League meetings.37 From that point forward, they were ‘Dear Charlotte’ and ‘Dear Katharine’ to each other, and their professional correspondence was frequently interspersed with personal intimacies and expressions of affection.38 Between 1936 and 1938, Whitton, Lenroot, and their staffs put these networks to use as they worked on the League-sponsored Report on the Placing of Children, a major international study of provisions for placing dependent children with various kinds of foster families (including adoptive families) as an alternative to institutional care. They wanted this report to demonstrate the potential of the Child Welfare Committee to establish best principles in child placement that could be enacted across nations.39 Work on the child-placing report also led to a friendship between Castendyck and Whitton that would flower when ‘Elsa’ and ‘Charlotte’ were in England and Geneva for League work in 1938.40 Both the process of creating the report and the content of the study were important for the North Americans. On the issue of permanent

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Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  27

child adoption, the report emphasized the critical role of state oversight in the legal process of adoption, the importance of a probationary period before finalizing an adoption, and the need for communities to recognize adoption as a ‘social as well as a legal process.’41 The report’s recommendations on adoption mirrored the adoption reform agenda that the USCB and the CWC were emphasizing in their domestic work in the 1930s. This report was not a description of how adoptions were then contracted in most parts of either Canada or the United States; USCB and CWC leaders had to recognize state-by-state and province-by-province lapses in their child welfare systems even as they positioned themselves as ‘New World’ leaders. Whitton saw the prevalence of institutional care in Quebec as the most embarrassing of the Canadian shortcomings. The idea was that transnational reform would move in two directions. The Placing of Children was a ‘New World’ example placed before other nations. It was also a model of best practices the Canadians and Americans could use in their work for domestic reform. Using external standards as a goal was an important part of how the USCB and CWC played off each other, and off each other’s states and provinces, as they tried to improve adoption laws and services at home.42 The Professional Perspective on Adoption Reform The reform agenda in Lenroot and Whitton’s League of Nations report must be contextualized in the history of adoption practice inside North America. Adoption as a legal or social means for creating new relationships between children and adults (or sometimes between adults) was well known in many ancient societies.43 Aboriginal peoples in North America have long traditions of permanent and temporary child transfer and of incorporating outsiders through adoption.44 Adoption was not, however, sanctioned under the British common law tradition that became the basis for the legal system in most of the United States, and in Canada outside of Quebec. The British tradition privileged the bloodline relationship in inheritance and strongly discouraged legal alienation of the rights and obligations of parents (especially fathers) towards their offspring. The French legal tradition that shaped the laws of Quebec and was influential in parts of the United States had no provision for adoption until the Napoleonic Code of 1804, which introduced the legal adoption of one adult by another. In France there was no legal provision for the adoption of children until 1926. Nonethe-

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less, informal kinds of adoption were regularly used by colonial and early national Canadians and Americans as a means to secure homes or educations for children, continue family lines, or establish inheritance. Legal options for securing these new relationships included apprenticeship, indenture, wills, and legal name changes sometimes enacted by private bills in colonial, state, and provincial legislatures.45 The first modern law of adoption in North America was enacted in Massachusetts in 1851. This legislation, which broke with the British common law tradition, established a formal process under the jurisdiction of a judge who could sever biological relationships between parents and children and replace them with new adoptive relationships. At the heart of this new approach to adoption was the requirement that the judge in an adoption case act ‘in the best interests of the child,’ a new standard developing in American family law. The Massachusetts law became the base for adoption laws passed in twenty-four states in the next twenty-five years.46 In 1917, the Children’s Code of Minnesota became the first state law requiring a social investigation of the adoptive home and a supervised probationary period before a judge could finalize an adoption. This law established the principal of government responsibility for the quality of adoption placements and became the model for adoption reform in the United States.47 The two concepts of investigation and supervision of the adoptive placement became the core of the professional approach to adoption practice advocated by professional social workers in both Canada and the United States. In Canada, the first modern adoption laws (generally following the US model) were passed in New Brunswick in 1873 and Nova Scotia in 1893. Quebec passed its first adoption law in 1924. The most expansive early Canadian legislation, including a distinct emphasis on the best interests and welfare of the child, was contained in Ontario’s adoption law as passed in 1921 and revised in 1927 (notwithstanding the questionable Ontario placements noted at the beginning of this chapter).48 The domestic adoption model with which we are now familiar – which includes widespread public acceptance of adoption, a preference for infants over older children, and extensive state regulation of the adoptive process – is a product of the twentieth century and particularly of the period from the 1930s forward. Historian Julie Berebitsky has studied US adoptive parents seeking infant children in the first decades of the century, but most historians date large increases in adoption rates to the mid- to late 1930s.49 They attribute the rather sudden upswing

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in the popularity of adoption to several factors related to the demand for children, the supply of children, and the changing attitudes of social workers towards adoption and unwed motherhood. Earlier in the twentieth century, social workers were cool towards child adoption and doubted it could serve as a widespread option for the care of dependent children. They were heavily influenced by eugenic concerns about the poor genetic heritage of children born to unwed mothers, and were committed to keeping those children with their mothers. By the 1930s, progressive social workers viewed adoption more positively. Change came as social theories stressing the impact of environment over heredity became more influential in the profession and as potential adoptive parents (themselves influenced by the rise of environmental theories of child development) pushed for help locating children to adopt. The savings accruing to financially strapped public agencies when they placed their dependent children in permanent adoptive homes were also a factor.50 The Second World War brought further increases in popular interest in legal adoptions, a development the USCB’s Maud Morlock attributed to the need to formalize past ‘informal’ adoptions to obtain war-related documents, a desire to secure family life before soldiers departed, and an increase in the out-of-wedlock birth rate that made more children available.51 After 1945, cold war pro-natalism meant still greater demand for children to adopt.52 By the late 1940s, increasing numbers of social welfare professionals had come to understand unwed pregnancy in white women (as distinct from unwed pregnancy in women of colour) to be the result of deep-seated neurosis in the pregnant woman, a psychological state that made her, by definition, an unfit mother. The neurotic unwed mother could, however, be cured of her neurosis (and her transgression against conventional morality) by relinquishing her child for adoption. Social workers who accepted this model of unwed pregnancy placed increasing pressure on white unwed mothers to give up their children to childless married couples anxious to join in the post-war ‘celebration of domesticity and family.’53 Statistics on adoptions in Canada and the United States in the period 1930–1972 are imprecise, since adoption figures (if they were kept at all) could be in the hands of municipal, county, state, or provincial officials. Moreover, official statistics could easily miss informal adoptions or black market adoptions never processed through a court. Nonetheless, the available data demonstrate steady and substantial increases in the number of children adopted by members of their own family

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and by unrelated others. In 1934 the USCB estimated 16,000 adoptions were contracted annually in the United States. By 1944 this estimate was 50,000 per year and by 1955 it had increased to 93,000. This was a six-fold increase over twenty years.54 Data collected by the National Center for Social Statistics in the 1960s and 1970s indicate the annual number of adoptions in the United States climbed through the 1960s to an all-time high of 175,000 in 1970, before declining to 130,000 in 1975.55 National data for Canada are sparser before 1960, but we do know that in Ontario (Canada’s most populous province) the number of legal adoptions rose from 663 in 1928 to 1241 in 1940 to 2560 in 1950 and 5278 in 1960.56 In 1955, the Department of National Health and Welfare estimated that Canada-wide adoptions numbered ‘in excess of 10,000.’ A more precise accounting from the CWC produced a national figure of 12,800 for 1959–60, rising to a peak of 20,500 in 1971 and then declining (as in the US case) to 16,200 by 1975.57 In both countries, these statistics combined adoptions of children by members of their extended families and adoptions of children by unrelated others. The US data indicate that from the 1940s through the 1960s about half of all legal adoptions were ‘relative’ adoptions and half were ‘stranger’ adoptions.58 In 1960, the census-recorded population of the United States was 179,323,175, just over ten times the 1961 Canadian census population of 17,870,000; the number of adoptions in the United States in 1960 (107,000) was roughly eight times the Canadian adoption figure (13,500) for 1961.59 These numbers indicate that the rate of adoptive placements per capita may have been slightly higher in Canada than the United States at this time, but the data support no more than this very rough comparison.60 What we can say with more certainty is that in both countries rates of adoption were on the rise. Despite the pressure on white birth mothers to relinquish, the ‘demand’ for healthy, white infants or toddlers (especially female infants and toddlers) available for adoption rose more quickly than the ‘supply’ of these children. By the 1950s, social agencies on both sides of the border reported having up to ten sets of qualified parents for every available white infant, and parents complained that they were forced to wait years to secure children through child welfare agencies.61 In both Canada and the United States, professional interest in the management of adoption grew as public demand for children to adopt expanded. Both agencies worked on models for better child placement from the time they were founded, but there was specific and increasing

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attention to child adoption in the 1930s. For example, from the mid1930s (and as the two agencies were working together on The Placing of Children in Families) the CWC and the USCB each worked on detailed guidelines for professionally supervised and state-regulated adoption procedures. In 1938, Whitton’s CWC published an updated version of its Comparative Summary of the Canadian Adoption Laws, a publication designed to point out best and worst practices in the adoption laws of the provinces. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the council received requests from social agencies in Nova Scotia, Quebec, and other provinces to consult on revisions to provincial adoption laws. In 1943 the council published a comprehensive guide to Essentials in Adoption Service.62 In 1936, USCB consultant Mary Ruth Colby began a detailed study of adoption practices in the nine states with more socially advanced adoption legislation.63 Adoption – What It Means, a popular Children’s Bureau leaflet designed to answer the basic questions of adoptive parents and steer them towards social agencies with high professional standards, was first published in the United States in 1938, and was soon distributed in Canada by the CWC. Using the Title V grant programs, the USCB staff worked with the states to improve adoption services after 1935.64 The bureau’s Preliminary Draft of Essentials in Adoption Law and Procedure was first distributed in 1944.65 Child welfare leaders regarded adoption as a complicated social and legal procedure that could go wrong at many stages, and which must be approached with the greatest care. Adoption guidelines produced by the CWC and the USCB laid out a remarkably similar set of practices (referred to collectively as ‘sound adoption practice’) that elaborated on the general principles in The Placing of Children. At the core of ‘sound adoption practice’ was a commitment to protect and promote the welfare of children in need of new homes, although the (sometimes conflicting) welfare of birth mothers and adoptive families was also considered important. The key concepts were investigation, matching, supervision, and regulation. The first step was counselling the birth mother to make certain she understood her options and had made a realistic ‘choice’ about relinquishing her child for adoption.66 The next step was a thorough social investigation of both the birth mother and the birth father (if possible) that delved into the moral and genetic background of the birth parents. The investigation looked at physical characteristics, from the race to the eye colour and skin tone of the mother and father, and looked for any evidence of either physical or mental illness in their families. Information on the religion, socio-

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economic class, occupation, and education of the birth parents was also considered important. Prospective adoptive parents also had to undergo a similar series of investigations delving into their physical and psychological health, their moral and financial standing, and their reasons for wanting to adopt a child. Medical proof of infertility was often required. Couples with a mixed religious heritage or a history of divorce or marital instability were frequently deemed unacceptable as adoptive parents. Parents over the age of forty were regularly told they were ineligible to adopt infants or toddlers because they were too old. Social workers insisted it was not necessary to be wealthy to qualify for adoption, but in most cases they insisted the adoptive mother not work outside the home and that the family home include a separate bedroom for the tobe-adopted child.67 Newborn children were also investigated before they were judged ‘adoptable’ and placed with new families. At advanced agencies, children were carefully observed, given thorough medical exams, and tested against models of ‘normal’ physical and mental development in the hope of identifying obvious physiological or neurological defects and of predicting future developmental potential. This process could easily take several months or even several years when early testing revealed potential problems or when the social worker’s investigation of the birth parents was either incomplete or raised concern. Through the 1940s, many social workers discouraged placements for children younger than four to six months, although some agencies experimented with earlier placements for carefully selected children in the late 1940s and earlier agency placements became much more commonplace in the 1950s.68 The information gleaned from investigating birth parents, potential adoptive parents, and children was critical in the next step of sound adoption practice: finding a ‘match’ between adoptive parents and adoptable children in which racial background, religious faith, and the intellectual potential of the child were the most important factors. Proper matching was considered key to the cohesion of the adoptive family, and hence to the happiness and welfare of children and parents. Once the match had been made, adoption reformers recommended the child be placed in the adoptive home for a probationary period so the new family could be supervised and evaluated by a professionally trained social worker. The final adoption order would ideally be processed in a court six months to two years later, after a satisfactory report from the social worker.69

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USCB and CWC adoption reformers preferred that adoption investigation, matching, and supervision services be performed by public welfare departments, or at least that the state/provincial child welfare departments have statutory authority over social workers in private agencies doing this work, but they recognized that this was not always possible. The bottom line was that the workers investigating adoptions needed professional training.70 Barbara Melosh has argued that as they elaborated this model of investigation and matching, social workers often portrayed adoption as a risky transaction and positioned themselves as the risk-managers best able to protect adoptive parents, children, and, ultimately, the larger society that might have to deal with the consequences of a mismatched adoptive family.71 Ellen Herman discusses this process as the ongoing rationalization of adoption by social workers advancing a model of kinship by design. ‘Kinship by design,’ she argues, ‘promised to reduce risks so that families made through adoption would be safe, natural and real.’72 African American families and children in the United States (indeed, non-white families and children of all kinds in both countries) were outsiders in this system. African American families were often characterized as uninterested in adoption, but in truth these families were poorly served by social agencies staffed for the most part by white social workers who were not reaching out to African American families before the 1950s, and who judged prospective families against a white and middle-class vision of the appropriate adoptive home.73 African American women facing unwed pregnancy were actively discouraged from relinquishing their children for adoption, even during the period when white women were pressured in the opposite direction. At any rate, the strict adherence to racial matching in adoption placement in the 1930s and 1940s, combined with the dearth of agency-approved non-white adoptive homes, made it highly unlikely that non-white children surrendered to social agencies would find permanent adoptive homes, at least before the mid-1950s.74 Julie Berebitsky argues that the system of investigation and matching in adoption served to reinforce the white, heteropatriarchal, and middle-class family as normative.75 The model of professionally supervised, state-regulated adoptions laid out by the CWC and the USCB in the 1930s remained an ideal rather than a reality throughout the twentieth century. In 1947, the USCB’s Lenroot noted that only one quarter of US states had adoption laws that gave ‘adequate’ protection to children, although another twenty were in the process of amending their legislation. In Canada, adoption laws developed in ‘fits and starts’ and varied greatly between provinces and

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territories.76 Although reformers were heartened by ongoing changes in provincial and state adoption law, there was considerable resistance to the dictates of professional adoption workers among parents, legislators, and even some social workers.77 Many critics viewed adoption reform as a project of professional aggrandizement for child welfare workers and government bureaucrats, and they questioned the increasing intrusion of the state in the intimate process of (middle class) family formation.78 In 1944, the USCB estimated that only 25 per cent all adoptions in the United States (or, 50 per cent of all non-related adoptions) were contracted through public or private social agencies presumed to employ some version of sound adoption practice. This rate rose to an all-time high of nearly 80 per cent of all non-related adoptions in the United States in 1971 before declining once again.79 The rate of ‘agency’ versus ‘independent’ adoptions varied greatly from one jurisdiction to another depending on the content of local laws and the success of social workers selling the benefits of sound adoption practice.80 But in both countries and across jurisdictions, large numbers of children were placed by lawyers, doctors, well-meaning friends, commercial baby brokers, and black marketers who paid more or less attention to the investigation of parents and the requirements of state/provincial law. Professional social workers worried about the quality of these ‘independent’ placements, and lobbied for reforms to make it more difficult for parents and placers to evade professional supervision by using the services of independent child placers.81 The reformers also knew, however, that as professional procedures tightened and the waiting lists for children lengthened, it was very tempting for parents to opt out of professional adoption procedures and obtain children through independent adoption operators, or on the black market.82 Another way for prospective adoptive parents to avoid tight professional supervision was to look for a child in another jurisdiction with less stringent adoption practices.83 For some desperate American parents, this meant looking to Canada for children to adopt. Canada seemed to offer the chance to obtain, quickly, the longed-for child. Adoption reformers on both sides of the Canadian-American border saw the situation as highly fraught, however. Under the best of conditions, child welfare leaders were extremely wary of what they called ‘distance placements.’ They argued it was nearly impossible to ensure high standards in adoption placements unless one social agency could work with the unwed mother, investigate the adoptive parents and the child, match the child with the parents, and supervise the adoptive placement. It was possible for two agencies

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in different jurisdictions to work together on a distance placement and achieve a quality result, but this required a high degree of consultation and cooperation between agencies of high professional standard. But in many cases, the whole point of looking to another jurisdiction to secure a child was to avoid or bypass professional supervision of the adoption. As a consequence, adoption reformers associated distance placements with poor-quality independent placements and with the black market.84 Child welfare authorities in US states whose citizens adopted in Canada had a series of concerns. Some of these concerns were relevant to all unsupervised distance placements (indeed, all independent placements) and some specific to cases of international border crossing. First, they worried about the welfare of children placed with families who had not been professionally investigated and the welfare of adopting parents assuming responsibility for children about whom they knew very little. State officials also resented being forced to provide after-thefact approval to Canadian adoptions they would never have sanctioned to begin with, as in the case of the Frank family at the beginning of this chapter. Before 1953, if US state officials refused to support a readoption of the child in the United States under the relevant state law, the Canadian adopted children could not qualify for US citizenship until after he or she reached the age of majority. If Canadian adoptees were never readopted under US law or never told as adults of their Canadian origin, they might end up with no claim on US citizenship. Thus, children and adults might be left ‘stateless.’ US state officials also worried they – or rather their state’s taxpayers – might be left financially responsible for the Canadian child if the hastily arranged placement broke down or if the child in an inappropriate home became a juvenile delinquent. US social workers also found the behaviour of their counterparts in Canada disrespectful and lacking in professionalism. Finally, many child welfare authorities were very frustrated that they could not stop unwanted placements into their jurisdictions.85 By the 1930s, a small (and then larger) number of social workers at private agencies and state departments of child welfare were asking the USCB and the CWC for help. Negotiating a Cross-Border Adoption Agreement In 1933, the North Dakota Department of Child Welfare complained to the USCB that the provincial Child Welfare Branch in Alberta had placed two children for adoption in their territory without contacting

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state officials.86 Around the same time, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins asked USCB chief Abbott to suggest areas of study connecting the various bureaus inside her department. Abbott suggested the Bureau of Immigration (soon to be the Immigration and Naturalization Service, INS) and the USCB cooperate to study child placement across national borders. The commissioner-general of the Bureau of Immigration suggested combining this work with planning for cross-border deportations separating family members.87 USCB-INS interest in deportations was a by-product of the deepening depression that left many families dependent on public relief. When these families included non-citizens, one consequence of claiming relief could be the deportation of all or part of the family. Subsequent USCB-INS investigations of family deportations revealed cases where non-citizen adults deported to Canada left behind minor children who were citizens of the United States, cases where families sent children north to be supported by Canadian relatives to avoid claiming relief in the United States, and cases where deported male breadwinners left (American) wives and children in the United States without financial support.88 These investigations demonstrated the myriad ways Canadian and American families – and consequently Canadian and American relief and social welfare systems – were tied to each other across state, provincial, and national borders. When asked for her perspective, Charlotte Whitton conveyed Canadian concerns that when the INS or Canadian immigration officials deported people across the border, they normally paid transportation to the nearest border crossing. This practice stranded destitute deportees (and sometimes their families) at the border towns. The USCB then used Whitton’s comments (and supporting evidence) to lobby the INS to change its policy and pay for transport to the deportee’s region of legal residence.89 The INS agreed, provided the Canadian government would reciprocate.90 Here, the USCB and Whitton’s CCCW convinced the INS that deportation proceedings must incorporate some sense of social responsibility for families and for children both inside and outside the United States. Later, however, the INS would refuse (with one notable exception) to accept any social responsibility for children adopted across the border and into the United States. In the dark economic days of 1933, deportation concerns overshadowed cross-border adoption issues at the USCB and the INS. But it was the adoption issue that caught and held Charlotte Whitton’s attention, possibly because the first 1933 complaints were directed against Alber-

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Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  37

ta, and Whitton was already a confirmed critic of that’s province’s government.91 Regardless, she decided to attack cross-border adoptions in both countries. To begin, Whitton asked her USCB friends to compose minimum standards for placements between Canadian provinces and US states, which she (Whitton) could use to press for reforms inside Canada.92 The USCB report written by assistant chief Lenroot and Social Service Division director Agnes Hanna stressed communication and cooperation between private placing agencies in the home jurisdiction and ‘public central authorities’ in home and receiving jurisdictions in a border-crossing placement. Lenroot and Hanna suggested basic procedures: private agencies contemplating placing a child outside the home province should first contact public authorities in the home province; the provincial authority should investigate possibilities other than ‘deportation’; the provincial authority should contact the receiving state; the receiving state should investigate the receiving family and home using the same standards applied to in-state family adoptions; and, the receiving state should specify any requirements for ongoing supervision of the placement. Finally, either the placing agency or the sending provincial authority must agree to resume responsibility for the child ‘in the event that he become a public responsibility or is considered by this [receiving] authority to be a menace to the community.’93 This list reflected developing professional standards in child placing, while also recognizing that receiving jurisdictions wanted protection from poor-outcome placements. It was a set of goals applicable to any kind of permanent or temporary child placement (for example, foster placement or temporary care by relatives) across borders, and an implicit criticism of current, more haphazard practices. Hanna and Lenroot referenced the child importation laws in place in some US states that already mandated communication between central authorities and/or the posting of bonds when children were brought into a state. Their suggestion was that the basic model of an importation/exportation law could also apply between states and provinces, although the existing importation laws often exempted children brought into a state explicitly for the purpose of adoption. Furthermore, the primary focus in importation laws was protecting the state treasury from financial responsibility for a child, rather than protecting the child from an unwise placement.94 The USCB and Child Welfare League of America had discussed a national agreement on interstate child transfer in the late 1920s, but

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without taking concrete steps.95 Hanna held out little hope for any such agreement because of divided (state-by-state) authority in child welfare.96 Chief Abbott, however, thought that if ‘Charlotte’ (Whitton) could use the US standards to spur action in Canada, this might lead to a transnational conference, some agreement involving US states and Canadian provinces, and then action on interstate child placements inside the United States.97 Abbott was envisioning border crossings that moved from the United States, to Canada, into the transnational space between the two countries, and then back inside the United States.98 Whitton’s view was very similar to Abbott’s, though her ambitions and her strategies reached further than her American contact knew. The Canadian used the USCB report to draft a memo on province-to-province and province-to-state placements, distributed to public and private child welfare agencies across Canada. She cited specific problems with placements between provinces and into the United States ‘under conditions and circumstances that could at best only be described as unethical, and at worst, as quite definitely contrary to minimum standards of child care and placement.’ She also made the entirely unsubstantiated claim that poor cross-border placements might become the subject of a formal diplomatic protest from Washington, as a way to make her plea for intra-Canadian and then inter-national cooperation appear the more urgent.99 Given the impending (though, actually, nonexistent) threat of diplomatic protest, Whitton urged Canadian agencies to agree to minimum standards in cross-border child placement. Their agreement could be, as Abbott had suggested, the basis for an international conference.100 The next step would be an international protocol between the Canadian Department of External Affairs and the US State Department binding the states and provinces to observe set standards and principles in border-crossing placements.101 Involving the Canadian and American federal governments was a logical extension of Whitton’s construction of cross-border adoption as a problem of formal diplomatic relations, but here she went far beyond what her USCB contacts envisioned. Whitton brought a model for a binding, interprovincial agreement managed through the provincial departments of child welfare to a 1934 national meeting of Canadian public and private child-placing agencies. The meeting was tumultuous, with the group divided on two key issues. First, there was considerable debate on whether or not the provincial departments should control inter-jurisdictional placements. In most provinces, provincial departments did not have legislative author-

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Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  39

ity over the placements made by local Children’s Aid Societies. The best organized and most professional CASs did not want to surrender their autonomy to provincial bodies that might have lesser professional standards.102 Second, the group divided over whether their object should be a formal and binding legal agreement enacted through provincial child welfare legislation or merely a template for a non-binding agreement to be signed between individual agencies outlining minimum standards. Although Whitton strongly favoured a legally enforceable protocol, the larger group disagreed. She left the meeting with the task of drafting a non-binding, agency-to-agency agreement based on a model provided by Manitoba officials.103 In Whitton’s original proposal, the emphasis had been on guiding principles and standards in child placement. The draft she wrote after the meeting was concerned much more narrowly with specific technical procedures for sharing costs and assigning legal responsibility for children placed across provincial borders. This new model was designed to cover a wide range of child-placing situations beyond adoption (for example, temporary foster care or institutional care), but it made no mention of placements into the United States.104 The USCB’s Lenroot agreed with a frustrated Whitton that the agencyto-agency voluntary approach would have little or no effect on agencies of poor standard – those most likely to make the most haphazard and ill-advised placements.105 In Alberta, provincial child welfare officials had already refused to participate in any process that would ‘interfere with the methods we have adopted here.’106 Still, the USCB leadership thought Whitton had made progress. They suggested a next step.107 In 1935, the US National Conference on Social Work would be meeting in Montreal, with Lenroot serving as president. Abbott and Lenroot proposed a meeting on ‘Interprovincial and International Placement of Children as it affects both Canada and the United States’ at the conference.108 Lenroot subsequently invited Whitton to a planning meeting for the conference and asked her to visit the USCB offices in Washington to discuss cross-border placements and other common concerns.109 Whitton mismanaged this opportunity. She could not attend the planning meeting – which created the Special Committee on Transborder Social Problems – and she insisted that any meeting on transborder adoption at the conference be organized by her agency.110 The Trans-border committee subsequently framed its work around deportation, relief, and family separation/reunification problems, like those at the centre of the USCB’s work with the INS. Its conference sessions were dominated by social workers from family welfare and immigrant

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aid organizations in the United States and Canada, and were attended by federal, state, and provincial officials responsible for immigration, deportation, and relief programs, including the US commissioner of immigration and naturalization and the Canadian deputy minister of external affairs.111 These sessions were, therefore, an important venue for defining what was ‘important’ in transnational social welfare and deserving of attention at the federal and state/provincial level on both sides of the border.112 Whitton thus missed a key opportunity to draw the issue of cross-border adoption into the realm of formalized, federally administered international relations. The CWC’s own cross-border session in Montreal became a narrowly focused meeting of Canadians dedicated to refining the draft inter-agency agreement. Whitton had been collecting more examples of poor cross-border placements within Canada and across the CanadianAmerican border. Still, the ‘Canadian group’ of public and private child welfare workers reassembled in Montreal would only commit to a voluntary ‘inter-agency agreement,’ along with the ‘suggestion that individual provinces might try to work out formal agreements with their child caring agencies and then approach other provinces to work out inter-provincial agreements.’113 The ‘Revised Reciprocal Agreement’ eventually approved at this meeting spoke less in terms of the legal responsibilities and absolute obligations of childcaring agencies, and more in terms of agencies respecting their moral obligation to protect the interests of children. That is, the terms were still softer and less specific than those in the draft Whitton wrote in 1934. At the same time, the final agreement made explicit reference to transfers from one country to another as well as from one province to another, and laid out more definite requirements for the kind of approval that sending agencies must receive from the new jurisdiction before transferring a child.114 This outcome was a significant retreat from Whitton’s original vision of an institutionalized interprovincial agreement. Nonetheless, the ‘Revised Reciprocal Agreement’ – if signed by large numbers of agencies and government bodies – promised some improvement in child-placing practices across Canadian provincial lines and possibly across the national border. Unfortunately, the extent of adherence to the agreement is impossible to determine; there is no surviving list of signatories in the records of the CWC apart from a 1949 reference to the agreement as originally approved by ‘many agencies.’115 Further, the fact that agencies signed the agreement did not guarantee that they would abide by its provisions.

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Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  41

‘An International Question’ Whitton sent the ‘Revised Reciprocal Agreement’ to the USCB, but there was no further action on a Canada-to-US adoption agreement until 1940. In Canada, Whitton’s attention was increasingly focused on questions of unemployment, relief, and community organization in response to the Depression.116 South of the border, the 1935 Social Security Act left Lenroot’s USCB with an increased budget, an enlarged staff, and a significant set of new responsibilities and opportunities under Title V. Nonetheless, this was also the period when both the CWC and the USCB became more involved in a domestic program of adoption reform, as interest in adoption rose in both countries. Internationally, Lenroot, Whitton, and their agencies became more closely tied to each other as they worked at the League of Nations and, particularly, on the Report on the Placing of Children in Families. New cross-border initiatives date from 1940 and 1941, when public and private child welfare workers from an increasing number of states complained to the USCB and the CWC about adoptions from Canada. Why this flurry at this time? Perhaps these complaints were related to new adoption activity as the Depression waned. Other critical factors, however, were the ever-closer ties between the USCB and the CWC, combined with the increasing profile of Whitton and the CWC in the United States. From 1939, Whitton travelled widely in the United States to speak about social welfare under conditions of war in Canada.117 In 1940–1, social workers from Utah, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Colorado all complained about the child-placing practices of the Alberta Child Welfare Branch. Rhode Island officials lodged a protest concerning Catholic social agencies from Quebec. Boston-area agencies worried that the New Brunswick Protestant Orphanage in Saint John was handing out children indiscriminately to American couples.118 In the case of Alberta, each of the complaining US states reported a small number of couples known to have adopted children from Alberta or to be in the process of doing so. The standard procedure was for prospective adoptive parents to exchange letters with Charles Hill (assistant to Alberta’s superintendent of child welfare), and then to travel to Alberta bringing letters of recommendation.119 Hill met the parents, examined (but did not check) the references, approved the couples, and immediately placed children with them. Most of the children were extremely young infants born to unwed mothers who surrendered custody very soon after giving birth. Arizona’s director of child welfare

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42  The Traffic in Babies

wondered, aptly, ‘what opportunities there are for these mothers to care for these babies?’120 The Alberta superintendent of child welfare, T.R. Blaine, approved Hill’s placements and then Hill arranged for adoptions through the Alberta courts and helped the parents apply for a Canadian passport for the child. The adoptions were normally finalized within a few days. Alberta law did not require the adoptive parents to be resident in the province. For US adoptive parents, Superintendent Blaine regularly waived the standard requirement of a one-year probationary period before an adoption was finalized. Within a few days – with no independent investigation of the adoptive parents or their home, no investigation of the child, and no probationary period – the adoption was complete and final.121 The next stop was the American consulate in Edmonton. The consul required adoptive parents to prove they were US citizens who could financially support the child. The consul sometimes also requested that the families have their homes examined by a ‘welfare society,’ but this investigation had no bearing on the placement, as the adoption was already complete. Parents provided the adoption certificate, the child’s new (post-adoption) birth certificate, a medical certificate, and a set of passport photos, and the consul issued an immigration visa for the child.122 Child welfare workers in the receiving states worried that children were being placed with uninvestigated families, that parents (and social agencies) in the United States were given almost no information on the health and family history of the children, and that no effort was made to match individual children with specific homes.123 US workers also worried that since adoptions were often completed on the same day as the placement, there was no opportunity to supervise families and make certain that the matches were in the best interest of ‘the children, the adoptive parents, and the State.’124 In one very troubling case, Alberta officials processed the adoption of an older child without first informing the Colorado-based parents (who had previously cared for the child) that the adoption was to take place. Nonetheless, the USCB’s Hanna referred to this Colorado adoption as ‘sounder than two other adoptions in Alberta reported to us in which residents of Utah in Canada for a few days were granted an adoption decree for Canadian children.’ From Arizona came the question, ‘What sort of place is this that has so many babies to give in adoption?’125 Some US agencies who heard about Alberta placements or were contacted for the consulate’s home study tried unsuccessfully to work

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Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  43

with provincial officials to develop safer, well-regulated procedures. After all, Alberta seemed to be offering their citizens the much-desired healthy, white infants so difficult to locate at home. From Wisconsin, Dorothy Waite of the State Division of Child Welfare reached out to Superintendent Blaine asking for more information on how Alberta investigated adoptive families, and suggesting (tactfully) that Alberta officials might not be aware of the problems she saw with the proposed Alberta-to-Wisconsin adoptions.126 A highly defensive Assistant Superintendent Hill insisted his department ‘would not select a child to go into a home that we did not consider fit for same,’ and added that ‘there is no child placed outside of our Province that is not of exceptional history and I am confident that nothing will happen to reflect on our placement later on.’ Hill stressed that Alberta was not in the business of recruiting adoptive families in the United States, but when American couples (or couples from other Canadian provinces) met the province’s requirements, they were willing to consider certain ‘exceptional homes’ ‘simply as an obligement, having in view perhaps a better future for any child so placed.’ If there were, however, to be any ‘complications in the matter,’ Hill advised Waite to tell Wisconsin couples that ‘their applications will no longer be considered.’127 The same tone appeared in correspondence with authorities in Utah and Colorado.128 Alberta officials would accept no questioning of their personal judgment or their placement methods; they insisted they were doing favours, which they threatened to withdraw, for the citizens of the states to which they sent children. They refused to comply with requests for cooperation with state officials and their standard procedures. US officials at the state and national level worried that Alberta’s fame as an ‘easy’ source of babies for US couples would spread.129 Alberta officials claimed they were not recruiting US homes, but some Quebec adoption agencies were doing just that. In 1941, Father Germain, director of La Crèche (later, La Sauvegarde de L’Enfance), a Catholic childcaring institution in Quebec City, asked the USCB for help placing children from his institution across the border; an enclosed pamphlet on the work of La Crèche left the USCB’s Hanna very concerned about the decidedly unprofessional methods the institution employed. In late 1940, Rhode Island’s administrator of children’s services reported that one of her workers had discovered a family who adopted from Montreal’s La Société d’Adoption et de Protection de l’Enfance (SAPE). Nuns from SAPE told this family the institution was inves-

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44  The Traffic in Babies

tigating thirty-four potential adoptive homes in the United States.130 Soon thereafter, Rhode Island officials heard directly from SAPE about another baby placed in the state. ‘They will not,’ the Rhode Island administrator complained, notify us ahead of time so that we may investigate the home first and this second home is really not acceptable according to our standards … and it does seem as though some procedure should be established before they come from one country to another for such placement … Should this organization place in states where there is no investigation of adoptions, I can see where these children might be exploited.131

State-level officials wanted to know if the USCB and CWC were aware of the cross-border placements and if they could provide additional details and context on Canadian child welfare law. The US agencies wanted to know, as well, where they stood in the process and how they might act. Could they disapprove such adoptions? Did they have any control over whether the children could enter their states? Should they provide home studies? Could they exercise any supervision over placements already made? They asked, effectively, just who (if anyone) was ‘in charge’ when babies crossed borders. Some of these state officials clearly understood cross-border adoption as a problem of international relations, requiring an international solution negotiated through national leaders. Wisconsin’s Waite asked Whitton if there was a standing procedure in place for adoptions from provinces to states. Rhode Island officials thought they might use the state’s interstate placement law to control the activities of SAPE, but since Quebec was not a state, this was technically not a case of interstate placement. They assumed, nonetheless, that there must be laws on ‘international placement’ that were being violated. They asked the USCB to act through ‘international channels’ to remedy the situation. Utah’s chief requested the USCB take the issue to the INS and the Department of State, a view Whitton would certainly have supported.132 Whitton had already convinced Grace Abbott (now retired), Katharine Lenroot, and Agnes Hanna that there was a serious child welfare issue in inter-jurisdictional placement. Still, up to the early 1940s there was resistance at the bureau to framing cross-border adoption as a formal problem of international relations that might involve the INS or the US State Department. Surveying the reports on Alberta placements, the bureau’s adoption expert Mary Ruth Colby concluded that since

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Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  45

all legal formalities had been completed in Alberta and the US consul had followed all legal requirements before issuing immigration visas, there was no basis on which the USCB could approach the INS or the State Department.133 Colby’s understanding of cross-border adoption focused on the division of responsibilities and jurisdiction between the federal and state/provincial levels of government. This reading tended to place ‘blame’ on Alberta authorities (who were certainly deserving of opprobrium) and deny the possibility of affecting the process by taking action at the federal or international level. Alberta was responsible, and Alberta (however uncooperative or uninterested) would have to enact the remedy. There is an interesting comparison to be made here with comments Colby made on interstate adoptions in 1938, when she argued that in cases of placement across state lines inside the United States, state departments of public welfare might have to adopt a more expansive definition of their responsibilities. ‘The interest of a State department must often extend,’ she argued, ‘beyond the borders of the State when residents, in their efforts to obtain a child for adoption, make use of institutions or agencies in another state.’ In such a situation, she argued, ‘co-operation between state departments is one of the best methods of dealing with interstate problems.’134 Colby did not make clear, however, whether such cooperation should be voluntary or compulsory, still less what the process would look like when the borders in question where national as well as state and where federal agencies (like the consuls and the INS) were positioned as intermediaries in the formal process of transfer from Canadian province to US nation to US state. Did such federal agencies have responsibilities beyond their formal ‘boundaries’? In the case of adoptions from Canada to the United States, Colby thought (in 1940) that the answer to this question was no. Agnes Hanna (Colby’s supervisor at the USB) mirrored parts of Colby’s position, though she connected a critique of specific Canadian practices with an admission of similar American shortcomings. ‘None of these cross-border cases,’ argued Hanna, ‘presents an international problem but rather shows a similar lack of safeguards for children in Alberta such as we find in some of our other states.’135 This understanding of the problem suggested poor standards in various parts of Canada were no different (and potentially no more or less dangerous) than poor standards in various parts of the United States, but it also implied a localized solution that lay in the reform of laws and practices inside specific Canadian jurisdictions. As Hanna explained to Rhode Island’s

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46  The Traffic in Babies

administrator, ‘Changes in the procedures of Canadian agencies can only be affected through Canadian provisions.’136 Whitton agreed there were serious problems with the child placement practices in various provinces – most notably Alberta and Quebec – and that reform in these provinces was critical to achieving better standards in cross-border placement. She remained consistent in her argument that cross-border adoption was also a larger problem that required a larger solution binding across provincial, state, and national borders. Whitton insisted to Hanna that cross-border adoption was an issue that had to be addressed across borders and she argued that, given the structural position of the CWC, the USCB would have to take a leadership position for the good of Canadians and Americans: ‘The question is an international one between this country and yours and we lack any public federal agency [like the USCB].’137 The USCB would have to act and, because of its location inside the federal government, was in a better position to elevate the issue to the realm on international relations. This exchange clarified an important impasse, a difference between Canadian and American thinking (or at least between the thinking of Whitton and Hanna) that had also underlain discussions between the two women and their respective agencies in the early 1930s. Whitton was inclined towards large, binding international agreements; Hanna was inclined towards localized, domestic reform and the patient interpretation of professional standards in social work within provinces and states. Still, Hanna was willing to consider the US implications of the cross-border adoption issue; she recognized US weaknesses and assumed there must also be poor US-to-Canada placements, though these were never uncovered in any significant number.138 The new cross-border evidence also caused Hanna to rethink the role of interstate placement laws inside the United States. Hanna was a long-time critic of these laws (even though she and Lenroot referenced their potential in their 1933 standards), which she saw as notoriously difficult to enforce and often ignored or evaded by agencies of low standard. Earlier, she had argued that state departments needed to exert greater control over whether and how the agencies inside their jurisdictions followed the existing laws. Like Colby, she also felt that direct cooperation between state departments was essential if the laws were to have any effect.139 In 1940, Hanna returned to another area of concern; interstate laws were first designed to protect the financial interests of states. At the same time, however, she hoped ‘the modern concept of

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Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  47

these laws [which] is to assure the protection of the child’ was gaining more currency.140 Whitton’s response was to forward another copy of the 1935 (voluntary) Canadian agreement. Whitton noted the ‘reciprocal agreements’ outlined in the document ‘have been signed among our provinces, and each province takes its own procedure in communicating with the societies and agencies within their own boundaries.’ Unfortunately, this representation reflected Whitton’s hopes (for a binding protocol between provinces with the provinces policing their own agencies) much more than the actual status of the Canadian agreement.141 But for Hanna, the Canadian agreement (as represented by Whitton) was now a useful model for stronger control by states over their agencies, direct cooperation between states, and an explicit emphasis on the needs of children to go along with protection of the financial interests of states. She argued to a state colleague that ‘Canada has gone farther than we have in sound inter-provincial placements of children,’ and she planned to distribute the Canadian agreement to the states, as an alternative to interstate placement laws.142 There is no direct evidence Hanna enacted this plan, but there is nonetheless an intriguing irony here. Hanna seemed unaware of the actual status of the Canadian agreement. She also seemed to have forgotten that the Canadian agreement had its origins in the memo she first drafted in 1933, and that Grace Abbott hoped would then become (as Hanna now intended) a US model. The national and international rebounded. By the summer of 1941, Hanna identified a specific area where the USCB might need to approach other federal agencies. Complaints to the bureau demonstrated that the US consuls in Canada were acting inconsistently. The consul in Regina, Saskatchewan (working in concert with Saskatchewan child welfare officials), would not issue a visa to adoptive parents from Colorado unless the Colorado Department of Public Welfare first approved the adoptive home as appropriate for the specific child and communicated this approval to Saskatchewan’s commissioner of child welfare. This approach was laudable.143 The Alberta consul asked only for a general endorsement of the home from any social agency, and was inconsistent with this requirement. Hanna was most upset, however, by the US consul in London, Ontario, who was blocking an ‘excellent’ placement of a Canadian child with an aunt in Iowa.144 By the fall of 1941, Hanna was admitting to a Canadian correspondent that the USCB staff had ‘problems of interpretation not only with some of our agencies, but also with some of our Consulates.’145

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48  The Traffic in Babies

Hanna was, it seemed, moving towards Whitton’s conception of cross-border adoption as an ‘international problem.’ That fall, Hanna, Whitton, Lenroot, Castendyck, and USCB newcomer Maud Morlock met on this issue at a social work conference in New Jersey. The discussion continued when Castendyck went to Ottawa on business related to the care of British refugee children in North America and when Whitton made additional trips to the United States for war-related speaking engagements and to meet with USCB staff.146 In these meetings, Whitton’s USCB allies endorsed her latest strategy, which was to share recent complaints with provincial child welfare directors and use this opening to reignite a Canadian discussion of domestic and cross-border reform. Whitton asked the provincial directors to pressure their local agencies not to place children in the United States without prior communication with US officials, a key provision at the heart of her 1933–5 proposals. She was, in effect, trying to make the provincial directors agents for the centralization and standardization of placement procedures (even without a national agreement). The response from the provinces was mixed; most provincial directors supported Whitton’s plan (without making definite commitments), but Alberta authorities ignored her. From Quebec, Father LaCombe of the SAPE claimed (despite evidence to the contrary from Rhode Island) that his agency followed all of Whitton’s recommendations for communication and collaboration with US counterparts.147 The most promising response came from British Columbia. Isobel Harvey, superintendent of neglected children, reported a working arrangement between child welfare officials in British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington and ‘socially minded staff’ of the INS in the northwest. Harvey argued her office could oversee the operations of reputable child-placing agencies, but ‘found it impossible to control the professional baby-brokers’ who placed young infants with families across the border before provincial or state officials knew of the child. ‘Some of the placements,’ Harvey wrote, ‘were satisfactory but fortunately for our adoption theories, some were dreadful and the United States had a few extra imbeciles as a result.’148 Working closely with the district superintendent of the INS in the north-west, Canadian and American child welfare officials developed a policy that blocked this kind of placement. Under this plan, INS officials at the border would not admit a child to the United States for adoption or free home care unless the people transporting the child had with them written approval from the receiving

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Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  49

state superintendent of child welfare. With the appropriate documentation, INS officials admitted the child as a visitor to the United States for the duration of the adoption probation. Under this arrangement, a US social agency or state department of child welfare supervised the child and reported to Canadian authorities through the probationary period until the adoption was completed. US immigration authorities became the key to a system designed to protect the interests of children and parents but also, critically, to protect state governments and police the activities of child-placers inside Canadian provinces.149 The only formal responsibility of the INS at the border was to ensure the just-adopted or to-be-adopted child held a Canadian passport containing a valid immigration visa issued by a US consulate in Canada. The INS agreement bypassed the requirement for an immigration visa (until after the probationary period) and gave the immigration inspectors a direct role in the child welfare system.150 How could this extension of INS activity be justified? As Harvey reported, ‘The Immigration Department justifies their stand thus: first, that it is their business to see that only children who will make good American citizens are admitted to the USA and second, that a child for adoption is either a ward of the Superintendent [of Child Welfare] or being a potentially a neglected child, ought to be and therefore the Superintendent stands in the position of parent to the child and must plan for it.’151 Whitton now had a concrete model for an international solution. If the INS would agree to follow the BC procedures at all border crossings (and Canadian immigration officers would reciprocate) provincial administrations and local agencies would be forced to work with US state departments. Agencies of good standard would have their existing practices reinforced; agencies of poor standard and recalcitrant provincial administrations would find it impossible to move children across borders. When the USCB worked with the INS in the early 1930s, and again at the meetings of the Trans-Border Committee on Social Problems in 1935, social welfare leaders argued strongly that immigration authorities must add a heightened sense of social responsibility to the enforcement of immigration laws. An expansion of the north-west model promised to bring cross-border adoption inside the circle of immigration problems to be considered in this way. With encouragement from the USCB, Whitton drafted ‘Proposed Controls in Respect to the Movement of Children for Adoption or Free Home or Boarding Home Care from Canada to the United States and from the United States to Canada,’ and delivered this document to Len-

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50  The Traffic in Babies

root for further consideration and circulation to other agencies. Making her case for cross-border controls, Whitton argued that the only procedure which seems to promise reasonably complete protection for the children, citizens and social agencies of both countries would seem to call for something more definite than reciprocal agreement which, it was hoped, would prove effective. Under these circumstances, it would appear that the controls required necessitate enforcement between the Immigration Departments of both countries, each working in collaboration with the provincial and child welfare authorities.

As justification for this activity, Whitton adapted the first of the arguments used in the north-west case – that immigration departments were responsible for ensuring that only children who ‘are likely to fit in and develop within their own communities are admitted.’ Whitton proposed the immigration regulations of each country be amended to provide that no child could be admitted for adoption, free care, or boarding care without a certified letter of approval from the state department of welfare (as in the north-west model).152 Whitton asked Lenroot to use her authority as USCB chief to take this proposal to the INS, while she promised the CWC would ‘make certain that our government is prepared to enter into this agreement and we shall also undertake the responsibility of getting provincial collaboration.’153 Thus, the USCB and the CWC, working in tandem, would facilitate an institutionalized international agreement. This was asking a great deal of her US colleagues, though Lenroot certainly knew a proposal of this type was coming and encouraged Whitton to put her idea on paper. Whitton was also promising a great deal on behalf of herself and the CWC. If the USCB was able to convince the INS to adopt this new approach, how would this be enacted? Would it require a (relatively) simple change in policy or instructions to officers? The 1933 changes in the INS deportation policy had apparently been introduced on this basis. Or, would Whitton’s proposal require changes to federal legislation? What of the constitutional division of powers between state governments and federal agencies? What role might the Department of State have to play? How would these same concerns play out on the Canadian side? And, finally, if all these barriers were overcome, how would Whitton secure the ‘provincial collaboration’ that had eluded her throughout the 1930s? The north-west model appealed to Whitton because it defined a

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site of policing and a set of ‘definite regulations’ that would require provinces and social agencies to adhere to basic standards. Still, the BC model also relied heavily on the pre-existing good relationship between provincial and state child welfare officials and on their continued close cooperation. The arrangement worked both because it policed basic standards (and thus could catch those trying to evade state and provincial standards), but also, crucially, because top state and provincial officials accepted a common set of procedures and were interested in working together. The CWC and the USCB shared these characteristics, but the relevant pairs of states and provinces might not. Would this model work without these good relationships and commitment to cooperation? And without informal and personalized ties to back the formal agreement? Presumably, a tighter and more formal regulatory framework would downplay the significance of voluntary collaboration. But it would also seem that the more emphasis was placed on the INS as enforcer, the more difficult it would be to convince the INS to participate and the more formalized the INS protocol would need to be. Despite the myriad complications, Whitton’s proposal received a respectful hearing and seems to have been taken seriously at the USCB. Whitton’s persistence, and her inside connections at the USCB seemed to be paying off. Hanna initially told colleagues at the USCB that she did not ‘think we can handle this in the way we wish.’ By December 1941, however, Lenroot was writing to ‘Dear Charlotte’ that ‘your proposals are very interesting and Miss Hanna is discussing them further with our immigration authorities.’ Lenroot promised personally to bring Whitton’s proposal to the attention of Fred Hoehler, leader of the American Public Welfare Association and another of Whitton’s fans in American social welfare circles.154 Conclusion Unfortunately, time was working against this plan in both countries. Just after Hanna took the proposal to the INS, the United States entered the Second World War. As Lenroot noted in her 1942 annual report, with the US entry into the war, ‘the work ... of the Social Service Division has been directed toward wartime problems of health and social welfare. All activities of these and other divisions not directly related to wartime needs have been brought to completion, suspended or greatly reduced.’ North of the border, December 1941 brought Charlotte Whitton’s resignation from her post as executive director of the Canadian

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52  The Traffic in Babies

Welfare Council. For several years, Whitton had faced increasing criticism in Canada because of her conservative opposition to the nationally directed income support programs advocated by the new vanguard in Canadian social welfare. Her forceful personality and autocratic leadership style also helped turn ideological opponents into fierce critics. In late 1941, Whitton was finally forced to recognize that – even as her star rose in international circles – she was losing the support of the CWC board at home.155 In January 1942, a Children’s Bureau staffer scribbled a note on Whitton’s proposal asking Lenroot ‘Is this dead?’ Lenroot responded by noting Whitton’s resignation, but also asking her staff to ‘please keep this in mind.’156 But without Whitton and under wartime conditions in both Canada and the United States, both the proposal and, for a few years, the larger issue of cross-border adoption was effectively ‘dead.’ Whitton never achieved her most important goal – a binding and enforceable protocol governing inter-jurisdictional placements – but she did draw the attention of child welfare leaders in Canada and the United States to cross-border adoption as a serious child welfare problem, generating a push for reform inside each country and a discussion across the border that enhanced domestic reform efforts. In 1934, Whitton had expressed her hope that talking about, negotiating, and regulating cross-border placements from Canada to the United States would turn Canadian and American child welfare workers into ‘good neighbours’ and allies. Except on the west coast, the cross-border complaints and discussions of the 1930s did more to identify problems – to point out bad, uncooperative neighbours – than to develop solutions. Whitton’s work in the 1930s demonstrated how difficult it would be to move from informal and personalized collaboration and communication across borders to formalized, institutional agreements. The northwest model showed that it was possible for federal authorities (acting in a restricted, localized area) to help provincial and state authorities manage cross-border adoption. But the adoption reformers who took up the cross-border issue in the later 1940s and 1950s would struggle to involve federal agencies in the regulation of adoption. The goal of a broad, international agreement never went away, but when cross-border adoption reappeared on the joint CWC-USCB agenda in 1945, the first focus was on pragmatic efforts to stop or control the three largest providers of children in the cross-border traffic. Two of these providers – the Alberta Child Welfare Branch and La Société d’Adoption et de Protection de l’Enfance – are already familiar. The

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Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s  53

third, and in many ways the most disturbing, was the Ideal Maternity Home, a not-so-ideal commercial maternity home operating out of East Chester, Nova Scotia. The next three chapters use the USCB and CWC reaction to these three adoption operations to explore how babies slipped across borders and how the national child welfare leadership in each country used informal collaborations to try to control the traffic in babies.

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2 Border-Crossing Responses to the Ideal Maternity Home, 1945–1947

In June 1946, the Canadian Conference on Social Work (CCSW) met in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Ernest Blois, Nova Scotia’s deputy minister of public welfare and the president of the conference for 1946, invited USCB consultant Maud Morlock to address the conference on ‘illegitimacy and adoption.’1 Morlock shared the stage with her friend and ally Nora Lea, acting executive director of the CWC. Morlock stressed the need for close professional supervision of the adoption transaction, and she underlined the risks to children, birth mothers, and adoptive parents in haphazard placements contracted without the benefit of professional input. She paid particular attention to dangers associated with distance placements and then turned specifically to the topic of bordercrossing adoptions between Canada and the United States, ending with a plea for cross-border cooperation. Next, Lea spoke on the need for communication between social agencies and government departments when children were placed from province to province or from province to US state, echoing themes introduced by Charlotte Whitton in the 1930s.2 All present would have interpreted these presentations against the example of the Nova Scotia–based Ideal Maternity Home. The IMH was a very large commercial maternity home and adoption placement service operating out of the small village of East Chester, Nova Scotia, about an hour’s drive from the conference venue. By the mid-1940s, the IMH had developed a niche market placing the children of unwed Canadian mothers of Catholic or Protestant faith with Jewish adoptive families in the United States (see figures 2.1 and 2.2). Everything about the IMH operation – from the high fees they charged to birth mothers and adoptive parents, to the poor medical care provided to moth-

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Border-Crossing Responses to the Ideal Maternity Home  55

ers and children, to the complete disregard for professional adoption practices in the Home’s placements – worried Morlock, Lea, and other child welfare leaders. For over a year, Morlock and Lea had been working with Nova Scotia’s child welfare authorities (including Blois), and with adoption reformers, bureaucrats, and politicians at the federal and state/provincial levels in the United States and Canada to curtail the IMH operation. With the IMH as subtext and almost literal backdrop to the conference, Morlock told her audience that the challenge of managing cross-border adoption required ‘sharing of thinking across the border.’3 The tragic history of the IMH and its proprietors, William and Lila Young, featured severely malnourished and neglected children, exploited birth mothers, desperate adoptive parents, and ‘evidence of “black market” practises.’4 The Youngs and their lawyers had a smooth operation specifically designed to exploit the loopholes and gaps in regulatory authority that opened as they moved children across borders. As Lea argued in 1945, ‘The real source of trouble with the Ideal Maternity Home is their complete violation of ordinary accepted standards in adoption placement, their circumvention of the law most successfully, and the fact they have built up a tremendous following of emotional people who think they are doing a wonderful job and who support them most generously … Briefly, the people behind the Ideal Maternity Home are dangerous.’5 This chapter examines the border-crossing response to the ‘dangerous’ Ideal Maternity Home in the period 1945–7, as constructed by the CWC and the USCB and primarily through the efforts of Morlock and Lea. The goal is to identify the specifics of transnational cooperation, and to see how a common purpose was turned into a program of reform pulling on the formal and informal resources of the Canadians and Americans and creating links between states, provinces, and national child welfare leaders. The abuses at the Ideal Maternity Home made the need for such cooperation across borders more than evident. Some strategies invoked in this campaign reflected pre-existing patterns in the joint work of the CWC and the USCB. As with Charlotte Whitton and Katharine Lenroot, Morlock and Lea used both the strength of their personal relationship and their professional reputations to gather information and build connections. Morlock and Lea prioritized links and bridges between states and provinces as an immediate and pragmatic response to the IMH; they were not as focused as Whitton on a formalized agreement between states and provinces. But,

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like Whitton and her allies in the 1930s, Lea and Morlock argued that the INS, the force policing entry into the United States, must be pulled into the transnational response to the traffic in babies. Several new elements were at play. As she fought to stop the Ideal Maternity Home, Lea had full and immediate support from Morlock and her USCB colleagues. The IMH campaign also pulled the USCB and CWC into more sustained cooperation with state and provincial leaders on both sides of the border than was evident through the 1930s. The transnational web woven in response to the IMH involved reformers in New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick. Morlock and Lea spun the web. There was always more at stake than simply closing down this one operation. The Ideal Maternity Home provided a graphic example of what could go wrong in unregulated, hastily contracted, and commercialized adoptions. Consequently, the Home was useful as a negative referent that Morlock, Lea, and their colleagues could use to make the case for reformed adoption practices. In the longer term, the IMH experience hung over the subsequent efforts of Canadian and American leaders to test new solutions and work out cooperative procedures. The IMH campaign was always about closing down the Home, selling ‘sound adoption practice,’ and developing broader transnational strategies to combat the traffic in children. ‘Lovely Babies for Adoption; excellent background and healthy bodies; write for information. Ideal Maternity Home, East Chester, Nova Scotia’6 The Ideal Maternity Home opened in 1928 as a small business that William and Lila Young operated out of their home. William, a chiropractor, and Lila, who had some training as a midwife and billed herself as an ‘obstetrical specialist,’ were both Seventh Day Adventist Missionaries. The Youngs and their supporters described the Home’s work with white women pregnant out-of-wedlock and with eager adoptive parents as a ‘Mission Field’ of service conducted with ‘a determination for the betterment of humanity.’7 This missionary work was highly profitable. The Ideal Maternity Home prospered in the 1930s, and grew still more as war conditions brought increasing numbers of women ‘in trouble’ to the Youngs’ doorstep.8 By the mid-1940s, the IMH – now housed in an impressive 54-room complex – was the largest maternity home in eastern Canada, with a nursery containing 75–125 babies at

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any time.9 Estimates of the total number of children born in the Home between 1928 and 1946 range from 800 to 1500.10 At first, most women confined at the IMH came from the local area. Later, the Home attracted white women from across eastern Canada who were pregnant out-of-wedlock.11 The IMH advertised its maternity service in newspapers and sent out welcoming letters and glowing brochures to those who inquired. The Youngs promised expectant mothers ‘NO PUBLICITY,’ and protection from ‘Dame Gossip.’ They offered ‘entertainment and recreation,’ ‘modern’ medical facilities, a ‘scientific start in life for baby,’ and a ‘complete adoption service.’12 It is not difficult to understand why all of this appealed to women facing harsh societal condemnation and almost certain poverty if they kept their out-of-wedlock children, or even if the facts of their pregnancies became widely known.13 The secrecy surrounding the IMH operation meant that most women who entrusted themselves and their children to the Youngs had no way of knowing that the reality of the IMH could differ greatly from the advertised image. And for many women, the IMH – even with its serious shortcomings – was still the best available choice in a difficult situation. At a minimum, the Home offered women the hard-to-come-by necessities of shelter, food, medical care (though there were serious questions about the quality of this care), and privacy as they awaited the birth of their children. Other women gave birth elsewhere and then approached the IMH for adoption services.14 The Youngs’ services did not come cheaply. A woman who arrived three months before her due date – the Youngs advised women to ‘enter early to avoid gossip’ – could expect a bill of over $500.15 This sum was beyond the reach of many women even if they had financial support from a boyfriend or family member, and the Youngs were known to resort to fraud, blackmail, and extortion to secure unpaid balances. Women were offered the option of staying at the Home after childbirth and working off the bill at the rate of twenty-five dollars per month. Later, some women complained of being held ‘hostage’ and treated very poorly. Through these women, the Youngs had access to a steady and cheap work force to do cooking, cleaning, and childcare. The Home employed a very small number of trained nurses, but most of the time the babies in the IMH nursery were cared for by these young women, who were told to pose as trained nurses for government inspectors and prospective adoptive parents.16 The largest portion of a woman’s bill was for the Home’s ‘adoption transfer plan.’ Each expectant mother was encouraged to sign an

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‘adoption transfer agreement’ whereby she contracted before the birth to relinquish her child for adoption and to pay the Youngs three hundred dollars to place the child. In return, the Youngs agreed to care for the child until it was placed, provided the child was ‘white, not birth marked, crippled, or deformed’ at birth.17 This fee system was highly unusual; birth mothers often paid for their board at other commercial maternity homes, but rarely paid public or private maternity homes for adoption services. In 1944, George Davidson (Charlotte Whitton’s successor as executive director of the CWC) characterized the IMH adoption transfer plan as a ‘viciously dangerous procedure’ because ‘an institution operating primarily as a commercial venture cannot afford to have these children left on its hands for too long … The sooner the child can be placed outside the institution in an adoption or pseudo-adoption home, the greater the chance for satisfactory profit.’18 In this situation, child welfare leaders knew the careful placement procedures they favoured would be ignored. The IMH story may be familiar to some readers as the tale of the ‘Butterbox Babies,’ a term that came from Lila Young’s practice of burying deceased children in the wooden crates in which dairy products were delivered to the Home. Nearly forgotten for forty years, this history was rediscovered in the late 1980s by journalist Bette Cahill. In a 1988 book, Cahill pursued disturbing rumours that the Youngs deliberately starved and neglected babies who could not easily be placed for adoption because they had some physical or mental defect. She records the long-standing suspicion that at least one hundred babies are buried in unmarked graves near a local cemetery in Fox Point, Nova Scotia, and that other bodies were either dumped at sea or thrown into the Home’s incinerator.19 Cahill’s most extreme charges are difficult to credit. The Youngs were never convicted in the death of an infant, and the terms of the ‘adoption transfer plan’ protected the Youngs from financial responsibility for a child that was visibly ‘defective’ at birth. They had an incentive to place children as quickly as possible, but not to murder the infants who were their ‘product’ in a lucrative adoption marketplace. There is, however, solid proof of serious deficiencies in both sanitary conditions and medical standards at the Home, and these conditions could certainly lead to many deaths. Without question, many of the children in the Home were neglected and malnourished. In 1945, a New York state adoption worker recorded a description of the IMH nursery given her by a potential adoptive mother: ‘The smell and stench of stale

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urine overcame her to such an extent that she was ready to fly from the place. The cribs had three children in each one. The floors were bare, and she noticed that the children who should be getting solid foods were getting pabulum in their milk bottles. No child was getting personal care and all looked undernourished, pale and soiled.’20 During a 1945 inspection visit, Nova Scotia’s director of child welfare, F.R. MacKinnon, saw that only one nurse was on duty to look after eighty infants and that ‘the children were dirtier than one would expect to see in a maternity hospital. Some were lying in their vomitous, some in their soiled linen.’21 In an early draft of a 1944 Report on Public Welfare Services, the CWC’s Davidson noted: Although the Home confines upwards of a hundred mothers or more a year, and cares for as many as seventy babies at a time, there is a total lack of qualified medical supervision, and a serious inadequacy of properly qualified, fully trained nursing care. The room in which the babies were kept was, on the occasion of the survey visit, distressingly overcrowded, with the obvious result that it was impossible to prevent the spread of colds (and this would apply to similar infectious diseases) … On at least one previous occasion, infant deaths at this institution have reached epidemic proportions, and it is the opinion of this survey that nothing except great good fortune has prevented similar tragedies from recurring on more frequent occasions.22

These passages are disturbing, even heart-rending, and they can be supplemented by many other examples. Doctors who examined children from the Home found them to be ‘exceedingly malnourished.’23 Birth mothers reported they received little medical attention from Lila Young during their stays and ill children did not see doctors.24 There are also numerous examples of birth mothers who were falsely told that their children were dead so they would not interfere in adoption placements.25 Parents who adopted children from the Home have since expressed their belief they saved the lives of the weak and ill children they took home.26 And even those adoptive parents who expressed overall support for the Youngs’ work commented on the ‘affectional starvation’ of the large numbers of children in the nursery.27 The first adoptive parents to secure children from the IMH were local residents. By the 1940s, the Youngs were placing children with families from across eastern Canada, up and down the US eastern seaboard, and as far away as South America. The Youngs worked very hard to

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dodge efforts by the province of Nova Scotia to make them keep formal records, and most existing records were later destroyed in a fire. Thus, it is impossible to know how many IMH children ended up with American families. My estimate, based on IMH-generated correspondence, the observations of Canadian and American social workers, and the current membership roll of the support group ‘Friends and Survivors of the Ideal Maternity Home,’ is that IMH children placed in the United States would number in the hundreds. While these children ended up in states stretching from Rhode Island to Florida, the vast majority seem to have landed with Jewish families in the New York City metropolitan area and, in particular, in the state of New Jersey (see figures 2.1 and 2.2).28 The Youngs placed newspaper ads offering ‘lovely babies for adoption’ in newspapers from Nova Scotia to New Jersey. By 1944 they were sending out a large-format, twenty-six-page booklet filled with glossy photos of the new IMH complex and testimonials from prominent supporters. Potential parents longing for children were offered ‘Sunshine for the Home,’ and they were reassured that ‘expectant mothers are placed under the most pleasant and comfortable surroundings in order that a happy contented disposition may be developed in the baby about to be born.’ The Youngs promised prospective parents that they conducted extensive studies of the birth parents ‘IN ORDER to convey to you a good idea of the type of child you are adopting.’ In at least one publicity brochure, they also declared, ‘This complete and Ideal service is FREE to you and at your disposal.’29 The service was only free insofar as the Youngs claimed not to be charging a fee for actually providing a child. However, the Youngs and their lawyers charged rather extensive legal, medical, and paperwork ‘fees’ in connection with adoptions and also solicited ‘donations’ in support of the Home. Cahill found examples where ‘fees’ and ‘donations’ totalled from one to two hundred dollars up to $10,000. IMH lawyer Charles Longley remembered decades later that his typical fee for an IMH adoption in the 1940s was a $165, although he also asserted that the Home’s Saint John, New Brunswick, lawyer gouged adoptive parents by charging $5,000–$10,000.30 It is unlikely many turned over such large sums. The going rate for black market adoptions in New York City in this period was in the range of $2000, although there is scattered evidence of higher fees.31 Child welfare officials in Canada and the United States never documented IMH fees in amounts more than the low hundreds, although they suspected much higher rates

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Primary Destinations New Jersey New York Rhode Island

Secondary Destinations

Connecticut Florida Massachusetts Pennsylvania

Figure 2.1  Adoptions Originating from the Ideal Maternity Home, pre-1945

were charged. In comparison, the USCB estimated ‘a typical attorney’s fee [for arranging an adoption in 1945] seems to be about $25, although it is not unusual to hear that the charge has amounted to $75 or $100.’ Even at the lower range (hundreds versus thousands of dollars), Cana-

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dian and American child welfare officials believed the Youngs’ work constituted a black market.32 The term ‘black market’ was, and remains, both extremely loaded and very slippery. In the mid-1950s, the USCB defined black marketers in adoption as ‘unauthorized middle men who offer babies for a price unrelated to legitimate services rendered natural and adopting parents,’ but this definition left many questions unanswered.33 What was a legitimate service? a legitimate fee? At what point ($75? $165? $1000? $10,000?) did the fees and donations associated with IMH adoptions become black market payments for children? What was the dividing line between the independent placement orchestrated by a doctor or lawyer charging a professional fee (sometimes referred to as the ‘grey market’) and the placements made by a baby-selling black marketer? Other definitions of the black market downplayed the specific issue of how much was paid and referred to placements where considerations of price and profit took precedence over the welfare of individual children and parents. Practices which were sometimes described as typical of the black market included warehousing large numbers of pregnant women before the birth of their children; offering children for adoption before they were born; paying women to relinquish their children; lying to birth mothers about the fate of their children; charging adoptive parents large fees to secure children; and using fraud or bribery to secure an adoption court order or bypassing the legal adoption altogether.34 At the IMH, women paid the Youngs to provide adoptive homes for their children and the adoptions were legal, although adoption reformers understood the carefully orchestrated border crossing of the IMH as a deliberate subversion of the legal protections offered to parents and children in jurisdictions with sounder adoption practices. The rest of the items in this list were all part of the IMH operation. For Morlock, Lea, and their colleagues, the importance of naming the Youngs as baby-selling black marketers was that the term invoked such a strong sense of moral outrage.35 The specific price tag for any child ‘sold’ from the Home was less significant than the general assertion that the Youngs were larcenous child sellers in the business of exploiting children, birth mothers, and adoptive parents. The accusation was imprecise, but also useful. The image of babies for sale could be very effective in public campaigns to discredit the IMH operation and to sell a larger agenda of adoption reform. Certainly, in the IMH case there was more evidence of poor placement practices and terrible physical standards in the Home than there was of vicious baby-selling. Maud Mor-

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lock made the general point about using black market scandals to sell adoption reform in a 1945 contribution to the professional journal Survey Mid-Monthly: ‘Price, profit and service fees are only symptomatic of the real evil – carelessness in the planless, thoughtless handing around of babies who have no families … The public interest in “baby black markets” aroused by newspapers and magazines presents a golden opportunity for conducting a campaign to obtain legal safeguards against loose adoption procedures.’36 Thus, black market accusations provided a culturally loaded shorthand for reformers concerned about haphazard placement procedures and the consequent dangers for adoptive parents and adopted children that went along with baby sales. In Cahill’s examples, the highest adoption fees were always paid by Jewish couples from the United States who came to dominate the IMH clientele in the 1940s. For this group, the appeal of an IMH adoption was directly related to their religion. Well into the 1960s, most states and most provinces had adoption or child welfare legislation restricting the placement of children across religious lines or strongly recommending that children be placed with families sharing the same religious heritage as the birth parents. When the child was born to married parents, the religion of the father usually determined the religion of the child. When the child was born out-of-wedlock, the religion of the mother was determinative. Legal requirements for religious matching were reinforced by the sectarian commitments of many maternity homes and social welfare agencies.37 The implication was that religion was an in-born part of the child’s identity, and that both the church and the state had a duty to safeguard the child’s religious heritage. But as Melosh argues, religious matching in adoption was also, crucially, about the communal claims of religious communities and about ‘turf issues’ between implicitly and explicitly sectarian placement agencies.38 Religious matching laws had roots in nineteenth-century battles over public funding for sectarian schools and charitable institutions, and in Catholic concerns about Protestant capture and conversion of dependent Catholic children.39 In New York City, public welfare authorities assigned Catholic or Protestant identity in rotation to foundlings whose religious heritage was unknown; Jewish assignments were briefly added to the rotation in the late 1930s and again for a longer period in the 1950s.40 This kind of religious assignment existed in tension with the idea that religion was in-born, but also underlined the complex and often competitive politics of sectarian child placement.

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Religious placement laws and practices led to religious segmentation in the adoption marketplace, with localized ‘shortages’ and ‘surpluses’ of children of different religious designations. In parts of North America, there were not enough Catholic babies to fill the local demand, but elsewhere (as in the province of Quebec) there were far more Catholic children available than there were Catholic adoptive homes on offer. Across North America – but particularly in the urban areas of the eastern seaboard – there was a distinct shortage of Jewish children. Jewish families, along with families from other religious minorities, mixedfaith families, agnostics, and atheists, found it particularly difficult or nearly impossible to obtain a child through a reputable social service agency. The shortage of Jewish children was understood as a product of comparatively low rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy among Jewish women (low supply), the heavy emphasis on child rearing in Jewish culture (high demand), and the extreme reluctance of social agencies to place children of Christian heritage in Jewish families, even in those instances where adoption laws permitted such placements. ‘Jewishness’ was understood by many social workers as both a religious identity and a racial identity, and workers felt constrained by personal conviction or professional standards to respect both religious and racial borders. Social workers worried that non-Jewish children placed in Jewish families might, on the one hand, be subjected to anti-Semitism and, on the other hand, be treated as outsiders within the Jewish community.41 By the 1940s, the USCB frequently received letters from frustrated Jewish couples across the United States desperately seeking children to adopt; a smaller number of such letters, including some making specific inquiries about the IMH, were sent directly to the CWC.42 A 1955 internal USCB report on the black market in babies noted that ‘in all of the black market cases that have come to light, the great majority are known to have involved Jewish couples.’ The report as a whole makes it clear this comment was not intended as a condemnation of Jewish communities for participating in the black market. It was, rather, a forthright acknowledgment of the limited choices and stiff challenges facing Jewish couples that wished to adopt.43 Nova Scotia’s Adoption Act was silent on the question of religion. The province’s Children’s Protection Act specified that Protestant children could not be placed in Roman Catholic childcaring institutions or ‘in any family the head of which is a Roman Catholic,’ and also made the reverse stipulation. But the act referred only to neglected and dependent children taken into care, and thus did not apply to the children

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born at the IMH and destined for permanent adoption. In addition, this law made no mention of religions other than Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Nonetheless, most child welfare agencies treated the child protection stipulations as if they applied in adoption as well and required religious matching across all religions in their placements.44 The Youngs and their lawyers stood apart; unrestrained by the letter of the law, they largely ignored the principle of religious matching in adoption. An exchange between IMH lawyer Charles Longley and Dr Ellen Potter, director of medicine for the New Jersey Department of Institutions and Agencies, lays out the conflict between the IMH and professional social work approaches to religious matching in adoption. Potter argued that while her ‘sympathies are entirely with the Jewish group who have suffered so much as a minority group … I think it should be borne in mind that a Gentile child, discovering, as he may, at a later date, that he is adopted by a Jewish family may find himself in an emotional conflict which it is difficult for him to resolve.’45 Longley countered: ‘I do not altogether see eye to eye with you in regard to the advisability of insisting on matching religious backgrounds. I believe religion is something that one acquires on reaching an age of understanding and discretion. It is certainly not hereditary in the ordinary sense.’46 Nearly seventy years later, and after almost all jurisdictions have repealed or softened their policies with respect to religious matching, Longley’s perspective (if divorced from the larger context of IMH practices) might seem reasonable and measured. Indeed, religious placement laws and practices were challenged repeatedly in both countries in the 1950s and 1960s.47 Furthermore, individual social workers and social agencies varied in the way they interpreted and enforced religious matching provisions.48 In 1945, however, religious matching in adoption was the generally accepted law or practice of both lands, respected by most reputable social workers and guarded by sectarian social agencies and religious hierarchies. The forthright rejection of religious matching at the IMH marked the Home as a rogue operator in adoption. Jewish families adopting at the IMH were sometimes told the children they were adopting were born of a Jewish mother, the key factor determining Jewish identity under rabbinical law.49 Given the religious demographic of Maritime provinces, it is highly unlikely that many of the children born at the Home were of Jewish parentage. At least one IMH birth mother later claimed she was pressured to falsely declare

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the father of her child was Jewish.50 Some families clearly recognized the lie, but were nonetheless grateful for the opportunity to adopt. Others continued to believe what they needed to believe: the Youngs had found Jewish children for them to adopt when no one else could. One New Jersey social worker noted the IMH adoptive mother she visited was probably mistaken in her belief that the children she adopted had Jewish parents, but went on to concede it was ‘true that both of these children do look Jewish.’ At the IMH, the more widespread preference for the blond-haired and blue-eyed child was replaced by a sometimes literal premium on children of darker complexion who would presumably fit more easily into their new families and religious communities.51 With the help of the Youngs and their lawyers, a supposed ‘surplus’ of Gentile Canadian children was transported across both geographic and religious borders to help fill a ‘scarcity’ of Jewish children in New Jersey and other parts of the United States. In chapters 4 and 5, we will see how a different religious demographic – one involving a ‘surplus’ of Catholic children in Quebec – conditioned Canadian placements with Catholic and Jewish families in the United States. Once the first New Jersey couples made their way to the IMH, the Youngs were eager to exploit the connection.52 As William Young explained to New Jersey’s Potter in 1944, ‘We have quite a number of babies placed in your district and it has been pointed out to us by several of these foster parents that there is a critical shortage of babies in your district so for this reason we decided to advertize [sic] since we have a splendid surplus on hand at present.’53 Young either did not know or did not care that such advertisements violated New Jersey law.54 At any rate, personal connections between families, friends, and neighbours quickly became an important recruiting mechanism for the Youngs. Sometimes more than one family travelled to Nova Scotia together.55 The Youngs actively encouraged these connections, with William writing to a former client: ‘I hope you folks can send up a lot of people right away to get children.’56 In late 1945, New Jersey child welfare officials intercepted a detailed set of instructions on how to manage the trip north that was circulating within a small group of New Jersey women. The instructions laid out the details of the adoption process and provided tips for making train reservations and enjoying the short visit to lovely Nova Scotia: ‘Arrange to stop at Mrs Nauss (inexpensive and clean) … Bring flat shoes, a bathing suit, a thermos, no fancy clothes. Dress for comfort.’57 The process of getting a child was remarkably easy and rather like

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going on a vacation. One cover story repeated by parents who adopted children at the IMH was to claim the child had been born to the adoptive mother while the parents were on a fishing vacation in Nova Scotia!58 The IMH process was particularly attractive when compared to the delays, frustrations, intrusive investigations, and even refusals many of these parents could expect in professionally managed adoptions. Echoing a standard criticism of social workers in this period, the adoptive grandmother of an IMH baby told a social worker it was ‘a shame that the New Jersey agencies work so hard to prevent families from adopting children.’ She then described ‘how very gracious the people in Canada were to her daughter.’59 Potential adoptive parents who contacted the IMH received the Home’s publicity material, an enthusiastic response from William Young, and a follow-up letter from the IMH lawyer in Halifax, Charles Longley. Longley told parents about the charges they could expect (although the quoted figure of $75 was far lower than the likely final bill) and listed the documents that would be required for an adoption petition, a passport and a US immigration visa for the child.60 Parents were instructed to bring to Nova Scotia copies of their birth and marriage certificates, thirteen different documents describing their financial assets and liabilities, and the names of two ‘responsible citizens who would be willing to give an affidavit as to your character.’ Families were told the IMH did not require that both parents come to Nova Scotia, and frequently prospective adoptive mothers came on their own.61 Once in Chester, parents chose a child from the IMH nursery. One Nova Scotia adoptive parent recalled she and her husband ‘spent a long time looking the babies over. It felt like we were in a grocery store looking for just the right box of cereal.’62 Other parents felt they were pressured by the Youngs to select a particular child. One New York woman, whose negative reaction to the nursery is quoted above,63 felt she was encouraged by the Youngs to accept a child ‘who was obviously “an idiot.”’ She believed ‘the object [in the selection process] is to work fast and apparently not give couples time to think.’64 Sometimes, the selection could take place before the child was born. More than fifty years after her experience at the IMH, one birth mother still remembered ‘in the evenings, when we girls were eating our meal at the table in the dining room, the Americans would come and look through the large picture window at us … That was how they picked the girls, by looking through that glass window at us.’65 Potential adoptive parents sometimes took the child to see a doctor

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before making a final decision.66 Once the child was selected, an IMH lawyer arranged for the adoption. Before 1944, adoptions were processed through the local county court, which required no investigation of the parents and no probationary period. The process could be completed in a matter of hours when the child was as young as two or three days old. In 1944, after the Nova Scotia adoption law was amended to require in most cases a one-year probationary period before the adoption was finalized, the Youngs began working with Saint John, New Brunswick, attorney Benjamin Guss, who processed the adoptions through the New Brunswick courts (see figure 2.2).67 Despite the fact that New Brunswick first passed an adoption act in 1873, through the 1940s adoptions were regularly processed under regulations contained in the Judicature Act. These regulations imposed no waiting period and did not require that either the adopting parents or the child be a resident of the province. Neither the child nor the adoptive parents appeared in court.68 By moving the adoption hearing into the New Brunswick courts, the Youngs evaded efforts based in Nova Scotia to regulate the Home’s operation. Once the New Brunswick courts became the location for the adoption proceeding, the trip from the United States to the IMH included a stop to see the New Brunswick lawyer Guss at either end of the journey. By late 1945, IMH correspondence quoted a minimum price of $150 plus additional fees for an adoption arranged by Guss, although (as noted) the Home’s Halifax lawyer later claimed Guss charged parents several thousand dollars.69 Thus far, the process for Canadian and American adoptive parents was the same. For American parents, after the adoption was finalized, William Young applied to the Canadian Department of External Affairs for a passport for the child. Passport officials did not inquire about the adoption proceeding. They were only concerned that the paperwork was correctly processed. All Canadian citizens had a right to a passport, and since these children would not be travelling with a parent who was a citizen, they required their own documents.70 With the passport processed, Young helped parents apply for a US immigration visa for the child issued by the US consul in Halifax. At the consul’s office, the issues that mattered were that the adoption had been finalized and that the adoptive parents provided evidence of good financial standing. The consul did not have any contact with child welfare officials in Nova Scotia or in the home state.71 There was no equivalent, in the Nova Scotia case, of the US consul general in Edmonton in the early 1940s, who stepped beyond his official responsibilities and tried to secure some

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Primary Destinations New Jersey New York Rhode Island

Secondary Destinations

Connecticut Florida Massachusetts Pennsylvania

Figure 2.2  Adoptions Originating from the Ideal Maternity Home, 1945–6

certificate of the suitability of the adoptive home from a social agency before issuing a visa. Documents in hand, the new family could go home. At the US border, adoptive parents holding a passport for the child containing a US

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immigration visa were waved through by INS officers and no record of their entry was maintained.72 As William Young informed prospective parents, ‘It usually requires only about a week to ten days to accomplish your purpose and be on your way back to the United States with your baby for life.’73 The Youngs justified their adoptions on the grounds they needed to find homes for ‘surplus’ children. IMH lawyer Longley explained to New Jersey’s Potter that he felt ‘very strongly that a place should be found for these children, and apparently our local demand is far from sufficient to absorb them.’74 Although she was always highly suspicious of the IMH operation, Potter was originally intrigued. On the one hand, she retained the reformer’s deep suspicion of any distance placement. On the other hand, she knew there were five to ten qualified couples for every available white infant child in New Jersey.75 Was there, really, a surfeit of white, adoptable babies in Nova Scotia? This was true only in the sense that the very large IMH did create a localized ‘surplus’ of children who could not all be placed in Nova Scotia. One of Potter’s own staff members identified the supply dynamic around the IMH quite precisely, when she noted the need for Canadians and Americans to work together to ‘close this “plant” and stop the practise of collecting babies to sell.’76 At the IMH the basic tenets of investigation, matching, and supervision that composed sound adoption practice were completely ignored.77 There was, for example, no evidence the IMH staff members ever contacted the referees for prospective adoptive parents. They pursued nothing that resembled a detailed study of the adoptive home and IMH staff frequently handed over children without ever laying eyes on the adoptive father. New Jersey officials investigating IMH adoptions found cases where the disorder of the adoptive home, the ‘nervous disposition’ of the adoptive mother, or the physical health of one adoptive parent gave them great pause, although they also admitted the children they visited seemed to be ‘surrounded with loving attention.’78 Of course, the lack of regulation and quick access to children was exactly what appealed to adoptive parents. The Youngs claimed to ‘exercise extreme care in the selection of girls to be confined,’ but the evidence indicates that willingness to pay was the primary criterion of selection. In 1945, one set of potential adoptive parents who left the IMH without a child reported to US authorities that the mothers they observed seemed ‘very dull’ or ‘rather dull and limited,’ and they ‘would never dare to take a baby from them.’79 So-

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cial workers observing the IMH operation found no indication the IMH staff ‘checked’ anything told them by the mothers or that the staff had any kind of professional training.80 Likewise, outside observers had serious questions about the extent to which the babies were adequately studied before they were released to the parents. There was controversy in the professional community about the proper age at which a child should be released for adoption – the overall trend was towards releasing children at an ever younger age – but in the mid-1940s the Children’s Bureau recommended four months as a minimum age below which it was impossible to determine whether or not the child showed signs of normal mental development. Responsible professionals also pointed out that the younger the age at which the child was released, the more important was a thorough investigation of the birth parents and the adoptive home. Professional supervision of the adoptive family during a probationary period was absolutely critical when children were placed at a very young age.81 IMH children were sometimes promised to parents before birth or taken from the Home when they were less than two weeks old.82 When it came to the delicate process of ‘matching’ children and parents, the Youngs’ practice was seriously deficient in professional terms. William Young claimed the Home took account of the birth mothers’ physical characteristics and their socio-economic and educational backgrounds (‘an effort is made to place babies from professional mothers into similar homes, etc.’), but he also described how he and Mrs Young relied on ‘God’s blessing and guidance in the placement.’ Young also admitted that despite such guidance, ‘when parents to be see the child they want, all others pale into significance.’83 This statement – combined with the stories social workers heard about parents strolling the nursery aisles to choose a child and the Youngs’ approach to religion in adoption – made it clear that the Youngs were not matching children and parents in any meaningful way. To make matters worse, adoption legislation in Nova Scotia and then New Brunswick allowed the IMH adoptions to be completed without a probationary period. As New Jersey child welfare worker Sarah Scott noted, ‘When the adoption is consummated so quickly, it is irrevocable and in the event the child were defective, the family would have no way of relieving themselves of the burden of its care.’84 An IMH adoption, the professionals feared, came at great risk to children (who were haphazardly given over to people about whom little was known) and to adoptive parents (who took permanent responsi-

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bility for children about whom they knew very little). Canadian and American child welfare reformers felt they must join forces to fight the IMH ‘for the sake of our children and of our adoptive parents.’ They focused on the placements, but in reality their strongest evidence of wrongdoing at the IMH had to do with conditions in the nursery. The two issues were of course not unrelated. Poor standards at the Home could affect the physical health and mental development of children available at the IMH, and the terrible conditions in the nursery were unlikely to improve as long as the Youngs were free to pursue their profitable and largely unregulated cross-border business.85 The birth mother experience is notably absent in cross-border discussions about the IMH. Both Maud Morlock and Nora Lea held responsibility for ‘illegitimacy and unwed motherhood’ as part of their professional portfolios at the USCB and CWC, and Morlock frequently wrote about the close connection between inadequate professional services for unwed mothers and illicit adoption operations. Nonetheless, in the fight to close the Ideal Maternity Home, Morlock, Lea, and their professional colleagues focused almost exclusively on the more saleable concern with adoptive parents and infant children, as opposed to the possible financial exploitation of birth mothers or the questionable conditions under which these women relinquished their parental rights.86 Social workers had one additional concern that applied specifically to the IMH children adopted by American parents. As noted in chapter 1, a Canadian adoption, while legal in the United States, did not confer American citizenship.87 To be eligible for US citizenship, the child had to be admitted legally to the United States with a consular visa and a properly filed affidavit of financial support. For most IMH adoptions, these conditions were filled. But until 1953, the child also had to readopted in the United States before he or she was sixteen and at least two years before the adoptive parents filed a naturalization petition on the child’s behalf.88 Many parents, the social workers feared, would not have their children readopted either because they were unaware of this requirement (it seemed most IMH parents were not told) or because the parents feared they would not qualify as adoptive parents under the laws of their home states.89 The worry, according to the CWC’s Lea, was that children would be left ‘virtually without a country’ and that consequently state governments might refuse financial responsibility for a child in a crisis, or that a child’s right to inherit might be questioned. Social workers also argued that the ability to document birth and citizenship was becoming more important in the modern bureaucratic world.90

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When parents did try to readopt their children, state officials often had to choose between giving their imprimatur to an adoption they would not otherwise have approved, or leaving the child in a state of legal limbo. State officials had no legal means of rescinding a Canadian adoption order, and they were loath to remove a child already bonded to a family, particularly when it was unclear who would be legally and financially responsible for the child. These were the same dilemmas faced by frustrated US officials encountering Alberta- and Quebec-adopted children in their jurisdictions in 1940–1. Nonetheless, child welfare officials, especially in New Jersey, sometimes used the importance of securing a child’s citizenship rights as a way to approach US families who adopted in Canada from the IMH. If the family could be convinced to undergo the second adoption, this meant the family would at least be visited by a professional social worker and come under some form of professional supervision/protection.91 Concern over the in-between and potentially stateless status of IMH children encapsulates the larger problem with the IMH and the challenge it presented to Canadian and American reformers. How could reformers fight back against an adoption operation that built its business by moving children between jurisdictions and by overtly exploiting the divisions of responsibility between one province and another, between one country and another, and between the federal and subordinate branches of government within each country? The challenge for the CWC and the USCB was to find a way to bind these units together and thus to close the gaps into which the adopted children and adoptive parents of the IMH seemed to be falling. ‘They become increasingly difficult to deal with from a local point of view …’ In Canada, George Davidson’s 1944 Report on Public Welfare in Nova Scotia first drew the attention of the CWC to the IMH.92 Ellen Potter of New Jersey discovered the IMH late in 1944, and soon thereafter asked the USCB for help controlling the Home’s activities.93 To this point, provincial authorities in Nova Scotia had been largely on their own dealing with the IMH. And the IMH was, in the most immediate sense, a problem for the province, since child welfare was a provincial responsibility under the British North America Act. The Youngs built their business in the 1930s in the context of the province’s weak child welfare regulations. Until the 1940s, provincial officials had no statutory authority to

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inspect – let alone to regulate – the activities of maternity homes in the province. By the early 1940s, four Canadian provinces (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario) had adoption laws that gave provincial officials some authority to compel adoption investigations and to oversee those investigations, but this was not the case in Nova Scotia. Up to 1944, Nova Scotia’s adoption law left responsibility for adoptions completely in the hands of local courts.94 Officials at the Nova Scotia Department of Public Welfare were aware of problems at the IMH as early as 1936, when the Youngs were tried for manslaughter in the death of a birth mother and her infant. They were acquitted.95 That trial began a protracted fight between the Youngs, the minister of public welfare, and his two senior deputies. At one level, the history of the IMH is a story about this fight and about the internal politics of Nova Scotia in the 1930s and 1940s. This history centres on specific weaknesses in Nova Scotia’s social welfare system; the economic and political clout of the Youngs as local businesspeople; and the desire of birth mothers and adoptive parents for discretion, which shrouded the entire operation in secrecy. In short, it took a long time for provincial officials to build a case strong enough to convince politicians to strengthen the necessary child welfare laws. Ultimately, amendments to the province’s Maternity Boarding Houses Act and Adoption Act between 1940 and 1946, followed by a string of convictions in provincial court for violating the new legislation, forced the Youngs to announce they were closing the Home in June 1946.96 Lila Young continued to operate the business on a smaller and more secretive scale well into 1947, until the Youngs’ ill-conceived decision to sue a Montreal newspaper for libel forced a very public exposure of the underside of the Home’s operation. A sensational libel trial in May 1947 ended with the Youngs’ complaint being dismissed and the couple’s already tarnished reputation completely destroyed.97 The domestic political manoeuvring and courtroom drama in Nova Scotia are only part of the IMH story. In the final fight to close the Home, the contributions of reformers outside of the province were very important; neither the IMH operation nor an effective campaign to stop it could be contained within the province. As Lea noted, ‘They become increasingly difficult to deal with from a local point of view and seem to be spreading their tentacles further and further into the USA.’98 The IMH caused problems for neighbouring provinces, for states that received IMH children, and for national reformers at the CWC and USCB.

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When Nova Scotia amended its adoption legislation in 1944, the Youngs openly informed prospective parents that ‘at the present time the Adoption laws in this province are not suitable, so to overcome this difficulty, the adoption will take place in an adjoining Province using New Brunswick laws which at present are ideal.’99 In 1945, IMH lawyer Longley made it very clear to New Jersey’s Potter that the Home would continue to exploit any available option to secure adoptions: ‘As to the placements which have been made recently with New Jersey foster parents and which may not have been completed in accordance with the most generally accepted standards, I would say that our Directors feel that our babies must be given an opportunity to enjoy a normal family life.’ Longley underlined that ‘we feel justified in seeking any legal means to place our children.’100 If the adoptions were legal under the law of one jurisdiction (Nova Scotia or New Brunswick), and if the children crossed the border with passports and visas, New Jersey officials could not stop the process. Inside Canada, Longley announced that if the New Brunswick laws became less permissive, the Home would shift its adoption proceedings to Prince Edward Island.101 The Youngs benefited greatly from the strict compartmentalization practised by the Passport Office of the Canadian Department of External Affairs in Ottawa, the US consul in Halifax, and the US Immigration and Naturalization Service at the border, each of which refused to link their procedures to any oversight or regulation of the adoptive placement. Thus, the IMH thrived in the open spaces or gaps between provincial, state, and federal responsibilities. It was politically difficult for provincial officials in Nova Scotia to fill these gaps by pressuring the leadership of surrounding provinces, and the Nova Scotians were far removed – in terms of geography and professional contacts – from US state-level officials. The Nova Scotians also found it difficult to get a hearing from federal authorities in Canada, let alone from federal bodies in the United States. But the CWC had a national mandate in child welfare and a set of valuable contacts across the provinces and, crucially, over the border at the USCB. Children’s Bureau officials, in turn, were ensconced in state-to-state networks. The USCB’s high-profile chief, Katharine Lenroot, could command at least a hearing from other US federal agencies. CWC and USCB intervention was critical because these agencies were positioned to make connections between units of government outside of Nova Scotia, but also because the national leaders fed valuable information to the reformers inside the province and prodded the

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Nova Scotians towards provincial reform. Facing down the Youngs was a difficult and demoralizing job. As CWC leader Lea noted, ‘Each imposition of a regulation [in Nova Scotia] designed to curb their [IMH] activities is met by … some change of policy or legal regulation which renders it ineffective.’102 In 1943 the Youngs spotted a loophole in the province’s new Maternity Boarding Houses Act that exempted corporations (like the provincially chartered sectarian maternity homes for whom the exemption was intended) from new licensing provisions in the act. The IMH incorporated, and was able to operate without a licence from the province until further amendments in 1945.103 Nova Scotia officials also faced vicious personal attacks and threats from the Youngs.104 In 1945 Lila Young coordinated an unsuccessful campaign to block the re-election of the provincial minister of public welfare. The minister was also the member of the Legislative Assembly for the village of Chester, where the IMH made substantial contributions to the local economy.105 In a candid letter to the USCB’s Morlock, Lea expressed her sympathy for the beleaguered Nova Scotians, but also noted ‘on the other hand, I have a shrewd suspicion that the Nova Scotia authorities are a little bit afraid of this institution and, hence, are walking warily.’106 Through their combined efforts, Morlock and Lea provided both encouragement and a sustained push from outside the province. Much like Katharine Lenroot and Charlotte Whitton, Lea and Morlock shared a warm personal relationship intertwined with a solid professional connection. Lea and Morlock were also near contemporaries of Whitton and Lenroot, and all four shared the life pattern of advanced education, no marriage, and lengthy careers in social service discussed in chapter 1.107 Inside Canada, Lea and Whitton were friends from at least the early 1920s, and Lea was a central player in what has been called the ‘Whitton Connection’ in Canadian social welfare.108 After an early career as a schoolteacher, Lea worked for a number of Toronto social agencies before settling in at the Toronto Children’s Aid Society, where she became supervisor of child protection, working under CWC stalwart Robert Mills. This work brought her into contact with the USCB’s Elsa Castendyck, who worked with Mills on the 1938 League of Nations Report on the Placing of Children and who later spearheaded CanadianAmerican cooperation with respect to British refugee children during the Second World War.109 In 1934, Lea attended Whitton’s first national meeting on international and interprovincial child placements.110 She served as president of the Canadian Association of Social Workers from

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1938–1940 and joined the staff of the CWC in January 1943, working first as assistant executive director before advancing to acting executive director in January 1945.111 Morlock joined the Children’s Bureau in 1936 after a career as a social worker and social work teacher. She became the bureau’s consultant responsible for adoption, foster care, work with unmarried mothers, and homemaker services. She worked in the USCB’s Social Service Division under Agnes Hanna and Elsa Castendyck.112 By 1941, Morlock was discussing cross-border adoption with Whitton.113 Lea took advantage of her 1943 move to the CWC to renew what was clearly a pre-existing relationship. That year, the two women met at the NCSW conference in New York, and Lea continued to Washington, where she stayed as Morlock’s house guest during meetings at the USCB.114 After Lea returned home, she and Morlock exchanged publications, research materials, and contacts as well as personal news and gossip about shared Canadian friends.115 Connection and joint purpose were critical in the anti-IMH work of Morlock and Lea. The two women and their allies used at least six overlapping strategies in their transnational campaign to close the IMH and spread a larger message about the reform of domestic and cross-border adoption practices. First, Lea and later other Canadian reformers used the prestige of the USCB to sell a program of adoption reform in Canada and to highlight the dangers of cross-border adoption. Second, Lea, Morlock, and colleagues at the USCB and CWC acted as connectors, disseminating information about the IMH so that key players in both countries and across states and provinces understood the Youngs’ changing plans. Third, USCB officials encouraged reluctant state authorities in New Jersey to support the CWC by investigating IMH placements in New Jersey. Fourth, Lea worked with Nova Scotia and New Jersey officials to block IMH adoptions in New Brunswick and push reform in that province. Fifth, New Jersey officials used the scandalous IMH in their domestic campaign for adoption reform. Finally, the CWC and the USCB mounted a transnational effort to pressure the INS into regulating the cross-border flow of babies, although this effort was ultimately unsuccessful. Lea initiated this round of cooperative work. In January 1945, she asked the USCB’s Lenroot to assign a staff member to write an article for the CWC journal Canadian Welfare treating the ‘point of view of the Children’s Bureau’ on the reform of adoption laws and practices and including ‘some comment on international relationships with respect

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to adoption.’ As part of her pitch, Lea invoked Lenroot’s ties with Whitton, and the history of CWC-USCB work on cross-border adoption. ‘As you know,’ wrote Lea, ‘we have been concerned about the bootlegging of babies across borders from certain provinces into certain States.’116 Fortuitously, the Children’s Bureau was in the midst of a publicity campaign designed to sell adoption reform by underlining the dangers and abuses of black market adoption, and this request fit well with that project.117 Lenroot assigned Morlock, who was happy to take direction from Lea. What Lea wanted was a piece that would stress basic principles in adoption law and practice, address challenges in developing high standards in adoption, and include a discussion of ‘the undesirable results which come from placement of children from one jurisdiction to another without proper investigation.’ Lea’s goal was ‘to build up public opinion against this procedure and create better acceptance of the idea that in placing a child in another jurisdiction it is essential that there be adequate investigation by the local authority and adequate follow-up.’118 Her strategy was to borrow the authority of her friend Morlock, and by extension that of the Children’s Bureau, to make the case for adoption reform and against haphazard cross-border placements. Morlock’s subsequent article described key legal reforms, underlined the importance of investigation, matching, and supervision in an adoptive placement, and explained that social workers frowned on long-distance placements because they made it difficult to follow sound adoption procedures. Finally, Morlock turned specifically to the issue of ‘Canadian–United States Relationships’ in adoption, stressing that the principles ‘that are found to be good procedure in making any adoptive placement are even more important when placement takes on an international aspect.’ She discouraged international placements when other options were available because of the distance issue and because the ‘ties that exist between a child and his family and the country of his birth must not be broken lightly.’ She stressed that a Canadian child adopted in Canada by American parents did not automatically gain US citizenship.119 Morlock’s arguments hit the same points Whitton had tried to embed in a formal and binding international agreement in the 1930s. ‘Chosen Children’ was published in English and in French, and over the next year both Canadian and American officials cited the article in response to requests from government officials, social workers, and the public

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for information about cross-border adoption in general or the Ideal Maternity Home in particular.120 The first New Jersey request for information on the IMH reached the USCB as Morlock was working on her article.121 The first direct reaction to ‘Chosen Children’ dealt directly with the IMH. Nova Scotia’s director of child welfare, Ernest Blois, contacted Morlock to confirm that Canadian children adopted by US citizens did not acquire US citizenship. He asked if this situation meant the children ‘might be subject to deportation.’ To Blois, this implied immigration officials in the United States could block the international transfer of children. US immigration officials, he argued, ‘should prohibit such children being admitted to the United States, or at least some means should be adopted of advising both American citizens and those interested in the Dominion … that such children might be returned to Canada at some time in the future, not being recognized as citizens of the United States.’ Blois did not know Morlock was aware of the IMH; he told her only that ‘we have an institution in this Province which I am sorry to say has been placing children in one or two of the States of the American Union under conditions of which we do not approve.’122 In response, Morlock also refrained from mentioning the IMH by name and posed as the detached expert. She was not opposed to using the INS to regulate cross-border adoption – both the CWC and USCB would pursue this option in the coming months – but she was uncomfortable with the suggestion that adopting parents should be frightened into avoiding cross-border adoptions with the threat their children might be deported. Prompting Blois towards a different approach, she asked, ‘Isn’t the important consideration here how to protect the welfare of Canadian children who are being sent to this country? Doesn’t this have to be done through working with the agencies that are making these placements?’123 Morlock also suggested that Blois might work with his troublesome institution, although within a few weeks (as more information became available) no one at the CWC or the USCB would be thinking about cooperating with the IMH. Throughout the IMH campaign, however, both Canadian and American officials returned repeatedly to Morlock’s key advice – that Blois and other government officials must remember their duty to children. Here, Morlock was reminding Blois that Nova Scotia had a social responsibility to children born in the province and should do all it could to ensure their safety. She was pushing him away from a narrow solution (threats and deportation) and towards a broad-

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er vision of the province’s responsibility for the welfare of children. She was, in effect, selling an extended, border-crossing vision of ‘sound adoption practice’ rooted in Nova Scotia. Morlock sent both sides of her correspondence with Blois to Lea at the CWC, thus initiating the second strategy in transnational cooperation: distributing information.124 Both women understood that sharing information was critical. Such exchanges – initiated in connection with the joint CWC-USCB work at the League of Nations – were perhaps the most important contribution the two agencies could make in the fight to control cross-border adoption. With the babies moving across borders, the information networks had to extend across borders, as well. To contain the IMH, social workers on all sides of national, provincial, and state lines needed to understand how the Home made its international connections and then devise connections of their own. The USCB-CWC connection was the obvious channel for international communication. These information exchanges required considerable trust. The details of the IMH operation were at the same time the confidential details of adoption transactions, the kind of material social workers were trained to protect.125 Lea, for example, shared with her American colleagues damning passages discussing conditions at the IMH that had been excised from George Davidson’s report before publication.126 South of the border, state officials suspicious of the inflow of IMH babies had reason to be mistrustful of their Canadian counterparts, who could easily be seen as ‘allowing’ this to happen. In 1945, Morlock went out of her way to convince New Jersey’s Potter to share all she knew about the IMH with the entirely trustworthy Lea. ‘As you know, this organization [the CWC] is the nearest agency comparable to the Children’s Bureau. Miss Lea is a personal friend of mine, an outstanding social worker on whose judgment you can rely in handling this situation. I know that she is deeply concerned over this problem and wants all of the information that she can get in trying to straighten it out.’127 Dr Ellen Potter (1871–1958) was another member of that impressive early-twentieth-century generation of interconnected female pioneers in professional social welfare.128 In her approach to Potter, Morlock invoked the holy trinity of the women’s welfare network on Lea’s behalf: a connection to the Children’s Bureau, credentials as a reputable social worker, and personal ties to another network member. In effect, Morlock was telling Potter to consider Lea a trusted insider in US networks. New Jersey was the critical US link in the IMH campaign. Although significant numbers of IMH babies also went to New York and Rhode

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Island, New Jersey was the Youngs’ most fertile recruiting ground for adoptive parents. Eventually, the transnational alliance against the IMH became largely a tripartite coalition joining the USCB, the CWC, and the New Jersey Department of Institutions and Agencies.129 Already in the spring of 1945, Potter sent copies of all the ‘data in our files’ on the IMH – letters the Youngs sent to New Jersey residents, correspondence between the Youngs and Potter, copies of newspaper advertisements – to the USCB, and Morlock subsequently sent this material to Lea.130 By the summer, Lea and Potter were communicating directly and the information from New Jersey proved invaluable as Lea developed her ‘little storehouse of exhibits’ that she used to support her ‘steady grind of interpretation’ on the problems at the IMH and the need for effective reform.131 In turn, Lea forwarded information to provincial authorities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to be used as ‘ammunition’ in their IMH-related battles.132 Lea sent her New Jersey colleagues updates on the 1945 licensing legislation for maternity boarding houses in Nova Scotia that promised to ‘put a spoke in the wheel of the Home.’ The Youngs’ criminal trials in the Nova Scotia courts in the spring of 1946 for violations of the new Maternity Boarding Houses Act were followed closely in Washington, Ottawa, and New Jersey, as well as in Nova Scotia. The mounting pile of convictions against the Youngs heartened all.133 Potter’s deputy Sarah Scott and Lea permitted themselves a small celebration in March 1946. New Jersey authorities had secured a letter from an IMH lawyer to a prospective adoptive parent indicating recent legislative changes were having a significant impact on IMH practices: the client was not promised an instant adoption and was advised to have her home examined by state welfare officials.134 Both Lea and Scott shared evidence from the IMH ‘exhibits’ with private social agencies in the United States and prospective adoptive parents in an effort to discourage parents from turning to the Youngs for a child.135 In the spring of 1947, both CWC and New Jersey officials shared some of the less confidential and more nearly public documents in their IMH storehouse with the Montreal Standard as the newspaper faced a libel trial launched against it by the Youngs.136 Work on the IMH case solidified ties between Lea, Morlock, and their two organizations, while also creating new links between the CWC and New Jersey (and between Lea, Scott, and Potter as individuals) that would continue beyond the IMH.137 But the new networks also extended beyond the CWC-USCB-NJ triangle. In August 1945, Maud

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Morlock arranged for IMH evidence to go to the USCB regional consultants across the United States so they might ask states to ‘be on alert’ for IMH adoptions or other cross-border adoptions.138 Eventually, the network orchestrated by Morlock and Lea took in information from Nova Scotia, New York, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Rhode Island and redistributed it to government officials in all these jurisdictions plus the INS, the USCB regional consultants, and the Child Welfare League of America. Looking ahead, Lea hoped the networks would prove of ‘ultimate use in bringing the matter of international adoption procedure to a more satisfactory conclusion.’139 A third, closely related, approach to fighting the IMH was to encourage state officials to actively investigate IMH placements. After reading ‘Chosen Children,’ Nova Scotia’s Blois asked Potter to follow up on four IMH placements with New Jersey families.140 A hesitant Potter told Morlock she thought investigating adoptions that were a fait accompli was a poor use of thinly stretched resources, but Morlock disagreed and convinced Potter these investigations might reveal more about the IMH while allowing social welfare officials to at least look in on IMH parents and children.141 Sarah Scott’s subsequent reports on these placements – forwarded directly to Nova Scotia but also to Ottawa and Washington – gave a very clear picture of the start-to-finish specifics of the IMH operation and its appeal to adoptive parents. Scott used this opening to lay out for Blois exactly why New Jersey was concerned with the Home’s practices. At the same time, Scott and a colleague took advantage of the home visits to the IMH families to convince themselves the children were relatively well cared for and to instruct the parents on the need to readopt their children in New Jersey as a prerequisite to naturalization.142 In effect, Morlock turned New Jersey officials into investigating agents who helped arm the Nova Scotians with evidence to use against the Youngs, while also providing some very minimal protection to the newly adopted children. Lea also used the anti-IMH coalition to push for adoption reform in New Brunswick. Although IMH practices first drew attention to shortcomings in Nova Scotia’s social welfare structure, Nova Scotia was nonetheless ranked ‘fairly high’ among the provinces in terms of its overall welfare program.143 New Brunswick (along with Alberta and Quebec) was consistently referred to as among the worst of the provinces in this regard. A scathing CWC social survey completed in 1929 was harshly critical of almost all aspects of the province’s welfare system.144 In 1930, the New Brunswick legislature passed a new Children’s

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Protection Act that the CWC found promising, but this legislation was never proclaimed and thus never came into effect.145 As noted, adoptions processed under the terms of the Judicature Act provided few of the safeguards social workers considered essential. The province did not hire its first child welfare officer until 1941, and the first incumbent in this job, R.H. Scott, lacked professional training.146 In addition to the Youngs’ use of New Brunswick courts, there was at least one other cross-border adoption operator in the province. Through the 1930s and 1940s, the New Brunswick Protestant Orphan’s Home (POH) regularly placed children with American parents with very little investigation of either the parents or the children. When Potter heard reports of POH adoptions to New Jersey and asked questions, Lea described the POH a ‘well-run, old-fashioned Home,’ rather than an organization engaging in ‘sharp practise in the Adoption field.’ ‘I think their intentions are good,’ she noted, but ‘nonetheless, I cannot truthfully say that they do a high-grade adoption placement.’147 Reforming adoption law and practice in New Brunswick would bring multiple benefits: the IMH would be blocked from using New Brunswick courts; the POH might be forced to develop more up-todate methods; and New Brunswick’s backward social welfare structure would be modernized in at least one area. Here, also, was another chance to directly support the Nova Scotians. In late 1945, Nova Scotia’s director of child welfare, Fred MacKinnon, asked Lea to do an adoption workshop with rural child welfare workers ‘in view of the activities of the institution at Chester,’ and she was pleased to oblige.148 At other junctures, however, national figures had to take the defensiveness of the beleaguered Nova Scotians into account; Lea and her colleagues had to be careful about how hard they pushed lest their ‘help’ be labelled as ‘interference’ and rejected outright. But when it came to controlling the IMH in New Brunswick, the Nova Scotians knew they needed help. In December of 1945, MacKinnon coupled a request for Lea’s help with the explanation that he did not want to approach New Brunswick authorities directly, ‘since we have already said so much that they might become offended.’149 Lea began the IMH-NB campaign (the fourth example of a transnational strategy) by approaching the New Brunswick premier, J.B. McNair, who had a history as an advocate of improved child welfare services in the province.150 Lea explained how the IMH was using the New Brunswick courts and suggested new adoption legislation. She described USCB concern about cross-border adoptions, thus empha-

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sizing that the IMH operation had serious international repercussions while avoiding the hyperbole of Whitton in the 1930s. Lea appealed to McNair’s pride as premier, arguing, ‘We feel sure we would not wish to have New Brunswick facilities used for this purpose.’ She also expressed nationalist concerns: ‘We are also anxious that our Canadian child welfare practise should not be inferior in standard and performance to that followed by our American neighbours with whom we have such fine co-operative relationships.’151 Importantly, while CWC leaders sometimes used this kind of rhetoric to goad Canadian authorities into action, conversations between the CWC and USCB leadership were never conducted on the basis of an overall Canadian inferiority and American superiority before the 1950s. The national leaders on both sides of the border recognized that a wide variation in standards – both to the good and to the bad – across states and provinces was part and parcel of a federal system of government.152 Mixed in with her other appeals to McNair, Lea rested, finally, on the needs of the child and on the bigger picture of child welfare reform in New Brunswick: ‘Our chief concern here is on behalf of the child – that his adoption shall be carefully planned and the placement be guarded in every possible way in the interest of both the child and the adopting parents.’153 There was a positive response: New Brunswick’s deputy attorney general McLatchy announced that a new Adoption Act would be introduced six months later at the spring 1946 sitting of the legislature. This was good news, but Lea and her allies wanted immediate action. To this end, Lea sent the premier a copy of the instructions the Youngs gave to prospective US parents explaining the recourse to New Brunswick courts. ‘We are sure,’ wrote Lea, ‘that this is a procedure you will not want to see perpetuated and hope that it will be possible for steps to be taken speedily to prevent this traffic and its utilization of the New Brunswick legislation at present.’154 In return, the premier ordered temporary changes in the province’s rules of court such that ‘no petition for adoption will be entertained unless the child is domiciled in the province at the time of the presentation of the petition.’155 Less encouraging was evidence obtained from Nova Scotia a few weeks later proving that at least one New Brunswick judge was still processing the quick IMH adoption the new court regulations were supposed to block.156 Lea sent this information to New Brunswick, along with a pointed query encouraging greater enforcement activity.157 At the same time, Lea – following up on a tip from Nova Scotia’s MacKinnon and using the evidence gained from her US informants – turned

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her attention to the province of Prince Edward Island. Lea warned PEI authorities that IMH lawyers had threatened to move their adoption proceedings to the province, and she convinced provincial authorities to make minor amendments in the Children’s Act to prevent this development.158 As she explained to Sarah Scott of New Jersey, ‘I am taking steps to spike the gun before it is fired.’159 The revamped New Brunswick Adoption Act unveiled in the spring of 1946 contained important advances. The new legislation required an investigation of the adoptive home, the approval of the province’s child welfare officer, and supervision of the child in the adoptive home before the adoption was finalized.160 The act did not, however, specify that parents using the New Brunswick courts must be residents of the province, a provision Lea argued ‘would have materially helped in cutting down the “bootleg” adoptions which are now taking place over the border.’161 The deputy attorney general reassured Lea that the province’s child welfare officer now had the authority to block such adoptions.162 Part of what troubled Lea, however, was the extent to which the act placed personal responsibility in the hands of the overworked and under-trained child welfare officer. But with the act already passed, Lea urged the premier to proclaim the legislation and offered CWC help with the choice of child welfare workers to enact its provisions.163 When the act came into force in January 1947, Lea focused on encouraging R.H. Scott, the child welfare officer, to push the limits of his authority under the act to control cross-border adoptions and to pull on CWC resources to train local adoption workers. Lea’s CWC colleagues encouraged New Brunswick’s Scott to stay in contact with the USCB.164 No sooner had the New Brunswick adoption legislation come into force than the USCB’s Lenroot was faced with a US senator complaining on behalf of a constituent upset that he and his friends could no longer secure children from the POH. In reply, Lenroot explained USCB and CWC concerns surrounding cross-border placement, but also suggested the two agencies might develop cooperative procedures allowing some Canadian children to be safely placed with American families.165 US state-level officials were very wary, however. There followed an extended round of correspondence between New Brunswick’s Scott and officials in New Jersey and Rhode Island, who were extremely reluctant to support Scott’s plans to place some New Brunswick children over the border.166 More ominously, by November of 1946 the CWC heard the first hints that Benjamin Guss, the Youngs’ former New Brunswick attorney, had established his own black market operation out of Saint

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86  The Traffic in Babies

John. Guss’s operation would become more public and break as national and international news in 1948, in the midst of the Alberta Babies-forExport scandal.167 Transnational initiatives were not always led or controlled at the national level. In New Jersey, Potter used her frustration with the IMH to spark a domestic publicity campaign to turn parents away from black market adoptions. New Jersey amended its Adoption Act in 1944 and 1945 with the goal of protecting, according to Potter, the ‘health, religious and social interests of the child, the mother and the adoptive parents.’ The new legislation provided for a probationary period as well as court-mandated investigation of children and adoptive parents. It regulated the importation of children to the state for adoption, and limited adoptive placements in the state to agencies licensed by the Department of Institutions and Agencies. Potter bragged, with justification, that New Jersey had ‘one of the most enlightened statutes in this field in the country.’168 But Potter was upset that New Jersey parents could evade state controls by adopting children in another jurisdiction. In January 1945, Potter told the New York Times that ‘New Jersey’s law is strict enough but there is evidence of a considerable black market in adoptions by residents. Most of these adoptions are made out of State and so do not come under the control of our law. We are asking cooperation of all other States in assuring adoption through legal procedures and through authorized agencies.’169 By the spring of 1945, Potter knew her most serious problem involved not another state but another country. But problems could also yield opportunity. Potter used the increasing visibility of the IMH to issue a sensational warning to New Jersey residents not to adopt children from a ‘Canadian baby market’ known to be operating in the state. At a June press conference, Potter discussed the unnamed Canadian operation and listed reasons why parents should not adopt children from this or any other black market operation. She warned that irregularities in the adoptive process might make subsequent naturalization of children impossible. She argued that the commercialization of children was wrong on moral grounds, and underlined that ‘commercialized baby farms specializing in adoptions pay little or no attention to the source of the children they raise, whether they are mentally or physically sound and whether their emotional and educational background will fit in with couples making the adoption.’170 Dramatically, she described a process where ‘some people will travel hundreds of miles and spend a lot of

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Border-Crossing Responses to the Ideal Maternity Home  87

money to get a child to adopt. Inside of a few days, or even a few hours, they will start back home, having grafted onto their family tree a tiny human being about whose physical, mental and emotional heritage they know nothing. They would not buy an automobile or a refrigerator without more of a guarantee than that.’171 Potter made her point starkly. She implied that New Jersey laws and the expertise of social workers could protect parents in adoption, but she focused most on scare tactics that might deter parents. This was one way to follow Morlock’s advice that child welfare workers could use the public’s fascination with the black market to speak out about the need for reformed adoption laws and practices. As Melosh and Herman have argued, social workers frequently used the language of ‘risk’ and ‘protection’ to sell their services in adoption to a sceptical public.172 Potter’s use of the ‘Canadian baby farm’ to ‘stimulate the citizens in the community’ was effective.173 Her press conference generated articles in at least four area newspapers – including the New York Times – and the story was picked up by Canadian news agencies.174 Before long, Lea was approached by Canadian reporters asking for comments on the alleged ‘trafficking in babies’ across the border.175 There was no coordination between Lea and Potter on this strategy for domestic reform. In this case, an independent action by a US state official rebounded as an opportunity for the CWC to make a national statement on cross-border adoption. In a press statement, Lea admitted the CWC ‘had reason to believe that all too many adoption placements are being made across the American border that do not comply with legal requirements’ and that this practice ‘frequently leads to unhappy placements or conditions which are not in the best interests of the adopted child or the adopting family.’ She chose not to dwell on illegal or dangerous schemes but instead emphasized that where children had to be placed across borders, there must be careful communication and coordination.176 Lea tried to ‘lay a foundation’ with the media by stressing the importance of professional adoption procedures. Consciously, she kept the emphasis on what should be done as opposed to what should not be done, and avoided any specific mention of the IMH or of emerging problems in Alberta. Lea, unlike Potter, had to be conscious of Canadian internal politics. Her approach was crafted to ‘avoid stirring up further animosity on the part of the organizations doing substandard placements’ so as not to undercut efforts in Canada to curtail this activity.177

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88  The Traffic in Babies

A Canadian Press reporter covering the story had difficulty understanding why ‘the federal immigration authorities couldn’t clamp down on people doing this sort of thing.’178 He was not alone. Using the authority of federal agencies to control the cross-border traffic seemed an obvious solution to adoption reformers in both countries. Three federal bodies participated in the IMH adoption process: the Canadian Department of External Affairs, which issued passports; the US consular service, which provided immigration visas; and the INS, which checked documents at border crossings. Reformers argued the traffic could be stopped or safely controlled if just one of these bodies required proof that social welfare officials approved the adoption before granting passport, visa, or border-crossing privileges. For the reformers, this was a simple process, justified by the responsibility of government officials – at all levels – to protect the welfare of citizens and potential citizens. But the situation looked much different from the perspective of Canadian and American federal agencies, which saw such requests as a violation of the constitutional separation of powers and a potential political quagmire. USCB, CWC, state, and provincial child welfare officials were disheartened. Federal action could so easily – it seemed – solve a serious social problem; federal inaction created ‘Ideal’ conditions for a fast and loose handing of babies across borders. In 1945, USCB-CWC reformers targeted the INS, possibly because concerns about the citizenship status of IMH children in the United States entered the debate very early on. USCB-CWC efforts to pull the INS into the regulation of cross-border adoption, the last transnational strategy under review here, revealed some disadvantages and limitations in the developing pattern of the cross-border cooperation. Morlock and her USCB colleagues were not interested in threats to deport children (the suggestion from Blois), but they were interested in the regulatory power of the INS. After all, the INS and the USCB had a history of working together to inject a greater sense of social responsibility and social planning – including working across the border with Canadian officials – into deportation proceedings in the 1930s.179 In the summer of 1945, Lenroot contacted Ugo Carusi, commissioner of the INS, noting that the bureau had evidence of a thriving cross-border black market in babies and suggesting that the INS might be able to block the trade at the border. Carusi would not be drawn in, arguing that he had no direct jurisdiction in this matter ‘except with reference to the admissibility of such children to this country under immigration

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laws.’180 In other words, if the infant children had valid US immigration visas in their passports, the INS would not impose any additional requirements at the border. In Canada, Lea became more and more convinced that local action would not solve cross-border problems and that INS action was critical. To Morlock, she argued, ‘If we can, between my office and your own and between our two Departments of Immigration, effect a policy which the local Immigration Department will consider binding, we may be able to put a curb on this over-the-border placement unless they have the approval of your State Departments of Child Welfare.’181 An enthusiastic Morlock agreed to push a discussion on the INS and cross-border adoption inside the bureau’s Social Service Division. Morlock and Lea discussed pulling in Lenroot, but this seems not to have happened.182 Nonetheless, the USCB’s Social Service Division planned a meeting with the INS in May 1946 where Lea, Potter, and Morlock, along with I. Evelyn Smith of the USCB and Henrietta Gordon of the CWLA, were scheduled to meet with Evelyn Hersey, assistant to the commissioner of immigration.183 In the interim, Morlock argued for federal intervention in correspondence with INS officials, and Potter made her own approach to Hersey (whom she knew personally).184 Lea and Morlock wanted the INS to require parents bringing a justadopted or to-be-adopted child across the border to produce a letter from the relevant state department of social welfare certifying that state officials knew the child was coming and had approved the adoptive home. This would require parents and children to undergo screening and matching before the placement and thus block the IMH-style instant adoption.185 This was very close to the localized plan in place between British Columbia and the north-western US states since the mid-1930s, which formed the basis of Whitton’s proposed cross-border treaty in 1941.186 Morlock and Lea did not make the BC connection, and this silence highlights a significant weakness in personalized and largely informal (versus institutionalized) cooperative strategies. At the CWC, cross-border adoption was largely Whitton’s crusade up to 1941. When Whitton left the CWC, she took her connections and her knowledge with her.187 At the USCB, Morlock was part of the group who discussed cross-border adoption with Whitton.188 Nonetheless, it seems Whitton’s document was not circulated to Morlock before Whitton left the CWC, and the proposal effectively died. Lenroot, of course, was well aware of this history. Since Morlock remained unaware, we can conclude Lenroot

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was not at the centre of the 1945–6 IMH-related adoption strategizing. In the late 1930s, the personal connection between Whitton and Lenroot meant that cross-border adoption reform was discussed at the top leadership level in both countries. In the mid-1940s, Lea’s connection was not with the USCB chief, but with Morlock. Morlock was the bureau’s adoption specialist and a well-respected American leader in adoption reform, but she was not at the highest level of the bureau. Lenroot was certainly aware of the IMH issue – Lea’s initial request for help went to her and she signed the earlier letter to Carusi of the INS – but she was not as directly involved in 1945–6 as she had been in 1941 and would be again in 1947–8, when Whitton re-entered the picture. The INS meeting never took place as planned. In the end, Potter, Smith, and, crucially, Hersey of the INS were unable to attend. Lea’s report to Hersey on the smaller meeting (Lea, Morlock, and Gordon of the CWLA) outlined the cross-border concerns of the USCB-CWC, connecting the IMH to New Jersey and Rhode Island. Lea asked if the INS could issue a central directive instructing border officers to require documentation from the relevant state department of child welfare before allowing the new family to enter the United States. ‘If,’ Lea argued, ‘such a practise could become universal we feel that it would help materially not only in cutting down on the number of undesirable adoption placements being made into your country, which we believe are many more than have yet come to light, but also in helping us on this side to tighten up on practices and provisions in Canada.’189 This report was remarkable on several grounds. Lea, who headed a Canadian voluntary agency, was asking a high-ranking US federal official to develop policy designed to clean up a mess attributed here to the weakness of the Canadian regulatory framework; she was asking Hersey to use the INS to make an end-run around Canadian adoption law. From the perspective of the USCB and CWC, this approach was efficient and followed the logic of prioritizing child welfare and fusing separate jurisdictions to regulate the transnational movement of children. Hersey, perhaps not surprisingly, could not accept this logic, pointing out that ‘the Immigration and Naturalization Service … must accept the adoption laws of the country of origin … It cannot go back of a decision made in the country from which the immigration is coming.’ Still, Hersey expressed interest in the issue and was not opposed to the idea that the INS had some social responsibility attached to its management of the border.190 Responding, Lea insisted she was not asking the INS to question the

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‘legality of the adoption … but rather the desirability of the prospective entrant as a satisfactory and suitable citizen.’191 While the end result was likely to be the same – discouraging cross-border placements – Lea was on much stronger ground making the citizenship argument to the INS. Not coincidentally, this second approach back to Hersey came to Hersey after Lea returned from the 1946 CCSW meeting in Halifax. In Halifax, Ruby McKay, British Columbia’s superintendent of child welfare, joined Lea and Morlock on the adoption panel discussing cross-border adoption. McKay spoke about the BC/INS/north-western states agreement, thus bringing this piece of cross-border history and strategy back to Morlock and Lea.192 Morlock, on her return from Halifax, suggested to Rhode Island’s child welfare administrator that he might follow the western example and try to ‘work directly with the immigration officials at the port of entry where children might enter the United States for Rhode Island, if there is one such spot.’193 At the CCSW conference, McKay suggested that localized agreements on the BC model might be worked out between each of the Canadian provinces and the relevant US immigration districts along the border. This solution had promise (it was working in BC), but it would only provide a partial solution. It would not help in the case of recalcitrant provincial or state administrations. If separate agreements were worked out, babies might still be transferred across provincial boundaries to less-regulated border regions before they were transported into the United States. Hersey was polite in her contact with Lea and her USCB counterparts, but these officials had little hope of moving the INS towards a formalized regulatory role in cross-border adoption covering the entire border. Nonetheless, well into the 1950s Canadian and American adoption reformers at both the national and state/provincial level were still debating how INS policy facilitated unregulated crossborder adoptions and how the agency might, instead, be used to block this practice.194 The extra-institutional and personalized nature of the CWC-USCB/ Lenroot-Whitton/Morlock-Lea connection was well suited to the work of building bridges between Canadian and American officials, of creating propaganda, and of exerting indirect pressure on state and provincial officials. This method of work proved less effective as a direct approach to the large federal bodies responsible for policing the relationship between the two nations, who worked with a set of priorities and an understanding of their responsibilities far different than those motivating national and local child welfare reformers. When the USCB

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and CWC leaders were speaking to other social workers, inside a professional environment where the participants shared a roughly similar set of values, the CWC and USCB reformers could be very effective in the use of their resources and advantages, as demonstrated in the transnational strategies explored in this chapter. The June 1946 meeting of the CCSW provides a very good example of such coordination. In the midst of the IMH campaign inside and outside the province, Morlock was asked to attend as a featured speaker.195 A year earlier, when Morlock was writing ‘Chosen Children,’ the connections between this work and the IMH were evident but not necessarily obvious. By the spring of 1946, there was much less subtlety. As Morlock was preparing for the meeting, the secretary of the conference mailed her newspaper clippings on the Youngs’ legal troubles, and Morlock vetted her papers through Nova Scotia’s child welfare leadership to make certain she did not ‘say anything that might hamper your efforts for better services.’196 Lea saw great potential in Morlock’s contributions to the conference, which moved from the IMH towards larger themes in the reform of adoption law and practice. ‘Many of the points that you have made,’ Lea wrote, ‘emphasize so exactly the attitude that I have been trying to put across that I felt like chuckling when I read them.’197 Conclusion After the Halifax conference, Lea and Morlock vacationed together in the province. They stopped in East Chester on their way down Nova Scotia’s South Shore to look at the IMH complex. There had been some recent changes. Two weeks before the conference, the Youngs announced they were closing the IMH and opening a rest home and hotel for the aged. But when Morlock visited the East Chester property, she was sobered by the realization that ‘there are still a large number of babies for whom some plan must be made.’198 And, though Morlock could not have known this at the time, Lila Young would continue to confine a small number of mothers and place their children for adoption well into 1947. Beyond East Chester and beyond the Youngs, there was a still larger pool of children about whom Morlock and Lea were gravely concerned. They were convinced that the poor adoption practices and weak regulatory systems in many jurisdictions across Canada and the United States placed children, birth mothers, and adoptive parents at risk in

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both domestic and border-crossing adoptions. Even as they worked to close the IMH, Morlock, Lea, and their allies were faced with evidence that the Child Welfare Division of the Alberta government was placing large numbers of children across the national border in the west, and that several Catholic religious organizations in Quebec were making questionable cross-border placements in the eastern and central parts of the continent. The Ideal Maternity Home presented a tragic and clear-cut example of what could go wrong and why child welfare officials had to work together across borders. The Canadian Welfare Council and the United States Children’s Bureau, as national bodies with similar philosophies and strong pre-existing ties, were well placed to weave connections across borders. In a sense, the IMH provided an ‘ideal’ starting point from which to build alliances and forge a transnational system of communication and advocacy. While the IMH attracted the most attention through 1945 and 1946, Morlock, Lea, and their colleagues were growing more concerned about Alberta and Quebec. Some of the strategies deployed in the IMH campaign – the creation of information networks, the use of international scandal to leverage domestic reform, the attempt to involve national regulatory bodies – were also a part of the response to adoptions originating in Alberta and Quebec, although each case had its own dynamic and particular complications. New faces appeared in the international alliance, and older ones reappeared. By early 1946 I. Evelyn Smith, who had no direct ties to the CWC staff, had taken over the adoption portfolio at the USCB, although Morlock remained connected to the issue for some time. Lea left the CWC in 1947, just as Charlotte Whitton began an investigation into child placing from Alberta, where the provincial government was making cross-border placements into the United States. As Lea predicted, it would ultimately prove ‘much more embarrassing to have to deal with a Provincial Department, which supposedly is the standard-setting body, than to consider the irregularities of a private institution which is operating in violation of Provincial standards. At least the approach would have to be different.’199

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3 The Alberta Babies-for-Export Scandal, 1947–1949

After she left the CWC in late 1941, Charlotte Whitton supported herself as a freelance writer and lecturer in social welfare. In 1946, the Alberta provincial chapter of the Imperial Order, Daughters of the Empire (a women’s community service and patriotic organization) hired her to conduct a survey of social welfare services in Alberta. The survey was publicized as a gift to the province, and a planning tool for future IODE efforts. Whitton, however, was a long-time critic of the Alberta government, with a well-known history of using sensation and scandal to create public support for her social surveys and reform campaigns, dating from her time at the CWC.1 As one Canadian commentator noted, hiring Whitton meant the IODE was ‘out for gore.’2 As expected, Whitton’s 1947 report was a thorough indictment of provincial services that shone a bright light on problems with the child welfare system. Above all else, Whitton condemned the haphazard ‘trafficking of the Provincial Welfare Department in adoptions across the United States border.’3 Whitton alleged that 10 per cent of the children provincial officials placed for adoption left the province. She eventually documented 241 placements in the United States and (rarely) Central America between 1934 and 1947 (see figure 3.1).4 ‘The cross-border movement of Alberta babies into the United States,’ Whitton wrote, ‘reveals the provincial welfare service in its most flagrant disregard of all accepted standards of good welfare practise, to say nothing of the most regrettable lack of co-operation with the welfare authorities of a friendly neighbour.’5 For Whitton, the ‘trafficking’ in babies to the United States was a serious child welfare problem in its own right, and a symbol of the poor standard of welfare services in Alberta in general.

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Primary Destinations



California Wyoming Montana Utah Washington

Secondary Destinations Alaska Indiana

Colorado Idaho Illinois

Iowa Kansas Minnesota

Missouri Oklahoma New Mexico Texas New York Wisconsin North Dakota

Figure 3.1  Adoptions Originating from Alberta

The ‘friendly neighbour[s]’ to which Whitton referred were the child welfare authorities in the US states receiving babies. Whitton knew from her CWC work that US officials disliked placements from the Alberta Child Welfare Branch. As in the IMH case, solving the border-crossing problem of poor adoptions from Alberta would require border-crossing strategies connecting US and Canadian child welfare workers in pursuit of common goals. These goals included changing the adoption practices of the Alberta government, and using the scandal of ‘Babies-for-Export’ from Alberta to leverage broader reforms in adoption practice within and across borders. Canadians in the reform coalition hoped to go further and push widespread reform in social welfare on the recalcitrant Alberta government.

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Whitton invoked her ties to the USCB and her international reputation in child welfare to pull US social workers and state authorities into her investigation of Alberta practices; she established information networks much like those used by Morlock and Lea in the IMH case. However, the networking and lobbying strategies used in the IMH case depended on cooperation between state and provincial officials who shared a commitment to – or at least an interest in – the professionalization of adoption services. In the case of Alberta, Canadian and American adoption reformers faced a provincial government that was openly hostile to adoption reform and to any outside interference in its social program. The firm refusal of Alberta officials to change their approach to US adoptions led Whitton and other reformers to look for federal intervention through the Canadian passport system. Whitton was helped, in this regard, when the publicity she generated in Alberta, combined with the after-effects of the IMH and a new black market scandal in New Brunswick, produced a nationalist backlash against baby exports. The Canadian Department of External Affairs (DEA) was compelled to defend its procedures for granting passports to Canadian babies on their way to adoptive placements in the United States. The resulting conversation between Canadian politicians, child welfare authorities, and DEA officials turned on the constitutional division of powers between the federal and provincial governments, but also on the very different world views feeding the logic of international relations, the logic of child welfare, and the logic of national belonging. There are two major arguments in this chapter. The first is that informal, border-crossing networks were of limited use in the face of resistance from a supposed partner in the project of professionalizing child welfare services, a government welfare department. The second argument is that the cross-cutting divisions of constitutional power and incompatible institutional world views both stood in the way of effective federal intervention to regulate cross-border adoptions. These arguments are played out in a complex narrative that moves in and out of the province of Alberta and back and forth from Canada to the United States, while also slipping between and across federal-provincial divisions in Canada. The story begins with Whitton’s IODE investigative work in Canada and the United States, and then shifts to federal-provincial debates about Canadian passport regulations. Next, the focus goes back to Alberta. Whitton became the key witness in a 1947–8 royal commission investigating the Alberta child welfare system, and she faced a criminal charge of conspiracy to commit libel launched at her

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by the Alberta government. The chapter ends with implications of the Alberta scandal beyond Alberta’s borders, exploring the nationalist response to baby exports in Canada and a new round of discussions between US child welfare leaders which linked Canada-to-US adoptions to interstate adoptions and to the increasingly common phenomenon of international adoptions from countries further afield. The Report: Welfare in Alberta By the 1940s, the long-standing Social Credit government of Alberta was well known for its extremely low tolerance of criticism, resistance to outside interference in provincial affairs, conspiratorial world view, and suspicion of the developing national welfare state.6 Whitton, and most other leaders in Canadian child welfare, had long ranked Quebec, New Brunswick, and Alberta as the provinces with the least professional child welfare systems, and this led to animosity between the CWC and the Alberta government. Relations between the two bodies worsened during the Second World War. Whitton, and then her replacement George Davidson, criticized the province’s inadequate supervision of British child evacuees.7 In 1943, Alberta’s minister of public welfare, Dr W.W. Cross, accused the CWC of ‘making a racket out of social work.’8 Also in 1943, CWC director Davidson learned that adoptive parents in San Francisco were obtaining children from the Child Welfare Branch of the Alberta Department of Public Welfare on terms that violated professional standards. These adoptions were similar to those uncovered by Whitton and her USCB colleagues in 1940–1. Davidson, however, seemed unaware of the earlier CWC-USCB work on this issue.9 He had no ties to the cross-border women’s network that linked Whitton and later Lea to the USCB. His only response to the new California complaints was to note that ‘the fight in Alberta is at last coming out into the open … and I think there will be a lot of fun there in the next few years.’10 Nora Lea, who was at the centre of the welfare networks, replaced Davidson in 1944. She heard complaints from Utah and then other states beginning in the summer of 1945, in the midst of the IMH fight.11 From the beginning, Lea realized that given the fractious relationship between the CWC and the Alberta government, the CWC’s standard strategy of using negotiation, lobbying, and careful interpretation of professional standards to effect reform held little promise. There was also little chance the Alberta government would cooperate with the Whitton-led IODE study. As the survey work started, the deputy minister of public welfare reminded all municipal and provincial

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officials involved in public welfare that the province did not approve the IODE survey. He warned that the Child Welfare Act prescribed criminal penalties for any child welfare employee releasing any ‘file, record, report or any information acquired by him in his official capacity’ without the approval of the minister.12 Public employees and private social service workers were left to balance their desire for reform against the possibility of prosecution and the certain knowledge that they would have to work with provincial officials in the future. In this environment, Whitton and her consultants had to secure information and build public support for their work.13 By the time Whitton issued her preliminary report (Some Wrongs That Need Righting) in April 1947, the Alberta press was demanding the provincial government respond to her charges. The charge that drew the most attention was Whitton’s claim the Child Welfare Branch was engaging in the ‘continuous export of Canadian born children to residents of the United States.’14 The publicity Whitton generated with this and other charges brought her access to information. Albertans inside and outside of public service, some braving prosecution, shared disturbing stories and provided evidence of problems at the Child Welfare Branch.15 Still, Whitton had no access to provincial adoption records and little input from public social service workers. She had to look outside of Alberta to document the role of provincial officials in cross-border adoptions. Here, her personal and professional contacts in Canada and United States were critical. As Whitton began her work in Alberta, Lea was preparing to leave the CWC. Before she left, Lea sent Whitton much of the CWC-USCB evidence on cross-border adoptions from Alberta, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and other parts of Canada. Lea explained that the CWC and USCB were now ‘discouraging placements over the line’ while also trying to improve those cross-border placements that must, nonetheless, take place (see chapter 4).16 When Lea left, CWC support for Whitton’s work softened. The new executive director, R.E.G. Davis, wanted to improve the council’s relationship with the Alberta government. It seemed politic for the council to maintain an official distance from Whitton’s controversial study, though CWC staff did some quiet background work for her on unwed parenthood and adoption.17 Whitton’s friends at the USCB were more openly supportive. When Whitton contacted US states receiving Alberta babies, she referred her correspondents to ‘Katharine Lenroot, US Children’s Bureau, Edith Abbott at the University of Chicago, Arthur Altmeyer, etc,’ for proof of her ‘bona fides.’18 Whitton’s confident claim that these leading lights

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would vouch for her was critically important since, at the time of her Alberta work, she was the employee of a citizen group (the IODE) and did not hold any official position in child welfare. Because she could connect herself to the very inner circle of child welfare, Whitton hoped she might nonetheless position herself as an insider who might be trusted with confidential information. And from the USCB, Lenroot certainly cheered Whitton on.19 Lenroot also wrote to the US consul in Edmonton (who happened to be a family friend), asking that he ‘extend every courtesy and assistance to Miss Whitton in obtaining … information through your office.’20 Whitton soon received reports from state officials across the US west. Utah’s director of services for children, John Larson, was glad to cooperate because he was personally frustrated by Alberta placements in his state. Larson reported a case where two Alberta boys ‘born within a few days of each other’ and placed with a Salt Lake City couple were ‘talked about as twins, even though they are extremely different in temperament and appearance.’21 Whitton was not surprised. ‘These madeto-order twins,’ she wrote, ‘seem a specialty of the department. There is one case where a baby’s hair was dyed to match up, and another case where, when blood tests were required, the test seems to have been taken twice from the same child.’ Although Whitton knew of these two cases, she could not support them with documentary evidence.22 Larson connected Whitton with Virginia Bennett of the Utah Children’s Aid Society, who could substantiate his twin story. Bennett was the source of Utah complaints about Alberta in 1941. In 1947, she recalled her earlier concern about a home that was an ‘extremely questionable possibility in view of the family’s economic status, educational background and living facilities,’ but had received a child in Alberta. Bennett worried that Utah parents went to Alberta before the birth of ‘their’ child and wondered if unwed mothers in Alberta were given any counselling or material support. ‘In this state,’ she noted, ‘releases for the adoption of an unborn child are considered illegal.’23 California’s director of child welfare sent details on a lengthy list of cross-border cases. The pattern was familiar. Adoptive families were not screened in any way acceptable to professional social workers, although some parents were asked for a general letter of reference from a social agency. Some placements seemed strong (a situation neither Canadian nor American reformers ever denied), but in other cases children were in homes turned down by California agencies or highly unlikely to be

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approved.24 In some cases, Superintendent Blaine of the Alberta Child Welfare Branch or his assistant (later, replacement) Charles Hill acted as proxies for the California parents in the adoption, passport, and visa proceedings. The parents did not see the child before the adoption, and no one in Alberta saw the parents before permanently turning over the child. After the adoption and all associated paperwork was complete in Alberta, the child was delivered to the new family in California. Whitton heard rumours that women in Superintendent Hill’s family and the wife of a former US consul in Edmonton were used as baby couriers.25 Quite effectively, Whitton deployed the Lea-Morlock strategy of turning US state authorities into investigating agents. Whitton sent the adoption section of her final report to the USCB for editing and comment, an indication that she considered this work an extension of the USCB-CWC network.26 Always conscious of media attention, Whitton released her findings in three stages. The preliminary report, Some Wrongs That Need Righting, appeared in April. This was followed by a Summary of Findings and Recommendations in July and then the final report, Welfare in Alberta, in August 1947. Whitton added more evidence at each stage, but the themes remained constant. Alberta’s social welfare bureaucracy was overly centralized, unnecessarily secretive, and completely lacking in professionally trained staff. Provincial officials discouraged municipal and voluntary agencies from developing locally controlled social programs. They rejected professionally sound models in use elsewhere and prioritized ‘cheapness’ in the care of children and of the aged. Welfare in Alberta was a biting critique of services to the youngest and oldest Alberta residents in need of care and protection.27 Whitton’s investigative team uncovered shocking examples of mistreatment and neglect of dependent children in care. The Child Welfare Branch assigned older children to work placements on Alberta farms, where the province was not required to pay maintenance costs. Children in these free placements were not visited regularly by child welfare officials and were often exploited or denied adequate schooling. Provincial authorities, Whitton argued, did not provide adequate institutional care for specialized populations such as the infirm aged and mentally and physically disabled children. Juvenile delinquents were held in appalling conditions before court appearances and sometimes jailed with adult criminals. Training facilities for convicted juvenile delinquents were inadequate. Alberta, Whitton noted, had no foster home system for dependent children and the commercial boarding homes in

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which children and the elderly were frequently placed were both overcrowded and poorly regulated. The Calgary Albertan argued that ‘if half the things she [Whitton] said are true, every citizen of this province, the public welfare department and the Alberta cabinet ought to hang their heads in shame.’28 Among many ‘shameful’ problems, Whitton chose to highlight the cross-border export of Alberta children in her report, in interviews, and in her testimony to the provincial royal commission convened after her study. Whitton knew she could conjure public outrage over the newborn innocent handed to strangers and expatriated from province and nation. Whitton told Lenroot that the twelve pages of two hundred in her final report discussing cross-border adoption presented the ‘the biggest single “break” we have to use in trying to blow the Alberta situation into a cleanup.’29 Whitton described a ‘hectic pace of checking in the surrender of children and an equally hectic pace of checking them out for adoption’ at the Child Welfare Branch. In 1945, 475 of the 532 children legally adopted in Alberta courts were wards of the province placed by the Child Welfare Branch.30 At this pace, and with Superintendent Hill insisting on personal oversight of the adoption program, it was simply not possible for the provincial staff to conduct in-depth investigations of children, birth parents, or adoptive parents. And Hill absolutely dismissed professional methods in child placement. He explained to reporters in 1944 and 1945 that he put little stock in contemporary theories about heredity and child development. ‘Toss your scientific approach to a baby adoption out the window. It’s a lot of baloney … Heredity? Rot!’ ‘Love,’ Hill argued, ‘is all that really matters. With love in the home you have the right environment for any child. And that’s the beginning and end of the matter.’ On the issue of choosing adoptive parents, Hill insisted that ‘as for the foster-parents, I just look them over and decide if they’re capable of really loving the child.’31 In many ways, Hill’s emphasis on ‘love’ was appealing. At a common-sense level, most people prioritize love as an essential component in child rearing, and child welfare reformers agreed a loving environment was critical to a child’s development. Whitton’s argument was that the serious business of separating a child from one family and placing it in another for life must also be based on a more rigorous and professional assessment of the child and the potential parents. She supported her argument by citing several cases where Hill’s personal judgment about adoptive parents seemed questionable. In one case, a

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woman lost three of her own children in infancy. Whitton alleged the children’s deaths were attributable to severe neglect. This woman was, nonetheless, approved as an adoptive parent. Her first adopted child died within a year. At the time of Whitton’s study, a second adoptive child had just been placed in the home.32 Alberta’s Child Protection Act stipulated that adoptions of wards of the province were subject to a one-year probationary period, during which time the adoptive family was to be supervised by Child Welfare Branch employees. The legislation allowed, however, for the superintendent of child welfare to dispense with probation at his discretion, as did similar legislation in other provinces and states.33 The problem lay in how the superintendent’s discretion was used in Alberta. Superintendent Hill sometimes waived the probationary period for in-province cases when children were going to relatives or when the family was well known to child welfare officials. In the case of cross-border adoptions, where these conditions were less likely to apply, Hill always dispensed with the waiting period so that the child would qualify for a US immigration visa and the family could return home quickly. Whitton challenged Hill’s ability to certify the US adoptive parents on the basis of the written references they provided and, in some cases, in the absence of any personal interview.34 Whitton conceded that ‘because there is, after all, more of good than evil in this world, more of humanity and kindness than cruelty and viciousness … no matter how callous the placing of children there will be reasonably successful placements for many because they have been honestly sought by kindly people.’ Still, she asserted that if ‘decency staves off disaster,’ this did not justify the Alberta government having ‘gambled’ on the future of children. Whitton also speculated that the cross-border practices of the Child Welfare Branch had been ‘conducive to a widespread knowledge in the United States and other parts of Canada that “it was easy to get babies in Alberta,” and [this] has inevitably contributed to such irregular and surreptitious traffic as may also be taking place without the knowledge or easy detection of governments.’ In other words, Whitton implied, though in no way proved, the existence of a baby black market in Alberta.35 She later learned that Montana social workers feared more of their citizens would look north as it became well known that ‘anybody can go to Alberta and pick up a baby without any trouble.’ This knowledge (among Montana residents) reinforced the critique that ‘we [social workers] make it too difficult to adopt children,’ thus undermining social work efforts to raise adoption standards.36

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As in the IMH case, Whitton also emphasized the potentially ‘stateless’ status of the Canadian-adopted child in the absence of a second adoption in the United States. Her logic was that unless the child’s US status was stabilized, state governments might refuse to take financial responsibility for the child in a crisis. She argued that state officials might refuse to approve applications for readoption, although she knew it was extremely unlikely state officials would take this stance in any but the most extreme cases.37 Indeed, one major complaint from states was that they felt obligated to sanction petitions for readoption. Whitton also knew the child could apply for citizenship in his or her own right at the age of majority. Nonetheless, Whitton and other reformers realized that the ‘stateless’ child had a potent propaganda value in the post-war era of displaced persons and refugees. Whitton played the citizenship issue from the Canadian side, as well, building a nationalist argument that emphasized the child’s right to his or her British/Canadian heritage and the Canadian nation’s need for the child as future citizen/worker. Whitton repeatedly described children as ‘exported’; she deplored the ‘disposition of children in another sovereignty.’ Whitton pointed out that the population of Alberta declined by 59,000 between 1941 and 1945 and that the province was ‘monthly losing more young families than it acquires.’ And all of this was happening at a time when, according to Superintendent Hill, the province had a waiting list of 250 approved adoptive parents inside the province.38 ‘If,’ Whitton asserted, ‘these babies are suitable for adoption they are a valuable national asset and the whole Alberta policy is puzzling; if they are not suitable for adoption it is a dastardly thing to send them to adoptive homes in a friendly neighbouring country.’39 There were various nationalist undercurrents in previous arguments against cross-border adoption, though Whitton pursued this issue in a more militant way. In 1946, Nora Lea argued privately that ‘our Canadian life is decidedly different from the American … We believe that there is something [Canadian] and that Canadian-born children have a right to that heritage.’40 Lea was less instrumental than Whitton – she did not refer to children as units of future production – but both seemed to see the children as somehow belonging to the Canadian nation. However, bringing nationalist claims to the fore in discussions with American partners was complicated. The transnational adoption coalition was built on a common professional analysis and a shared sense of how best to protect the interests of children. There was little to be gained, and perhaps much to be lost, in a cross-border discussion

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of separate national ownership of children. Lea was more circumspect and rarely expressed her views on Canadian heritage to her American contacts. Both Lea and Whitton appreciated, however, that a nationalist analysis of cross-border adoption might draw useful public attention inside Canada.41 Passports for Babies Overall, a sensational public scandal offered the best hope that the Alberta government would be forced into a radical reorganization of welfare services. Whitton certainly achieved the explosive reaction she was hoping for, starting with an angry response from the government. In April 1947, Minister of Public Welfare Cross declared, ‘We have not a particle of respect for her [Whitton’s] ability whatever. She is just a human talking machine. She is limited in what she says only by her disregard for the truth … All she can ever do is talk.’42 Other Albertans criticized Whitton as an interloper from eastern Canada who did not understand that ‘our older people and children can stand a little tougher treatment that yours in the East … If a few more or less of our babies whom very likely no one wanted were allowed to go to the States, then I think those few are lucky.’43 Whitton heard, as well, from at least one US adoptive parent praising the Alberta model. For this parent, and doubtless others, Superintendent Hill was a caring man who sidestepped unreasonable barriers in adoption. The right-wing Hush Free Press accused Whitton of opposing cross-border adoption in order to protect the jobs of social workers looking after children in institutions, repeating a common criticism of child welfare workers.44 The mainstream press largely supported Whitton, but declared she ‘must now prove to all of Alberta that the things she has said are true.’45 One issue of contention was the number of children placed in the United States. Minister Cross claimed the number was no more than three or four per year, but Whitton said it was more like one baby per week. Canada’s federal minister for external affairs, Louis St Laurent, was questioned in Parliament about the number of passports issued to young children through applications from Alberta’s Hill. The answer – sixty-four in 1946 and eleven in the first four months of 1947 – supported Whitton’s position. Since every child adopted into a US family required a passport before a US immigration visa could be issued, Hill’s passport applications marked the minimum number of babies crossing the border.46

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The USCB’s new adoption consultant, Evelyn Smith, discovered that the INS had no accurate records of children entering from Canada on immigrant visas, and that the State Department did not count immigrant visas issued to Canadians because there was no quota on Canadian immigration to the United States.47 Thus, Canadian passport records offered the only source for a reliable count. But beyond documenting the flow, Whitton became more and more interested in how ‘obliging’ Canadian passport authorities seemed to be in support of Superintendent Hill. To George Davidson (by now federal deputy minister of welfare), Whitton complained that ‘the very crux of the situation is the issuance of these passports by the Dominion.’48 This analysis of the problem implied a solution; the federal passport system should be used restrictively to control cross-border adoption. Whitton suggested to Davidson three alterations to federal passport procedures. First, federal officials should refuse passports for children under guardianship of a private or public welfare agency unless the passport request came with a letter of approval from public welfare officials in the receiving state. This suggestion picked up the spirit of the localized INS agreement in the north-west (see chapter 1, above). Whitton’s second, rather drastic, suggestion was that the Department of External Affairs (DEA) seek new legislation ‘precluding the issuance of passports to … babies going out of this country in the custody or guardianship of other than their born parents, under an age, nine months of usual breast feeding or some period prescribed by the Department of Health.’ Such legislation would stop the flow of just-adopted infants across the border, but it would also restrict other border crossings (for example, young children travelling with relatives or family friends). This recommendation also implied that all women – including birth mothers intending to surrender a child – should breastfeed for an extended period. Third, Whitton recommended the DEA refuse a passport if the child was ‘going out of the country under such circumstances that it was precluded from gaining citizenship in the country to which it was going.’49 With each suggestion, Whitton advocated an aggressive assertion of federal power that would bring passport agents into the field of child welfare, an arena of provincial constitutional responsibility. Davidson doubted very much that the minister for external affairs would agree to deny passports, but he was already pushing the DEA to enforce existing passport guidelines.50 Current regulations stipulated that no one other than the parent or legal guardian of a minor child

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could sign the passport application, but this rule was often ignored. If the rule were enforced, it would be impossible for people who were not legal guardians – for example, William Young at the IMH or Superintendent Hill in Alberta acting after legal adoptions gave custody to the adoptive parents – to arrange for passports.51 Davidson knew this was only a partial solution; federal officials would still process applications signed by legal guardians (birth mothers before an adoption, adoptive parents after the adoption proceeding). He felt the most effective control of cross-border adoptions would come through the border-policing authority of the INS and the US consulates.52 This was the same conclusion reached by Whitton in the 1930s and by Lea and Morlock in 1945–6. In 1945 and 1946, however, the INS leadership had rejected USCB-CWC requests that border officers require letters of approval from state departments of child welfare when parents entered the United States with just-adopted children.53 As Davidson expected, Canadian passport officials were also loath to become involved. In February 1947, however, the DEA asked the provinces to specify how passport authorities could determine if someone ‘claiming to have custody over the child and the authority to give custody to foreign citizens for adoption purposes’ could legally claim this authority.54 That is, the DEA wanted to know how provincial law defined an official guardian, eligible under federal rules to apply for a passport for a child. Several provinces welcomed what they interpreted as an expansive offer to use federal power to regulate border-crossing adoptions. Ontario’s minister of public welfare argued that a passport should not be issued unless it was clear the cross-border placement was in the best interest of the child. He offered the services of his department to investigate and report on proposed US placements.55 Nova Scotia officials had very specific suggestions for federal passport regulations. In response to the IMH, the Nova Scotia Adoption Act was amended to require that the provincial director of child welfare personally approve any adoption contracted in a Nova Scotia court that would take the child out of the province. This law did not address the situation where potential adoptive parents took the child out of the province (for example, to another province or a US state) to complete the legal proceeding. The Nova Scotians wanted to know when this kind of placement was taking place, and they wanted a chance for meaningful intervention in the process. They suggested that when federal officials received a passport application for a child under three, the applicants should be required to state whether they were the legal

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parents or guardians who would accompany the child to a foreign jurisdiction and live with the child. If the passport was to be used by any person other than the parents or legal guardian (for example, an adoption broker or a potential adoptive parent without a final adoption decree), the Nova Scotians wanted the application to ‘be supported by a recommendation from the Department of Public Welfare in the province concerned. Such approval … would only be given after proper investigation in the Province, and, what is of greater importance, in the jurisdiction to which the child is being removed.’56 The Nova Scotia plan was designed to insert provincial and state child welfare oversight into the cross-border process, regardless of who made the initial application for a passport. In most cases, the Nova Scotia plan would bring the adoption to the attention of professional child welfare workers with some commitment to the tenets of sound adoption practice. For both Ontario and Nova Scotia, the model was one of Canadian federal–Canadian provincial–US state cooperation, with the province and state providing the ‘social input’ and the Canadian federal government the policing authority. The Nova Scotians – still smarting from their encounter with the Ideal Maternity Home and newly aware of the benefits of inter-jurisdictional cooperation – expressed their ‘gratitude’ at the new federal interest in the adoptions.57 This gratitude turned out to be misplaced, or at least overstated, as the DEA remained committed to a very restrictive view of federal responsibility. Responding to the Ontario offer to study placements, the DEA’s L. Audette noted that he was ‘dubious about the actual value of such a confidential report; it might only place us in the position of having to decide whether or not a given adoption was a good or bad thing, thus dragging us well beyond our normal jurisdiction.’ For the provinces, this was precisely the point. But Audette and his senior colleagues felt the provinces missed the key issue. ‘We will have to point out to them that we are interested only in the authority required to make application for a passport on behalf of a minor child and not in the merits of the sinister problem of traffic in babies whereof is a Provincial matter.’58 The provinces and the DEA were separated by differing professional cultures and priorities. The Nova Scotians, in particular, understood that cross-border adoption could not be managed from within one unit. If the state was to fulfil its responsibility to the child, working across borders and stretching definitions of constitutional responsibility was essential. The critical concept was that governments at all levels had

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a responsibility to protect and promote the welfare of the child, and this was an approach deeply rooted in the professional culture of social work. DEA bureaucrats had different priorities. Despite Whitton’s pioneering work at the League of Nations in the 1930s, the expansive social work understanding of child welfare was unfamiliar in the precise and legalistic world of international relations experts. The DEA staff wanted, as well, to insulate the minister for external affairs from any political responsibility for the sensitive issue of exporting Canadian children. Furthermore, the federal-provincial division of powers was a highly contested political issue in post-war Canada, with the most pitched battles fought exactly on the topic of the extent of federal responsibility and federal authority in social welfare.59 It made institutional and political sense for the DEA to define its role narrowly and to resist calls for expanded federal involvement. The clash between the child welfare and External Affairs perspectives on cross-border adoption was absolutely clear when DEA officials responded to Ruby McKay, superintendent of child welfare for British Columbia. McKay was one of the most senior administrators in Canadian social welfare, and an ally in Whitton’s Alberta work.60 She described the DEA plan to require proof of guardianship as ‘excellent’ and ‘constructive.’ She suggested the model of BC cooperation with the INS (which she oversaw) might be applied across the country and wondered whether Canadian federal immigration authorities might work with their American counterparts to create a similar national system.61 McKay also underlined the importance of provincial action. Good provincial legislation on adoption and the supervision of maternity homes should go far to stop the casual placement of children, although this approach would only work if a province had a competent director of child welfare enforcing good laws. She pointed to Alberta as a negative example. Overall, McKay was ‘impressed’ that the DEA was taking an interest, a development that spoke well ‘for the interpretation of child welfare they have received over the years.’62 Whatever the level of interpretation, federal authorities did not react well to McKay’s suggestions. Audette described McKay as writing ‘a long screed lauding her own Provincial Administration and roundly criticizing the Province of Alberta. She … completely fails to discuss the question submitted.’ More bluntly, Audette’s colleague Leslie Chance noted that ‘with a woman’s usual negligence of purpose, McKay has written a good deal on child welfare but nothing on the question put to

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her.’63 For Chance, the ‘question’ was narrow and specific – what documents were required to prove guardianship under BC law – and McKay did not include this information. To McKay, the important ‘question’ was how to protect the interests of children and parents. She gave a child welfare answer to what was, to her, a child welfare question. The harsh reaction to McKay reflected the larger DEA frustration that the provinces did not understand the federal department’s restricted role. It was ironic that Audette and Chance directed these feelings towards McKay, since she specifically wanted provincial administrations and federal immigration authorities to become more active. That Audette’s and, especially, Chance’s hostility was expressed in specifically gendered slurs – McKay produced a hysterical ‘screed’ and showed ‘a woman’s usual negligence of purpose’ – is significant. McKay was on the wrong side of a series of oppositions (female/male; incompetence/ competence; child welfare concerns/realistic or serious policy considerations), and her suggestions were totally discredited. The child welfare response to cross-border adoption simply did not make sense inside the definition of international relations and federal responsibilities at the DEA (or the INS, or the US State Department). It was very difficult to translate child welfare concerns and child welfare tactics into the politics of international relations. At this juncture, Whitton’s IODE work pushed the Alberta Child Welfare Branch to the foreground. It was very clear, now, that Superintendent Hill regularly violated federal passport regulations when he filed passport applications for children who had already been adopted. ‘It leaves our position a little uncomfortable,’ noted Audette, ‘when we consider that over sixty passports were issued last year on the application of the [Alberta] Superintendent of Child Welfare.’64 The embarrassed DEA had to take some action. In mid-1947, departmental officials rewrote parts of the existing passport regulations to stress that applications for passports could only be signed by parents or legal guardians (as defined by provincial law). In the case of a just-adopted child, the applicant would have to supply proof of guardianship (for example, completed adoption papers) or evidence that ‘competent welfare authorities’ approved the passport application and hence the adoptive placement. In the case of a child in a probationary placement (that is, the adoption was not finalized), the new regulations stipulated a passport would not be issued unless the application was accompanied by evidence ‘from some recognized body … that permission has been granted to take the child abroad.’65

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There was a victory here for child welfare reformers; the passport regulations now required some social oversight when legal adoption proceedings were not completed in Canada. This kind of placement was very rare, however, since most US consulates would not issue an immigration visa for the child unless the adoption was complete. Probationary placements with US families were common only in the north-west, where the existing cross-border arrangements already surrounded adoptions with professional supervision. In the dominant case of completed Canadian adoptions, federal officials were simply restating an existing policy, though with a new promise to enforce the rules. Here, they still insisted they had no role in cross-border adoptions apart from identifying a legal applicant for a passport. The DEA informed the minister for external affairs that ‘we have held to the line that questions of child welfare fall within the ambit of provincial jurisdiction.’66 After mid-1947, Alberta’s Superintendent Hill could no longer sign passport applications for just-adopted children; passport officials would not recognize these applications as valid. This required a change and occasioned some delay in Alberta, but birth parents (before adoption) and adoptive parents (after adoption) were still free to file passport applications. DEA officials had not, however, seen the last of Whitton’s publicity machine or the cross-border adoption controversy. Reactions: Royal Commission and Libel Trial In July 1947, the Alberta government appointed a royal commission chaired by Justice W.R. Howson to investigate allegations against the Alberta Child Welfare Branch appearing in the print media. Whitton’s Summary of Findings and Recommendations and those parts of her Welfare in Alberta text that dealt with child welfare were placed before the commission. The commission hearings, lasting from November 1947 though June 1948, became a highly charged test of Whitton’s work.67 Whitton treated the commission as a personal quest. She wrote the IODE submission, prepared endless briefs for the IODE lawyer, recruited witnesses, and testified for nineteen days. She faced hostility and even contempt from the province’s lawyers, from Justice Howson, and from witnesses supporting the Child Welfare Branch.68 Whitton could hold her own – dishing out her own hostility and contempt – but the strain was evident. Phyllis Burns of the CWC noted that Whitton seemed near collapse and ‘a crack-up wouldn’t surprise me.’69 Personal

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tragedy was layered on top of the professional challenge Whitton faced in Alberta. While she was in Edmonton for the commission hearings, Whitton’s companion of over twenty years, Margaret Grier, was dying of cancer in an Ottawa hospital.70 Grier’s death, in December 1947, devastated Whitton and left her wracked with guilt. She confessed to the USCB’s Castendyck that ‘Margaret’s going has taken half my life across with her.’ To one of her collaborators, Whitton expressed her hope that, ‘by God’s Grace, we shall get a reorganization [of welfare services in Alberta] … It will have to be very good ever to justify Margaret being left to die with recent acquaintances while I was out there.’71 Grier was scarcely buried when a new crisis erupted. The 27 December 1947 issue of the newsmagazine New Liberty included an article by Harold Dingman entitled ‘Babies-for-Export: Alberta’s Tragic Traffic in Babies.’ Dingman quoted extensively from the IODE study, and Whitton approved a draft of his work before publication.72 Dingman charged that ‘one of the blackest and ugliest chapters in the development of modern governments has been written against the province of Alberta. It is the unparalleled story of government trafficking in illegitimate babies, exporting them to foreign homes; and the further story of unjustifiably harsh and delinquent care of Alberta’s very young and very old.’ Dingman repeated Whitton’s charges about the poor treatment afforded unwed mothers in Alberta, the pressure on women to surrender children, the casual transfer of children to American applicants, and the way federal passport authorities facilitated cross-border placements. ‘The cream of the [baby] crop,’ he argued, ‘went to the export market.’ The article was accompanied by a set of lurid drawings illustrating the misery of unwed mothers, the uncaring detachment of Alberta officials, and the dangers awaiting children in uninvestigated placements.73 In January 1948, the Alberta government lodged criminal charges of ‘conspiracy to publish a defamatory libel’ against Harold Dingman, Charlotte Whitton, and Jack Kent Cooke, the publisher of New Liberty. All three faced trial in the April sitting of the Alberta Supreme Court. Alberta authorities hoped to discredit Whitton, but the result was more nearly the opposite. Across North America, the charges against Dingman, Cooke, and Whitton were interpreted as an attack on the freedom of the press.74 The effect was to rally support for the trio and to draw further attention to Whitton’s critique of Alberta welfare, especially on the issue of the baby exports. Canadian child welfare leaders were now under pressure to take

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sides in the battle between Whitton and the Alberta government. The official CWC response was tepid; the board of directors passed a resolution deploring the ‘side issues’ that drew attention from Whitton’s substantive critique of social welfare in Alberta.75 But most of Whitton’s friends and colleagues in Canadian social welfare sprang directly to her defence. Many – for example, Robert Mills in Ontario, Laura Holland of Manitoba, and Nora Lea – had contributed to the Alberta work. Lea reassured Whitton that ‘at no time in your long years of work for Child Welfare have you had such widespread and general support from the field as during these past months of anxiety and heavy work.’76 Whitton also received support from her USCB friends. Castendyck and Lenroot worried deeply about the combined effect of grief, the royal commission, and the trial on Whitton; Lenroot reminded Whitton she was ‘with you in spirit throughout ordeal.’77 Lenroot, as chief, was removed from the immediate management of the bureau’s work on adoption and Castendyck, by 1945, worked in the bureau’s mental health unit. Nonetheless, Castendyck organized bureau staff to support Whitton’s professional and legal case in Alberta, with the proviso that bureau contributions remain in the background in legal proceedings. USCB staff helped Whitton with briefs to the Howson commission, and used connections in Central America to uncover details in two placements to Costa Rica and El Salvador that Whitton suspected crossed racial and religious lines.78 Whitton most needed professional support from adoption consultant Evelyn Smith, but Smith was not part of Whitton’s transnational network and had few ties to any of the Canadians. Smith followed earlier bureau patterns and sent Whitton copies of USCB reports, as well as correspondence with US states complaining about Alberta.79 But she reached her limit when Whitton asked her, personally, to convince state officials to release confidential case details (including names, dates, and identifying information) on cross-border adoptions for use during incamera sessions of the Howson commission.80 In these sessions, Whitton would be expected to move beyond the generalities and anonymous references to ‘US leaders’ that appeared in Welfare in Alberta. Thus, she needed permission from state authorities to use identifying information. At the same time she approached Smith, she also wrote to state governments enclosing a copy of Welfare in Alberta and describing the royal commission and libel proceedings. She asked state officials to conduct further investigations and share details with her, promising that confidential information would only be used

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‘for in camera hearings, for our substantiation of claims by reference to departmental files and will neither reach the public nor react upon your clients.’ She attached her fight for reform in Alberta to the larger fight to control the cross-border traffic in babies.81 This was an extraordinary request. William Rose, supervisor of child welfare services for Nevada, replied: Your request places me in a somewhat embarrassing position in that, as much as we wish to see justice done, the Superintendent of Child Welfare and the Child Welfare Commission in Alberta represents a kindred public welfare administrator and agency … I am somewhat loath to provide the information you refer to and in so doing appear to take up sides against them … Being an experienced social worker you will, I am sure, understand my hesitancy in releasing confidential case material to a private agency such as the IODE or to a law firm.82

Rose, quite understandably, assumed that the public authorities in Alberta would share with him a roughly similar professional culture and that, therefore, they were his natural allies in child welfare. He might be convinced to see the Alberta administration in a different light, but this would not affect his larger concern about the propriety of releasing the information Whitton requested. Rose suggested, politely, that Whitton could not be trusted. He saw her as an outsider in child welfare – she did not represent an established social agency or a government body – and he worried that any case material he shared might become part of the libel proceeding. And in a strict sense, Whitton was an outsider in child welfare reform, and an aggressive one at that. Rose consulted the USCB director of field services, Martha Wood. Wood also heard from the USCB’s regional consultant based in Colorado, who noted that various state directors of child welfare were concerned about releasing confidential material to Whitton. Evelyn Smith responded for the USCB, suggesting that state officials give Whitton general information on the number of cases and whether state laws had been complied with. But, she underlined, ‘we agreed that confidential information could not be sent to Miss Whitton for personal use in the case which was pending against her.’ Smith did not specify who constituted ‘we,’ but the probable consultation group was the staff of the USCB Social Service Division to which Wood, Smith, Morlock, and Castendyck belonged. These women understood the cross-border situation, the Alberta conflict, and Whitton. But when the push of Whitton’s

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crisis came up against the ‘pull’ of professional codes of conduct, they sided with professional restraint. This was one limit on transnational cooperation in support of Whitton’s crusade.83 Fortunately for Whitton, many of her contacts ignored the USCB caution and released case details. She had good responses from state officials who contributed in the first round of her inquiry and now saw Whitton as a trusted ally in a difficult fight that had to be pursued across borders.84 Whitton received detailed information from Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Illinois, and Arizona. One frequent concern was the age of the adopting parents. Bennett from Utah relayed the unhappy story of a young woman who, when she was seven, was placed in Utah with adoptive parents over the age of eighty. From Arizona, Whitton heard that Alberta authorities were considering a placement with a sixty-eight-year-old woman turned down numerous times by in-state agencies.85 The reasons why US social workers deplored Alberta cross-border adoptions were laid out in a letter that Utah’s Bennett forwarded to Whitton, which was originally written to a frustrated woman turned away by state agencies and now seeking a child in Alberta. Bennett explained why reputable agencies would not place infants with parents over forty (the parents would retire just as the child needed money for college); why they placed only one child with a family (many families were waiting for a first child); why the child’s background must be investigated (to determine if the child was mentally and physically fit for adoption and the child and parents well matched); why the probationary period was necessary (to relieve the parents of a burden if a defect in the child became apparent or the placement was not working); and why the state had a financial interest in cross-border adoptions (taxpayers might end up responsible for a ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘spastic’ child carelessly adopted by the parents). A grateful Whitton noted that this letter and other case details from Utah would be very helpful, even determinative, at the royal commission and in the libel trial.86 The libel proceeding was, in the end, rather anticlimactic. On the appointed day, the Alberta Crown sought a stay of proceedings in the conspiracy charges against all three defendants. The Crown then proceeded with a separate charge against the publisher, Cooke, for counselling to commit libel by encouraging Alberta news agents to distribute the controversial issue of New Liberty. After a four-day trial, Cooke was acquitted. This acquittal substantially weakened the conspiracy case and the Alberta Crown abandoned the stay of proceedings, freeing Whitton

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and the others from further legal jeopardy.87 In the end, the libel charge only raised Whitton’s public profile and focused more attention on the ongoing royal commission.88 By this point, the royal commissioners had granted the IODE team access to Child Welfare Branch adoption files for children adopted into US families. Combining US reports with these files, Whitton’s team identified 241 children adopted by non-Canadian parents between 1934 and 1947, with just over 200 adoptions since 1942. The children went to homes in twenty-four states, plus Alaska, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and El Salvador (see figure 3.1). Nearly half of the children (103) went to California, while large numbers also ended up in Utah, Washington, and Montana. In thirteen cases, it was unclear where the US parents resided at the time of the adoption. There was not a single instance where the adoptive home was visited by an Alberta welfare worker before the adoption. Fourteen homes might have been visited by an US social agency, but in no case was social information exchanged between Alberta authorities and US social workers before the adoption. An adoptive home was visited after the placement twice, in both cases by an escort delivering a ‘mail order’ child to the United States. Twenty-three adoptions were completed without the parents coming to Alberta. The IODE researchers identified sixty-seven cases where letters of reference provided by adoptive parents contained ‘something unsatisfactory,’ and many more cases where, despite positive references, they felt the adoption could not be approved by reputable social workers. Whitton’s team alleged that forty or more of the files were tampered with before they were turned over, and they identified eleven cases where negative letters of reference were removed from the file before it was given to the Alberta judge granting the adoption. These were serious violations of sound adoption practice and also, in some cases, of Alberta law.89 Whitton’s investigators uncovered very careless placement procedures. In one case, Hill had to admit to an adoptive mother that he could not tell her child’s birth religion, if the child had been baptized, or if the child had had any inoculations. One adoption was approved without any references. In another file, a letter of reference from the couple’s minister recommended against a placement. There was no longer any question that Alberta authorities flagrantly disregarded ‘sound adoption practice,’ and no more dramatic illustration of this shortfall than in Alberta’s baby-export procedures.90 The job of defending Alberta practices fell to Superintendent Hill, who linked the recent upsurge in US placements to increasing rates of

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out-of-wedlock birth and to the high number of US civilian and military personnel in Edmonton, both a result of the Second World War. Hill claimed there was a shortage of qualified adoptive homes inside Alberta, even though he told the press as late as January 1947 that he had a long list of waiting homes. Asked why he placed in the United States versus other parts of Canada, Hill replied that he had tried but found that ‘we’re not welcome … They don’t like us.’91 Essentially, it was easier to place across the national border than across provincial borders because other Canadian child welfare workers distrusted his department. Hill characterized Alberta’s highly centralized child placement system as the most advanced in Canada, well designed to prevent the development of a black market in babies. He was forthright in his rejection of professional social work standards in adoption and expressed pride in boundary-crossing placements securing ‘good homes’ for children Albertans were unwilling to absorb.92 ‘Albertans,’ Hill argued, ‘typically wanted Anglo-Saxon children but Americans typically did not care what foreign parentage their adopted children came from.’93 Individual parents may or may not have known or cared about the ‘parentage’ of their children and may or may not have agreed with the professional line on racial and religious matching, but there was little more likely to incense US officials than the suggestion that US citizens were receiving less-desirable children who were not acceptable to Alberta families. Whitton, whose Anglo-Saxon elitism was well known, argued Hill refused background information and placed children by ‘mail-order’ because he was adopting children of Ukrainian and Métis background into unsuspecting Anglo-Saxon families in the United States.94 Hill emphasized his success. His staff contacted all but fifteen of the US adoptive families, and all reported their adoptions had turned out well. Two adoptive fathers from the United States testified in his support.95 Whitton and her supporters pointed out that reports from adoptive parents were not the best indicator of a quality placement. They were quick to highlight poor outcomes (unlike Hill, they identified some significant problems), but emphasized the need to professionalize the adoptive process and surround children and parents with the greatest possible protection before the placement was finalized. Children and parents, they argued, deserved the best that professional child welfare services could provide; leaving a happy outcome to chance was not good enough. The royal commission reported in December 1948. The commission-

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ers criticized Whitton’s sensationalism and her personal attacks on Hill, but agreed with her that the Child Welfare Branch must change its procedures and hire professionally trained staff.96 The commissioners recommended ‘that cross-border placements be discontinued,’ although they emphasized that most of the placements seemed to have turned out well.97 And while the commissioners wanted reforms in the adoptive process, they remained suspicious of professional social work practices and were concerned that adoptions not become ‘over-finicky.’98 Whitton disagreed with some particulars, but was willing to declare a ‘complete vindication genuine.’ Editorialists across Canada urged the Alberta government to ‘turn with good grace to implement the recommendations’ of the royal commission.99 Some changes were already in place. Provincial officials were now asking some US social agencies to investigate homes, Hill no longer processed passport applications, and only one child was placed in the United States in the first half of 1948.100 Still, ‘good grace’ was in short supply. Alberta officials explicitly rejected ending US placements, and Minister Cross declared his government would not be ‘stampeded’ into making changes.101 Frustrated reformers could only look on in anger, discourage adoptive parents from turning to Alberta, enact adoption reform in their own jurisdictions, and cooperate with more receptive government officials in other states and provinces. ‘The niceties of jurisdiction’102 Whitton identified cross-border adoptions as her most important example of what was wrong with child welfare in Alberta, but many of her specific recommendations on this issue looked outside and beyond the province, towards the assertion of federal power. As noted, Whitton wanted much stricter federal passport controls. Recalling her agenda from the 1930s, she suggested a federal-provincial agreement on interprovincial placements, followed by a Canada-US convention or treaty on international placements.103 Whitton quickly became a resource for the very US colleagues who helped her build her case in Alberta. While the royal commission was still in session, Montana social workers asked Whitton to suggest border-crossing reforms to a regional conference of adoption workers trying to control ‘loose placement practises.’104 Although she began with the Alberta case, Whitton drew on admirable and poor placement practices across Canadian and American jurisdictions to explain why babies

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crossed borders. She argued that the best way to eliminate loose or illicit placements and to increase the odds that well-suited parents and children would find each other was to enforce professional standards in all adoption practice. Without universal application of professional practices, ‘those [parents] who are willing to go through authorized channels are today losing out, in all too many cases, to those who bypass the procedure set up for the protection of all three parties [children, adoptive parents, birth parents] in the transfer of custody.’ In other words, states were inviting their citizens to participate in illicit or unsafe adoptions, including cross-border adoptions from Alberta, when they failed to provide adequate professional adoption services. Cross-border adoption, thus, was a problem linked to American as well as Canadian shortcomings.105 Whitton recommended improved adoption standards within the states and suggested steps towards federal-level cross-border cooperation between Canada and the United States. The states should pressure federal authorities to refuse immigration visas for children placed into the United States ‘without the prior approval in writing of the welfare authorities of the state of intended jurisdiction.’ The INS should be pushed to require that any child ‘under a specified age entering the United States as adopted’ be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian when crossing the border. US federal officials should also be asked to pressure the Canadian federal government to exert greater control over passports for adopted children. Here, Whitton was trying to enlist the states in the longer-term campaign by the USCB, CWC, and other reformers to commit the US Department of State, the INS, and the DEA to an enforcement role in cross-border adoption. She closed by suggesting less formal collaboration between US and Canadian social agencies and government departments, led by the CWC and the USCB, ‘to work out a procedure for the cross-border placement of children … in those cases and under those circumstances which may be justified from time to time.’106 In the United States, the Alberta scandal folded into a larger discussion of interstate and international child placements at small regional meetings (like that organized in Montana) and at larger USCB-sponsored conferences in the Midwest and West in 1947, 1948, and 1951. These conferences collected many people – John Farr Larson of Utah, Ruth Bartlett, Beth Muller, and Evelyn Smith of the USCB, Ruth Dana of Illinois, and Dorothy Waite of Wisconsin – well acquainted with Alberta. The USCB conferences took up three kinds of child placement

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border crossings: from one state to another; from various European countries and Asia to the United States; and from Canada to the United States.107 These meetings are significant because they connected Canada-to-US adoptions to just emerging post–Second World War patterns in transnational adoption, and because they anticipated by several years a series of European-based United Nations meetings in the 1950s and early 1960s that are generally taken as the origin point for transnational efforts to regulate intercountry adoption.108 Overall, delegates to these meetings agreed that border-crossing placements meant extra hazards and risks for children and parents because it was difficult, in these cases, to meet professional standards of investigation, matching, and supervision. The child, as many participants noted, could easily slip through the cracks between state, provincial, and national bureaucratic systems and be left without the formal protection of a supervising welfare agency. The consensus was that distance placements should be discouraged. If children were to be placed at a distance, communication and cooperation between sending and receiving jurisdictions was critical, though difficult to achieve.109 If there were common issues connecting interstate, Canada-to-US, and other transnational placements, there were also important differences. One attraction in Canadian adoptions was that the children (up to the mid-1950s) were primarily white, although Whitton certainly implied this was not always the case in Alberta.110 Also, there were no immigration quotas for Canadians entering the United States at this time and ‘very limited formality’ along the Canada-US border. At the same time, contiguous geography combined with the largely shared professional culture of Canadian and American reformers left the state representatives at the USCB conferences hopeful that Canada-to-US adoptions (and the comparatively rare US-to-Canada adoptions) could be managed through an administrative agreement or cooperative arrangement similar to what might be used between the states.111 At different points in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, US officials explored using existing child importation laws or child exportation laws to police border-crossing adoptions. Most of these laws were drafted in the late nineteenth century, and were designed to protect state governments from financial responsibility for children, although by the 1940s many had been amended to emphasize protecting children. (The ‘child exportation’ laws in place in nine states were different; they were concerned with the home state’s continued responsibility after the child left the jurisdiction.) But it remained very difficult to enforce importa-

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tion or exportation laws; penalties were weak and for the most part only social agencies and government departments with good practices followed their dictates. In addition, the interstate laws of various states often contradicted each other, or were incompatible with other public health, guardianship, or residency laws. One recommendation from the USCB conferences was that states explore how they could modify existing interstate laws to establish reciprocal procedures with other states. Still, the need for another mechanism – preferably one with a uniform, national reach – was clear.112 Delegates discussed a federal law regulating interstate placement justified under federal responsibility for interstate commerce, but both USCB staff and state officials had reservations about whether this would be a constitutional application of federal power. Participants focused, instead, on developing a national standard in inter-jurisdictional placement. At each successive meeting, delegates refined a statement of best practices in interstate child placement. They hoped such a document might lead to a voluntary interstate agreement or an interstate compact enacted by legislation in the various states, but there was never a widely accepted national statement.113 At the 1948 and 1951 meetings, delegates recommended working through the USCB and CWC to secure Canadian cooperation in the application of these standards to adoptions across the international border.114 The USCB conferences clarified three issues implicit in previous discussions of inter-jurisdictional placement in both Canada and the United States. First, ‘families and children are mobile and will continue to move across state borders; our laws tend to reflect a bygone social condition and may not be adequate to deal with the current situation.’ If people were on the move, then welfare systems would have to become more flexible to reflect this reality. The second issue was that states (and provinces) would have to define their authority in child welfare expansively in order to regulate cross-border placements, stretching the limits of their administrative power. States should also bear responsibility for children that might, in some cases, extend beyond the state’s physical borders. The child born in Iowa (or Alberta) and placed in Illinois still deserved the protection and oversight of Iowa (or Alberta) authorities, at least until the new placement was tested and then finalized. Some states, those with child exportation laws in place, had already woven something of this philosophy into their welfare statutes. For many others, this was a new way of thinking about the role of child welfare systems and the relationship between states. This flexible ap-

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proach to cross-border adoption, and to child welfare more broadly, stood in marked contrast to the restricted definition of responsibility and authority at the centre of cross-border discussions at the DEA in Canada.115 Finally, discussions at the USCB conferences emphasized that states must develop cooperative relationships with each other, and recognize cross-border placement as an issue affecting all states (and provinces). Uneven adoption laws across jurisdictions encouraged poorly regulated cross-border placements. Parents in states (or provinces) with weak child welfare systems would seek children in other jurisdictions because they could not get help from reputable adoption agencies in their area. Parents in a jurisdiction with high standards would be tempted to adopt in an area with few restrictions to avoid the long waits and careful inspections that came with a professionally regulated adoption. High standards in one state could thus be undermined by problems and weaknesses elsewhere. The reverse was also true, however. If states (or provinces) with high standards worked patiently to reform states (or provinces) with lower standards, the overall tenor of child welfare services in the less-developed region might be improved, to the benefit of children, parents, and child welfare workers across many jurisdictions. Inter-jurisdictional work could ameliorate problems associated with poorly regulated adoptions, but also have a larger, longer-term educative effect.116 There was wide variation in child welfare and adoption systems across the United States and Canada, but in the ranking of ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ standards at the USCB conferences, Alberta was at the bottom. Indeed, Alberta’s perceived deficiencies sometimes overwhelmed any recognition of differences between provinces. In the 1951 report, which included a section on placements from Alberta, Canada was described as a nation where ‘the social welfare program is not at the point of development at which this country is today, and they do not have the social workers who can provide detailed information on the child [considered for cross-border placement].’117 This description was inaccurate, and it would surely have angered Canadian reformers. Smith at the USCB insisted on changes to many parts of the Salt Lake report before it was distributed, but she left this passage untouched.118 This description of Canadian welfare standards was a striking reversal from the late 1930s, when the USCB’s Hanna observed that despite specific weaknesses in some Canadian jurisdictions (specifically Quebec and Alberta), a greater proportion of Canadian provinces as com-

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pared to US states had advanced adoption laws and good adoption practices.119 A new cross-border scandal further tarnished the Canadian reputation. In May 1948 – just after the second USCB meeting and in the midst of the Alberta royal commission – the Children’s Aid Society in Saint John, New Brunswick, announced that a large, cross-border, baby black market was operating in the city. In the past year, the CAS alleged, over fifty children born to unwed mothers had been ‘sold’ to Jewish parents in New York City, New Jersey, and Delaware for a price in the range of $1500 (see figure 3.2). The newspapers hinted at links to the IMH saga in Nova Scotia. Privately, CAS and government officials named Benjamin Guss, formerly the New Brunswick attorney for the IMH, as mastermind of the Saint John ring.120 The CAS, the CWC, and Premier McNair of New Brunswick had known of Guss’s operation for some time. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had been investigating for over a year, but there was no specific crime with which Guss and his associates could be charged since the ‘selling price’ for children could be described as a high legal fee for arranging the adoption. McNair’s government had recently amended the Child Protection Act to prevent the solicitation of mothers for the adoption of their children. These new rules, designed to stop Guss, were not yet proclaimed.121 The CAS announcement aimed to generate publicity and force provincial action. News articles on the ‘Baby Black Market’ ran across Canada and into the United States. Premier McNair, who was sincere in his desire to stop the black market, immediately proclaimed the new regulations.122 McNair also wanted federal action. His staff could find no record of New Brunswick adoptions for the ‘exported children.’ Indeed, the quick border-crossing adoptions Guss pushed through the New Brunswick courts for the IMH before 1946 were no longer possible under the province’s new Adoption Act. Since the US consular office in Halifax always required a completed adoption before issuing a US immigration visa for infants crossing with adoptive parents, McNair concluded these children were entering the United States illegally – without a legal adoption, a passport, or a visa. It was not clear to McNair or anyone else whether the children were subsequently adopted in the United States. Two months before the black market story broke, McNair wrote to the federal minister for external affairs, Louis St Laurent, accusing US immigration officials of corruption and asking for an investigation.123

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The Alberta Babies-for-Export Scandal  123

Primary Destinations Delaware New Jersey New York

Figure 3.2  The Saint John Black Market, 1947–8 McNair’s query went to the same DEA officials who had investigated passport policy in 1947 and who still did not want to become involved. First, McNair’s accusation could lead to a difficult confrontation with US officials; Canadian diplomats were extremely reluctant to suggest US corruption. Second, McNair’s request for help once again raised

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the issue of federal versus provincial responsibilities. DEA officials recommended the minister insist on provincial responsibility over child welfare and thus deflect McNair’s request for help.124 The differences between child welfare and diplomacy-centred understandings of child welfare were once again evident. Restricting federal involvement was more difficult once the story broke in the media. The New Brunswick scandal plus the ongoing Alberta royal commission hearings increased pressure on both provincial and federal officials to take action. In Toronto’s Globe and Mail, denial and obfuscation from Alberta officials was compared unfavourably with efforts in New Brunswick to amend laws and seek federal aid.125 There were more questions in the House of Commons about federal involvement in cross-border adoption and a demand that the passport office in the DEA document the number of children ‘exported’ from the country. DEA officials were also required to give the House all correspondence they held on cross-border adoptions.126 DEA staffers knew that releasing these documents and answering other detailed questions might ‘prejudice’ the department’s position ‘that these matters do not fall within federal jurisdiction.’127 To determine the number of children leaving in recent years, they surveyed 100,000 passport files. This inquiry revealed 248 passports issued to Canadian-born infants on the application of legal guardians (not adoptive or birth parents) between 1 January 1947 and 31 May 1948. Chance of the DEA assumed that almost all of these were ‘adoption passports.’ He also suspected a large number of passports for young children issued on the application of adoptive or birth parents would fall into this category as well. Since young children travelling with their parents did not require a passport of their own, Chance assumed that passports issued on behalf of children under five on application of their parents ‘were almost certainly adoption cases.’ Counting the parental applications, Chance added another 328 children to the list.128 This brought the total to 676 children across Canada in seventeen months, excluding any children who were taken across the border illegally without passports.129 Breakdowns of these numbers by province (reproduced in tables 3.1 and 3.2) demonstrate that children from every Canadian province were going to the United States to new adoptive homes. These statistics also reveal the changing dynamic of cross-border adoption in Canada. By 1947, after the IMH was officially closed and after changes in the New Brunswick adoption law, there were only eleven applications for pass-

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The Alberta Babies-for-Export Scandal  125 Table 3.1  Canadian passports issued to minor children, on the application of legal guardians (not adoptive or birth parents), January 1947–31 May 1948 Province

1947

January–May 1948

Total

British Columbia

  14

  3

  17

Alberta

  11*

  1

  12

Saskatchewan

   3

  1

   4

Manitoba

   3

  1

   4

Ontario

  42

  8

  50

Quebec

  90

40

130

New Brunswick

  10

  5

  15

Nova Scotia

  11

  0

  11

Prince Edward Island

   5

  0

   5

Total for all provinces

189

59

248

* DEA officials suspected this number was too low, due to a mid-year change in filing procedures. ‘Memorandum for the Secretary of State for External Affairs,’ 22 November 1947, DEA, 3937/9463-40. Source: Adapted from ‘Memorandum for the Secretary of State for External Affairs,’ 15 June 1948, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9).

ports from guardians in Nova Scotia and ten from New Brunswick. In comparison, William Young’s Nova Scotia lawyer noted that he processed fifteen to twenty adoptions per month between 1941 and 1946. There were, however, an additional thirty-three ‘parental’ applications in the two provinces in 1947 (nineteen in Nova Scotia and twenty-four in New Brunswick), a figure that might include adoptions engineered by William and Lila Young after the official closure of the IMH and perhaps some of the placements arranged by Benjamin Guss. In the case of Alberta, ‘guardianship’ applications (submitted by Charles Hill) peaked at sixty-four in 1946. By 1947, this number fell to eleven (plus twentyseven parental applications), with only one guardianship application in the first five months of 1948. Most striking are the numbers on cross-border adoptions from Quebec. In 1947, there were ninety applications for passports by guardians (58 per cent of the national total) from Quebec, plus another forty (68 per cent) from January to May 1948.130 Whitton hoped the Quebec situation would also explode in the me-

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126  The Traffic in Babies Table 3.2  Canadian passports issued to children five years of age and under, on application of adoptive or birth parents, January 1947–31 May 1948 Province

1947

January–May 1948

Total

British Columbia

  41

   8

  49

Alberta

  29

   7

  36

Saskatchewan

   7

   9

  16

Manitoba

   5

   0

   5

Ontario

  50

  30

  93

Quebec

  57

  10

  67

New Brunswick

  24

  18

  42

Nova Scotia

  19

   7

  26

Prince Edward Island

   7

   0

   7

Total for all provinces

239

  89

328

Source: Adapted from ‘Memorandum for the Secretary of State for External Affairs,’ 15 June 1948, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947).

dia, but public and political attention remained focused on New Brunswick and Alberta. From New Brunswick, a frustrated Premier McNair argued that ‘the solution of the problem created by United States couples taking un-adopted children from the province requires the exercise of powers far beyond provincial jurisdiction.’ ‘The matter of emigration to a foreign country,’ he continued, ‘is an international problem,’ hence an area for federal intervention.131 Members of the House of Commons also insisted on the federal responsibility to keep Canadian children in Canada. Parliamentarians picked up Whitton’s nationalist argument that Canada must hold on to its citizens, and urged that the passport system be used more restrictively.132 One member found it ‘somewhat ridiculous that at this time when we are looking for a desirable type of citizen that we should allow our own citizens to be exported from the country.’ Another member noted: ‘While I realize that the adoption of children lies within the jurisdiction of the provinces, I think that if the minister’s department refuses passports, the question can be solved in that way. We need these children here. We have many good Canadian families who want children for adoption. It is a crime to allow these

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children to go to another country where we have no supervision over them.’133 Minister St Laurent responded with the DEA line that adoption was a provincial matter and that his department could not refuse to issue passports to infant children and minors if provincial laws were obeyed. St Laurent argued that Canada was a ‘freedom-loving country,’ in which ‘we endeavour to place as few restrictions on the movements of peoples as possible, provided of course there was no infringement on the rights of others.’ The curious logic here was that the situation of the infant migrant was analogous to that of the adult choosing to emigrate from Canada. Since the infant child was clearly not deciding to leave, St Laurent was effectively prioritizing the decisions of US adoptive parents, guardians, or adoption brokers (exerting a Canadian freedom) to remove the child from Canada over any right the child might have to a Canadian heritage and upbringing. At the same time, the minister was sympathetic to provincial governments that wanted to control the flow of babies. He told the House that his department was working with the provinces to protect children. ‘I think,’ St Laurent told the House, ‘that with the wholehearted desire that exists between the provincial administration and the Department of External Affairs to deal with this problem of the adoption of children in as careful a manner as possible, we shall not be too much concerned with the niceties of jurisdiction.’134 Of course, the debate over how to regulate cross-border adoption was all about ‘the niceties of jurisdiction.’ The second half of St Laurent’s statement seemed to undermine the position developed in his department, where officials had gone to great lengths to assert jurisdictional boundaries and resist responsibility for the welfare of children. ‘In light of Mr St Laurent’s statement in the House,’ at least one senior DEA officer felt the department should now consider ‘alternative methods’ for dealing with the problem. H.H. Wright suggested several options, including restricting passports and working more closely with the provinces. His preferred solution was that the department would only issue passports (separate from those of parents) for children with the explicit approval of provincial secretaries of welfare. Wright of the DEA could help regulate the adoptions ‘by the careful exercise of administrative discretion in close co-operation with the provinces.’ Despite St Laurent’s comment, Wright’s colleagues resisted this move. The DEA’s Chance insisted on the ‘essential principle’ that ‘this is a Provincial matter … Unfortunately for all concerned, this matter tends to be dealt with emotionally – we must keep it on a calm base.’135

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There was one alteration in DEA policy in the spring of 1948. Just as public interest peaked, DEA officials discovered a ‘loophole’ in the new passport regulations from 1947. As George Davidson of Health and Welfare had predicted, once federal officials enforced the rule requiring the passport application to be signed by a parent or legal guardian, adoption providers had birth mothers of infants sign the passport applications before relinquishing their children. With evidence of this practice in hand, senior DEA officials recommended that passport officers issue ‘no passport to any child under five years of age if there is the slightest suspicion that the child is being removed from Canada under guardianship arrangements [leaving the country with someone other than the legal parents] until the Department has received assurances that the appropriate provincial requirements have been met.’136 This was a recommendation versus a formal change in the passport regulations and the relevant ‘provincial requirements’ (guardianship? child welfare? adoption?) were not defined. As well, this new policy would have no effect if the adoption was already complete at the time of the passport application. Still, there was a lot of room in this policy for passport officers to exercise the ‘administrative discretion’ Wright had recommended, and hence for the DEA to work cooperatively with provincial authorities.137 This remained something less than an agreement to use federal power over passports to erect new barriers and prevent adoption brokers from exploiting loopholes in provincial laws. Much depended on how passport officials chose to define a suspicious application and how willing they were to reach out and work with provincial officials. Inside the DEA, there was an ongoing debate on ‘whether an extensive or restricted interpretation should be given’ to Minister St Laurent’s statements in the House and hence whether the department should use its discretion extensively or restrictively.138 In 1949, a new minister of external affairs, Lester B. Pearson, was questioned on federal support for New Brunswick’s McNair and on the federal position on baby exports from Alberta. Pearson described a DEA policy of consultation with the provinces ‘whenever there appears reason to question the propriety of issuing a passport on behalf of a child who is leaving the country under guardianship arrangements,’ thus referencing the 1948 changes.139 This comment was interpreted in the press as the minister guaranteeing that federal officials would work with the provinces to ensure that ‘illegal traffic in babies is not involved.’140 A surprised Premier McNair asked for clarification; he was unable to ‘learn of a single instance in recent years when any provin-

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cial authority in New Brunswick has been consulted with reference to the issuance of a passport to a baby.’ Pearson’s replied that ‘since the adoption of the practise referred to in my statement, there has been no case from New Brunswick in which there appeared to be any reason to question the propriety of issuance of a passport.’ Given recent New Brunswick history, Pearson’s explanation seemed more like an admission of weak oversight at the DEA.141 Conclusion Inside Alberta, little changed as a result of the Whitton inquiry and associated public debate. By 1951, Larson of Utah was complaining that after a short period during which Alberta officials cooperated with his office, the province was placing children in his state ‘in violation of this agreement.’ More complaints – from Missouri, Kansas, Texas, Minnesota – followed in the mid-1950s. When questioned by USCB officials, CWC staffers could only explain that Alberta authorities still refused to implement the recommendations of the Howson royal commission and remained highly suspicious of ‘interference’ from outside the province.142 Cross-border placements remained an integral part of Alberta child welfare policy well into the 1960s.143 For the long-term significance of Whitton’s fight in and with the Alberta government we have to look broadly at questions of strategy and process in transborder reform, and at developments outside the province of Alberta. Whitton drew on her international reputation in child welfare and on her well-established personal and professional contacts in the United States to build her case against Alberta adoption practices and for improvements in adoption services across state and provincial lines. She used many of the same strategies – funnelling information through a transnational network, using resources on one side of the border to leverage reform or access information on the other side of the border, developing lobbying networks – that she employed in her cross-border work in the 1930s and that Nora Lea and Maud Morlock used in their IMH campaign in the mid-1940s. There were, however, significant limitations in the networks and alliances Whitton assembled in 1947–8. Although she was often treated like an insider, Whitton was no longer the representative of the CWC or any other major Canadian welfare body. She could not tie her personal and professional contacts to an institutional base. And Whitton’s ties to the Children’s Bureau were less immediate, by the late 1940s, than they

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were in the 1930s, when she and Lenroot worked together as leaders of the two organizations. The highly controversial and sensationalized aspects of Whitton’s Alberta fight – particularly the libel charge and trial – also tested the limits of Whitton’s US connections. The model of transnational cooperation pioneered by Whitton and extended by Morlock and Lea was one where informal and personalized lobbying would (ideally) be translated into more formalized changes in child welfare systems and practices. New laws and practices would link jurisdictions together and close the loopholes that allowed children to slip unnoticed across borders. This model assumed that child welfare officials in the various jurisdictions were at least sympathetic to the cause, that they recognized the need to extend professional supervision in adoption. Alberta’s opposition to reform underlined the importance of combining informal, cooperative approaches to cross-border adoption with some form of interstate, interprovincial, and transnational policing of adoption transfers. This kind of policing could be done through broadly recognized interstate/interprovincial placement agreements or through the exercise of federal regulatory power. There was a common goal in these two approaches: connecting governments and jurisdictions to each other around the presumably shared goal of protecting children and parents in adoptive placements. The two approaches had very different implications, however. Interstate or interprovincial agreements, like those contemplated at the USCB meetings on interstate and international adoption, could be seen as an extension of more informal models of communication and cooperation between Canadian and American reformers and between states and provinces. This kind of collaboration depended (perhaps too much?) on personalized connections between key reformers, and it was very difficult to coordinate welfare practice, let alone welfare legislation, across multiple jurisdictions. Furthermore, it was impossible to force recalcitrant or disinterested welfare administrations to join in such a collective endeavour. If the centralized Canadian passport system were used to control placements across borders, it would be easier for state/provincial welfare workers to track the movement of children and harder for a renegade administration, like Alberta, to bypass the child protection systems in place in other jurisdictions. A more formalized system would rely less on the good or bad relationships between governments and individuals on different sides of the border. While DEA officials moved slowly in this direction, they still insisted at the policy level and

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in advice to their minister that the cross-border movement of children was not their responsibility. Taking increased responsibility for children leaving Canada for another country was foreign to their world view and sense of priorities. DEA officials did understand the bad publicity and political pressure, however. The memory of the ‘unwelcome notoriety and publicity’ stayed in the DEA, and influenced the department’s response after 1948 and again in 1953–4, when a new cross-border scandal came to the fore.144 Although the Alberta Babies-for-Export scandal had wide resonance, Whitton’s choices and those of the Alberta administration personalized this story and placed her at the centre of a personal and professional drama. Events in Alberta left Whitton with disappointment and pain; there would be no sweeping reforms in the province to assuage her guilt and regret about leaving Margaret Grier to die alone in Ottawa. There was some limited vindication, at least in the public eye; the royal commission and libel proceedings called forth sympathy and public support for Whitton as the champion of high standards in Canadian social welfare. There was professional opportunity; as the Alberta investigation wound down, Whitton established herself as a crusader on the issue of cross-border adoption. In the spring of 1948, Whitton told US contacts that she would like to visit US social welfare conferences to discuss cross-border adoption and she eventually made a limited trip.145 In the end, she used her renewed public visibility to launch a second career in politics. As the long-serving mayor of Ottawa in the 1950s and 1960s, she became the first Canadian woman to lead a major metropolitan area.146 Whitton did not, however, forget her ties to social welfare or her friends in the transnational child welfare community. Nor did they forget her. In 1951, Whitton was considered for a social welfare position at the United Nations. Katharine Lenroot wrote her friend a letter of recommendation. ‘I have known Miss Whitton very well indeed for many years and consider her one of my best friends. We worked together at the old League of Nations in Geneva. She did outstanding work as head of the Canadian Welfare Council, and later made a great contribution to social work in very courageous studies of child welfare practices, particularly in Alberta.’147

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4 Cross-Border Placements for Catholic Children from Quebec, 1945–1960

The CWC’s Nora Lea was frequently struck by ‘the general impression in the US that there is a superfluity of [white, healthy] adoptable children in Canada.’1 The situation in Canada, she insisted, was very similar to that in the United States. ‘We [Canadians] have fewer suitable children for adoption than there are approved homes and the wellestablished and properly-functioning adoption agencies … have long waiting lists.’2 There was one very significant exception to this generalization. In Roman Catholic and French-speaking Quebec, thousands of infant children born to Catholic unwed mothers and available for adoption were cared for in large institutions run by the powerful Catholic church. ‘In the province of Quebec,’ Lea noted, ‘the number of children for adoption far exceed the homes offered.’3 Canadian and American child reformers worked hard to shut down the IMH, and they strongly opposed border-crossing placements from Alberta. The case of Catholic adoption agencies placing from Quebec into the United States in the 1940s and 1950s was different. Here, reformers had to balance their general opposition to distance placements – and their specific dislike of the unprofessional placement practices of the Quebec agencies – against an equally strong dislike of institutional care for children. If children in the care of the Church in Quebec were to find adoptive homes, some border-crossing placements would be necessary. Child welfare leaders at the CWC and the USCB decided to temporarily support cross-border placements from Quebec, while urging the Catholic agencies to work closely with US child welfare officials and develop better placement practices. This approach helped reformers meet two important objectives: securing non-institutional homes for children, and encouraging Catholic adoptive parents to work with pro-

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fessional agencies in their home states. It was also a pragmatic choice. Given the supply of children in Quebec and the demand for these children on the other side of the border, the movement of Quebec children to US families was not going to stop.4 Indeed, apart from the children placed in the United States by the Catholic agencies, there was also a thriving black market in babies (over which the reformers had no control) moving children across the border.5 The narrative core of this chapter is the transfer of ‘surplus’ Catholic infants from Quebec to Catholic homes in the United States. This story is thoroughly conditioned by the dominance of the Catholic church in mid-century Quebec, by the religious identity of birth mothers, children, and adoptive parents, by laws mandating or preferring religious matching in adoption, and by the commitment of adoption professionals to religious matching. Tracing the US placement activities of Church-sanctioned adoption agencies takes us back, again, to informal connections and collaborative strategies pursued by child welfare leaders at the CWC and the USCB. By the later 1940s, however, the ties connecting the USCB and the CWC were weaker. The tenor of Canadian-American collaboration changed, and on each side of the border the national leaders developed separate strategies to combat the crossborder traffic. Cooperation between the Canadians and Americans became both more difficult and less effective with the absence of personal ties in the transborder networks. Still, as the Canadians and Americans worked separately they also built on the earlier collaborative work and made some significant progress towards national adoption standards and better-regulated cross-border flows. ‘An Over-Balance of French-Canadian Babies’ Informal child adoptions were part of settler society in Quebec from the founding of New France, but the province did not pass its first adoption law until 1924. The new Quebec law, modified substantially in 1925, required that the adopted child be placed in a family of the same religious faith. Superior Court judges were empowered to grant final adoption decrees after a probationary placement of one to two years, which could be reduced in some cases to six months. The judge was required to ‘make a thorough inquiry into the moral qualities of the proposed adopting parents,’ but the legislation did not specify the form of that inquiry nor did it require that the new family be visited during the probationary period.6 By the 1920s, some states and provinces had

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laws mandating that social workers or state officials investigate adoptions, but this was the exception. Thus, the Quebec adoption law was roughly similar to legislation elsewhere.7 The Quebec law stood out in that it differentiated between children born to married parents and children born out-of-wedlock. Almost all ‘illegitimate’ children were eligible for adoption, but after the 1925 amendments to the adoption law the only ‘legitimate’ children who could be adopted were those whose parents were deceased. This provision was rooted in the Catholic church’s insistence on the divinely ordained rights and obligations of fathers towards their offspring, rights and obligations that could not be severed.8 The special categories of ‘legitimate’ children who could be adopted in Quebec were expanded during the 1930s and 1940s, but the basic distinction remained in Quebec law until 1969. The result was that the potential pool of adoptable children in Quebec was more restricted than in other provinces.9 How, then, can we explain what Lea described as the ‘over-balance of French-Canadian babies’ needing adoptive placements?10 In 1941, out-of-wedlock births in Quebec numbered 3.0 per 100 live births, as compared to 4.7 per 100 in Ontario and an average of 4.3 per 100 in the remaining provinces. In absolute numbers, 2646 children were born to unwed mothers in Quebec in 1941, as against 3384 in Ontario and 10,101 for the country as a whole. Between 1934 and 1943, 26,014 children were born to unwed mothers in Quebec, compared to 30,752 children in Ontario. In Ontario, however, this number of out-of-wedlock births was accompanied by a recognized ‘shortage’ (in the most desired categories) of adoptable children.11 The key issue was not how many children were born in Quebec, but what happened to them. Were they retained by birth parents? Placed in institutions? Surrendered for adoption? Were there enough willing and qualified families to adopt surrendered children? The answers to these questions were all linked to the powerful influence of the Catholic church, which Andrée Lévesque has described as the ‘primary normative agency … omnipresent in every sector of society’ in Quebec in this period.12 Over 85 per cent of Québécois were Roman Catholic (2,458,285 Catholics out of a total population of 2,874,255 in 1931), and thus the vast majority of children born out-of-wedlock in the province were born to Catholic mothers.13 Under Quebec law, and under child welfare law and practice in most North American jurisdictions, these children could only be placed in Catholic homes. Catholic child welfare offi-

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cials in Quebec and professional social workers inside and outside of the province disagreed on many points, but they agreed on the need for religious matching in adoptive placements. One effect of religious matching policies and laws was to create a segregated adoption ‘market’ with distinct shortages and surpluses of children from various religious faiths.14 In the 1940s and 1950s, a ‘surplus’ of Catholic children in Quebec was matched by a ‘shortage’ in many parts of the United States and in specific locales elsewhere in Canada.15 The Church’s harsh condemnation of sexual relations outside of marriage made it very difficult for women in Quebec to keep the children they bore out-of-wedlock. In the interwar period, only one in eight women giving birth at the Catholic Hôpital de la Miséricorde in Montreal kept their children. As late as 1952, one study of maternity homes in the province reported a relinquishment rate of 85 per cent.16 Nora Lea argued that the typically large size of French Canadian families (a demographic shaped by Church doctrine banning contraception and linking family size to the survival of the French-Catholic nation in Quebec) meant that ‘French-Canadian homes for the most part are wellsupplied with children born to their natural parents and there is not the same urgency to adopt as there is in some of the other provinces where families are small.’ Lea was indulging in a stereotype here, but the reality was that there were more Catholic children on offer in the province than there were families willing and able to take them in.17 Lea and her colleagues often blamed the ‘surplus’ in Quebec on the backward state of child welfare services in the province.18 Child welfare leaders measured child welfare systems by the quality (read, professional training) of child welfare workers and by the regulatory structure provided in legislation. By both of these measures, the Church-dominated child welfare system in Quebec was seriously deficient. Until 1957, there was no provincial department or office clearly responsible for child welfare concerns. There was no Quebec equivalent to the director of child welfare responsible for child welfare developments in other provinces. The province did not enact its first consolidated Children’s Protection Act until 1977. In most provinces, this was the legislation that established provincial authority in child welfare, set up juvenile courts, established procedures for the termination of parental rights, set standards for childcaring institutions, and regulated the Children’s Aid Societies that were the backbone of local child welfare work across most of the country.19 Every other province, with the exception of New Brunswick, had a

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Children’s Protection Act in place by 1930. By the 1940s, Quebec and Alberta were the only provinces that did not have a system of Children’s Aid Societies empowered to act as guardians for children removed from the care of their parents. In Quebec, the care of children outside of their own homes was entirely in the hands of private agencies that were chartered by the province and received minimal provincial funding. These agencies were almost exclusively sectarian, with the vast majority run by the Catholic church and staffed by members of religious orders.20 One study from the early 1930s listed thirty-nine religious orders with 5261 members devoted to social service in 145 locations across the province.21 In 1933, one English, Protestant social welfare leader in Montreal argued that ‘the Province of Quebec is among the Provinces with the lowest standards [in childcare] and one might even say without exaggeration, no modern acceptable standards at all.’ This was how most professional social workers across Canada viewed the situation in Quebec, but there was some exaggeration (and not a little anti-French, antiCatholic sentiment) in the statement.22 Beginning in the 1930s, CWC staff recognized pockets of what they called ‘professional’ service in Quebec (most frequently credited to non-Catholic and English-speaking social agencies), and noted the emergence of potential professional allies in the government and in French-speaking social work in the province. By the mid-1940s, there were two professional schools of social work in the province at the Université de Montréal and at McGill University, and the Université Laval was emerging as a site of progressive social thought. Slowly, graduates of these programs were making their way into the province’s social agencies.23 There were some voices within the Catholic church calling for increased state responsibility in social welfare. The dominant message from the Church hierarchy, however, was that any expansion of state responsibilities in social welfare would come at the expense of Church authority and thus would constitute an attack on the socio-religious core of Quebec society. Provincial royal commissions in 1932 and 1944 recommended a new child welfare structure on the model used elsewhere in Canada, but these studies were met with stiff opposition and only minor changes were enacted.24 The Church’s response to the problem of neglected and dependent children was to maintain large childcaring institutions.25 Elsewhere in North America such institutions had fallen out of favour early in the twentieth century. Social workers argued it was much better for

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the physical, intellectual, and moral development of children that they be raised in a family-like atmosphere. Some children with specialized needs (for example, juvenile delinquents or the physically and intellectually disabled) would still need institutional care, but the trend in professional child welfare circles was definitely away from the institution and towards foster care.26 Well into the 1950s, Catholic leaders in Quebec resisted this trend strenuously. Indeed, the Church’s opposition to increased state authority in social welfare was tied to its defence of institutional care. The argument was that an expanded state would interfere with the institutions and force the placement of children in foster care. The great virtue of the institution over the foster family lay in the commitment of religious workers to protect and nurture the child’s Catholic soul; apart from the natal family, the institution was the best place to succor the next Catholic generation.27 By the late 1930s, there were more children in institutional care in Quebec than in the rest of the country combined. By 1945, there were eighty-six childcare institutions in the province (not counting specialized institutions for intellectually disabled children) that cared for more than 21,000 children. Eighty-two such institutions were run by the Catholic church, including fifteen of sixteen crèches and infant schools caring for 7730 infants and children under the age of six. The largest and oldest, La Crèche d’Youville, cared for 1240 children under the age of three in 1945. La Crèche de la Miséricorde, which received children born to unwed mothers at Montreal’s Miséricorde hospital, cared for 1030 children. With the Church advocating strongly for institutional care for children, it is hardly surprising that in difficult times unwed mothers and other parents in crisis left their children in Church care.28 Despite the overall defence of institutional care, by the 1920s Church leaders were advocating permanent adoptive placements for the children of unwed mothers and for children whose parents were deceased with no other relative available to care for them. This group constituted approximately 12 per cent of children under the care of the Church.29 Historians Goubau and O’Neill argue that the religious hierarchy of the Church pushed hard for the 1924 Quebec adoption law so they could secure legal adoptions for this group.30 Beginning in the 1920s, Les Soeurs Grises at La Crèche d’Youville opened a placement bureau to locate homes for their charges. Earlier in the century, the infant mortality rate at the crèche was an astounding 82 per cent. By 1932, this rate had been reduced to 8.1 per cent and the Sisters simply could not care for all

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the children who were left in their care.31 The Depression of the 1930s led to overcrowding at all infant-care facilities in Montreal. And despite the significant improvements, there remained serious concerns about the rates of child mortality in the crèches. In response, Catholic officials working with financial support from the city of Montreal and the provincial government founded La Societé d’Adoption et de Protection de l’Enfance (SAPE) in 1937. According to its provincial charter, the ‘chief purpose’ of SAPE was ‘the highly social work of adoption and child protection in every respect,’ a task that included an effort ‘to clear the crèches through child placing and adoption.’32 The first leader of SAPE, Father Leandre LaCombe, reported some opposition from clerics who feared empty childcaring institutions, but the agency was publicly popular and expanded rapidly.33 SAPE placed 165 children in 1937, but 1271 in 1942.34 By way of comparision, there were 2048 adoptions across the entire province of Ontario in 1947. SAPE – on its own – accounted for a very significant percentage of all adoptive placements in Canada in the 1940s.35 In the early 1940s, the SAPE model was exported to other Quebec cities: La Société de Réhabilitation, Inc. was founded in Sherbrooke in 1943, La Sauvegarde de l’Enfance in Quebec City in 1943, L’Assistance à l’Enfant sans Soutien in Trois-Rivières in 1945. According to the Abbé Charles Bourgeois, general director of L’Assistance à l’Enfant sans Soutien, the Catholic agencies collectively placed an impressive 5535 children between 1943 and 1945.36 By the late 1940s, there were more adoptions each year in Quebec than in any other province.37 To sustain this level of placement, the Catholic agencies in Quebec used parish priests and the media to recruit Catholic homes of high religious standard.38 They needed homes inside the province, in other parts of Canada, and in the United States. The Catholic agencies described their placement practices as modern and up-to-date, but American and Canadian adoption reformers had a more critical assessment.39 In the early days of SAPE, when there was a tremendous pressure to open space in the crèches, the CWC claimed that the SAPE practice ‘was for a staff member to be put on a train with a certain number of babies. She would stop at some village and be met by some local authority, usually the parish priest, and the babies turned over to him to make whatever disposal locally he saw fit.’ By 1945 the situation was better, but the CWC’s Lea still worried that SAPE relied too much on references provided by parish priests, did not match specific children to specific homes, did not supervise probation-

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ary homes outside Montreal, did not investigate the birth mother, and did not cooperate with agencies in the placement jurisdiction.40 CWC officials nonetheless regarded SAPE as the best of the Catholic agencies, and they appreciated that SAPE and the other agencies were moving children out of the institutions and into adoptive homes. What could the CWC and its partners do to improve the situation? The CWC could not exploit an existing regulatory structure or work with allies in the provincial government. To make matters more complicated, the CWC’s influence in the province was limited by its reputation as the voice of secular (or at best, Protestant) social work and of an English culture in opposition to the Catholicism of French Quebec.41 In Quebec, the best option – perhaps the only option – for child welfare reformers was to support the Catholic agencies, gently push them towards better practices, and for some indeterminate time accept bordercrossing adoptive placements for Catholic children. Avoiding ‘Placement by Mail Order’ Catholic agencies from Quebec placed children in at least eighteen states and territories during the 1940s and 1950s (see figure 4.1). Between January 1947 and May 1948, the Canadian passport office identified up to 197 passports issued to children under five years of age likely on their way to adoptive placements in the United States. The passports were considered a proxy for the number of children adopted by American parents, since the passport was required before a US immigration visa could be secured for an adopted child (see tables 3.1, 3.2).42 In 1947, Rhode Island officials identified twenty-nine placements from Quebec in the preceding twelve months; one SAPE worker estimated her agency alone placed a total of 125 children in the United States over the same period. Between 1951 and 1953, the US consul in Quebec City (another consul operated from Montreal) issued 127 US immigration visas for Quebec children adopted by US parents. In 1951, Indiana child welfare workers assisted in thirty placements from La Sauvegarde de l’Enfance (SE). In the first half of 1954, thirty-four children from SAPE and SE were placed in Ohio.43 The flow of children was steady and substantial. US child welfare workers regarded the Quebec adoptions with some interest; they had long lists of well-qualified Catholic families searching for children.44 At the same, US workers were upset when the Quebec agencies bypassed state officials or ignored professional procedures.45

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Primary Destinations



Indiana New York Ohio Rhode Island

Secondary Destinations California Massachusetts New Jersey

Connecticut Michigan Iowa Missouri Maine Nebraska

Utah New Mexico Wisconsin Pennsylvania Puerto Rico

Figure 4.1  Adoptions Originating from Quebec

The first US complaints came from Rhode Island in 1940–1. Rhode Island was attractive to the Quebec agencies because the state had a substantial French-Catholic minority. In 1945, Rhode Island’s director of child welfare, Lawrence Cole, shared with the USCB his concern that ‘due to our inadequate supply … some Rhode Island families, particularly of French extraction, have been going to Canada to secure children without the usual safeguards.’ Some of these adoptions were finalized within twenty-four hours, contrary to accepted professional practice and in violation of the Quebec Adoption Act.46 In 1946, Cole reported a case where parents who adopted in Quebec sought approval to readopt the child in Rhode Island. Cole was stunned when he asked for social information on the child, but was told by SAPE that it was ‘quite dif-

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ficult for us to give you any information concerning the preceding of the child, due to the fact that she was born out-of-wedlock and those details being quite confidential.’ For Cole, this information was the absolute bedrock of professional adoption planning.47 Lea was not surprised by this lapse, but she was also encouraged when, in mid-1946, a new director took over at SAPE. Father Paul Contant was a complete newcomer to social welfare, but seemed willing to work with other agencies and adopt more professional standards.48 SAPE started telling families they must have their homes approved by Rhode Island child welfare officials before placements were made. For state officials, this raised new questions. Director of Child Welfare Cole questioned whether his overloaded staff should prepare the home study, when they could not expect background information on the child under consideration for a family. Cole knew that participating in SAPE placements might ‘be of help in raising standards’ in Quebec, but he worried that he would still end up encouraging substandard placements.49 In the coming months and years, the USCB, and sometimes the CWC directly, received similar reports and questions from many states. What did the USCB or CWC know about the Quebec agencies? Should state agencies collaborate, commit their resources, and implicitly sanction the Quebec placements? What prospects did the USCB see for a significant improvement in the placement practices of SAPE and the other Quebec agencies? Would it be better for the states to walk away, to give up on Quebec as a ‘source’ of Catholic babies, rather than participate in placements that did not meet their usual standards?50 USCB adoption consultant Evelyn Smith replied to Cole’s initial inquiry about sanctioning imperfect methods. Her letter became the USCB template for all inquiries about Quebec, and eventually for most requests for information about cross-border placements from Canada. Smith sympathized with Cole’s concerns about allocating staff resources, but ultimately advised him to work with the Quebec agencies. CWC officials were encouraging SAPE and other agencies to work with state officials, but this strategy required reciprocal cooperation from US jurisdictions. Smith counselled patience; repeated requests from US agencies for social histories of the children would slowly lead to a more satisfactory practice. In other words, steady pressure from both Canadian and American sources would, finally, lead to more adequate standards at the Canadian agencies.51 Thus far, Smith’s argument rested on the goodwill of US officials and on their commitment to a larger, transnational, project of adop-

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tion reform. But Smith also provided more immediate, self-interested arguments. She argued that since child importation laws already gave states ‘certain responsibilities’ for the welfare of children from other states, state officials could think of service to the Canadian agencies as an extension of this work. She also hinted that if states refused to conduct home studies for Canadian placements, their citizens would turn to ‘independent sources’ for children.52 Later, another USCB colleague pushed further, arguing that ‘if agencies do not find a way to provide service to prospective adoptive parents … there is a real danger that the latter may be forced to resort to so-called Black-market practices.’53 Smith wrote her response without consulting the CWC, although the document included approaches developed in earlier joint USCBCWC work. Smith portrayed cross-border adoption as a joint Canadian-American problem and positioned US child welfare workers as crucial partners in any solution. She identified defects on both sides of the border, and asked social workers and government agents at all levels (state/provincial and federal) to think expansively about their responsibilities to children and parents inside and outside their physical borders. Smith also identified some new issues. Her approach took for granted that children would move across borders, including international borders. Smith urged child welfare workers to accept this reality and to see possibilities for service to their citizens in well-orchestrated border crossings. She linked the Canadian problem to domestic critiques of social work practice in the United States and to the increasingly visible black market there. She compared international (Canada-to-US) adoptions to interstate child transfers. Elsewhere, Smith specifically linked Canada-to-US problems to USCB concerns about interstate placement practices from two notorious US agencies, the Juvenile Court in Kansas City and the Cradle Society in Illinois.54 On each of these points, Smith’s comments foreshadowed the USCB conferences on interstate and international adoption discussed in chapter 3. Lea approved of Smith’s template, but there were emerging differences in Canadian and American responses.55 Lea and her colleagues encouraged US officials to work with the Quebec agencies and openly linked US cooperation to improved standards in Canada.56 Still, Lea and other Canadians were less comfortable than Smith with the longterm inevitability of cross-border placements. While Smith encouraged state officials to view well-managed Canadian placements as a resource for US citizens, the Canadians hoped improved standards would mean

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the end of cross-border placements. Lea’s generalized Canadian nationalism came out when she expressed her belief that ‘these are Canadian Children and if suitable Canadian homes are available for them, it is our feeling from the social as well as the national point of view that they should be permitted to remain and grow up in the country of their birth and heritage.’57 It is not clear whether the Canadians thought that adoption reforms would eliminate the need for bordercrossing placements from Quebec – after all, the demographic realities of the province would not be altered – but certainly they hoped the numbers could be diminished as the quality of the placement work improved.58 US agencies were not always willing to tread the path of patient indulgence and slow reform laid out by the CWC and the USCB. In the fall of 1946, Father Contant contacted departments of social welfare in states where he had adoptive applicants. Connecticut expressed interest in cooperation, but set expectations for background checks on children that were difficult for SAPE to meet. Massachusetts wanted SAPE to post financial bonds against disrupted placements. Maine officials had their own ‘surplus’ of French Catholic children in areas close to the Quebec border, and preferred to serve the state’s Catholic families themselves. New York, where Contant had at least five adoptions pending, absolutely refused to arrange home studies for SAPE. The New York Department of Social Welfare did not provide direct service to any out-of-state agency, and New York law stipulated that only social agencies licensed by the state could legally place children for adoption in the state. Since SAPE children were adopted in Quebec (not New York) the Canadian adoptions were technically legal, but state officials disliked the practice and would not participate in it.59 Contant was frustrated. He had tried to work with US officials, only to be met with rebuffs and what seemed to him unnecessary red tape. In an ironic twist, he accused the American agencies of lacking ‘a true social sense’ in their adoption policy, thus reversing the critiques of professional social workers who understood a ‘social’ approach to adoption in much different terms. Contant emphasized that his US adoptive families were ‘highly recommended by the parish priests’ and that the American consulate in Montreal, which he considered the ‘the official representative of the interested government’ (the US federal government) had no problem approving US immigration visas for the children placed through his agency. He refused to accept that state agencies could stand in the way of plans approved by the federal government.

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Again ironically, Contant pointed directly to another of the frustrations dogging adoption reformers; while the US consulates resisted an explicit regulatory role in cross-border adoptions, they became a part of the legitimating mechanism for questionable placements when they issued visas.60 CWC leaders worried the little progress they had made with Contant’s SAPE would be lost. As Lea noted to the USCB’s Smith, If the [US] agencies are not able to collaborate in this way, it will mean that this French Adoption Agency will be thrown right back into its ‘Placement by Mail Order’ … We have for so long held up the American agencies as a model … and, consequently, feel a considerable amount of concern over the fact that when a situation such as this arises, hitherto rather reactionary and ill-equipped agencies find themselves confirmed in their original pattern from which we have been trying to dislodge them.61

Lea’s frustration shows in her choice of words; the Canadian agencies are ‘reactionary and ill-equipped’ as against ‘model’ American agencies. The implicit hierarchy in American versus Canadian standards is a construction Lea went out of her way to avoid most of the time. In other correspondence from the same day, Lea argued: ‘I have come to the conclusion that the situation in this country [Canada] is somewhat similar to that in the United States in that, as far as procedure is concerned, there are good states and less good states, good private agencies and not so good institutions.’62 The best explanation for Lea’s change of stance is her desire to make Smith appreciate the seriousness of the SAPE situation. The tactic worked, perhaps because Lea’s American-Canadian hierarchy (as expressed in this one letter) matched Smith’s developing understanding of the situation. Later, Smith borrowed phrases and images from Lea, explaining to state officials that they had a duty to prevent poor Canadian agencies from slipping back into old patterns. Smith also reused Lea’s reference to ‘placement by mail order,’ a phrase that neatly encapsulated the dangers of not cooperating with the Canadians.63 Smith also convened a meeting of child welfare directors from northeastern states. The directors made it very clear that ‘the agencies in the United States do not want these placements made across the border,’ although some states (Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island) said they would work with the Canadians if these placements could not be avoided. The three largest states – New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania – absolutely refused to participate. Ellen Potter

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of New Jersey, just through the IMH scandal, argued that her state ‘did not want placements to be made if they could prevent them.’ Above all, the US states were upset that they would have no role matching children with specific families in any placements from Quebec.64 This US reaction did not bode well for cross-border cooperation. Nonetheless, Lea sent minutes of this meeting to Canadian departments and agencies so they could ‘see firsthand the statement about the undesirability of placing children across the border.’65 Meanwhile, the CWC and USCB pressured Cole of Rhode Island to work with SAPE.66 In early 1947, Lea asked Cole to detail the information on the child and the birth parents that he (as representative of US professional practices) wanted before a placement from Quebec. This was a tactic used earlier by other reformers: using the authority/expertise/reputation of US social agencies to back up recommendations for better practices issued by the CWC. CWC staff expanded the outline Cole provided, and then distributed it nationally in Canada as an example of ‘careful adoption practice.’ Thus, the Quebec campaign was connected to a larger project to improve adoption practice.67 In spring 1947, Cole and Contant agreed to an adoption process in which Rhode Island authorities would complete a home study of the adoptive family and would be provided with a social history of the child before placement. The child would enter the United States as a ‘visitor’ for six months. Pending a positive report from Rhode Island, the adoption would be finalized in a Quebec court after six months.68 This was progress, but serious problems remained. Cole was very dissatisfied with the quality of the social histories he received.’69 Other states had similar complaints about social histories provided by SAPE or other Quebec agencies. A placement agreement between SAPE and Wisconsin authorities fell apart because the US officials found SAPE social histories unacceptable.70 Part of the problem was the absence of professionally trained staff in the Quebec agencies that could interview relinquishing mothers. Institutional care before placement meant that some information – such as data on the child’s development in foster care – was simply not available. The traditions of the Church, and the legal status of the ‘illegitimate’ child as the ‘child of no one’ under Quebec law were also barriers. Church officials were extremely reluctant to conduct investigations that might expose a woman’s pregnancy to a wider community or reveal details of the child’s parentage. Contant informed Wisconsin officials that ‘as to the putative father’s name … we never divulge his name. Even the court, for the legal adoption of the child, do not [sic] oblige us

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to do so.’71 CWC officials continually pressed Contant to strengthen the histories, but progress was slow.72 By late 1947, Cole was complaining to both the CWC and the USCB that an increase in SAPE placements was putting too much pressure on his resources. Cole was further upset that both La Sauvegarde de l’Enfance (SE) from Quebec City and the Trois-Rivières-based L’Assistance à l’Enfant sans Soutien had started placing in his state without contacting his office. Compared to these two, SAPE practices looked relatively good.73 At the same time, Cole and other state representatives discovered that provincial child welfare officials in both New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were placing children in the United States. In the New Brunswick case, the provincial superintendent of child welfare (operating with new authority under the province’s 1947 Adoption Act) was easily convinced to stop cross-border placements and turn away American adoptive parents. PEI officials, however, could not be convinced that US agencies had any say in adoptions completed under PEI law.74 Cole complained, as well, that parents adopting from Quebec treated the Rhode Island role in their adoptions as a minor formality or an exercise in inefficient ‘red tape.’ Cole blamed SAPE and other Quebec agencies, claiming the agencies would promise a child to the parents before working through the agreed process. The parents, quite understandably, considered the placement a fait accompli. Cole was particularly annoyed when his office was subject to interference and pressure from local elected officials and even from the governor, acting on behalf of the parents.75 Later, state officials from Indiana and Ohio complained of similar situations where parents adopting in Quebec expected to ‘jump the queue’ in adoption services. State officials found this unfair to parents adopting domestically. Ohio’s supervisor of child welfare services complained that SE workers told parents to pressure state child welfare workers.76 By early 1949, Cole’s patience was exhausted and he asked Contant to stop placing babies in his state.77 From Quebec, an angry Contant replied that he would no longer make placements in any US state.78 For Cole, this ‘settled’ the whole matter of Canadian adoptions, and he turned to neighbouring states to set up a carefully monitored adoption exchange to place ‘surplus’ Catholic babies. More realistically, USCB and CWC officials doubted that this really was the end of the problem, since families in Rhode Island and other states were well aware of the availability of babies in Quebec.79

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SAPE did not stay out of the United States for long, but when it returned its procedures seemed much closer to professional standards. In 1952, Sister Suzanne Collette, a professionally trained social worker who had joined Contant’s staff, reported to the CWC’s national adoption committee that SAPE had a ‘limited program of international placement’ and had agreements in place with four north-eastern states. The SAPE list included New Jersey, a strong sign that placement standards had improved substantially. A year later, Collette reported that SAPE had agreements with eight states. She described an adoption plan under which US parents made two trips to Quebec, one for an interview and another to pick up a child selected for them after a US home study and SAPE consultation with US child welfare workers. US agencies supervised the adoptive home and reported back to Montreal before the adoption was finalized. As described by Sister Collette, this was the model of adoption practice that Canadian and American officials were looking for in the 1940s.80 We do not know whether or not US officials viewed the new SAPE procedures in the same way. There are no specific complaints (or positive expressions of support) from Rhode Island or any other north-eastern state about SAPE placements in the 1950s in the CWC or USCB files. This might indicate improvement, but overall there was little exchange of information between the CWC and the USCB on Quebec adoptions in the 1950s. What caused the improvement in SAPE practices? CWC and USCB leaders would surely like to think this was the payoff for their earlier work. Certainly, the appointment of Sister Collette (which might reasonably be linked to the CWC’s pressure on SAPE to engage professionally trained workers) had a significant impact. In 1951, the USCB’s Smith argued that most of the states that had followed USCB-CWC advice and cooperated with the Quebec agencies were experiencing a higher quality of service.81 Nonetheless, after the RI-SAPE agreement collapsed in 1949, the CWC and the USCB pursued largely separate strategies with respect to cross-border adoptions. Both the Canadians and Americans continued to counsel cross-border cooperation between Canadian and US agencies, but they did – for the most part – speak with a common voice. In early 1949, just as the RI-SAPE agreement was dissolving, the USCB’s Smith added a new element to her standard description of Quebec/Canadian adoption practices, noting: Some twenty-five years ago, most of the adoption agencies in this country

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148  The Traffic in Babies were following the same procedures now in use by some of the Canadian agencies. Agencies here have progressed slowly and painfully over the years in the matter of the information required for the placement of children for adoption. The fact that agencies here have progressed to the point we have does not mean that we can demand that every other country can be at the same point of development.82

Smith did not claim that all American agencies had reached exalted standards, or that all Canadian agencies pursued bad practices, but the ‘we’/‘them’ separation was clear. Canada was no longer an equal partner of the United States at the cutting edge of child welfare. Instead, it was classed with more backward nations who might some day rise to the US level. Smith, by this time, had also been through the Alberta scandal, an experience that left her with another negative example of Canadian child welfare practices. The less-developed parts of the Canadian child welfare system had now come to stand for the whole. Earlier, both CWC and USCB leaders were careful to differentiate the ‘problematic’ part from the ‘progressive’ whole on both sides of the border. This approach was influenced by a broad familiarity with child welfare systems in both countries and with the women leading child welfare reform efforts in both countries. Smith never had personal ties to the CWC staff, though Lea had strong links to Maud Morlock and through her to the rest of the USCB leadership. But Lea left the CWC in early 1947, after she and Smith agreed on a basic strategy with respect to Quebec adoptions but before that strategy could play itself out. The women who took over responsibility for adoption policy at the CWC – K.M. Jackson, Phyllis Burns, and Marie Hamel – were very interested in adoption reform, but they lacked Lea’s experience with cross-border adoption and her history with the USCB. In 1951, USCB chief Katharine Lenroot retired. She had not been directly involved in the cross-border issue since Whitton’s work in Alberta, but her relationship with Whitton was the very foundation of the Canadian-American connection. With the departure of Lea, and then Lenroot, there was no longer a personal link between the reformers at the CWC and the USCB. When the RI-SAPE project fell apart, so too, for the most part, did the selfconscious CWC-USCB alliance around cross-border adoption. Separate Paths Through the 1950s, the Quebec City–based SE was at least as active in the United States as SAPE, and both agencies expanded their activities

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Katharine Lenroot, 1936 (Wisconsin Historical Society, Image 66879)

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Charlotte Whitton, c. 1944 (Library and Archives Canada, PA-126400)

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Maud Morlock (Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, 235-N-CB228-3)

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Nora Lea (Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Welfare, vol. 18, no. 6, December 1942)

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Ernest Mitler (The Gazette Photo Archives)

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Ideal Maternity Home (Nova Scotia Archives and Records Administration, O/S V/F, vol. 16, no. 7) 6/29/2011 2:51:56 PM

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Babies and nurses on the front lawn of the Ideal Maternity Home, c. 1944 (Nova Scotia Archives and Records Administration, O/S V/F, vol. 16, no. 7)

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Map of the United States showing states with no law against baby-selling (United States Congress, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary, Interstate Adoption Practices, 15–16 July 1955, Washington: GPO, 1955, 14) 6/29/2011 2:51:58 PM

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from the north-eastern states into the Midwest. Some states (Nebraska, Missouri, California, Indiana in the early 1950s) were pleased with the cooperation they received from the Quebec agencies, another indication that earlier efforts were paying dividends. It was hardly high praise, but during the 1950s both SAPE and SE placements were described as better than those from the Alberta Department of Child Welfare or from the various Irish adoption agencies that began placing children in the United States in the late 1940s.83 Some states (Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana in the later 1950s), however, repeated the same complaints about Quebec placements heard in the 1940s, most frequently with respect to SE: inadequate case histories, no input on matching a particular child to a particular home, more requests for service than local agencies could easily handle, and pressure to process adoption approvals quickly.84 By 1955, SE was circulating a pamphlet for ‘prospective foster [adoptive] parents in the United States’ which laid out what seemed like a careful, professionally sound adoption procedure except that the agency affirmed it would not reveal to anyone the names of the birth mother or birth father. Recognizing that this could pose a problem, the agency warned that ‘in some states of the United States adoptions cannot be legally completed unless the names of the natural mother and father are made known to the Court.’85 The standard advice from the USCB to states receiving children from Quebec (or elsewhere in Canada) remained that they should cooperate with the Canadians, provide as much service as possible to their own residents, and remain patient, since US agencies could not expect social agencies in other countries to be at the same level as those in the United States. This period is different from the 1940s in that the USCB seldom followed up with the CWC and, with the exception of a 1954 meeting discussed below, there was little attempt from the Canadian side to continue the cross-border alliance.86 An adoption scandal from New York in 1951 illustrates the changed dynamic. In the first few months of 1951, the New York City Department of Welfare received seventeen requests to provide home studies for children about to be adopted through the Social Welfare Court in Montreal. City and state officials thought they saw, in this sudden influx, ‘the earmarks of a “black market” operation.’ State officials noted that most of the prospective adoptive families had Jewish names, though ‘we would question whether the children from Montreal are Jewish.’ A large number of the adoptions were arranged through one Montreal lawyer, Herman Buller.87 Further investigation showed that many of the adoptions were already finalized when the Quebec court requested home studies. Brief

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visits to the adoptive families revealed that most of the families seemed like good candidates for adoption (provided they could be matched with Jewish children), but at least five had been turned down by the Free Synagogue Child Adoption Committee in New York. All the families had the children in their homes before the home study request was lodged. The US consul in Montreal issued US immigration visas for the children on the basis of something referred to as an ‘interim adoption order’ so that the children could enter the United States before their adoptions were finalized, even though there was no provision for such a document under Quebec law. State officials in New York concluded that ‘the present practice of the Social Welfare Court in Montreal is very poor,’ but they also argued that the ‘ease with which the American Consulate issued “permanent resident visas” to children … would seem to contribute to malpractice in adoption work.’88 The New York Department of Social Welfare approached George Davidson, still serving as Canada’s deputy minister of health and welfare, for more information.89 Davidson referred the request to the CWC, which then investigated. The CWC reported that the Social Welfare Courts were established in 1950. Professional social workers initially praised the courts, hoping they would emphasize ‘social’ considerations in family law cases. The rushed and inadequate procedures New York officials identified in 1951 were actually the result of a more conscientious court trying to inject some sense of social responsibility in adoptions engineered by independent operators. The CWC approached the Montreal judge responsible for these adoptions and convinced him, in future, to refuse to produce the ‘legal fiction’ of the interim adoption order required by the US consul to process immigration visas. Thus, it was hoped, the adoption pipeline from Montreal lawyers to New York City families would be closed down.90 The near-absence of CWC-USCB collaboration around this incident is remarkable. When New York officials informed the USCB’s Smith of their problem, her chief reaction was to blame the officials for not cooperating with the Catholic agencies in the 1940s and thus expanding options available to New York residents. Smith’s logic was faulty, given that neither Catholic agencies in Quebec nor New York child welfare workers would ever have approved placing Catholic children from Quebec with Jewish families in New York, but she saw a vindication of her larger point about providing all possible services to adoptive parents, lest they turn to less socially desirable options.91 Smith did not, however, see any particular need to work with the CWC on the Mon-

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treal welfare court adoptions. Her contact with the CWC was limited to a request for clarification of the legal status of the so-called interim adoption order; the brief Canadian response explained there was no such document with any legal standing in Quebec. Neither side suggested renewed cooperation around the cross-border issue.92 The United States The Montreal adoptions renewed USCB interest in a strategy invoked jointly by the Canadians and the Americans in the 1930s and 1940s, using the levers of the US federal government – the INS and the Consular Service of the Department of State – to regulate cross-border adoptions. In 1951–2, state child welfare authorities in both New York and California complained to the USCB about procedures developed by the US consul in Quebec City for children adopted through La Sauvegarde de l’Enfance. After complaints from several states about SE placements, the consul had adopted a new policy of requiring a letter from the state department of child welfare in the receiving state before issuing an immigration visa for the child. The letter was to state that ‘the child would be eligible for recognition as an adopted child within that jurisdiction.’ The consul’s approach showed awareness that child welfare authorities in the receiving state should have input in the cross-border adoption. This was a positive development. Both state officials and the USCB leadership, however, were unhappy with the Quebec consul’s specific approach and with the attached threat to withhold visas for children bound for specific states if the relevant state departments would not provide the requested document.93 Officials at the New York Department of Social Welfare, who were in any case unwilling to provide any direct service in cross-border adoptions, argued the consul’s requirement was impossible to meet. In New York, as in most states, only a judge acting in the context of an adoption hearing could determine whether or not a child was eligible for adoption. As a result, neither state officials nor local social agencies could issue the letter the consul asked for. Presumably, such a letter issued from other states would have no legal and little social value. USCB officials found the consul’s request to be almost meaningless under the law and a poor mechanism for inserting social responsibility into the crossborder process. They pointed out there were very few absolute bars to adoption under state law – some states required racial matching, had an unbendable religious matching law, or mandated a minimum age

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difference between the child and the adoptive parents – but very few children would be obviously ‘ineligible’ for US adoption. At any rate, most Canadian adoptions were processed through Canadian courts and all US jurisdictions honoured foreign adoptions. After changes to US immigration law in 1952 (outlined below) foreign-adopted children did not have to be readopted in the United States to qualify for citizenship. In this situation, the question of ‘eligibility for recognition as an adopted child’ was moot.94 California officials also objected to the ‘eligibility’ letter and to a further requirement from the consul that state officials give their approval to the ‘placement of a particular child in a particular home.’ The consul felt that ‘this determination should be made by an American rather than a foreign agency, such as La Sauvegarde.’ US child welfare workers had long sought input in the matching process – particularly when they could expect a readoption petition in state court – but they did not want to wholly substitute their judgment from a distance for the judgment of the Canadian agency with custody of the child. Ideally, the placement decision ‘would be a shared one with the two agencies working on a cooperative basis,’ but the Quebec agency was ultimately responsible for the ‘care, planning and placement of the child.’ The California position was, of course, based on their assessment of practices at the SE, which they (unlike other state workers) found generally acceptable. Overall, California officials were much more impressed with the policies of the SE than with the ‘requirements which are currently being made by the Consul in Quebec.’95 The Californians also had problems with the very different and changeable requirements the US consul in Edmonton established for issuing visas. Indeed, the thing that bothered west coast officials most was the unpredictability and inconsistency they faced as they negotiated adoptions from Quebec and Alberta. Californians found both the Alberta Department of Child Welfare and the US consul in Edmonton difficult to work with. The Albertans placed little emphasis on cooperation with social agencies in other jurisdictions. When (in the aftermath of the Babies-for-Export scandal) the Alberta Child Welfare Branch started asking California agencies for home studies, this was a significant improvement on earlier procedures. However, California officials wanted more input before the adoption was finalized. The Californians hoped that the US consul might use the visa process as a way to give them a more meaningful role. In the early 1940s, the US consul in Edmonton had sometimes requested that parents produce

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an ‘affidavit as to the suitability of your home for the upbringing of the child,’ but this document was not necessarily a professional home study conducted by a social agency and it was not requested until after the adoption was finalized.96 In the early 1950s, the same US consul was making no effort to involve social agencies or state welfare officials in the visa process. Parents were only required to furnish financial documents to prove the child would not become a public charge in the United States (this was a basic requirement at all consulates), references to indicate community standing, and, in some cases, an affidavit stating they would send the child to school and that ‘the child will not be put to work unsuited to his years.’ Presumably, this last was to be a guarantee that parents were not adopting children to secure cheap farm labour.97 California officials asked the USCB to lobby for standard, professionally sound procedures at all US consulates in Canada. The USCB set up meetings with the INS and the State Department to discuss the regulation of cross-border adoption, though the justification for including the INS in this consultation was weak. The USCB argument for the meeting referred almost exclusively to issues that were clearly the province of the State Department alone, although the bureau did ask the INS for clarification on the implications of Public Law 82414, the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952.98 One provision of the McCarran-Walter Act amended the Immigration and Naturalization Act to remove the previous requirement that children adopted outside of the United States must be readopted inside the country to become eligible for citizenship. One implication of this amendment was that the INS now had less of a stake in Canadian cross-border adoptions. In the 1930s, INS officials based in Washington justified their involvement in the North-west–British Columbia cross-border adoption agreement on the grounds that the INS was responsible for the citizenship of new immigrants and, thus, had an interest in whether the children entering the United States would be eligible for readoption.99 Once the McCarranWalter Act came into effect in January 1953, this was no longer an issue.100 Not surprisingly, INS officials stuck to their old line and refused to become involved in further regulation of adoptions from Canada.101 Negotiations with the State Department produced much better results. Faced with evidence that the consuls were in a practical sense already and inconsistently involved in the administrative procedures for Canadian adoptions, the Canada Desk at the State Department agreed to work with the USCB to develop standard procedures. The USCB had three goals in this project: first, to institute consistent practices at

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the consulates that would give the states an opportunity to participate meaningfully in cross-border adoptions; second (following the cooperative policy initiated in the 1940s), to encourage state departments of child welfare to expand their sense of responsibility to children and parents and work with Canadian social agencies planning cross-border placements; third, to insert some social guarantees and professional oversight in the adoptive process when the standards of Canadian placing agencies (particularly in Quebec) were inadequate. The consulates’ control over visas, and hence over the entrance of adopted or to-be-adopted children to the United States, provided the policing mechanism in adoption that Canadian and American adoption reformers had long sought.102 These were familiar objectives for reformers on both sides of the border, and if implemented they would impact adoption practices in both countries. The outcome was a January 1954 memo from the US ambassador in Canada to all consular offices in Canada outlining a six-step procedure for issuing immigration visas in cross-border adoption cases. For the most part, the memo reflected USCB priorities. Consuls were directed to contact child welfare directors in receiving states to ask whether the state office ‘or any authorized agency in your state’ approved of the placement. USCB officials knew reputable social agencies would have to conduct home studies and establish contact with the placing agencies before providing this endorsement. In the event neither state officials nor any other social agency in the state was willing or able to follow this procedure, consular officials were directed to gather written references on the adopting parents and report any negative or questionable information in the references back to the receiving state before making a final decision on the visa. The new consular procedure also required that adoptive parents ‘produce a letter from the provincial Department of Welfare stating that there is no objection to the adoption.’ This second letter would ensure that provincial officials would be aware of the placement, thus ‘furnish[ing] the Provincial department with statistical information on the number of placements outside of Canada. It would also … prevent unauthorized placements arranged through individuals who might be operating for profit.’103 These new instructions were generally well received at the consular offices, although the Quebec City consul disagreed with some of the specific procedures. The consul objected that the new plan would require repeated letters to state authorities (like those in New York) who would not provide the requested document. USCB officials admitted

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that where state-level objections were well known (as in New York), some modification of the visa process might be needed. They nonetheless insisted that state and provincial authorities must always be informed of the placements, perhaps because the bureau hoped eventually to coax reluctant state officers into more active involvement. When the final details were agreed between the State Department and the USCB, the bureau distributed a copy of the consular instructions to all state directors of child welfare.104 Even though the new procedure required a letter from provincial child welfare officials, the USCB did not consult the CWC (or any of the provincial departments of child welfare) while working with the State Department. Indeed, the CWC was not informed of the negotiations until after the new instructions were largely finalized.105 The Canadians were left in a difficult position. K. Phyllis Burns of the CWC noted that there was no provincial authority in Quebec ‘which takes responsibility for adoptions,’ and therefore nowhere parents could apply for the provincial letter stating no objection to the adoption. But, the USCB initiative had achieved the important objective of drawing federal regulators into the issue of cross-border adoption. This was an important victory, for the Canadians as well as the Americans. Even though the Canadians were ignored at the end of the process, it could be seen as an outgrowth of earlier, cooperative work. Burns suggested further USCB-CWC discussion of the consular process, though it is not clear this ever took place. She also agreed to circulate the instructions to the Canadian child welfare directors, thus giving the CWC stamp of approval to what was the first procedure to standardize cross-border adoption using federal authority.106 The USCB achievement was to be short-lived, at least in official form. Early in 1955, the State Department withdrew the memo containing the visa instructions on the grounds that State Department employees were not justified in placing restrictions on the issuance of visas other than those laid out in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Since the act ‘does not contain authority under which compliance with state adoption law may be made a prerequisite to the issuance of a visa,’ consular officers could not require documentation from US or Canadian social welfare officials before issuing a visa.107 The relevant sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act had not changed since the USCB and State Department worked out the original agreement, but the overall climate around border-crossing adoptions into the United States was in flux. In 1953, the federal Refugee Relief Act was passed. This legisla-

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tion set the terms under which adopted or to-be-adopted children from a foreign country with an annual quota for immigration to the United States could enter the country, utilizing special non-quota orphan visas. This act (as amended over the 1950s) gave the INS and the State Department expanded authority with respect to these children and, from 1957, gave the INS specific responsibility to ensure the children were placed in appropriate homes. In other words, under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 and especially the Refugee Escape Act of 1957, the INS became an agency with the kind of child welfare responsibilities that it had always resisted in the Canadian case.108 The Refugee Relief Act did not cover Canadian adopted children entering the United States because there was no quota for Canadian immigration to the United States before the 1965 overhaul of the Immigration Act.109 One USCB official attended a State Department–INS meeting on international adoption during which the Canadian case, where the INS had no official role, was contrasted with that of international adoptions from other countries, where the new legislation gave the INS (and the State Department) specific responsibilities. The clarification and expansion of INS responsibility in some adoptions served to draw attention to the strictly extra-legal anomaly of the consular policy in Canada.110 The consular procedures were officially rescinded, although USCB officials were happy to learn that at times consular officers in Canada continued (unofficially, of course) to follow the procedures and contact provincial and state authorities before issuing visas.111 The increasing attention to non-Canadian international adoptions at the State Department, the INS, and the Children’s Bureau was, however, a sign of new directions and new priorities in the United States. The story of transnational adoption to the United States was becoming the story of overseas adoptions, and in particular Asian adoptions, even as large numbers of Canadian children continued to enter the United States.112 Canada Inside Canada, the most important national work on adoption policy in the 1950s took place in the CWC’s Committee on Adoption and in CWC-sponsored meetings of the provincial directors of child welfare. Nora Lea established a Committee on Uniformity of Adoption Legislation in late 1946, just before she left the CWC. The committee’s first task was to ‘evaluate the difference in legislation and regulations which make for complications and difficulties in effecting sound adoption pro-

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cedure interprovincially and from these evaluations to move toward suggestions which might provide for greater interprovincial reciprocity.’113 These issues were obviously related to the USCB-CWC response to the IMH, and the Canadian committee deliberations were in some ways a mirror of the USCB interstate adoption conferences later in the decade.114 Over the following two years, the adoption scandals in Alberta and in Saint John, New Brunswick, heightened public interest in border-crossing adoptions in Canada and helped redefine the focus of the committee. In 1948, prominent Montreal social worker and adoption innovator Muriel McCrae became chair of an expanded CWC Committee on Adoption.115 McCrae’s group surveyed adoption agencies across the country and confirmed previously suspected national and regional patterns in Canadian adoption. There was a surplus of French Catholic children in Quebec and of both Catholic and Protestant children in Newfoundland, although in a few areas of the country (including the territory covered by the English-language Catholic Welfare Bureau of Montreal) there were a small number of extra Catholic homes. Large numbers of Protestant families in cities across the country could not find healthy, young, white children to adopt. Jewish families had almost no hope of finding children anywhere in Canada. This survey confirmed that the combination of geography and religion had created mismatches of supply and demand in the Canadian adoption marketplace. McCrae’s committee then asked, ‘Is there a way that this problem can be resolved by carefully worked out procedures and agreements between agencies, provincial authorities, and even between the United States and Canada?’ The committee adopted the question of ‘inter-jurisdictional placements’ between Canadian provinces and across the US-Canadian border as a top priority.116 McCrae’s committee was centred in Montreal and consequently the adoption situation in Quebec largely shaped the committee’s discussions, although English-language meetings made it difficult for Frenchspeaking adoption workers to participate fully.117 McCrae, personally, assumed that inter-jurisdictional placements were necessary and could be professionally managed. That is, she started this work more willing than Lea and other CWC staff members to see cross-border adoptions as a positive good. Eventually, the committee united behind her position and thereby pulled the CWC in this direction. The work of SAPE, of SE, and of L’Assistance à l’Enfant sans Soutien influenced the committee and Sister Collette of the reformed SAPE was regarded by

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the group as an expert in the successful management of cross-border adoptions. By 1952, the committee was working on a set of ‘standards in inter-jurisdictional placement’ that could be used to guide successful border-crossing work.118 These standards were the core of the committee’s 1955 final report.119 After discussion and editing in the Family and Child Welfare Division of the CWC, the standards became the official CWC position on cross-border adoption, widely distributed as A Policy Statement on Adoption across Borders. The statement was neither long (five pages) nor complicated. It contained a concise outline of basic adoption practices applicable to all adoptions, as well as special recommendations to be followed in the cases of international and interprovincial adoption. The document stressed that ‘every effort’ should be made to place a child ‘in his own locality, province, or at least in Canada’ before resorting to more complicated border-crossing procedures. Nonetheless, the statement recognized that uneven supply and demand for children in Canada meant some children would be placed in other jurisdictions. In these cases, the CWC recommended communication with the relevant provincial or state child welfare authority, clearance through Canadian and foreign departments of external affairs and immigration, and careful attention to the legal technicalities of the adoption consent and the child’s eligibility for citizenship in the new country. The CWC distributed the pamphlet to social agencies, government officials, and citizens across the country and used the occasion to call for better community support for high standards in adoption work.120 The CWC’s Adoption across Borders was the first national statement on best practices in crossborder adoption produced in either Canada or the United States since Charlotte Whitton’s early efforts in the mid-1930s. While McCrae’s committee was deliberating, the provincial directors of child welfare were also working on a plan for professional placements across provincial and (potentially) national lines. The CWC organized the first gathering of the directors in 1948 and provided logistical support to subsequent meetings. At the first meeting, the directors identified interprovincial placements by provincial authorities and by private adoption agencies as a key concern. The group’s work on this issue was slowed by the frequent absence of the Alberta director of child welfare in the early 1950s and by confusion over just who should be invited from Quebec, since the province lacked a director of child welfare. Nonetheless, over the next decade the directors made considerable progress negotiating bilateral agreements for child transfers

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and establishing basic principles for cross-border work inside Canada and into the United States. Not surprisingly, British Columbia’s Ruby McKay and Nova Scotia’s F.R. MacKinnon took the lead.121 The CWC produced Whitton’s 1935 Reciprocal Agreement on Interprovincial Placement (a voluntary agreement signed between individual social agencies, not provinces) as a beginning point for the directors’ discussion. Many of the directors were unaware of this document, and preferred to start anew. The new discussions were highly technical in nature, with a focus on reimbursement of expenses, transfers of legal guardianship, responsibility for supervision, and potential clashes between adoption and child placement laws across provincial boundaries. For the most part, the directors assumed a basic, common agreement on best practices in adoption (placements should be local if possible and children should not be moved to other jurisdictions without prior consultation with provincial authorities), though it is questionable to what degree Alberta provincial authorities and social agencies in Quebec accepted these assumptions.122 By 1955, British Columbia and Saskatchewan had a formal bilateral agreement on adoptions and other kinds of child transfers. This model was eventually applied across the west and among the Maritime provinces. By 1958, all provincial directors (again, this would exclude Quebec) were reporting they did not place children in other provinces without first establishing contact with their counterparts in those provinces.123 The directors were assembling, piecemeal, a solid model for interprovincial placements, although the bilateral agreements only applied to placements made by the provincial departments of welfare, and not by private child-placing agencies in their provinces (unless they chose to follow the guidelines) or by independent child placers. That is, those agencies and individuals most likely to use poor or unprofessional pratices could ignore the detailed new procedures. The directors were still unable to devise a regulatory structure legally enforceable across all jurisdictions.124 Nonetheless, at this point the Canadians were much closer to a working agreement on professionally sound transfers than their American counterparts, who could not parlay the USCB meetings on interstate placements into a national agreement.125 Of course, negotiating between ten provinces was a much less complicated task than working across forty-eight states. The mechanics of interprovincial placement led the directors to discuss which children were most likely to be placed across borders by a provincial department or a reputable agency. By the 1950s, this was

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rarely a discussion about stopping the ‘export’ of the most desirable of Canadian children: the healthy, white, usually Protestant, infant. There was a general agreement among the directors (with the exception of Alberta and in the absence of a director from Quebec) that given the demand for such children in Canada, they should not be placed outside the local area except to join extended family. The children who might need cross-border placements were referred to as the hard-to-place, a wide classification that included African-Canadian, First Nations, Métis, mixed-race, older, physically or intellectually disabled children, and children in sibling groups. In some parts of Canada, notably Alberta, eastern European and especially Ukrainian children were considered hard-to-place because of their nationality and cultural background.126 ‘Surplus’ Catholic children in Quebec (and, increasingly, in other provinces) were also hard-to-place, though this case was somewhat different. These children had most of the desirable characteristics for an adopted child – they were white, Christian, and generally healthy – but it was still often difficult to find homes for them in their home provinces or even in their home country. Significantly, the directors concluded that if a choice must be made between a child’s Catholic identity and his or her Canadian heritage, the religious connection should take precedence.127 Ten years earlier, most of the children characterized as hard-to-place were considered largely unadoptable in both Canada and the United States because of their physical or mental traits. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, adoption professionals in both countries expanded their definition of the ‘adoptable’ child in the face of increasing public demands for children to adopt, public criticism of restrictive social welfare practices, new scientific understandings of mental and physical development in children, and a growing recognition that all children had the right to family life. The growing popularity of overseas adoption in the United States and to a lesser extent Canada also served to open up definitions of adoptability and challenge the previously unassailable rule of racial matching.128 In Montreal, the Open Door Society and the Children’s Service Centre (headed by Muriel McCrae) pioneered placements across racial lines in the 1950s.129 In 1954, the CWC’s Phyllis Burns noted that it was time for adoption professionals and adoptive parents to think beyond the ‘imaginary fair-haired, blue-eyed infant.’130 Finding homes for these children could be complicated; most parents still wanted the fair-haired and blue-eyed child. Adoption professionals were placed in the relatively new position of trying to find homes for

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hard-to-place children and this could mean looking beyond the immediate geographical area. In the 1950s, the Canadian child welfare directors, the members of the CWC’s Committee on Adoption, and adoption workers in a variety of other settings in Canada and the United States were testing new definitions of adoptability and talking about the need to look across borders to ‘match’ hard-to-place children with families ready and willing to accept them.131 Border-crossing adoptions took on a new context as an essential tool in professionally managed home finding for hard-to-place children, a development explored in greater detail in chapter 6. Much of this work – at the CWC Adoption Committee and in the directors’ meetings – expanded from shared Canadian-American work on cross-border adoptions, but there was no direct contact between either of these bodies and the USCB. In 1954, however, Burns of the CWC, acting at the suggestion of the Committee on Adoption, approached the USCB with a joint project. Burns asked the USCB to co-sponsor a meeting on cross-border placement to be held at the upcoming International Conference of Social Work in Toronto in June 1954. She suggested the USCB and CWC could, together, work out an agenda for the meeting and she underlined the benefits of Canadian provincial and US state officials meeting face to face. After all, this kind of personalized contact had been the backbone of the USCB–CWC relationship. USCB officials encouraged Burns, but declined the invitation. The USCB Division of Social Services had no plans to send a representative to the Toronto conference, and Evelyn Smith’s departure from the USCB staff in the spring of 1954 left the agency both understaffed in adoption and minus a major part of the USCB-CWC institutional history on cross-border adoption. The USCB encouraged US child welfare departments to send representatives or report to Burns on their experiences with crossborder adoption, but this was the full extent of USCB involvement in Burns’s project.132 Without USCB sponsorship, the proposed gathering had limited drawing power. Over a dozen states sent Burns detailed reports on their cross-border experiences, but only eight states (Indiana, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Michigan, New York, Maine, Ohio, and Tennessee) sent representatives. Still, this small group included some of the states receiving the largest number of children from Canada. The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) sent a representative, as did the US office of International Social Service, an international social welfare organization dedicated to facilitating and safeguarding international adoptions

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and other migrations across borders.133 Most of the meeting was devoted to presentations on Canadian and American adoption practices by Muriel McCrae and by Joseph Reid of the CWLA. F.R. MacKinnon read a statement from the Canadian Directors of Child Welfare affirming the provincial departments would always look first for in-province and then in-Canada child placements, ‘but failing in these, would through recognized official channels consider inter-country placement in the interests of the child.’134 Most questions from US participants addressed the child welfare situation in Quebec, the activities of Catholic placing agencies in the United States, and a recently uncovered Canada-to-US black market operating out of Montreal. Indeed, the CWC effort to re-establish a personalized connection between Canadian and American social welfare leaders was largely overshadowed by the ‘traffic internationales de bébés’ out of Montreal.135 As the Montreal scandal unfolded in the spring of 1954, the centre of transnational work on cross-border adoption moved away from child welfare leaders and towards police, prosecutors, and legislators in both countries. The 1954 transborder meeting never advanced beyond information exchange to programmatic suggestions for improved cooperation and communication. This was almost a case of starting over in the crossborder coalition. There was some discussion of a more focused followup at the CWLA’s important national adoption conference scheduled for Chicago in early 1955. Burns tried to pursue this suggestion with the CWLA, a potential new partner in cross-border adoption.136 At the Chicago conference, the specific issue of Canadian adoptions was swallowed by a larger discussion of international adoptions, wherein the focus was on immigration law and other concerns that did not pertain to the Canadian situation. All told, this was a disappointing outcome for the Canadians.137 Conclusion Professional control of Catholic child placements from Quebec in the 1940s and 1950s required cooperative relationships between Canadian and American social agencies. The earlier model of CWC-USCB crossborder work showed that even in the absence of legally enforceable cross-border protocols, these relationships could be orchestrated effectively through these national organizations. This model depended on compromise, flexibility, and a commitment on the part of CWC

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and USCB staff to work closely together on a set of shared objectives. Initially, the CWC-USCB approach to the Catholic adoption agencies followed this model. The Quebec project was less organized and extensive than the earlier USCB-CWC collaboration. Nonetheless, the CWC and the USCB working across national and state borders with US state authorities had some impact on the policies and procedures of the Catholic adoption agencies. By 1950, CWC officials had even convinced Father Contant to serve on the executive of the council’s Child Welfare Division, though this appointment had more to do with drawing Contant into the CWC milieu than with any recognition of his leadership in the field.138 This was something of a success story for the transnational coalition. At the same time, the USCB-CWC collaboration over Quebec also highlighted weaknesses in the coalition. Even in the late 1940s, the level of communication and cooperation between the agencies was not what it once was. The objectives of the two organizations were diverging and they followed separate paths. Ironically, each made important achievements in the previously shared objectives defined by earlier reformers: involving national regulatory bodies, negotiating domestic (interstate and interprovincial) cross-border procedures, and producing a comprehensive policy statement. These achievements should not be seen as a denial or repudiation of the previous transborder approach, but rather an extension of earlier efforts. If the two groups had managed, in the 1950s, to combine their efforts, they might have achieved the comprehensive cross-border strategy their predecessors sought. Instead, by the mid-1950s, the CWC and the USCB no longer operated as tight partners. Differing interpretations of the Quebec adoption dynamic, changing personnel at the two agencies, and increasingly crowded and complicated adoption agendas at the two agencies all contributed to weakening ties between the two bodies. By the early 1960s, the child welfare situation in Quebec was changing. As the 1950s progressed, SAPE expanded its role in child welfare until it was assuming many of the roles undertaken by Children’s Aid Societies in other provinces, though still without the same legal authority. Once again, the SAPE model was copied across the province. Through the 1950s – as the critique of institutional care intensified and as professionally trained social workers made their way onto the staff of church agencies – there was a gradual turn towards the use of foster care for more children. This trend accelerated in the 1960s. At the same time, the critique of church institutions and a general softening of pub-

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lic attitudes towards unwed mothers meant that fewer children were relinquished to the crèches. By 1961, 69 per cent of women giving birth at La Miséricorde in Montreal were keeping their children. As a consequence of these developments, there were fewer children available for placement by the Catholic adoption agencies. The ‘surplus’ of Catholic children was diminishing, though not disappearing entirely.139 As early as 1955, SE decided to stop placements in some ‘new deal territories’ because the agency could not keep up with US requests. By 1961, the CWC’s Hamel believed that fewer children from SAPE were crossing the border. SAPE was moving into a new role as a receiving agency doing home studies and adoption supervision for children entering Canada in overseas adoption placements. As Nora Lea had hoped, a general improvement in the professional standard of child welfare work in the province (combined, of course, with other social and demographic changes) meant fewer Canadian adoption placements in the United States and a higher standard for placements inside Canada.140 A final word must be said about the children who were sent to the United States by the Catholic adoption agencies (or, for that matter, by the black market) in the 1940s and 1950s, and those who were not. For at least some of the children adopted out of the Quebec crèches in the 1940s and 1950s, the alternative to the US placement was not a professionally managed placement with another family inside Quebec or another Canadian province, but life in a Church-run institution. In recent years, the story of Les orphelins de Duplessis has received wide publicity in Canada. During the tenure of the Duplessis provincial government in Quebec in the 1940s and 1950s, several thousand children with no disabilities spent their childhoods warehoused in dismal institutions for the intellectually disabled. The crèches and orphanages remained crowded and underfunded through much of this period, and the provincial government received more federal transfer funding to support the care of children in mental asylums as compared to institutions for ‘normal’ children. These children grew up with almost no education or stimulation and few of the skills necessary to survive on their own when they were discharged as young adults. Many of these children experienced physical and sexual abuse. In June 2001, the government of Quebec offered a group of 1000 to 1500 of Les orphelins cash settlements averaging $25,000 each in recognition of their suffering.141 There is no evidence that CWC or USCB officials knew about ‘normal’ children housed in institutions for the intellectually disabled in Quebec.

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Both agencies, however, had a long history of critiquing institutional care for children, and the CWC argued throughout this period that a major overhaul of social welfare services in the province was both desperately needed and long overdue. The adoption reforms achieved and attempted in the 1950s could not have saved the majority of Les orphelins, but attaching this tragic story to the adoption reform movement does remind us how much is at stake in efforts (past and present) to provide humane and safe options for children.

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5 Criminal Law and Baby Black Markets, 1954–1964

In mid-February 1954, newspapers across Canada and into the United States announced that a massive baby-selling ring had just been uncovered through the joint efforts of Montreal police and prosecutors and the New York City district attorney’s office. Headlines screamed that a well-organized ‘traffic international des bébés’ had been operating out of Montreal for up to ten years. The papers alleged that as many as 1000 infants born to French Canadian and Catholic mothers were sold to desperate Jewish couples from Chicago, Cleveland, Florida, and, above all, the greater New York City area. The ‘selling price’ of children was initially pegged at $2500 to $10,000, and the baby trade was described as a $3,000,000 or sometimes a $5,000,000 operation.1 ‘L’affaire du traffic des bébés’ came on the heels of a smaller-scale cross-border black market in Toronto a year earlier, touched off when a Jewish couple from New York was caught trying to leave the country with the newborn infant of a young Toronto woman. The couple was accused of purchasing this infant from a city doctor.2 When the Montreal scandal broke, there were suggestions that the Montreal baby rings were connected to Toronto and that perhaps thirty Ontario children had been ‘sold’ into the United States in the previous year. Nonetheless, the centre of Canadian cross-border operations was clearly Montreal.3 The black market thrived in the same landscape outlined in chapter 4: punitive attitudes towards unwed mothers, weak government oversight and regulation in child welfare, and a surplus of Catholic babies. Canadian and American child welfare reformers at the national level played little role in the Montreal scandal and its aftermath. The CWC and USCB were very concerned about the risks to birth mothers, adoptive parents, and children in black market adoptions (as in all unregu-

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lated, independent adoptions), and they were well aware of adoption dynamics in Quebec. Nonetheless, both agencies stood back from the sensationalism and legal manoeuvring in Montreal while police, prosecutors, and politicians – new actors in our cross-border story – took centre stage. As sociologist Viviana Zelizer has argued, selling children for adoption is a troubling affront to the twentieth-century vision of the sentimental, sacred, and ‘priceless’ child. To sell or buy a child is a moral outrage that would seem worthy of public condemnation and stiff legal penalties.4 But what constitutes the sale of a baby? When do legal fees, medical fees, or fees to cover the expense of caring for an unwed mother become a purchase price? What laws, if any, are broken when black marketers sell children and adoptive parents buy them? Defining the crime in baby-selling was, and remains, very difficult.5 In 1955, only fifteen US states and one Canadian province had explicit statutes designed to criminalize baby sales. Neither country had a federal black market law that could police baby black markets operating across state or provincial lines. In 1953, New York City Assistant District Attorney Ernest Mitler argued that even when baby-selling laws were not in place, an important ‘moral concept’ was violated when children were turned into commodities.6 Moral concepts did not, however, translate well into criminal statutes or successful prosecutions. In this chapter, we explore the Montreal scandal and attempts by prosecutors, police, and politicians to use the legal system to prosecute baby black markets and stop cross-border baby sales. The chapter begins with the complex black market operation in Montreal, which was very explicitly designed to exploit loopholes and gaps in the law that opened when babies and parents moved from a Canadian province to a US state. The Montreal example allows us to see how legal and jurisdictional border crossings facilitated a rather remarkable movement across ethnic, social, religious, and national borders. On the Montreal black market, Roman Catholic, Québécois infants became Jewish babies for American families. These same border crossings and gaps complicated the work of Canadian and American police and prosecutors trying to use New York, Quebec, or Canadian federal law to stop the traffic in babies, an overall goal they shared with child welfare reformers. Although their approach was different, police and prosecutors also shared some of the same challenges facing child welfare reformers. Weak laws, poor enforcement, deliberate border crossings, jurisdictional divides, and conflicts

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over federal-provincial/federal-state authority all caused problems for law enforcement officials. Frustrated by border crossings and constrained by existing criminal law, there was relatively little Canadian and American police and prosecutors could do to punish the people they believed were selling babies in Montreal. In the spring of 1954, there was a very brief discussion in the Canadian Parliament about using the Canadian federal criminal code to police the black market. In the United States, the Montreal case became part of an extended series of congressional hearings and legislative proposals aimed at a US federal statute, though no law was ever passed. Ultimately, the Montreal case and the larger US discussions seemed to demonstrate, to quote Canadian minister of justice Stuart Garson, that when it came to baby black markets ‘the criminal law … is a very blunt and harsh instrument … with which to deal with relationships between parents and children.’7 ‘Ampleur considérable du “Racket” des bébés’8 Since at least the 1930s, child welfare workers were aware of adoption black markets in Montreal.9 In 1951, New York officials recognized ‘the earmarks of a “black market operation” in a sudden influx of adoptions from Montreal.’10 In 1952 the Montreal lawyer behind these suspect adoptions, Herman Buller, was arrested in Quebec on a charge of falsifying a birth registration in connection with an adoption. That charge was later dismissed.11 In 1954, the executive director of the Montreal Council of Social Agencies admitted that city agencies were aware of ‘frightful irregularities in baby placements’ in the city. Still, ‘the extent of the abuse was not suspected.’12 The birthing and adoption underground of the black market was an alternative to working through the Church’s system of hospitals, crèches, and adoption agencies. This alternative appealed to desperate unwed mothers who wished to avoid detection, to would-be adoptive parents (mostly non-Catholics) who could not find children, and to a series of maternity home operators, lawyers, and smugglers who saw an opportunity to make money.13 Criminal investigation of the Montreal black market began in New York City. In 1949, the New York state legislature passed a law making it a crime for any organization or individual other than a licensed adoption agency to charge fees or accept payment for placing a child for adoption; this was the first explicit anti-baby-selling legislation of its kind in the United States. The legislation was part of a larger group

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of bills designed to tighten state regulation of adoption that came out of a multi-year investigation of the black market in babies in New York undertaken by the state’s Joint Legislative Committee on Interstate Cooperation. The New York legislators were concerned that children were being bought and sold in a fast and loose traffic in babies operating inside New York and, importantly, across state and national lines.14 Between 1949 and 1955, the New York County District Attorney’s office prosecuted seven major black market cases with mixed success. It was very difficult for prosecutors to prove that a lawyer or doctor was accepting payment for placing a child, as opposed to charging a professional fee for services in support of an adoption.15 The situation was yet more complex when baby-selling operations crossed state or national lines and involved jurisdictions that did not have explicit black market statutes. Regardless of where adoptive parents, birth parents, children, or child placers resided, the New York law had no effect unless the exchange of money took place inside New York State.16 Assistant District Attorney Ernest Mitler was at the centre of many of these prosecutions. He became involved in the Montreal case in 1952, when a mother who secured a child in Montreal approached his office. The mother was concerned about the legal standing of the adoption arranged for her by lawyer Herman Buller. Mitler and his investigator, Detective Theresa Bogatta, eventually interviewed over sixty sets of New York parents who had obtained children in Montreal. Buller was involved in many of these adoptions and, allegedly, presented himself in New York as controlling the traffic in babies from Montreal. Mitler came to view him as ‘le tsar international des vendeurs de bébés.’17 In 1953, Mitler described the Montreal case in detail (though without naming the city) to a US Senate investigating committee exploring the baby black market as part of larger probe of the causes of juvenile delinquency.18 The New York County district attorney asked an existing grand jury investigating baby sales to look at the Montreal case. There was a significant jurisdictional issue. Even though the children ended up in New York, the adoptions and exchanges of cash took place in Montreal and thus New York law could not be used to bring charges.19 By October 1953, Mitler and his investigators were working with Montreal police detectives and Crown prosecutor George Hill. On 12 February 1954, Herman Buller was arrested and charged with falsifying birth certificates and giving counsel and advice in connection with an indictable offence. Police arrested another lawyer, Louis Glazer, on similar charg-

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es after a successful sting operation in which Det. Bogatta paid Glazer $3050 to secure a baby and a false birth certificate.20 At first, Mitler, Hill, and the police thought that Buller, Glazer, and three other women who were also arrested were part of a single operation. They searched for ‘les gros bonnets’ directing a citywide black market.21 In fact, there were a series of independent but nonetheless highly organized baby rings operating in the city. These rings competed to the point of kidnapping children from each other.22 The rings used maternity boarding houses where children were born, as well as a series of ‘baby depots’ in Montreal and in Vermont where children were housed while they awaited parents. There were allegations that New York connections periodically set up baby showrooms in a New York hotel.23 ‘Spotters’ trolled the city for pregnant women, and ‘contacts’ or ‘legmen’ approached pregnant women who seemed in need of help. Sometimes, doctors referred pregnant women to Glazer, Buller, or other lawyers.24 The black market offered desperate women anonymity, free board, some form of medical care, and adoptive homes for their children. Women were sometimes given forty or fifty dollars to make a new start after giving birth and turning over their newborns. The arrangements between birthing women and the baby placers could, however, vary quite substantially. Denise LaChance, a surrendering mother who later testified in the criminal case against Glazer, indicated that she gave birth in a hospital and paid her own hospital bill, while Glazer took care of the medical fees.25 Other women fared less well. The conditions in private maternity homes where many women waited out their pregnancies and then gave birth could be both appalling and dangerous. There was great potential for birth mothers to be exploited and treated cruelly.26 One father from New Jersey, who adopted in Montreal and subsequently told his story both to the US Senate and to Canada’s Weekend Picture Magazine, described the maternity home where he secured his child as a place that ‘could have come out of a Dickens novel of 100 years ago.’27 Mr Boyd (a pseudonym) arrived just after the birth of the child he would adopt to witness the child’s birth mother, a ‘young girl … half unconscious and screaming in pain. She was on a small, little narrow cot and on the floor was saturated rags, blood, the residue of childbirth, and the stench was all over the place. There was a sickening odor of ether, but no one was in attendance. There was no nurse, doctor, anything.’ No one, including the would-be adoptive father, went to the young girl’s aid.28

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This father heard about the Montreal babies through word of mouth; others were approached through ‘salesmen’ who worked in New York City apartment blocks.29 Although the adopters were often described in the media as ‘des riches famillies juives,’ a US immigration official familiar with the unfolding investigation described the ‘composite’ baby-buyers as an ‘average man and wife … in Brooklyn … each about 35, married eight to ten years and childless. They are in the middle income bracket, between $4000 and $7000 … and paid an average of $2100.’30 As in the IMH operation, it seems that most of the adopting parents were of Jewish heritage. The father quoted above explained that the greatest barrier he and his wife faced as they tried to adopt through legitimate channels was ‘the fact that we are Jewish … because there were so few Jewish babies available.’ He described a visit to the Free Synagogue Adoption Committee in New York City, the city’s only Jewish adoption agency, where he and his wife were told that ‘applications outnumbered babies between fifteen and twenty to one. And there are many more Jewish couples who don’t even bother to apply because they know it is hopeless.’31 One Montreal columnist noted that during an earlier investigation of the baby black market, he was told by officials at the Free Synagogue Adoption Committee that they had ‘9000 couples investigated and approved, waiting for babies, and only a few hundred babies a year to meet their needs.’32 Child welfare leaders in both Canada and the United States were well aware that the law and practice of religious matching made it very difficult for Jewish families to find children to adopt. As a consequence, Jewish families desperate for children were turning, disproportionately, to domestic and transnational black markets.33 Most potential parents began with a telephone call to a lawyer or a woman running a maternity home or baby depot. Next, the parents travelled to Montreal or Vermont to select a child. After the financial details were settled, the next step was the documentation establishing the parents’ claim to the child. The black marketers had several strategies in place. Because the birth mothers were Catholic, their children were also Catholic in the eyes of the Church and of the law. Until the religious identity a mother bequeathed to her child was erased, the child could not be legally adopted by Jewish parents and thus could not be legally taken to the United States. Religious bonds still connected mother to child and child to language, culture, province, and country. In order for parents to ‘legally’ claim their children, they had to sever

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the religious tie between birth mother and child and re-create the Catholic waif as Jewish. Ironically, Quebec’s birth registration system – exclusively in the hands of religious authorities – made this transformation relatively easy. The official birth registration document in Quebec in this period was an entry in a register kept by a member of the clergy. Lawyers helped adoptive parents find rabbis who would register children presented to them as Jewish or even as ‘born to’ the adopting parents, thus obviating the need for an adoption and denying the very existence of the birthing mother.34 For many adoptive parents, the process ended with an official copy of the rabbi’s birth registration, the Quebec equivalent of a birth certificate, naming them as the parents of their child. Often parents were told, and perhaps believed, this document was an adoption certificate.35 At this point, the new parents could take their Jewish, American, born-to-them, children home to the United States and show the false birth registration in the unlikely event they were questioned at the border. Nonetheless, some parents – perhaps afraid of drawing attention to themselves and to the mulitple borders separating Judaism from Catholicism, Quebec from New York, English from French, Canada from the United States – paid an additional fee to have their children delivered (smuggled) across the border by paid baby-couriers. There were also allegations that babies were hidden in freight trucks crossing the border.36 These approaches had their own risks; children who were smuggled across the border and children who entered the United States on the basis of false birth registrations were not legal residents of the United States and were potentially subject to deportation. If parents wanted a legal adoption in a Quebec court, the process was different. The baby rings employed twenty or more ‘phony mothers,’ young Jewish women masquerading as birth mothers who presented ‘their’ children for registration as Jewish and then signed consents relinquishing the children for adoption.37 The ‘phony mother,’ standing in for the body of the birth mother, became the physical vector transforming the child into a religious entity suitable for legal transfer to a new Jewish family. With the help of Montreal lawyers, prospective parents could adopt this Jewish child through the Montreal Social Welfare Court. Often, the parents did not even appear in court. On the basis of this adoption, the parents could then obtain a passport for the child from the passport office of the Canadian Department of External Affairs (DEA) and an im-

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migration visa from the US consulate before ‘legally’ taking their new Jewish child to a new life in the United States.38 In the progression from birth registration, to adoption, to passport, to visa, to border crossing, each step facilitated and helped legitimate the next. This process was perfectly designed to find gaps and weaknesses in Quebec’s system of birth registration and adoption, and to exploit the divisions of jurisidiction and authority opening up in the move across provinces, states, and nations. The adoption rings also benefited from weak enforcement of existing rules, lax oversight, and perhaps corruption within each jurisdiction. Quebec police and prosecutors told the media they suspected some social welfare workers might be in league with the baby rings (specifically, might be helping the baby-sellers find pregnant women), but nothing definite came of these statements.39 Even though the false birth registration was the foundation of the ring’s operation, there was never any public accusation that rabbis were aware of the deception or were consciously involved in fraud or misrepresentation. When a rabbi paid by Glazer to register a Catholic child as Jewish testifed at Glazer’s trial, no one questioned his motives or suggested he was aware of any wrongdoing.40 When a New York investigator interviewed another Montreal rabbi about the birth registrations, he ‘expressed grave concern that all of a sudden so many Jewish girls were “going bad,”’ but raised no concerns about whether the mothers or children in front of him were ‘of the Jewish faith.’41 Likewise, there were no direct accusations that judges in the Montreal Social Welfare Court were part of the scandal. This, even though at least one judge in the Montreal court was regularly ignoring the statutory requirement for a six-month probationary period and processing US adoptions in twenty-four to forty-eight hours so that parents could return to the United States quickly. Despite the CWC intervention in 1951, some adopting parents were still being issued ‘interim adoption orders’ at the Social Welfare Court even though these documents had no standing under Quebec law.42 Canadian passport officials realized that the DEA might be – or might be seen to be – facilitating the Montreal black market. In late 1953, Canadian consular officials in the United States reported they were getting passport applications from parents who brought Canadian children into the United States (perhaps using visitors’ permits, perhaps with no documentation) and subsequently adopted the children there. The parents then sought Canadian passports for the children so that the families could return to Canada, secure immigration visas for their

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children from US consulates in Canada, and have the children re-enter the United States legally.43 Passport officer J.W. O’Brien subsequently discovered that at least some of these passport cases were related to the Montreal black market. He worried that in the Montreal case, and also in other cases of cross-border adoption, US adopting parents might be using passport applications from the United States to avoid provincial adoption regulations.44 These DEA discussions made it clear that in the years since the Alberta scandal, DEA officials had been working more closely with the provinces to check passport applications related to cross-border adoptions. The passport office had developed specific procedures for direct collaboration with provincial child welfare directors in some provinces, though not in Quebec where there was no director. These new procedures followed the broadest interpretation of the 1947–8 changes to the passport regulations, with the passport office using its administrative discretion broadly. The new methods looked rather like the procedures reformers had asked for, and the DEA had strongly resisted, in the late 1940s.45 It is not clear why DEA policy evolved in this direction and how this more proactive stance could be justified alongside External Affairs’s very strict interpretation of the consitutional division of powers, so prominent in its response to the Alberta and New Brunswick scandals. The change may have been related to personnel; O’Brien was part of the DEA staff in 1947–8 but he was not then the passport officer. The changed approach may have reflected a genuine willingness at the passport office, beyond O’Brien individually, to prioritize the welfare of children. If this was the case, then it was a solid and substantial victory for the child welfare reformers of the 1940s. Part of the motivation at DEA was also, clearly, to avoid a return to the ‘unwelcome notoriety and publicity we were subjected to when the export of infants was very much to the fore … about five years ago.’ This was also an indication, though a more negative one, that the child welfare reformers had influenced the DEA.46 DEA concern over US-based passport applications and the Montreal black market led to further changes in procedure. Canadian consulates in the United States were instructed in 1954 that any application for a passport on behalf of a Canadian child adopted by a US family should be referred to Ottawa, so that passport officers could consult with provincial officials before issuing a passport. The DEA instructions stressed that these US-based adoption/passport cases deserved extra scrutiny because of the potential for impropriety.47

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The US consul in Montreal was also implicated in the black market scandal. The ease with which US adopting parents were obtaining immigration visas for their children indicated that the consul’s office in Montreal might not be following the State Department protocol for cross-border adoptions that came into effect in January 1954. Under that protocol, consular officials were supposed to ensure that the relevant state department of child welfare or another authorized childplacing agency in the state approved the adopting family before issuing a visa. In addition, adopting parents were supposed to produce a letter from the provincial department of welfare stating there were no objections to the placement.48 The visa regulations were very new, however, and the pairing of New York and Quebec in these adoptions made it very difficult to follow this procedure. In Quebec, there was no central child welfare office from which parents could get a letter approving the placement, and New York officials were very clear in their refusal to do any home investigation or provide any other kind of support in out-ofstate placements.49 The INS had an embarassing role in the Montreal adoptions. On multiple occasions, INS border guards had allowed women (who were in fact paid baby smugglers) to take babies across the border without any documentation. Women would claim they were ‘just visiting’ in the United States for a day or two, and had forgotten their babies’ papers. The INS was forced to investigate these border crossings and other examples of baby smuggling connected with the black market. The agency insisted, however, that the point of these investigations would be to help the parents regularize the immigration status of their children and not to deport children who had entered the United States illegally.50 We might expect the dramatic events in Montreal to have generated increased cross-border activity at the USCB and the CWC. After all, this black market was the most concentrated example of cross-border adoption discovered to date. The Montreal operation highlighted exactly those themes that animated earlier cross-border work: shady adoption operators; questionable border crossings; weak regulatory control over adoption proceedings; and disconnects between provincial, state, Canadian federal, and US federal jurisdictions and agencies. Nonetheless, there was no joint response to the black market from the CWC and the USCB, another sign that the earlier cross-border coalition had faded. The CWC made no formal statement about events in Montreal, although publicity from the black market certainly shaped conversation at the CWC-sponsored transborder adoption meeting in June 1954.51

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The Montreal scandal also reinforced central themes in the work of the CWC’s Committee on Adoption. By 1954, the committee had already documented the way in which religious placement practices segmented the adoption marketplace, leading to surpluses of Catholic children in Quebec and deficits of Jewish children almost everywhere. The committee had argued, consistently, that professionally directed cross-border placements were needed to even out supply and demand in adoption.52 In February 1954, members of the Committee on Adoption attended a press conference of local social agencies responding to the black market, but did so as representatives of the Montreal social agencies where they worked.53 USCB staff became increasingly concerned about black market adoptions from the mid-1940s. For the USCB, and for most adoption professionals, the exchange of money for children was only part, and perhaps not even the worst part, of the black market. ‘The real evil,’ according to the USCB’s Maud Morlock, was ‘carelessness in the planless, thoughtless handing around of babies who have not families.’ For the USCB, public fascination with the scandal of the baby black market presented a ‘golden opportunity for conducting a campaign to obtain legal safeguards against loose adoption procedures.’54 The USCB always connected public statements about the black market to its wider program for improved adoption practices and better social services in support of unwed mothers. In January 1945, USCB chief Katharine Lenroot publicized the bureau’s new Preliminary Draft of Essentials in Adoption Law and Procedure by arguing the traffic in babies could be stopped if state governments and social agencies modelled their adoption work on the bureau’s recommendations.55 When Dr Martha Eliot became USCB chief in 1951, she listed ‘wiping out the black market in babies’ as one of nine priorities for the bureau. Later, she offered a five-step program for achieving this goal. Not surprisingly, her plan focused on better social service to unwed mothers, relinquishing parents, and adoptive parents and children, and on better laws protecting all parties to an adoption. Eliot argued that ‘all children should be placed through agencies licensed by state agencies and operating under adequate supervision.’ She underlined that this last goal – which amounted to ending all independent placements – would only be achieved through greater cooperation and support from ‘doctors, lawyers, ministers, nurses and other groups serving parents’ who arranged placements out of a sincere but misguided effort to help.56

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In 1953, the USCB launched a black market initiative designed to gather information and develop policy responses.57 The USCB explored the Montreal case as part of this work, but had little to say in direct response.58 From the beginning of the black market project, bureau officials felt uncomfortable when confronted with criminal trials and police investigations. They worried about becoming too embroiled in sensationalism and grew increasingly concerned that bureau files containing confidential case information, or for that matter the files of the social agencies supporting their investigations, could be subpoenaed in judicial proceedings. It also proved difficult to develop a working distinction between ‘grey market’ placements by well-intentioned professionals and ‘black market’ placements by nefarious baby-sellers, who might well be drawn from the same professional groups. Bureau officials worried that the term ‘grey market’ implied that all independent placers were connected in some way to the black market. Consequently, the term could well be seen as an insult to the doctors and lawyers whose help and cooperation the bureau wanted.59 In truth, neither the USCB nor the CWC was well positioned to delve into the seamy side of black market baby-selling or become involved in criminal prosecutions. Rather, these organizations were set up to educate and lobby for improvements in social services and legislation that might prevent black markets from developing. In the case of the IMH, baby-selling accusations were useful as a tool to prove the Youngs were corrupt, but the main interest of the transborder coalition lay in improving child welfare laws and practices. In 1955, the USCB’s black market project was consciously retooled as a study of all ‘unprotected adoptions,’ emphasizing the need for improved social services, reformed legislation, and close cooperation between social workers and other professionals.60 Among the local social agencies in Montreal, reactions to the black market ranged from frustration to a more hopeful sense of opportunity. Frustration was the order of the day at the Baron de Hirsch Institute and Jewish Child Welfare Bureau, the city’s major Jewish social service agency. The agency’s Child Welfare Division had a small adoption program. Like most other Jewish child welfare agencies in North America, the Baron de Hirsch Institute and Jewish Child Welfare Bureau had far more qualified parents than it had children available to place. Between January 1951 and June 1953, it placed twelve children in adoptive homes, although it also investigated sixty-four other independent placements in Jewish homes at the request of the Montreal

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Social Welfare Court. (These placements may well have included local families who found their children through the black market rings, though media reports referred exclusively to American families acquiring children.) The agency complained that ‘recent publicity in newspapers concerning the black market is an indication of the kind of activity which has been going on outside the agency which has made a sound adoptive program a very difficult one to develop.’61 Leaders from the city’s largest Protestant and Catholic child-placing agencies expressed their outrage at what Father Contant of La Société d’Adoption et de Protection de l’Enfance called the ‘ugly situation’ in the city, but also their ‘fear that the value of adoptions through recognized agencies may suffer from the publicity given local baby black market activities.’ The social agencies realized that they needed to differentiate themselves from the black market, and that meant explaining to the public the services they offered in support of unwed mothers, adoptive parents, and children. Explaining quickly became promoting. Together and separately, the Montreal agencies used public interest in the black market to emphasize the benefits of professionally managed adoptions. Above all, they stressed reaching out to unwed mothers before they became entangled in the black market.62 The president of the Montreal Council of Social Agencies expressed his hope that the scandal might ‘shock the population and the authorities into action for modern, stringent baby-placement practises controlled by laws that have teeth in them.’ Father Contant called for legal reforms, including a provincial law outlawing adoption placements by any individual or organization other than a provincially accredited placement agency. Rev. Ambrose of the Catholic Welfare Bureau railed against ‘grey market adoptions’ by independent child placers, which he described as potentially ‘ethical and legal’ but lacking in ‘charity or justice.’ He called for a revamped provincial Adoption Act, and a consolidated Children’s Protection Act.63 Not surprisingly, these local leaders made more direct and immediate connections between scandal and reform on the ground than their national counterparts. ‘It is not illegal to buy or sell babies in Canada’64 Overall, reactions from local and national child welfare organizations were a side issue in the unfolding drama. The key actors, before and after the headlines appeared, were police, prosecutors, and politicians who uncovered the unseemly details of the black market and plotted

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to shut it down through criminal prosecutions. ‘Black market adoption’ was itself an ambiguous term that carried a heavy load of moral disapproval, but was very difficult to define in practice. Ernest Mitler argued that ‘adoption enters the black market, as I conceive it, only when the passage of money becomes the determining factor of the transaction,’ but this was still imprecise. As Mitler himself admitted, ‘traders in the black market may argue that all of the money went for “fees and services.”’ He believed that this ‘plea would not remove the taint if it was money alone that primarily determined whether a child went to one set of prospective foster parents instead of another.’ But, as a legal question, the difference between charging fees for professional service and charging a fee to sell a child (the difference, in some definitions, between the ‘grey’ and ‘black’ markets) was both extremely important and very difficult to mark. This was an important reason why explicit anti-black-market statutes were so rare.65 As of February 1954, there were no Canadian provinces with explicit laws aimed at the black market, although three provinces (Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, and Ontario) had clauses in their adoption acts referring in more general terms to restrictions on the exchange of money in adoption. Later that spring, Ontario passed the first Canadian law directly aimed at outlawing the sale of children for adoption.66 Precise definitions aside, neither police, nor prosecutors, nor politicians, nor social workers, nor the public had any reservations about describing the Montreal adoptions as a particularly reprehensible example of a baby-selling black market. Whatever line there may have been between independent adoptions, grey markets, and outright black markets, the Montreal baby-sellers seemed well across it. Le Devoir described the Montreal black market as ‘un commerce répugnant’ that must ‘révolte la conscience des honnêtes gens,’ and Charles Young of the Montreal Council of Social Agencies argued that ‘no human baby at any stage should be considered a commodity.’67 The baby-sellers themselves were universally condemned, and described as ‘clever, unscrupulous scoundrels’ who were ‘vicious’ and ‘callous.’68 Not all parties to the black market were subject to the same criticism. Doctors who delivered babies, nurses or social workers on the margins of the black market, perhaps even the ‘phony mothers’ might be seen as ‘innocent dupes.’69 The babies, of course, were the most innocent of victims. Pictures of the tiny infants rescued from the baby rings (often held, incongruously, in the arms of their burly police rescuers) were splashed across the newspapers.70 Birth mothers who turned to the black market

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were also described as exploited victims – trapped in a difficult situation, sometimes mistreated, sometimes coerced into relinquishing their children. Overall, however, there was relatively little attention to the mothers, except when the focus was on preventing the black market by directing unwed pregnant women to social agencies.71 Next to the baby-sellers, the adoptive parents received the most attention in the media coverage. They were treated with remarkable generosity by reporters and by police and prosecutors. If baby-sellers were nefarious evil-doers, baby-buyers were ‘misguided but well-intentioned couples gypped by the ring.’72 The parents were frequently described as misled, duped, deceived, or taken advantage of by baby-sellers who might return later as blackmailers.73 At worst, the parents were accused of ignoring the terrible risks involved when they assumed permanent responsibility for a child about whom they knew little or nothing.74 Like the investigating detectives, adopting parents were sometimes portrayed as rescuing children from the perils of the black market, or more generally from lives of misery and poverty.75 The adoptive parents were supported as the best parents for the children they acquired.76 Prosecutors promised parents who cooperated with American and Canadian investigators that their children would not be taken away, and parents were offered help regularizing their adoptions and securing legal standing for their children in the United States.77 This sympathetic treatment of the adoptive parents is the more striking since the Montreal adoptions removed children from the culture and language of Quebec, from the country of their birth, and from the Catholic religion.78 In order for this transformation to be culturally acceptably, the parents had to be seen as good, loving people and they had to be acquitted of overt wrongdoing. Indeed, Mitler argued that most of the parents believed their adoptions were legal, although they ‘were pretty gullible.’ He described the parents as ‘duped’ into believing the children they adopted were of the Jewish faith.79 Prosecutor Hill and Canadian investigators agreed, and argued that parents who were unfamiliar with the language and legal practices in Quebec were easily convinced that the ‘procedure that was followed was according to Quebec law.’80 Perhaps, but it may make more sense to describe parents who knew how difficult it was to find Jewish children through social agencies and who knew how much money they were paying as deliberately gullible. Our confessing adoptive father certainly knew that his child was not born to a Jewish mother; he knew that the law was broken

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on his behalf, and he knew that he broke the law himself.81 Parents who had their children delivered to them in the United States would have to know something was amiss. Parents who directly told a rabbi that the child in their arms was born to them knew they were lying. If a lawyer obtained a false birth registration for the adoptive parents, these parents might well believe (or need to believe) that this was a legitimate certificate of adoption. The ‘phony mother’/adoption scenario had the advantage of shielding parents from direct contact with the illicit character of the adoption, and thus clothing the adoption transaction with plausibility. This plausibility, or deniability, was important since it helped smooth the transformation of the Catholic Québécois child to Jewish American child, and allowed both parents and investigators to feel better about the new family. If nobody ‘knew’ (or was forced to admit knowing), was the child really ‘purchased’ by his or her parents? Forgiving or ignoring the misdeeds of the adoptive parents meant the criminal investigation focused on the maternity home operators and the lawyers. Testifying before the US Senate in 1953, Mitler argued that New York authorities had trouble applying the state’s anti-blackmarket law because most black market operations moved children and parents across borders. The legal prosecution of baby-sellers was very difficult because there were differences in criminal statutes across jurisdictions and because it was difficult to investigate crimes taking place hundreds or thousands of miles away.82 As a further challenge, the key witnesses in any case against the baby-sellers (birth mothers and adoptive parents) had very good reasons for not talking and not testifying. Mitler was determined to take on the baby black markets, including those operating across state lines. Attacking black marketers was a personal crusade that occupied him throughout the 1950s. He became a master investigator with a flair for sensationalism, publicity, and self-promotion.83 The lawyer defending accused black marketer Herman Buller later argued that the size of the Montreal black market was greatly exaggerated as ‘a publicity stunt for someone not under our jurisdiction.’84 Still, without Mitler’s work or that of his investigator Bogatta it would have been much more difficult for Montreal authorities to crack the city’s black market. Accordingly, Mitler was front and centre at press conferences and in media interviews. There were some unspecified intimations in the press of divisions inside the investigation – perhaps indicating that the path to transnational cooperation was not always smooth – but the dominant public image was of a ‘winning

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team’ combining Canadian and American expertise and investigative skills.85 Ultimately, it was up to Prosecutor Hill and the Montreal police to put together a criminal case. According to Hill, Premier Duplessis gave him instructions to ‘end once and for all, the baby traffic out of Quebec.’ Hill hoped the scandal would lead to a complete remodelling of the Quebec adoption law, but he had to work within current provincial and federal law.86 He had very little to work with, at least directly. As Hill explained, ‘It is not illegal to buy or sell babies in Canada.’ ‘But,’ he continued, ‘falsification of official documents, forgery, uttering and fraud are always crimes.’87 Hill’s only option was to go after the black marketers with ‘accusations indirects’ that related to the false birth registration documents.88 Hill could only support prosecutions against lawyers Buller and Glazer, both of whom were charged with several counts of fraud, falsifying birth registrations, and counselling others to falsify registrations.89 Glazer’s lawyer argued that the charges against his client were unjust because the central ‘crime’ underneath the charges, selling a child, was not an offence under Canadian law. He accused Hill of playing to American criticisms of Canadian law and of doing an end run around federal and provincial legislators, whose job it was to fix any defects or omissions in Canadian statutes.90 To a very real extent, this ‘end run’ was Hill’s strategy. Faced with border-crossing baby-sellers who used loopholes and gaps in the laws of Quebec and New York, Hill found his own loophole that let him act in the absence of an explicit statute.91 Still, Hill faced critics who felt the proposed charges were insufficient. Father Contant suggested the prosecutor might lay charges against maternity home operators under the province’s legislation governing private hospitals, though he also admitted this legislation needed to be strengthened to guard against future infractions.92 Le Devoir editor Gérard Filion created a side-scandal when he suggested Hill had deliberately backed off more serious charges because Buller and Glazer were fellow lawyers.93 Hill insisted he had no other legal options. Federal parliamentarians were in the midst of a major debate on the revamped Canadian criminal code in February 1954. When the minister of justice Stuart Garson was asked whether ‘the Criminal Code, as revised, will include an article which would make it punishable to sell infants or children,’ he was forced into the potentially embarrassing admission that it did not.94 Elaborating, Garson defended federal

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inaction by referring back to the divide between federal and provincial responsibilities. ‘Indeed,’ Garson argued, ‘no subject matter of legislation enactment is more peculiarly within provincial jurisdiction than the relationship between parents and children.’ Garson also felt that ‘the criminal law … is a very blunt and harsh instrument with which to deal with the relationship between parents and children.’95 The child welfare leaders in this study would likely have agreed. They always emphasized better child welfare services over punishments. Still, when it came to overt black markets – to adoption operations that deliberately flouted child welfare standards and community values – then that blunt instrument might have to be used. Furthermore, it might have to be used across the divide of provincial and federal spheres of activity. Garson opened some space for federal intervention when he suggested that ‘law relating to adoption should remain within provincial jurisdiction and should not be overridden in any way by federal legislation … unless it can be shown that abuses under the provincial law have arisen which cannot be cured by amendments to the relevant provincial statutes.’ He refused to speculate on whether or not the crossborder baby trade met this requirement until after the legal process in Quebec was finished, and more facts were available. Opposition leader George Drew argued that when the baby traffic took children or any other human beings outside the country, it was not sufficient to rely on provincial laws.96 In different ways, Garson and Drew both underlined how boundaries and borders – between federal and provincial jurisdiction, between one nation and another – might allow for slippage, evasion, and a relatively free ride for baby traffickers. The question (an old one for adoption reformers) was what the federal government might do about it. The answer in the case of federal criminal code revisions and the Montreal black market was, ultimately, nothing. Back in Montreal, the list of document-related charges against Buller and Herman expanded and then contracted. In March, a Canadian ‘rogatory commission’ consisting of a judge, Prosecutor Hill, two defence lawyers, and Mitler as observer went to New York to interview adoptive parents, though the record of these interviews was kept tightly sealed.97 At the end of the legal preliminaries, the presiding judge ruled that only one federal charge could go to trial. Buller was indicted on four counts of violating Article 480B of the Federal Criminal Code, which dealt with falsification of civil registrations such as birth, marriage, and death certificates. Glazer was indicted on one count.98

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In February 1955, Buller pled guilty and was sentenced to one day in jail and a $2000 fine. He later faced further sanctions from the Montreal Bar Association. Even with the guilty plea, Buller’s lawyer maintained that his client had done nothing but good on behalf of the children he placed in loving families. ‘Technically, ‘ the lawyer argued, ‘my client did wrong but morally he didn’t.’99 Glazer elected to stand trial and was defended by the city’s most prominent criminal lawyer, Joseph Cohen.100 The prosecution’s case seemed strong. It rested on the testimony of New York Detective Bogatta, who described how Glazer acquired a baby for her, arranged for a false registration, and took $3050 in marked bills from her hands. Cohen argued at trial that the only reason Glazer agreed to help Bogatta register the child (as opposed to smuggling the child to the US without documentation) was because she insisted. He also stressed that even if Glazer advised Bogatta and knowingly supplied her with false information to give to the rabbi registering the birth, it was Bogatta herself (posing as the mother of the child in her arms) who relayed that information. Glazer was acquitted.101 For police and prosecutors in both Canada and the United States, the legal results must have been disappointing. After the Montreal scandal, there were no substantive changes to provincial or federal laws. Early rumours that the provincial Adoption Act would be remodelled and a royal commission appointed to further investigate the black market were quickly quashed. Such a royal commission would be politically explosive as it must, inevitably, open up the controversial issue of the Church’s control over child welfare in Quebec and attract unflattering national and international attention.102 Mitler and Hill put together an impressive cross-border effort, but without new laws (provincial, federal, border-crossing) aimed explicitly at the black market, it was not possible to use criminal investigations and prosecutions to put a final stop to cross-border baby-selling.103 ‘The evil is being committed on both a local and a federal plane’ After Montreal, Ernest Mitler kept up his fight against border-crossing black markets. The frustrating experience in Montreal reinforced an argument he had been making since his testimony to the US Senate in 1953. The only way, Mitler argued, to fully control the black market was through federal legislation. ‘It seems to me obvious,’ Mitler argued, ‘that the evil is being committed on both a local and a federal plane. I think that a Federal law would cover all of the territory – all of the

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States – and that it would not only facilitate investigation, but I think it would defeat the question of jurisdiction that is raised all the time. It would also defeat the circumvention these people employed by going to territory where they have no local laws.’104 There was already some interest in a federal black market law, prompted in part by publicity from cases prosecuted by Mitler and his colleagues in New York. In 1949 Mitler successfully prosecuted New York lawyer Irwin Slater, who ran a Florida-to-New York interstate black market. Although Slater was convicted and went to jail for one year, this case left Florida Congressman George Smathers shocked that there was ‘no applicable Federal law prohibiting such commerce.’ He called on Congress to use its authority over interstate commerce to punish this ‘new kind of nefarious scheme.’105 Over the next thirty years, the federal regulation of interstate black markets returned to Congress many times. The first bills were introduced in the House of Representatives in 1949 and 1950, close on the heels of the Slater case. Neither of these bills was reported out of committee, a fate shared by twenty-one of the twenty-five black market bills introduced in the House (twelve) or the Senate (thirteen) between 1949 and 1979. On four occasions (1956, 1962, 1964, and 1965) federal black market legislation was approved by the Senate, but was then neglected by the House.106 There were also six sets of congressional hearings on this topic (five in the Senate, one in the House) between 1955 and 1977.107 The most concentrated attention came in the decade 1955–65. The most important congressional advocate was Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, who sat on the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency where Mitler testified in 1953. Kefauver was an adoptive father and his home state hosted one of the most notorious interstate black markets uncovered in the early 1950s, the Tennessee Children’s Home Society.108 By 1955, Kefauver was chair of the subcommittee, and Ernest Mitler was working for him as special counsel responsible for investigating the interstate black market in babies. Kefauver argued that a study of the black market belonged at the federal level because ‘so much of traffic occurs across state lines.’ The issue belonged with his subcommittee because many of the unwed mothers surrendering children were minors, and because poor or risky adoptive placements (a presumed consequence of the black market) created the potential for family disruption and future delinquent behaviour.109 Kefauver and Mitler organized three sets of hearings in 1955 and 1956 designed to prove that a federal law was necessary to curb the interstate baby trade,

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and to explore the specifics of proposed legislation.110 Between 1955 and his sudden death in 1963, Kefauver personally sponsored eight federal baby black market bills. All four of the black market bills that passed the Senate were sponsored by Kefauver, or explicitly linked to him by colleagues who took up the issue after his death.111 Together, Mitler and Kefauver launched an extensive public discussion about whether and how the federal government should intervene to regulate the movement of babies across borders for profit. The first hearings were held in Chicago in July 1955. Mitler appeared as an expert witness, testifying about his experience as a prosecutor, his sense of the vast extent of the black market, the mechanisms used by black marketers to skirt existing adoption laws, and the ‘social dangers’ inherent in placements made solely because ‘the adoptive couple is able to put up the stated sum of money.’112 Mitler described how difficult it was for prosecutors to pursue an adoption operation crossing state lines, especially when there were ‘thirty four states where there is no criminal law against baby selling.’113 He explained the investigations of black market practices in Chicago, Texas, Oklahoma, and Minnesota undertaken by the subcommittee staff.114 Other witnesses – ranging from judges, police detectives, and social workers to unwed mothers and maternity home operators – provided more details. Most of these witnesses (with the exception of those accused of black market practices) agreed with Mitler and Kefauver that there was a widespread, interstate baby-trade in the United States and that federal intervention was needed.115 Kefauver and Mitler connected the international to the interstate, and legislation sponsored by Kefauver and others referred explicitly to the transportation of children and parents in ‘interstate or foreign commerce.’116 Of course, a US federal law could not be used to police adoption operators inside Canada who sent children to the United States, just as the New York state law could not be used to prosecute Montreal’s black marketers. At the 1956 hearings, Mitler explained that the references to ‘out-of-the country and overseas adoptions’ in the legislation grew out of his experiences in Montreal. The intent was to design US federal legislation that could, at least, be used to prosecute US-based intermediaries in border-crossing adoptions making ‘illicit arrangements’ from within the United States.117 There was extensive testimony on the Montreal case at the July 1955 hearings in Chicago. The Montreal testimony underlined connections and similarities between interstate and international baby markets and

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the Montreal-based witnesses provided some of the most dramatic and graphic testimony at the hearings. Drama and the media attention it might arouse was important since, as Kefauver argued, ‘We are aware that only an aroused public interest will lead to the alleviation of the conditions which permit the black market in babies to flourish.’118 Detective Bogatta testified on the sting operation that led to the arrest of Glazer. She also described the case of the ‘Warrens,’ who acquired a child through Buller, received a falsified birth certificate, and then had the child smuggled across the border.119 Kefauver’s subcommittee also heard from Eugene Moyneur, an ex-boxer, wrestler, weightlifter, and carnival man with a long criminal record. He worked as a professional baby courier for Montreal maternity home operator Sarah Wyman, and was engaged in the outright smuggling of children across the CanadaUS border with help from contacts in organized crime. Moyneur knew he was breaking multiple laws, and was aware he had to avoid ‘finger men’ who might trail him to the parents’ homes and then return as blackmailers, but he had no sense of personal wrongdoing. When Mitler referred to his work as ‘smuggling,’ Moyneur protested: ‘You call bringing in a baby smuggling? That ain’t smuggling … that is giving a baby a home.’ He did admit, though, that he never thought about whether or not the adoptive parents to whom he delivered the babies were ‘the right “Joes” for this baby.’120 The only adoptive parent to testify at the Chicago hearings was Mr Boyd, who described his dealings with the same Sarah Wyman who employed Moyneur. His testimony was unquestionably self-serving, but it also painted a deeply disturbing picture of the Montreal baby trade. Boyd described how Wyman pressured him to accept a ‘very defective’ and ‘emaciated’ child with ‘labored’ breathing. He and his wife rejected this child and left it to Wyman’s questionable care, but they returned the next day to claim an infant who had just been born. This child was also in crisis: ‘The umbilical cord … was ripped and torn, and bleeding … The delivery was mismanaged and this child was gasping for oxygen.’ Boyd and his wife felt compelled to rescue this second child from Wyman, though the child’s birth mother (who was left ‘screaming in pain’) did not merit the same treatment. Boyd positioned himself and his wife as potential victims, themselves, of the black market because they took a ‘heavy, calculated, and perhaps stupid risk’ by assuming responsibility for a child who could well turn out to have serious medical or developmental problems. Boyd eventually paid $1000 to Wyman for the child (there was no pretence that this was other than a payment for

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the child) and $500 to a lawyer who arranged a false birth registration followed by an adoption through the Montreal Social Welfare Court. The child became their beloved ‘Anna.’ Mercenary black marketers, innocent children in danger, adoptive parents taking terrible chances, and exploited birth mothers – all of these had a role in Boyd’s dramatic account of his ‘dreadful experience’ in Montreal.121 After telling the senators all that was wrong with the black market, Boyd concluded without any apparent sense of irony by stating his strong support for a federal black market law that would prevent others from following in his footsteps. Even though his black market adoption ultimately turned out well, other parents and children might not fare so well.122 After Chicago there were hearings in Miami in November 1955, where the focus was on intrastate black markets operating out of Miami, Georgia, Kansas, and Alabama. Kefauver told the press these hearings proved that a federal law was needed to ‘stop the interstate sale of children.’123 In January 1956, Kefauver introduced to the Senate Bill S3021 on the ‘Interstate Placement of Children,’ designed to ‘make unlawful certain practices in connection with the placing of minor children for adoption.’ S3021 was built around the federal power to regulate interstate commerce. The key clauses made it a crime, punishable by a fine of $10,000 and up to five years in jail, to receive compensation for arranging ‘the placement of any child in any home for permanent free care or adoption’ under circumstances ‘requiring or resulting in’ the child or the parent of the child moving or being moved across state or national lines. Childcare agencies licensed by state governments were exempted, allowing them to receive funds to cover their expenses when they placed children across state lines.124 Remarkably, this bill went beyond regulating placement for compensation. The bill made it a crime, punishable by a fine of up to $5000 and up to three years in jail, to arrange the placement of a child across state or national lines unless the adopting home was studied and approved by a licensed childcare agency in advance of the placement, and the state department of child welfare in the receiving state approved of the placement, in writing and in advance. There were exceptions when the child was placed in the home of ‘a relative within the third degree’ or when the placement was made by ‘the natural mother directly and without assistance or guidance of a third person or intermediary in the selection of the foster parents.’125 These provisions could be used to prosecute black marketers, but they would also force any independent child placer (anyone working on the grey market) to work with a li-

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censed child welfare agency before the child was placed in a home. In other words, independent placements (at least those crossing state lines) would no longer be independent. This was a proposal for federal regulation of border-crossing adoption on a very grand scale and one that would give the federal government extensive responsibility for the child welfare aspects of adoption. Kefauver sold this legislation by describing the vast extent of the baby black market in the United States, where ‘thousands of children were transported for sale – like so many sacks of flour – from State to State, in assembly line fashion for prices ranging usually from $500 to $3500.’ He described how the ‘basic and tender human emotion – the urge to parenthood on the part of couples who are deprived of children of their own – is frequently exploited by unscrupulous individuals whose only desire is for personal gain.’ He chided his colleagues with the fact that ‘under our present laws, anyone who arranges to sell a car, a motorboat, or any other piece of property illicitly obtained across state lines would be subject to arrest and imprisonment. Yet … there are no federal laws regulating the sale of a child, however obtained, across state lines.’ Kefauver reported that law enforcement officials from across the country supported a federal law because ‘due to the interstate nature of the problem … they were unable to cope with the problem on a State level.’ On the question of state versus federal jurisdiction, Kefauver insisted that ‘the legislation is not intended in any way to remove or interfere with the basic responsibilities of the States dealing with adoptive matters,’ but rather to ‘combat situations which are beyond the control of the States, and to eliminate the tragic and sordid interstate traffic in children.’126 At hearings in May 1956, lawyers, prosecutors, social workers, and religious leaders responded to S3021. Most supported the idea of federal intervention to criminalize the black market and to require social agency oversight in all cross-border placements. The most cutting criticism came from the Rt. Rev. Monsignor O’Grady, secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Charities, who objected to specifics in the bill and to the very principle of federal regulation in social welfare. His was a protest against activist government in general and against the extension of state or federal authority in social welfare in particular. He saw more government in social welfare as an intrusion on the pastoral mission of the Church that would impede the work of voluntary organizations and violate the integrity of American families.127 In many ways, his arguments mirrored those of the Catholic church in Quebec

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as it resisted the extension of government control over child welfare. O’Grady was also suggesting that as the federal government reached into state jurisdiction, it was also reaching, unjustly, into the private space of the American family.128 The comments of Florence Brown, executive director of Louise Wise Services, were more typical of how social agencies responded. Brown argued that the social problems rising from baby sales and the social problems rising from independent placements by the ‘well-meaning intermediary’ were very similar. In either case, ‘none of [the] necessary safeguards can be provided from the unmarried mother, the child, and the adoptive parents.’ Thus, Brown welcomed federal policing of the interstate black market and of all border-crossing independent adoptions. The federal legislation would not on its own stop ‘the local black and gray market dealers,’ but Brown thought it likely a federal bill would ‘by example, ultimately affect State legislation.’ In the long term, federal legislation and state legislation must be combined with enhanced professional social services to stop the black market and improve the overall standard of adoption placements. Representatives from other social agencies echoed Brown’s arguments, but several pointed out that the law had its own, gaping, loophole. If, as Kefauver’s bill allowed, birth mothers placing their own children were exempted from the bill’s provisions, then black marketers would only need to claim the mother made the actual placement in order to escape prosecution.129 This three-stage solution Brown laid out – deploying the federal power to police across borders, encouraging state-level reform, extending professional welfare services – sounded very much like the adoption reform agenda pursued by the CWC and the USCB in the 1930s and 1940s. Nonetheless, USCB chief Martha Eliot testified against the bill. Eliot argued that while the USCB supported the bill’s major objectives – stopping the ‘nefarious practice of the black market in babies and providing better safeguards for all border-crossing adoptions’ – her staff questioned ‘whether and to what extent’ the federal government should become entangled with the licensing of adoption agencies and the specific child-placing regulations of the various states.130 Eliot felt that adoption safeguards should be developed at the state level. The bureau’s ideal approach to improving independent interstate placements was ‘more uniformity of good state laws … possibly supplemented by interstate compacts.’ The USCB was concerned that the part of S3021 requiring preplacement studies and state approval in advance of interstate placements leapfrogged over state-level reform,

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and imposed requirements that were out of sync with developments in the states. ‘If,’ Eliot argued, ‘the committee should decide federal legislation is necessary, it may wish to consider whether such legislation should establish standards without relation to State standards and laws, as this bill would do. Or, in support of state policy, should this bill merely prohibit interstate placements which are in contravention of the law of the [receiving or sending] State.’131 Eliot preferred that the subcommittee drop the preplacement investigation sections of the bill and produce legislation focused only on placements for profit. ‘A bill narrowed to prohibit the black market in babies would certainly strike at the worst evils which now exist and would not raise as many difficult questions of policy.’ She then added a series of more specific comments designed to improve the existing bill by specifying who could and could not advise a birth mother on the placement of her child, protecting adopting parents from prosecution, and opening space for doctors and lawyers working on adoptions to collect professional fees.132 The USCB had long advocated using federal power to police crossborder adoptions between Canada and the United States, and had argued that it was not possible to control poor placements across borders unless federal agencies stepped into the space between state and provincial jurisdictions. Nonetheless, when the USCB or the CWC approached the INS, the US consuls, or the Canadian passport office, the model was usually one wherein federal agencies would refer back to the social welfare professionals at the state/provincial level to make certain that state/provincial requirements were met. This approach required federal authorities to inject a social sense (a child welfare logic) into their systems, but one that relied on the intentions and expertise of the provinces or states. S3021 pushed too far when it substituted federal criminal sanctions for improved programs and procedures worked out at the state level. In essence, Eliot was arguing that the federal criminal law laid out in S3021 was too rigid an overlay on legal and social relationships between parents and children that were best regulated with an eye to local concerns and local developments. Nonetheless, the USCB (and CWC) had also argued in the past and would continue to argue that where weak state/provincial laws, poor professional standards, and rogue adoption operators put children and parents in danger, a bold, even blunt, appli­cation of federal power could be useful. Thus, it was not so much that Eliot was opposed to any use of federal power to curb interstate

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adoption abuses, but rather that she preferred more emphasis on state reforms and disliked the specific design of this bill. At the next round of Senate hearings, in 1964, the USCB was lined up squarely in support of a federal black market bill, S1541. USCB chief Katharine Oettinger testified that a federal law was now needed because the black market was expanding and differences between state laws and enforcement measures meant that some states had become black market ‘adoption havens.’133 Oettinger, however, was supporting a bill that differed in key respects from S3021. After Eliot’s 1956 testimony, the preplacement provisions (designed to stop all independent adoptions) disappeared from the legislation. Subsequent bills proposed by Kefauver and others focused on placement for profit were far more precise in their language about birth mother placements, and excluded adoptive parents from prosecution. In addition, lawyers and doctors were granted the explicit right to charge fees for medical and legal services in connection with interstate adoptions.134 In 1961, Kefauver told the Senate that his committee had polled more than five hundred public and private child welfare agencies ‘on the merits of the proposed legislation. This poll showed those agencies uniformly urged its enactment into law.’ In 1963, he reported that his legislation had the support of the National Conference of Catholic Charities (no longer led by O’Grady), the National Jewish Welfare Board, and ‘the various denominational groups of the Protestant Church.’135 Despite this support, plus six sets of congressional hearings and twentyfive proposed bills (1949–79), the United States has never passed an explicit federal statute outlawing the interstate traffic in babies. At the 1975 Senate black market hearings, Joseph Reid, executive director of the Child Welfare League of America, was asked why no federal law was passed in the 1950s or 1960s. Reid cited opposition from religious leaders to the first proposals, and the early preference of the USCB (and his CWLA) for solutions rooted in the reform of state law. He talked about public hostility towards professional adoption agencies, which translated into support for independent adoption options and opposition to measures that would increase the power of state bureaucracies and social workers. Reid also noted legislators’ concern and confusion about the role of lawyers and doctors as adoption intermediaries.136 These were the issues that dominated in congressional discussion of the baby-selling bills in the 1950s and 1960s.137 Together, these objections and concerns showed that using federal criminal law to control adoptions across state and national boundaries meant challenging other boundaries, like those between federal and state legal and consti-

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tutional jurisdiction, between the public realm of government and the intimate realm of family, between the prosecutor’s world of criminal prosecution and the social worker’s world of reform and development. These border crossings were all complex and controversial. In a 1991 interview, Ernest Mitler suggested some additional, more prosaic reasons why the black market legislation never made it into law. He pointed to the power games of Washington politics. Kefauver was a strong and prominent supporter of the black market initiative, and Senator Lyndon Johnson helped move S3021 through the Senate in 1956. But after it was approved in the Senate, the legislation was ‘buried’ in the House Committee of the Judiciary by Representative Edwin Willis, who told Mitler that ‘Kefauver never did anything for him.’ After Kefauver died in 1963, there was no equivalently powerful congressional advocate on this issue. Mitler also argued that the Justice Department was reluctant to support the bills and remained ‘neutral.’ The official reason for this stance was that adoption was usually a state responsibility; Mitler thought the department opposed the bills because the FBI wanted no part of enforcing them.138 In the end, Mitler spent a total of three years (1955–8) working with Kefauver on the legislation and on the black market investigations before taking his fight to other venues.139 Mitler recognized that the subcommittee’s work led many adoption agencies to tighten their procedures and some states to change their adoption laws, but, overall, he was disappointed that the hearings did not lead to a federal law.140 Conclusion Criminal law (especially a border-crossing federal law) might have been an important tool to fight the black market, but developing an appropriate law that could garner support from the public, law enforcement officials, child welfare leaders, and politicians proved impossible. Regardless, child welfare leaders argued that improving and extending professional service to unwed mothers and adoptive parents was just as important, perhaps more important, than criminal prosecutions in the fight to stop the baby traffickers. Since the 1930s, child welfare leaders at the CWC and USCB had been arguing for a combination of top-down policing from federal agencies, amendments and reforms in state/provincial child welfare law, cooperation between child welfare workers in different jurisdictions, and better local services as a strategy to combat dangerous border-crossing placements. Law enforcement officials and politicians such as Kefauver and Mitler trying to use crimi-

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nal law to stop the black market were aware of this larger picture. The preplacement/independent adoption provisions in Kefauver’s S3021 were intended to bring all cross-border adoptions under the purview of professional social workers in licensed social agencies. There would be no Canadian federal baby-selling statute, no Quebec provincial statute, no royal commission, and no significant reworking of Quebec’s adoption legislation after the Montreal scandal. The dramatic events of February 1954 had revealed the seamy side of the black market to the public, unwed mothers, social agencies, and would-be adoptive parents, but did little to change on-the-ground conditions in Montreal. Black market operatives learned that provincial officials were willing to go after them on birth registration charges, but that the legal consequences were not serious. Although there was never another comparable black market scandal in the city, most observers believed that adoption black markets continued to function in Montreal and in other North American cities.141 In 1959, a legislative committee in New York, with Mitler as counsel, heard evidence that maternity home operator Sarah Wyman was back in the baby business in Montreal.142 More significant changes in the way both legitimate and underground adoptions took place in Montreal came with overall changes to the child welfare system and the demographics of unwed pregnancy and child relinquishment in Quebec in the 1960s, as described in chapter 4. In the nearly sixty years since the Montreal black market scandal, all US states and all Canadian provinces and territories have enacted some form of anti-baby-selling legislation (usually, rules limiting fees in adoption transactions), and a small number of US states require that all placements be made through licensed social agencies. However, the standards set in these laws and the mechanisms for enforcement vary widely.143 At its core, black market legislation was restrictive legislation designed to make certain kinds of adoption more difficult. The child at the centre of the anti-black-market debate, and most other efforts to curtail cross-border adoptions, was the scarce, highly desired, healthy white infant. Through the 1950s and beyond, social workers remained very concerned about the interstate and international black market and other unsafe border-crossing adoptions. They were also, however, thinking in more positive terms about promoting cross-border adoption for children they considered hard-to-place. Chapter 6 takes up the new move towards promoting cross-border adoption.

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6 Promoting and Controlling Cross-Border Adoption, 1950–1972

In 1966, the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) established the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA), an interstate and international network designed to ‘bring together the waiting children and the waiting families of this continent.’1 ARENA built upon the Indian Adoption Project (IAP), an earlier CWLA experiment using a cross-border adoption exchange to find homes for Native American children. IAP and ARENA both rested on changing attitudes among social workers and the public about which children were suitable for adoption by which families. By the mid-1950s, the CWLA was arguing that adoption was possible for ‘any child who is legally free and who can benefit from family life.’2 ‘Any child’ could include minority or mixed-race children, children of uncertain or problematic (from a social worker’s perspective) heritage, and children with intellectual or physical disabilities. Almost all of these children were considered virtually unadoptable a decade earlier. Finding the homes willing and able to take in ‘any child’ could be challenging. For social workers, this frequently meant arranging adoptive placements that crossed geographical borders, and sometimes also crossed borders of race and religion. Child welfare leaders retained their earlier concerns about placing children across jurisdictions, but also realized that finding homes for the newly adoptable meant exploring carefully supervised professional placements in other states, provinces, or nations. There were now two challenges associated with border-crossing adoptions. There was, first, the older issue of controlling bad, unprofessional, border crossings, including black market adoptions. There was also the new challenge of promoting good, professional, adoptions across borders.

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This chapter explores how border-crossing adoptions were promoted through IAP, ARENA, and other adoption exchanges operating in the United States, in Canada, and across the international border. Earlier, we explored how inconsistencies in adoption law and practice across jurisdictions made it easier for parents and adoption entrepreneurs to bypass state or professional supervision of adoptive placements. The same divisions and uneven standards could also complicate or block the cross-border adoptions that social workers supported. Thus, professional collaboration, inter-jurisdictional agreements, and changes to adoption laws were also crucial in the new project of promoting adoptions across borders. The chapter begins with social workers’ new understanding of adoptability and with the adoption exchanges appearing across Canada and the United States. Next, we look specifically at the CWLA’s two national exchanges, IAP and ARENA. The focus then shifts to politicians in New York and other states involved in the interstate cooperation movement that produced, among other innovations in interstate governance, the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC). Although the ICPC was an interstate vehicle, there were provisions to extend the compact to include Canadian provinces. The interplay between IAP, ARENA, and the ICPC is clear in a 1972 CWLA report on the ARENA project, entitled Obstacles to Interstate Adoption. Author Roberta Hunt noted that despite the commitment of social workers to border-crossing adoptions, there were still significant ‘variations in laws, policies and practices that appeared to be impeding interstate placement for adoption.’3 She argued that one crucial step to removing the barriers was to ensure that all US states and all Canadian provinces join the ICPC. The final section of this chapter looks at the obstacles identified by Hunt, and then at those she ignored. For example, Hunt’s report had little to say about the increasing objections of African American, Native American, First Nations, and Métis communities to border-crossing adoptions that placed their children in homes and families of another race and another culture. ‘Any child who is legally free and who can benefit from family life’ Up to the 1940s, child welfare professionals had a very restricted definition of the adoptable child. Adoptable children were children whose background had been thoroughly investigated and who showed no signs of intellectual or physical pathology; disabled children or chil-

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dren with problematic or unknown family histories were considered largely unadoptable. Mixed-race or non-white children were shadows at the edges of adoptability, since relatively few social agencies in Canada or the United States provided extensive adoption services to unwed mothers or adoptive parents in minority communities. In addition, the vast majority of social workers and adoptive families remained committed to racial matching in adoption.4 By the later 1940s, however, professional social workers were experimenting with much wider, far less restrictive definitions. At the CWLA’s National Adoption Conference in 1955, there was extensive discussion of ‘changing definitions of adoptability,’ now extended to include ‘placements of older, handicapped, and minority group children.’5 In Canada, this new understanding of adoptability can be traced through the discussions of the Canadian directors of child welfare in the 1950s and in the work of the CWC’s Committee on Adoption.6 Committee chair Muriel McCrae enacted the new approach in her work at the Children’s Service Centre in Montreal.7 This expanded vision can be linked to interrelated developments in social work practice and public attitudes. Public challenges to the restrictive practices of social workers and the increased demand for children to adopt both influenced social workers, as did a new emphasis on nurture versus nature in the science of child development and an increasing recognition of the benefits of family life for child development.8 Civil rights activism and increasing racial pluralism in both countries led to more popular and professional tolerance for transracial families; a few innovators began to cross racial lines in domestic and international adoption by placing non-white children in white families.9 Some of the earliest and most vocal advocates of transracial placement were in Montreal, where the Open Door Society (a communication, support, and lobbying group first organized by adoptive parents) worked in concert with McCrae’s Children’s Service Centre.10 As Karen Dubinsky has argued, the Open Door Society ‘espoused an integrationist, civil rights philosophy and worked with black communities to find a politic of adoption that was unifying, not colonizing.’11 The Open Door model was later copied across Canada and the United States, though often without the sophisticated approach to race and culture visible in Montreal. In both countries, adoptive families that crossed the borders of race were often seen as a ‘hopeful harbinger’12 of the liberal vision of ‘colorblind mutuality.’13 This positive assessment would, however, be challenged by those who interpreted transracial adoptions as the theft of children and an attack on minority communities.

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Most adoptive families still preferred white, healthy infants. It could be very challenging to find homes for the newly adoptable, hence the emerging term ‘hard-to-place children.’ Hard-to-place was an awkward construction. At the National Adoption Conference in 1955, one speaker argued that the term could imply that the child was in some ways a ‘problem,’ reflecting the tendency of social workers to ‘place the burden on the children rather than our own lack of skills in finding homes for this group of children.’14 The term also combined children who were hard-to-place for very different reasons, collapsing ‘the child who is hard-to-place because his condition limits the number of homes that would be able to give him the special care he needs, and those who are hard-to-place only because sufficient publicity had not been given to their needs.’15 In other words, children who were disabled in some way and required specialized medical or psychological support were grouped with children whose skin colour or ethno-religious heritage was the impediment to placement. Of course, the most difficult to place were children who crossed both groups, as in minority children with physical or intellectual disabilities. The conflation of physical and intellectual disability with minority racial status in hard-to-place could also create the impression that non-white racial status was in some sense a pathology that needed to be, or could be, overcome through the intervention of social workers. Public and private agencies across North America now needed specialized publicity and education programs to recruit adoptive families. In the United States, the National Urban League sponsored an ‘Adopta-Child’ program in the mid-1950s, working with social agencies to recruit African American adoptive parents for waiting African American children. Agencies in both countries had limited success recruiting minority-race adoptive parents in the 1950s and 1960s. This result was often, and far too simplistically, explained by citing a persistent lack of interest in adoption in minority communities. Other factors – including historically weak or antagonistic ties between social agencies and communities, culturally specific models of childcare and family formation, racism in social welfare services, and persistent economic disadvantage – were equally significant. The Children’s Service Centre in Montreal is one example of an agency that moved from recruiting minority-race parents for minority children, to recruiting white parents for non-white children.16 Child-placing agencies sometimes advertised specific children in need of homes. Agency-directed advertising campaigns gave a more

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professional stamp to an older model of private adoption notices in classified ads and child-placement campaigns sponsored by newspapers and magazines.17 In 1959, the Ontario Department of Public Welfare began a three-year publicity campaign during which some of the most hard-to-place children in provincial care were featured in newspaper and radio spots. The advertisements were run in Ontario media outlets, but the campaign drew attention across the continent.18 Provincial officials eventually received 4321 inquiries from interested couples. Almost 1400 responses came from the United States, although some of the US couples clearly thought Ontario was offering healthy, white infants for adoption rather than hard-to-place children from racialized communities and children with various physical, intellectual, and psychological challenges. Ontario officials promised that Ontario adopting families would be given first priority, but they were absolutely willing to look across provincial and national borders for families to fit the children. In the end, 91 of the 211 children featured were placed in adoptive homes, but this still left 120 children waiting.19 The provincial effort was followed by the long-running ‘Today’s Child’ column in the Toronto Telegram written by journalist Helen Allen, who worked closely with provincial child welfare officials.20 In 1967, the Saskatchewan government began advertising preschool-aged First Nations and Métis children available for adoption through the AIM (Adopt Indian Métis) program. By 1971, AIM had located homes for over 400 First Nations and Métis children, including some children from Quebec referred by the Children’s Service Centre of Montreal.21 By the 1950s, the CWLA was just as important, and perhaps more important, than the USCB in adoption reform in the United States.22 At the national level, the CWLA championed the adoption resource exchange as a way to find adoptive homes in challenging cases. The idea was straightforward: an adoption resource exchange was ‘an organized means of exchanging information among agencies about children for whom the agency has no suitable homes and about families for whom the agency has no children.’23Adoption agencies would look outside their immediate geographic area – across state and even national borders – to find the right home for the child and the right child for a family. According to the CWLA, the children most likely to be referred to adoption exchanges included ‘older children, handicapped children, children of a minority race or mixed racial background, siblings who should be placed together, children who should be placed in a different

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geographical area, and children for whom the agency has no home of the appropriate religion in states where religious matching is the law.’24 Agencies unable to find a home for a child through local resources would send information about a child (or, conversely, about a family seeking a child) to a central index operating at a state, provincial, regional, national, or international level. In some exchanges, a central supervisor suggested tentative matches between the children and the homes referred. More commonly, the exchange coordinator circulated a newsletter describing children and families and left agencies to contact each other and work out possible placements. Some exchanges held periodic meetings of adoption workers to consider options for children and families listed on the exchange. Frequently, exchanges made use of newspapers or even television to advertise particular children to the wider public; many of the children featured in the Ontario campaign were also listed on the provincial exchange.25 Thus, exchanges were closely linked to media and educational campaigns to recruit adoptive families. Exchanges offered hard-to-place children a better chance to find a home and family, and they helped hard-pressed public welfare systems save money by removing children from long-term, state- sponsored care. The first state-wide exchange was formed in Ohio in 1949. New York, Ontario, and Nova Scotia were also early pioneers. In 1953, the CWLA and Ohio officials sponsored a meeting at the National Conference on Social Work (NCSW) to discuss a national adoption resource exchange.26 By 1955, the CWLA had hired experienced child welfare worker Zelma Felton to promote state-wide exchanges and build towards a national system. In 1957, the CWLA published a Guide for Establishing and Operating an Adoption Resource Exchange.27 The Canadian Child Welfare directors discussed adoption exchanges in the 1950s as they considered adoption standards, uneven supply and demand, and better standards in inter-jurisdictional placements. In Ontario, the first two years of the provincial registry revealed that nonwhite and Catholic children were most likely to be listed, and that the exchange did help find homes for children with disabilities.28 In Nova Scotia, the province moved cautiously in the mid-1950s from a provincial exchange to direct collaboration with exchanges and provincial/ state welfare departments in other provinces and states. The children most difficult to place in Nova Scotia were African Canadian; eventually, provincial officials placed these children with black and white parents in the West Indies, central Canada, and the United States.29

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The Canadian directors considered a national adoption exchange on several occasions in the 1950s and 1960s, but were always hesitant. One significant barrier was that there was no provincial exchange in Quebec, the province with the highest rate of adoption. There was also concern that even if children were listed in a national registry, there would be no homes in other regions to take them in. Overall, the directors felt that a national exchange would be of uncertain use and too difficult to administer. They focused, instead, on developing bilateral agreements for interprovincial adoptions, which by this time were usually placements for hard-to-place children.30 The provinces developed their own exchanges, joined regional exchanges with US states, and collaborated (with greater or lesser formality) with other provinces and states. Provincial authorities in Alberta continued to place children in the United States and other jurisdictions on a regular basis, attracting periodic protests from US states through the 1950s and 1960s. Increasingly, First Nations and Métis children dominated the border-crossing group from Alberta.31 In 1958, the CWLA’s Felten counted ten states and two provinces running formal exchanges. In 1960, she identified exchanges in fourteen states and two provinces, and by 1967 she listed twenty states and three provinces with formal exchanges, plus seventeen states and five provinces with informal exchanges. In addition, the Midwest Adoption Facilitating Service connected seven states and the province of Manitoba.32 The move to wider definitions of adoptability and the development of adoption exchanges occurred in the midst of the larger push for standardization and what Ellen Herman calls ‘rationalization’ in adoption practice. These changes were both part of, and a challenging reorientation within, the broader emphasis on professionalizing adoption services. If the careful ‘matching’ of adoptive child to adoptive parents was the core of professional services offered by adoption workers, what would ‘matching’ look like for hard-to-place children whose physical appearance and intellectual and physical capabilities would not be the same as those of their parents? By the mid-1950s, social workers were backing away from some earlier elements of matching. For example, they had largely abandoned the use of IQ tests on young infants to match the developmental potential of an infant with the intellectual achievements of the adoptive family.33 But, this was a very small step compared to seeking out adoptive homes for children who had serious developmental disabilities, or placing children across long-guarded racial boundaries.

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Professional leaders argued that they were not abandoning matching, but redefining it. Matching was no longer as focused on placing ‘like with like,’ at least for the newly adoptable. Matching became a more subtle art that required the application of professional expertise to find, prepare, and appropriately bring together parents and children likely to form a successful family unit. Successful hard-to-place adoptions would, in fact, require a further extension of professional supervision and, ideally, more regulation and standardization of adoption services. Felten at the CWLA was one of many who hoped that an overall improvement in adoption laws and services (read: increased authority for professional social workers and more standardization in adoption practices) would be a by-product of adoption exchanges. New York exchange leader Clara Swan argued that exchanges must be imbedded in a larger program of improved adoption services and outreach to unwed mothers.34 Some, perhaps many, social workers remained uncertain about the wider understanding of adoptability or uninterested in outreach to minority children and parents.35 A 1949 social work thesis from the University of British Columbia noted that despite considerable outreach and publicity from provincial leaders, many child welfare workers were very hesitant when it came to expanding adoptability. There was also controversy about how wide the definition could be stretched. This same thesis argued that while social workers should worry far less about problems in the child’s family history and should loosen their attachment to religious matching, they ought to remain cautious about transracial adoptions and placements for children with intellectual and physical disabilities.36 Finding homes for hard-to-place children also meant that, in some cases, agencies had to become more flexible in their assessment of potential adoptive parents. This change also made some workers uncomfortable, particularly when ‘marginal’ families were assigned children with special needs.37 Other workers, even those committed to finding homes for the hard-to-place, had significant concerns about the intense work required to find and prepare homes for these children. Could their agencies afford these resources? If they did devote resources to special-needs adoptions, would other participants in the resource exchange match their effort? Could fellow professionals, working in other jurisdictions, be trusted?38 Previously, professional leaders had been openly suspicious of ‘distance placements,’ which were associated with independent placements and the black market. In the case of distance placements coordinated

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through an adoption exchange, there were presumably professional social workers in both the sending and receiving areas, and presumably no attempt to evade professional placement standards. Many workers still had serious concerns about arranging adoptive placements through an agency or worker previously unknown to them, especially when the added complications of placing a special-needs child and choosing unconventional adoptive parents were added. Could the other agency’s assessment of the child and the potential home be trusted? Was it ethically sound for a worker to turn over a child to the supervision of an agency when (s)he knew or believed that agency’s standards to be inferior to her/his own?39 Would professionally managed distance placements be any better than the dubious cross-border placements that had so concerned social workers in the past? Professional standards were, potentially, at risk. The CWLA response urged trust, flexibility, and patience; encountering lesser standards in a placement partner might just be an opportunity to improve standards all around and advance the professional project in adoption reform.40 This sounded very much like the advice the USCB and CWC gave to US agencies dealing with Catholic placement agencies from Quebec. The Indian Adoption Project and the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America The CWLA’s first national adoption exchange, the Indian Adoption Project (IAP), operated from 1958 to 1967. A 1957 study of conditions for Native Americans sponsored by the National Council of Protestant Churches drew the attention of the public and of social workers to the terrible living conditions of many Native children. A subsequent survey of US Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) social workers and state departments of public welfare revealed ‘approximately 1000 Indian children of all ages and degrees of Indian blood who are legally free for adoption today,’ but who were living ‘in foster families, institutions and Federal boarding schools because adoptive families have not been found for them.’41 By September 1958, the CWLA and BIA had agreed on a BIA-funded demonstration project designed to place between fifty and one hundred Native children with non-Native adoptive families in other states. The children selected would be those whom social workers viewed as otherwise ‘doomed to lives of stark deprivation.’42 The IAP was envisioned as a bold experiment in transracial placement. IAP director Arnold Lyslo described the project as an effort ‘to

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stimulate on a nation-wide basis the adoption of homeless American Indian children by Caucasian families.’43 Between 1958 and 1967, IAP coordinated placements for 395 Native American children, almost all with non-Native families. The IAP also had a planned demonstration effect and helped stimulate adoptive placements for thousands of additional Native children in the same period. By 1967, IAP staff had referred more than five thousand families interested in adopting Native American children to adoption agencies across the United States.44 Any adoption agency with a qualifying ‘Indian’ child (defined as a child with ‘1/4 or more degree of Indian blood’) could refer that child to the IAP. The emphasis was on children who lived on reservations and thus were the financial responsibility of the BIA, but occasionally off-reservation children in care were referred. In its first year, the project operated on thirteen reservation areas in five states (Arizona, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, and South Dakota) although eventually sixteen states were involved. Across the period 1958–67, the most active states releasing children were South Dakota and Arizona.45 The BIA paid the CWLA to administer the project, and also subsidized the costs (staff time, foster care, travel) associated with some adoptions. The project started with two partner agencies placing the children, Louise Wise Services in New York and the Children’s Bureau of Delaware. By 1967, thirty-one private agencies and nineteen state departments of public welfare had placed children through the project.46 The IAP was built on a series of assumptions about what was wrong in Native American communities and about the ability of social workers to use their professional skills to save children. Director Lyslo argued that while social workers in the 1950s were developing programs to ‘promote the adoption of all children who need it – the handicapped child, the child in the older age group, and children of minority racial groups in the United States and from foreign lands … the Indian child has remained the “forgotten child,” left unloved and uncared for on the reservation without a home or parents of his own.’47 The children who were presumed to be ‘unloved’ and ‘uncared for’ were those who were not living in what social workers understood as stable, nuclear families. Without question there were and there remain difficult economic and social problems in Native American, Canadian First Nations, and Métis communities, problems that have serious consequences for children.48 Critics have argued, however, that the understanding of care, of needs, of home, and of permanency in the vision of family life underlying the IAP and other programs promoting extra-tribal adoption were rooted

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in a narrow application of middle-class and Euro-American norms for family life. This vision ignored Native traditions of family that emphasized more shared responsibility for childcare and assigned more independence to young children than was acceptable to social workers steeped in Euro-American cultures. From the perspective of Native Americans, a child cared for by extended family was enveloped in community. Social workers looked at the same situation and saw a child in crisis in need of permanent care in an adoptive family providing stability (defined in Euro-American terms) and a higher standard of living.49 One of the primary objectives of the IAP was to prove that Native American children were adoptable and that competent and enthusiastic adoptive families could be found for them. The key to home finding in the early stages was to look for Caucasian families located at a distance. That is, this project was explicitly designed to cross borders of race and geography. The idea was to take the children away from states where they were subject to discrimination from the non-Native population, and move them to regions or states where more positive or romanticized feelings towards ‘real’ or ‘first’ Americans would increase the children’s appeal to potential adopters.50 Following this model – described at the time as the ‘exchange of prejudices’ – most IAP children came from states in the west and southwest and most were placed in the east (55%) or the midwest (41%).51 Canadian child welfare workers looking for homes for racialized children noted similar patterns of geographic prejudice; families in the Canadian west and in western Ontario were less willing to adopt First Nations children, but these children found a warmer reception elsewhere. African Canadian children faced poor prospects near to home in Nova Scotia, but could sometimes be placed outside the region.52 Looking across regions opened up more potential matches between adoptive parents and children, but it also seems that geographic border crossings smoothed the way for racial and cultural border crossings. For white adopters, some racial boundaries were easier to cross than others. In both countries, there was a distinct hierarchy of racial preference in adoption. Sociologist Richard Fanshel’s research on parents who adopted through the IAP revealed that parents who had already incorporated a Native child in their families were also open to adopting an ‘Oriental’ child, but far less willing to consider adopting a child with obvious African American physical features.53 As historian Barbara Melosh argues, white parents in the United States who adopted African American children were ‘crossing the most enduring

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and significant racial boundary in American history,’ and these adoptions were most frequently marked as ‘controversial’ and difficult for American society to accept.54 Although the historical contexts of First Nations–Euro-American and African Canadian–Euro-American relations are different in the Canadian case, some Canadian agencies also found that would-be adopters preferred Asian or First Nations children to children of African heritage.55 In both countries, however, there were far more racialized children of differing ages and abilities in care in the 1950s and 1960s than could be placed for adoption. The IAP helped to turn this situation around, although only for healthy and very young Native American children. As IAP promoters predicted, once the ‘plight’ of Native children became well known, it was not difficult for adoption agencies to find homes. By 1963, the IAP had a backlog of qualified adoptive parents.56 IAP success and the associated media attention had a significant impact on state and local adoption programs. Public and private child welfare officials reported increased interest in Native American children from white adopters, even in states originally marked as highly prejudiced against Native Americans. BIA social workers in South Dakota reported in 1965 that the IAP had stimulated ‘local state and private agencies in Indian Country to expand and develop their own adoption activities for Indian children.’ Another South Dakota worker argued in 1961 that since the advent of the IAP ‘the number of Indian children referred to the welfare department for services has increased tenfold,’ because of the new possibility that there was somewhere (that is, white families) for children taken into care to go.57 This development was interpreted as a significant marker of success. Canadian researcher Margaret Ward argues that IAP-generated publicity reached into Canada, and helped increase the numbers of Native adoptions by white families north of the border in the 1960s.58 IAP encouraged the development of adoption exchanges that listed a broader community of hard-to-place children. In Washington state, a pre-existing adoption exchange saw its referrals of children double once the IAP became active there in 1966.59 In another example, IAP functioned as a springboard for the first large regional exchange, the Midwest Adoption Facilitating Service. The Midwest exchange, formed in 1966, included over ninety placement agencies in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Manitoba. This exchange grew out of the IAP and state-level work with Native children, but was designed to serve all hard-to-place children; plans for the

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exchange identified one thousand children in need of extra placement services, of whom two hundred were Native American or Canadian First Nations and Métis.60 In 1966, the CWLA announced its long-awaited Adoption Resource Exchange of North America, open to public and private agencies and state and provincial exchanges operating in the United States and Canada. The exchange took shape in mid-1967, and was fully operational by early 1968. It was initially a three-year demonstration project funded by the Field Foundation and the American Contract Bridge Association. It was also supported by the BIA and, later, the USCB. ARENA was more ambitious than IAP, placing a broader range of children and working with a larger number of social agencies. In effect, IAP become a department within ARENA.61 The CWLA argued that as ARENA found homes for children it would raise the overall standard of adoption practices across jurisdictions. This improvement would come as ARENA encouraged greater standardization and pushed adoption agencies to expand their services to hard-to-place children. When participating agencies placed children through ARENA, their foster care burden would fall, releasing more funds to support adoption work. The central ARENA office planned to run a central registry of children and homes and publish a monthly bulletin (ARENA News) with descriptions of children and families. In addition, the office would conduct a national recruitment campaign for adoptive parents, support new state and regional exchanges, identify legal and procedural barriers to interstate placement, develop standards for inter-agency and inter-jurisdictional cooperation, and promote the adoption of children from minority racial groups.62 There was no significant outreach to Mexico, but ARENA was always envisioned as a project including Canada. ARENA’s board included Canadian social workers and ARENA publicity always included examples of Canadian children who might be placed in the United States. The example used most frequently was French Canadian and Catholic children from Quebec and New England who faced prejudice in their home region, but who would be accepted elsewhere in the United States. By the 1960s, these were not the Canadian children most likely to be placed in the United States. British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta, and Ontario were already placing First Nations and Métis children with families in the United States who were usually white. Canadian child welfare directors and Canadian adoption agencies stressed that they needed cross-border homes for First Nations children of Catholic

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heritage, although African Canadian children in Nova Scotia and multiracial Jewish children in Montreal were also mentioned.63 Officials in Alberta doubted whether a US-based exchange would really provide the needed homes, since all regions seemed to have similar kinds of hard-to-place children. Child welfare leaders in the Northwest Territories wondered if it was realistic to expect US families to accept Inuit children, and also noted that they would not be able to provide the level of professional service required for ARENA placements. Elsewhere, the Canadian response was generally positive, even though many Canadian officials wondered if they would face a nationalist backlash if they signed on formally to ‘export’ Canadian children.64 The late 1960s was a period of intense Canadian nationalism, with a significant anti-American flavour. In October 1967 a ‘baby export’ scandal erupted in Toronto when the press revealed that the Catholic Children’s Aid Society had sent fifty African Canadian or mixed-race Catholic children to the United States since 1964. The non-Catholic Metro Children’s Aid Society had sent another twenty-five children of similar heritage to the United States in the same period. The agencies argued that they had looked, in vain, for Canadian families willing to take these children, and that US or other foreign placements were the only alternative to ongoing foster care. They also noted that US placements were nothing new.65 The difference in 1967 – Canada’s centennial year – was that the ‘baby exports’ drew the attention of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, whose representatives contended that ‘placing children in foreign lands violated their rights as Canadian citizens.’ Debate raged in the press. Some argued that the child’s right to a permanent family home trumped all other concerns, while others stressed the child’s right to Canadian citizenship and a Canadian upbringing. The scandal intersected with intensifying debates about religious matching in adoptive placements when some argued that religious affiliation must not be allowed to trump national belonging. The agencies insisted that they were willing to cross religious lines, but still could not find families in Canada.66 In the wake of the scandal, provincial administrations across the country questioned the political cost of affiliation with ARENA. In 1968, the child welfare directors discussed whether the deteriorating political situation in the United States (including assassinations, Vietnam War protests, and race riots) meant they could not sanction US placements for Canadian-born children. Less dramatically, the directors wondered

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if ARENA might mean fewer US homes would be available for First Nations children from Canada, given improved connections between US children and US homes and given the structural bias created by continued BIA funding of the project.67 In 1967 and 1968, the directors returned, again, to the possibility of establishing a Canadian national exchange that might work on its own, or act as partner to ARENA, but these discussions stalled. Despite their concerns, provincial exchanges, public departments, and private adoption agencies across Canada eventually joined ARENA. British Columbia, Manitoba, and Ontario had all listed children with ARENA by the end of 1968, and Ontario was later noted as a strong supporter of the exchange.68 By 1972, ARENA had referrals on hand for 853 children and 1403 potential adoptive families from fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, as well as seven Canadian provinces. In 1973, ARENA placed 183 children, including 61 children with physical or intellectual disabilities ranging from deafness, to dwarfism, to cerebral palsy, to ‘emotional problems’; 74 children in sibling groups including two sets of five siblings each; and 116 children school aged or older including 18 who were at least 12 years old. The racial and national classifications of the children were 52 African American or African Canadian; 58 Caucasian; 65 Native American, Canadian First Nations, or Métis; five Asian; two Chicano; and one Puerto Rican.69 Many of these categorizations were overlapping; ARENA and other exchanges found homes for children who were hard to place on more than one register. The 1973 racial breakdown demonstrates that Native American, Canadian First Nations, and Métis children were at the centre of ARENA work. By 1969, ARENA was already reporting that ‘the Indian … is no longer a child who is hard-to-place unless there are other factors such as his age, a physical or emotional handicap, or the fact that he is a member of a sibling group from which he cannot be separated.’70 Thus, the type of Native child listed and placed by ARENA was changing. In 1972, Native children placed by ARENA included a set of two siblings, a set of three siblings, two sets of four siblings, four children with intellectual disabilities, one visually impaired child, and one child with partial deafness; sixteen of the children were ‘school age.’71 The biggest challenge for ARENA, especially early on, was finding homes for African American or part–African American children, who were now ‘certainly the most needy.’72 The same structure of racial hierarchy that made Native American children popular with

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white adoptive families discouraged transracial placements of African American children. At the end of 1970, over two-thirds of the children registered with ARENA (231 of 322) were of full or partial African American or African Canadian heritage, but only seven of the 645 families then registered were willing to consider children with this background.73 A 1972 study Supply and Demand in ARENA noted the ongoing challenge of finding families willing to accept African American children. Home finding for children with physical and, especially, intellectual or emotional problems was also difficult.74 ARENA tried to use families who first expressed interest in Native children as a resource for other children. The central office advised placement agencies to ask families who requested infant Native American children to consider older children, disabled children, or children from racial groups who were harder to place. By the mid-1970s, ARENA was returning registrations for families who could not be more flexible.75 ARENA officials hoped that Canada would provide homes for African American and mixed race children, but this expectation was never fulfilled.76 Indeed, Canadian agencies listed far more children than adoptive homes. Between 1968 and 1971, Manitoba agencies registered 104 children with ARENA, but offered only two adoptive homes (see figure 6.1). Most, not all, of the Canadian children listed on ARENA were First Nations or Métis, many of whom had other characteristics making them still more difficult to place. It is difficult to specify the number of Canadian children placed in the United States through ARENA; statistics on Canadian adoptions were not recorded consistently and seldom specified the race of the children placed in the United States. (Similarly, the ARENA records do not specify US-born children who might have been placed in Canada.) The statistics that are available show that an increasing percentage of the indigenous children placed through ARENA came from Canada, particularly after 1970. In August 1971, twenty-five of the forty-three indigenous children then registered with ARENA were from Ontario.77 Across 1974, ARENA placed 122 indigenous children and 106 children from Canada out of a total of 238 children placed (see table 6.1). The children placed through ARENA were part of a much larger movement of First Nations and Métis children across provincial and national borders. Manitoba led the way. In 1970, seventy First Nations and Métis children from Manitoba were placed in Minnesota through the efforts of Lutheran Social Services and the Midwest Adoption Facil-

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Figure 6.1  Total number of registrations with ARENA, by state and province, 1968–71. Used by permission of the Child Welfare League of America and Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota itating Exchange.78 A case review conducted by the Manitoba Department of Family Services in 2004 revealed that between 1960 and 1980, the province placed 3649 children in other provinces and 1149 children in the United States; over 90 per cent of these children were First Nations or Métis.79 ARENA, however, continued to take on the hardest cases of children disadvantaged across multiple registers. ‘The mobility of the population and the division of territorial jurisdiction’ IAP, ARENA, and other adoption exchanges had to work through and around existing state/provincial laws, as well as the passport and visa requirements that came into play across national borders. Conflicting or even contradictory requirements in different jurisdictions could make it very difficult or sometimes impossible for social workers and parents to complete the adoption placements they planned while obey-

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Table 6.1  Statistical overview of Native American and First Nations / Métis adoptions through ARENA, 1968–75 Year

Total children African American Native children placed children placed* placed*

No. of Native children placed with Native families No. of Canadian children placed**

1968   130    5   70† not stated not stated 1969   169   22   89 not stated   34‡ 1970   198   26   81   0   43 1971   249   79   95 not stated   66 1972   243 105   54 12   51 1973   183   52   65   9 not stated 1974   238   48 122 not stated 106 1975   201   50   64 45 Canadian national exchange began operating Total 1968–75

1611

387

323

* Includes children described as ‘racial mixtures’ up to 1972; from 1973 children were divided in single race categorizations. ** Most of the Canadian children placed through ARENA were placed in the United States and most were First Nations or Métis. † Not including so-called ‘mixtures’ (as described in ARENA statistics). ‡ SWHA, SW55, box 18:4, ‘Notes on Staff Meeting of the Division of Field Operations,’ 25–6 March 1970. Source: Adapted from Center for Social Research and Development, Denver Research Institute, Indian Child Welfare: A State-of-theField Study, table 4-3 (273), table 4-4 (275).

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ing state and provincial law. This was the frustrating flipside of the situation, where less responsible adoption providers used the same gaps and inconsistencies to evade government and professional supervision in border-crossing adoption. In Canada, the provincial and territorial directors of child welfare developed a series of bilateral agreements in the 1950s laying out the technical procedures for transferring children between jurisdictions. These agreements provided a blueprint for best practices and legal procedures that would be followed by provincial departments and responsible private agencies. This approach was manageable in Canada because there were only twelve provinces or territories, and because the provincial directors (with the important exception of Quebec) met regularly as a collective. State representatives talked about a similar approach at the USCB meetings on interstate and international adoption, but the sheer number of states and territories in the United States case made this approach far more complicated. The CWLA urged childplacing agencies to be patient and work hard to make sure that ‘red tape’ did not stand in the way of good placement, but this did not solve the overall problem.80 IAP and ARENA officials advised the agencies on individual cases and lobbied state governments to change laws that made interstate placements difficult, but through the 1950s there was no effective national protocol or central administrative body that could provide the administrative machinery to manage interstate child transfers efficiently. We have focused on border crossings in child welfare, but the problem of connecting state laws and managing the movement of people, goods, and resources across borders had, of course, a much wider resonance. By the 1930s, US states were experimenting with various ways to collaborate with each other to manage the many complex border crossings taking place in the fast-paced world of the twentieth century. One method used by state governments to manage interstate flows was the interstate compact. An interstate compact is ‘a legal agreement between two or more states entered into in order to deal with a problem or concern that crosses state boundaries.’81 A compact is enacted as an agreement between state governments (a contract) and as legislation enacted in each signatory state (a statute). Compacts are binding on member states, supersede other statutes enacted individually by the states, and cannot be changed unilaterally by member states. Thus, compacts have a stronger legal standing and are more permanent than other modes of interstate collaboration, such as administrative agree-

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ments, periodic conferences, or reciprocal or uniform laws enacted by separate state legislatures.82 The earliest compacts were enacted to settle boundary disputes. In the twentieth century, the compact model was used for new purposes, including allocating natural resources (especially water), managing joint facilities (ports, bridges, parks), controlling and combating pollution, and developing joint regulatory mechanisms in fields as diverse as transportation, economic production, education, and social welfare.83 As of 1920, thirty-six compacts were in place. Another twenty-five were added between 1920 and 1941, and an additional one hundred between 1941 and 1969, the most active period for the creation of new compacts.84 The upswing from the 1940s coincided, not surprisingly, with increased interstate collaboration across many fronts in response to the challenges of governing through depression and war. In 1931, the newly formed American Public Welfare Association (APWA) established an active Committee on Interstate Problems. In 1935, the Council of State Governments (CSG, established in 1933) and the American Legislators’ Association convened the Second Interstate Assembly, billed as the first meeting of the states since the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention. At the meeting, the CSG urged individual states to form permanent committees or commissions to explore opportunities for interstate cooperation.85 By 1938, all but thirteen states had a designated committee or commission. In New York, the state assembly created the Joint Legislative Committee on Interstate Cooperation (JLCIC) in 1935. In its first annual report, the JLCIC argued that the states had to learn to work together in order to solve the problems ‘inherent in our quickened tempo of life’ and to resist ‘the demand for further centralization and enlargement of Federal powers’ as a response to these problems.86 The interstate movement was, thus, about providing better, more efficient services to citizens in a border-crossing world, and about resisting the expansion of federal power. The JLCIC, and through it the state of New York, became an important innovator in the use of reciprocal agreements and interstate compacts. By 1966 New York was party to thirty-five regional or national interstate compacts, more than any other state.87 New York’s JLCIC was always very interested in the interstate dimensions of social welfare problems. As the committee explained in 1961, ‘The mobility of population and the division of territorial jurisdiction among the several states makes it very important that cooperative arrangements be employed to obviate the difficulties which otherwise

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exist in supplying services to the general public.’88 By 1937, JLCIC representatives and their partners in other north-eastern states were already exploring uniform marriage and adoption laws. The USCB, however, eventually convinced the New York committee (and its regional partners) that ‘adoption laws must be so carefully integrated with other social welfare laws in a particular state that uniformity may be neither desirable nor practicable.’89 From 1940–5, war-related concerns dominated the JLCIC’s agenda in social welfare. In 1945, New York Governor Dewey asked the JLCIC to study the state’s various welfare services and recommend how they could be integrated into a more efficient and simplified system. Towards this end, the JLCIC created a Special Committee on Social Welfare, which had a subsection focused on adoption and foster care. This group engaged in an extended study of the adoption system in New York, which included hearings on the black market in babies operating within New York and across state lines. In 1949, a series of JLCIC-sponsored adoption reform bills (including the anti-black-market statute discussed in chapter 5) passed the state assembly.90 This legislation was directed at adoptions within the state, but the committee’s investigations had revealed serious problems with cross-border adoptions. A northeast Regional Continuing Committee, organized by the Council of State Governments and the JLCIC, explored problems with interstate adoption and foster care. This regional group brought together legislators and administrators from New York (including members of the JLCIC), and from Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. This list included the states most upset by placements from the Ideal Maternity Home and from Quebec’s Catholic child-placing agencies. Thus, state officials in this group had an eye to international placements from Canada as well as interstate placements. In 1944, the regional group recommended that states enter into administrative agreements with each other ‘with respect to children placed in foster care in such other states and the supervision thereof.’91 In 1948, the Regional Continuing Committee discussed problems with the black market in babies and with ‘unauthorized out-of-state agencies that place children without regard to the technicalities of the law.’ This conversation extended beyond stopping dangerous adoptions, to consider how the states might support safe, professionally sanctioned placements crossing state lines. Ellen Potter of New Jersey took aim at the New York Department of Social Welfare’s unwilling-

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ness to license professional agencies from other states to place children within New York. ‘Some machinery,’ Potter argued, ‘has to be set up so that interstate transactions have a validity and a dependability and so that reputable agencies may have recognition across state lines.’92 Similar discussions also took place at the USCB-sponsored conferences on interstate and international placements in 1947, 1948, and 1951.93 Beginning in 1952, the Regional Continuing Committee studied the Uniform Adoption Act proposed by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws and recommended to the states by the CSG. When the final version of the Uniform Act was distributed in 1953, the Regional Continuing Committee and New York’s JLCIC were disappointed that it made no mention of interstate placements. The northeast group pushed the CSG for legislation treating interstate placements but got no definitive response.94 At any rate, the Uniform Adoption Act was not well received by state legislators, in part because of the objections to uniform adoption legislation raised by the USCB in the 1930s. Only two states (Montana and Oklahoma) passed the Uniform Act; another three (New Mexico, North Dakota, and Ohio) passed the Revised Uniform Adoption Act distributed in 1971.95 Through the 1950s, the Canadian directors of child welfare discussed bringing more uniformity to adoption laws across the provinces, but their approach was to develop a model (as opposed to uniform) adoption act that could be used to guide changes in individual provincial statutes. Similarly, the USCB developed what it called Legislative Guides for the Termination of Parental Rights and Responsibilities and the Adoption of Children, first published in 1961.96 In 1956, the New York State Assembly formed the Joint Legislative Committee on Matrimonial and Family Law (JLCMFL), which took in adoption law and practice as part of its mandate. The committee hired Ernest Mitler, erstwhile New York County assistant district attorney and special counsel in Estes Kefauver’s Senate hearings on the black market, to study interstate and international black markets. After Mitler’s investigation, the committee concluded that legislation to promote ‘mutual cooperation’ between the states was needed to ‘stop the interstate traffic and to prevent some problems caused by irresponsible and careless interstate private placements.’97 Nonetheless, the issue of interstate legislation was bounced back to the JLCIC in 1959. That year, a group of city officials and social service agencies in New York City asked Governor Rockefeller to amend a part of the state’s social welfare law which prohibited licensed or public agencies from

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placing children outside the state for adoption or foster care. This provision had been added to the social welfare code in the late nineteenth century when state officials learned that many of the New York children sent west on the ‘orphan trains’ ended up doing exploitative hard labour. By the late 1950s, this well-meant clause was limiting the ability of social workers to find temporary and permanent homes for their charges. In his message approving the requisite change in legislation, the governor argued that ‘in the interest of children to be placed for adoption, it is vital that public welfare officials have as wide a field of good homes to choose from as possible. State lines should not limit the field of choice.’ The governor noted that he expected the JLCIC to produce a wider solution to the complex legal problems surrounding interstate adoption in the ‘near future.’98 The JLCIC moved quickly. Working with the USCB and with two of the nation’s foremost authorities on interstate compacts (Frederick Zimmerman and Mitchell Wendell), the committee drafted an Interstate Compact for the Placement of Children, modelled on existing interstate compacts in social welfare. The draft was discussed and approved at a January 1960 conference bringing together representatives from state departments of welfare and state attorneys general, plus other public and private child-welfare agencies, family court judges, and staff from the USCB. Twelve states were represented.99 The compact established procedures for moving children from one state to another for adoption, foster care, or care in an institution for juvenile delinquents. Under the compact, a sending agency (or individual) placing a child in another state was required to provide information on the placement to public welfare authorities in the receiving state and secure the approval of those authorities before making the placement. As a consequence, receiving jurisdictions would know about and be able to study an impending placement before it took place. The compact also established that the sending agency retained jurisdiction over the child until ‘the child is adopted, reaches majority, becomes self supporting or is discharged with the occurrence of the appropriate authority in the receiving state.’ The sending agency could, however, arrange for a public or private agency in the receiving state to discharge this responsibility. The compact covered all placements between two states when both of the states had enacted the compact into law, except that close relatives placing a child with other relatives were exempt. In other words, the compact required contact with a public child welfare authority in advance of a placement, and required that a placing agency

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or individual retain responsibility for the child in the new state until the child’s status was firmly and finally settled.100 The Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC) had strong support in the legal, political, and social welfare community in New York, and the New York Assembly passed enabling legislation in the spring of 1960.101 The JLCIC argued that the compact filled an important gap between the laws and practices of separate states. ‘When placements are made across state lines,’ noted the committee, ‘no single jurisdiction can deal with them satisfactorily.’102 Harold Hagen of the APWA argued that the compact had the dual potential to ‘facilitate interstate placement when it is found by authorized agencies to be socially desirable’ and also to ‘discourage irregular or illegal activities; for example interstate black market or gray market adoptive placements.’103 Hagen and the JLCIC argued that at the level of legal technicalities the interstate compact was the best way to manage child transfers. Child welfare reformers had long ago pointed out problems with the highly variable state-by-state child importation laws, which in their original form offered more protection to taxpayers than to children and which were notoriously difficult to enforce. Uniform laws, argued Hagen and the JLCIC, were inferior to an interstate compact because (unlike a compact) they could be unilaterally amended and did not provide for overlapping jurisdiction. Hagen argued that the interstate compact was also superior to a federal law (on the model proposed by Kefauver) because the wide variations in state laws could mean that ‘a given action could be a federal offense in one state and not in another.’104 At any rate, there was no federal law, in part because federal and state legislators preferred to keep this issue in state hands. The great advantage of the compact was that it provided for some overlap of jurisdiction and even legal sovereignty between states. For example, violations of the compact when children were transferred from one state to another could be prosecuted under the child welfare laws of either state. The JLCIC’s legal counsel argued that retention of jurisdiction clauses like those in the ICPC were already part of existing and well-tested interstate compacts such as the Interstate Compact on Parolees and Probationers and the Interstate Compact on Juveniles. He added that designing state laws with legal effect outside the state’s borders (as in the child exportation laws set up by a small number of states) was a cumbersome process open to court challenge; the interstate compact was a proven way around this legal morass.105

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The ICPC was very close to the model for regulating interstate, interprovincial, and Canada-US adoptions that Charlotte Whitton first envisioned in the 1930s. The ICPC was a formalized and binding agreement tying public agencies, private agencies, and independent adoption operators to a uniform procedure for border-crossing adoptions. It used the policing power of state governments and state laws to ensure professional supervision of all border-crossing adoptions. Depending on how the ICPC was enforced, this might mean more professional oversight for interstate as compared to in-state adoptions. Hagen argued that the close contact between public and private agencies across state lines mandated by the ICPC might, over time, promote uniform procedures across the states and raise the overall standard in all adoptive placements.106 Why was all of this acceptable in New York by 1960? A number of critical factors came together. One was the overall upswing in interstate activity, evidenced in the work of the APWA, the CSG, the Regional Continuing Committee, and the JLCIC. By 1960, there were working models for social welfare compacts in the Interstate Compact on Juveniles and the Interstate Compact on Mental Health, both of which were popular in the north-east. The specific use of the compact as a model for controlling interstate adoption was discussed at APWA conferences, and at the USCB conferences on interstate and international adoption. The compact was a very good fit in the new atmosphere of home-finding and expanded definitions of adoptability, and it was a visible response to the scandal of interstate black markets.107 There were significant problems with the ICPC, however. For one, the compact depended for its force on the content of what were still highly variable state laws. Thus, as Hagen noted, ‘the unevenness in the quality and coverage of services that now exists’ would shape how and where the compact was enforced.108 The compact only applied when a placement took place between two states that had passed enabling legislation. Unless Canadian provinces also joined (the compact had a provision allowing the provinces to join, with the consent of Congress), the compact would have no effect on cross-border placements from or into Canadian provinces. New York enacted the ICPC in 1960, followed by Maine in 1961, Massachusetts, North Dakota, and Wyoming in 1963, and Kentucky in 1966. In 1963, state-level administrators gathered for the first time through the auspices of the APWA, which became the secretariat of the compact.109 Nonetheless, when the CWLA’s Hunt looked at the ICPC in

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1972 as part of her study of Obstacles to Interstate Adoption, there were still only fifteen adherents. She noted that many placing agencies in states that were part of this group seemed unaware of the compact and its provisions. Still, Hunt and others saw great potential in the compact – if widely adopted, well publicized, and fully enforced – to provide ‘a much-needed framework [on] which to build a useful, nationwide administrative mechanism for facilitating placement across state lines.’110 Obstacles to Interstate Adoption Hunt’s study Obstacles to Interstate Adoption focused on ‘legal and policy provisions and practices’ impeding interstate and international placements in ARENA. She concluded that ‘the basic impediment to interstate adoption is that NO ONE IS NOW IN CHARGE of regulating it on a nationwide basis.’ The ICPC appealed to her because it offered administrative clarity and a forum to bring interstate compact administrators together.111 The problems she identified in interstate adoption in the early 1970s were complex and multifaceted. Some grew from the variation in child welfare services and laws across provinces and states, and some from the ongoing resistance of social workers to new practices.112 Other impediments were related to legal and administrative procedures which caused ‘complex entanglements’ when social workers tried to move children across borders. Too often, Hunt argued, ‘laws and practices fairly well designed to “block” or slow up undesirable independent placements … work inadvertently to “block” or needlessly delay ARENA-style placements.’113 Hunt focused mostly on interstate placements, although she also consulted provincial departments of child welfare in Canada. Many of the barriers she outlined applied to placements from state-to-state and from province-to-state, although some were particular to crossing the international border. For example, new US immigration rules caused problems when ARENA children crossed from Canada to the United States. The 1965 US Immigration Act contained provisions that for the first time made Canadian immigrants to the United States subject to immigration quotas and a labour certification process. Minor children of US citizens (including adopted children) were specifically exempt from these provisions, but this distinction was not always clear to border officials, and the resulting confusion caused lengthy delays in some ARENA adoptions in the late 1960s.114 Hunt had a long list of legal obstacles to interstate adoption. The

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rules for legal consent to adoption could vary widely from state to state to province. If the courts in the receiving state could not legally accept consent secured in another jurisdiction, then that court could not finalize an adoption. This was an issue of long-standing concern for adoption workers, which Charlotte Whitton first encountered in complaints from New York about Ontario placements in the early 1930s.115 Hunt also noted that state laws and agency practices which required shorter or longer probationary periods before an adoption was finalized also complicated final adoption proceedings. She pointed, as well, to the differing opinions and regulations from state to state on whether or not the sending state should retain legal jurisdiction over the child placed in another state, though she noted that the ICPC provided a clear guide on this issue. Hunt received reports from several states that New Jersey state officials refused to allow out-of-state agencies or individuals to retain guardianship over children to be adopted in New Jersey in a deliberate effort to restrict the movement of children into the state.116 New Jersey had not joined the ICPC and thus was not bound to follow the compact’s rules with respect to ongoing legal jurisdiction.117 As to the child importation laws in place in most states, Hunt recognized that where these laws had been updated and amended (to emphasize social protection for children over financial protection for the state), they provided some safeguards for children. She noted, however, that the overall effect of the laws was often to slow or block interstate adoptions, because the laws were originally designed to impede placements into a state, because they were not uniform between states, because they were not legally binding on other states, and because they tended to be either ignored or enforced with ‘inflexibility and unreasonableness.’118 To all these problems, Hunt added conflicts over who should pay the administrative and transportation costs, ‘lack of trust’ between agencies, and the wearying reality of ‘endlessly time-consuming paperwork.’119 Hunt’s solutions to these problems were very similar to those suggested by earlier reformers more focused on restricting cross-border movements. Her plan to ‘bring order out of chaos’ began with ‘strengthening and extending child welfare services generally, so that services of uniformly high quality are available wherever whenever and for whomever they are needed.’ Next, Hunt argued that judges, lawyers, social workers, and state officials had to agree to uniform standards for consent, waiting periods, continued jurisdiction, continued guardianship, and shared financing. She also argued that ‘joinder by every state

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(as well as by the Canadian provinces) of the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children is essential.’120 In other words, Hunt asked for improved standards within individual jurisdictions, enhanced cooperation and communication between professionals in differing jurisdictions, and a formal agreement binding separate jurisdictions to a common set of practices. What she wanted, above all, was for someone or some organization – the USCB, the CWLA, ARENA, the APWA – to be in charge and to take responsibility for filling up the space and smoothing out the inconsistencies between states and provinces. By the time Hunt’s study was published in 1972, there were many voices converging to promote better, more streamlined border-crossing adoptions for hard-to-place children. There were also counter-currents and growing sites of opposition, although these voices had no place in Hunt’s assessment of law and policy. ARENA was established just as Native Americans and African Americans were launching public campaigns against child removal and transracial adoptive placements. As scholar Steve Unger has argued, Native communities have always hated and feared the removal of their children to residential schools and to foster and adoptive homes. By the 1960s, the scale of child removal was staggering. Surveys by the Association of American Indian Affairs in 1969 and 1974 indicated that 25 to 35 per cent of all Native children were separated from their families and placed in foster care, adoption homes, or institutions. Similarly, Fournier and Crey argue that in Canada in the early 1970s one in three First Nations and Métis children was in foster care or an adoptive home.121 In 1968, the attempted removal of a child from his grandmother on the Devil’s Lake Sioux reservation in North Dakota sparked a more concerted national protest against child removal in the United States.122 At hearings before the US Senate in 1974 and 1977, testimony from Native and non-Native sources highlighted the cultural dislocation and poor outcomes experienced by many Native children removed from their homes, and the destructive impact of extraordinarily high rates of child removal on Native communities. Witnesses argued that transracial adoptive placements robbed tribes of their future and robbed children of their culture and heritage, producing broken and confused adults who functioned poorly in both white and Native society and leaving broken, dispirited communities and families on the reservations.123 Native American activism and the publicity generated by the federal hearings led, finally, to the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Key provisions in ICWA established the jurisdiction of

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tribal courts in child welfare proceedings for children living on reservations and for children living off reservations if they were enrolled in the tribe. ICWA established priorities for the placement of Native children when children had to be removed from their parents (the child’s extended family, followed by members of the child’s tribe and other Native families, before any other adopter) and provided funding to improve child welfare and family development and preservation programs on reserves.124 Native American protests were both influenced and supported by similar protests from African Americans. The best-known protest against transracial adoptive placement came in a widely publicized 1972 position statement from the US National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW). The NABSW statement was an impassioned call for the preservation of black families, which included a very pointed condemnation of transracial placements. The statement stressed the importance of placing black children with black families for foster and adoptive care when they must be removed from their homes, and talked about the negative consequences for black children who were ‘cut off from the healthy development of themselves as Black people’ when raised in white homes. Transracial placements for black children were described as bad for children, and as devastating for African American communities; they were a characterized as a ‘form of genocide.’125 The NABSW statement had an immediate and significant effect. While white families in the United States adopted 2574 children of African American heritage in 1971 and 1569 in 1972, there were only 1091 such adoptions in 1973 and 831 in 1975.126 The statement is still used as a reference point in discussions about transracial adoption in both Canada and the United States.127 The statement had such a great impact because it spoke directly to contemporary concerns in American society. It echoed the nationalist themes of emerging civil rights discourses in the United States, but was also, as Laura Briggs has noted, part of the ‘under-noted civil rights tradition of fighting for the legitimacy and integrity of black families.’128 As Veronica Strong-Boag has argued from Canada, the ‘colour-blind liberalism’ that fed transracial placement in the 1950s and 1960s often involved the ‘deliberate denial of the heavy hand of history and ongoing discrimination.’129 By the late 1960s and early 1970s this denial, and with it some of the more utopian dreams of liberal universalism, was more and more untenable. The NABSW statement and other protests around racial border crossing in adoption forced liberals, including lib-

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eral social workers, to reconsider the impact of race, racism, culture, and community for the families and children of adoption.130 Native American and African American activism in the United States influenced developments in Canada, where First Nations peoples were also deeply concerned by child removal and extra-tribal adoption. In Canada, poor economic and social conditions and inadequate social services on the reservations became worse in the 1960s, when the federal government transferred responsibility for social welfare services for status First Nations peoples to overloaded provincial departments of welfare. Worsening conditions and limited social welfare resources, combined with Euro-American cultural bias and outright racism, meant that more and more children were apprehended or sent to residential schools in what has become known as the ‘Sixties Scoop.’131 Fournier and Crey point out that in 1959 First Nations and Métis children constituted 1 per cent of children in state care; by 1969 the figure was 40 per cent.132 Social workers in provinces with large Native populations turned to white adoptive homes (located in Canada and the United States) as one solution to the problem of caring for these children, although some child welfare workers were already questioning this solution in the early 1960s. Strong-Boag cites examples from British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario of provincial child welfare officials looking for Native homes for Native children.133 Through the 1960s and 1970s, individual bands protested removal of children from their communities and demanded more control over child welfare decisions. The Spallumcheen Band in British Columbia organized its own child placement program and in 1980 staged a protest on the front lawn of the province’s minister of human resources, demanding the return of children taken from the reserve.134 There was no direct equivalent, in Canada, to the high-profile congressional child welfare hearings and the ICWA, although Native and non-Native concerns about extra-tribal adoption were highlighted in provincial and federal studies such as Justice Berger’s Royal Commission on Family and Children’s Law in British Columbia (1975), Justice Kimelman of Manitoba’s 1985 No Quiet Place report on First Nations and Métis adoptions, and the 1996 federal Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Patrick Johnson named the Sixties Scoop in his important 1983 study Aboriginal Children and the Child Welfare System.135 Changes in law, practice, and policy giving more control over child welfare decisions to local bands or protecting legal status have come

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through province-by-province changes in law and practice, or through court challenges and negotiations around the meaning of Aboriginal rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In some cases, First Nations communities and federal and provincial officials cooperated to develop or support reserve-based child welfare initiatives and reduce adoption rates for Aboriginal children.136 By the 1980s, most provinces with substantial First Nations populations were making conscious efforts to work with First Nations communities to recruit status or non-status Aboriginal adopters for children who must be removed from families, though with mixed success and varying levels of commitment. In 1968, 55 of the 213 status First Nations children adopted in Canada (25.8%) were adopted by status First Nations parents. In 1980, 131 children (still only 23.2% of the 566 children placed) found homes with status parents.137 Dubinksy argues that ‘the so-called “export” of Native Children to adoptive homes in the United States seemed to sharpen the pain of [child] apprehension’ for Canadian Native communities. In 1982, the government of Manitoba placed a temporary moratorium on out-of-province placements at the request of First Nations groups in the province. Still, one social worker testifying before Justice Kimelman in Manitoba in 1985 argued that (white) American families had a ‘keener awareness of Indian culture’ than their Canadian counterparts and were willing to take on special-needs Native children who simply could not be placed in Canada. She also noted that many of the US families receiving First Nations children from Manitoba, especially during the period 1969–75, had some Native heritage. At the same hearings, a representative from the Manitoba Métis Federation argued that US Native groups disliked the Canadian placements because these adoptions undermined Native American efforts to stop transracial placement. The borders of nation, race, and geography crossed and re-crossed.138 What did the challenge to transracial adoption for African American and Native American children mean for the CWLA’s adoption exchanges? In the late 1950s, the IAP concentrated on placing Native children with non-Native families. IAP officials sometimes argued that placement with a white family was a ‘second best’ solution after a ‘good life’ with the child’s first family or a ‘family of the same tribal heritage,’ but there was never any significant attention paid to recruiting Native adoptive families.139 Indeed, to attach too much importance to Native parents or to the child’s tribal heritage would challenge the entire project. IAP director Lyslo went so far as to argue that ‘many of

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the children [adopted through the IAP] come into care at a very early age, and therefore are not “Indian” in culture.’140 Culture, in this way of thinking, was an overlay; it was in no way intrinsic to the child, nor linked in any direct way to biological race, community, and tradition.141 Lyslo’s statement was an expression of faith in the creative power of adoption – properly guided by professional social workers – to produce new families and new identities through what was imagined as a relatively smooth process of assimilation. Something of this faith, and with it a commitment to placements across the borders of race, was transferred from IAP into ARENA. By the early 1970s, however, sustained critiques from minority communities meant that ARENA workers had to pay more attention to the significance of racial and cultural heritage for children and for the communities from which they came.142 The CWLA as a larger organization also had to respond. After the NABSW statement, the organization released a carefully worded statement on ‘Standards in Transracial Placement,’ which argued: ‘In today’s social climate, other things being equal, we believe it is preferable to place children in families of their racial background. We, however, affirm transracial adoption as one means of achieving needed permanence for some children. Children should not have adoption denied or significantly delayed when adoptive parents of other races are available.’143 A ‘background statement’ explained that the CWLA directors knew the League’s support of transracial placements was unpopular with African American and Native American groups. There was some recognition in the statement of the importance of preserving the cultural heritage of the child and the community in the face of a racist society, and the directors suggested a number of strategies that member agencies could use to recruit minority homes and work with minority groups on child welfare concerns. Still, the CWLA insisted that the ‘best interests of children’ demanded timely placements, and that transracial placements were a viable solution when in-race placements were not immediately available.144 ARENA staffers were at work tracking and encouraging in-race placements for minority children. Starting in 1971, ARENA regularly reported new registrations received from African American families willing to adopt, supported national and local campaigns to recruit African American parents, and celebrated the increasing percentage of African American children placed with same-race families through the exchange. In 1973, ARENA’s annual report noted successes plac-

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ing a small number of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and ‘Oriental’ children in same-race families. The same report pointed out that 67 per cent of African American children placed that year went to African American families. Still, the total number of African American children placed in 1973 (52) was half the number placed in 1972 (105), when more children were placed across racial lines145 (see table 6.1). In 1973, ARENA director Arlene Nash underlined that ‘since the Indian people have the same resistance to their children being placed trans-racially as the blacks, we continu[e] to use the resources of ARENA to make known the need for Indian families.’ Later that year, Nash asked child-placing agencies to use a list of Native American families approved and waiting for children to persuade reluctant tribal councils to release children for adoption.146 Nonetheless, it proved difficult to find Native families to take on the older or disabled children who dominated in ARENA’s Native registrations by the 1970s. In 1973, only nine of sixty-five Native children placed went to families ARENA classified as ‘Indian.’ This percentage did not increase substantially until 1975, when forty-five of the sixty-four Native children placed went to ‘Indian’ families (table 6.1). This was a significant advance, although a 1976 study of the exchange argued that many of the families ARENA characterized as ‘Indian’ ‘may have very few links with Indian culture and Indian communities.’147 ARENA tried to negotiate the balance between encouraging in-race placements and insisting that transracial placements were still viable. One way to do this was to use the exchange as an aggressive tool to find same-race families, thus making transracial placements less common and perhaps less controversial. In 1973, Nash asked social workers to consider whether ‘we are reaching out to all of the varied minority populations in our society … [W]hen one of these minority infants (or older children) becomes available, are we exploring every avenue for the “preferable” [in-race] placements, other things being equal, or are we placing them with other races for expediency or other reasons?’ Although the IAP, ARENA, and the CWLA more broadly were strongly associated with transracial placements, Nash suggested that ARENA could become the best resource for finding same-race families. ‘How otherwise would the little Indian baby for whom there is no Indian family in his own state be placed with the Indian family in another state who is waiting for a child? Where else should this be more possible than at a North American Exchange?’148 Crossing geographic borders could be rethought as the best way to stay inside racial borders. In this

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reading, minority objections to transracial adoptions might not be an ‘obstacle’ to border-crossing adoptions but, instead, another argument in favour of expanding and streamlining procedures for placing children across state, provincial, and national borders. Conclusion The early 1970s were a critical period in the history of adoption in both Canada and the United States. The number of adoptions per year peaked in the United States in 1970 at 175,000 and in Canada in 1971 at 20,500. In 1971, social agencies in the United States oversaw an estimated 80 per cent of all non-relative adoptions, a rate that has not been equalled since.149 The period from the 1950s through the early 1970s has been described as one where adoption was widely viewed as the best solution for unwed pregnancy, care for children in crisis, and involuntary childlessness. But the adoption consensus faded quickly in the 1970s as the increasing availability of abortion and the decreasing social stigma attached to unwed motherhood led to a diminished supply of the most desired children for adoption. These developments coincided with the rise of the adoption-rights movement and with increasing challenges to the culture and politics of transracial adoption from minority communities.150 The year 1972 stands out as particularly important in the bordercrossing practices studied here. Hunt’s Obstacles to Interstate Adoption outlined ongoing and serious problems with the administration of interstate adoptions, but the very shape of the report assumed that border-crossing adoptions were an important tool in the arsenal of adoption workers. For adoption reformers, embracing exchanges and deliberate, planned border crossings meant confronting in new ways the challenge of connecting with their counterparts in other states and provinces and working across and through the laws and practices of disconnected jurisdictions. They confronted (in a new context) many of the same problems that troubled earlier reformers, who were more focused on stopping or limiting undesirable border crossings. As Hunt noted, and as many earlier reformers had discovered, in the spaces between states, provinces, and nations, it often seemed as though no one was in charge. The NABSW statement on transracial adoption also makes 1972 stand out in the history of border-crossing adoptions. The stories of adoptions across racial borders and adoptions across geographic borders are not

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the same, but they intersect in the history of adoption exchanges that so often moved children across races as well as spaces. The NABSW statement and protests from Native Americans did not end border-crossing adoptions, but they did challenge easy assumptions about identity, culture, and assimilation that shaped many of the early experiments in transracial adoption. The protests also added a new level of communication and collaboration – with minority communities, about the significance of race and culture – to the complex business of home finding or home preservation for disadvantaged children. In 1975, a National Adoption Desk was created in Canada’s federal Department of Health and Welfare, and this office took responsibility for an adoption exchange connecting all the Canadian provinces and territories, with the exception of Quebec. Canadian social agencies and provincial departments continued to work with US exchanges, but most Canadian registrations (including those for First Nations and Métis children) were withdrawn from ARENA.151 In the mid-1970s, the CWLA reconfigured its various adoption-related programs under the North American Center on Adoption (NACA). ARENA became a department inside NACA, increasingly focused on the most challenging adoption cases, now understood as cases of ‘waiting children.’ Children in large sibling groups, and children with intellectual disabilities or difficult psychological problems (often in combination with minority racial status or physical challenges) were increasingly prominent in ARENA registrations. At the 1977 congressional hearings considering ICWA, ARENA director Mary Jane Fales was one of very few witnesses who testified against the legislation. She argued that although the CWLA recognized the need for child welfare reform supporting the cultural integrity of Native peoples, the organization wanted to underline (as in the 1972 standards statement) that transracial placement remained a viable option if the biological family could not be preserved and if no Native adoptive family could be found. The CWLA was concerned that the law contained ‘no statement of children’s right to a permanent home, if not in their biological family then through adoption, as opposed to placement in an Indian foster home.’152 In 1979, the CWLA closed down ARENA and went to work designing a new National Adoption Exchange to be run by the Children’s Bureau. The bureau did not, in the end, enact the CWLA plan for a new national exchange, although regional exchanges continued to function across the United States.153 In 2002, the Children’s Bureau became the primary sponsor of an online

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national photo listing service for foster children in need of adoption (AdoptUSkids.org), run by the not-for-profit Adoption Exchange Association, with the CWLA as a consulting partner.154 In recent years, the NABSW has run its own adoption exchange at its national convention, designed to demonstrate that black families can be found for black children by looking, as Nash suggested, at resources across the country.155 By 1990, all US states plus the District of Columbia and the US Virgin Islands had enacted the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children. The clause opening up the ICPC to Canadian provinces has never been used. If a Canadian province were to consider joining, this would turn the compact into an international treaty, and would require the consent of Congress. This development is unlikely, as a significant reworking of the ICPC (now the Interstate Compact for the Placement of Children) is currently circulating for approval by state legislatures. The American Public Human Services Association, the current secretariat of the ICPC, worked with a wide range of child welfare and legal organizations on the revisions to the ICPC, including the Children’s Bureau, the CWLA, and the Council of State Governments. The revisions were designed to address problems with accountability, enforceability, and long delays that frustrated compact administrators, social workers, judges, lawyers, and parents working with the old compact. Looking back over the long history of attempts to regulate border-crossing adoptions since the 1930s, the most interesting provisions of the new ICPC are those that provide specific procedures for enforcing the terms of the compact, and outline specific penalties for violations as assessed by a new Interstate Compact Commission. As of June 2010, nine states had enacted the new compact and it was in the legislative process in two others. It will come into force and replace the old ICPC twelve months after the thirty-fifth state enacts enabling legislation.156 Over time, the devastating impact of extra-tribal adoptions for Native communities, for birth families, and for many adopted children has become more and more evident.157 As Karen Dubinsky has argued, the standard Canadian assessment is that transracial adoptions for First Nations children have been ‘an almost unmitigated disaster.’158 In 2001, the executive director of the CWLA offered a formal apology for the IAP and for the CWLA’s opposition to ICWA in 1977.159 ICWA gave the force of federal law to Native American claims for tribal control over child welfare. In the aftermath of ICWA, transracial adoptions of Native American children became far less common, but they did not disappear. In the United States and Canada, there is ongoing contro-

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Promoting and Controlling Cross-Border Adoption  231

versy over how best to provide for Aboriginal children in crisis. As social work scholar Raven Sinclair points out, ‘Many Aboriginal adoptees from the Sixties scoop and beyond have developed positive identities despite … the challenges of their experiences.’160 Transracial placements for African American and other racialized children in both Canada and the United States have also remained controversial. Changes in policy and practice curtailed such placements in the 1970s, but there was no equivalent to the ICWA provisions in either Canada or the United States. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the US Congress overcame its earlier reticence to legislate in the field of adoption and passed a series of ‘Adoption Opportunity Bills’ designed to solve the crisis in foster care and emphasize ‘permanency planning’ for children. The Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994 (MEPA) and the Interethnic Placement Act of 1996 (amending MEPA) mandate that adoption agencies receiving federal funding in any form cannot delay or deny adoptive placements on the basis of the race, colour, or national origin of children or prospective adoptive parents.161 Although MEPA also contains provisions requiring agencies to recruit foster and adoptive parents from diverse racial and ethnic communities, the legislation was seen and has been interpreted as an attack on same-race placement practices in the name of providing timely placements for children in foster care (where African American children are disproportionately represented). ICWA placements are excluded from the provisions of MEPA.162 The pressure on public and private agencies to move children from foster care to adoptive homes has, in turn, led to renewed attention to barriers in interstate and international adoption, and to new reform initiatives like the revised ICPC.163 Child welfare professionals in Canada and the United States still face considerable obstacles as they work across many kinds of borders and with diverse communities to find families for children disadvantaged and marginalized by race, culture, or ability. That work takes place inside the United States, inside Canada, between the two countries, and on a global stage.

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Conclusion: ‘A “No Man’s Land” of Jurisdiction’

In January 1937 state representatives at a national meeting on interstate cooperation issued a Declaration of Interdependence, which argued that it was time for state governments to join together to meet ‘their mutual problems brought on by this modern era.’ Instead of cooperating, state governments had been developing laws and policies with ‘no thought of harmony.’ The result was that ‘our governments … have developed a “No Man’s Land” of Jurisdiction. In thousands of instances, their laws are in conflict, their practices are discordant, their regulations are antagonistic, and their policies are either competitive or repugnant to one another.’ Against this backdrop of hostile conflict, the Declaration offered a new and contrasting model for interstate cooperation within the US federation. The bonds of good will and the lines of communication which connect our many interdependent governments must be immeasurably strengthened. Through established agencies of cooperation, through compacts under our Constitution, through informal collaboration, and through all other means possible, our Nation, our states, and localities must fuse their activities with a new fervor of national unity.1

The story in this book is one of adoption reformers stepping into ‘the “No Man’s Land” of Jurisdiction’ they identified in interstate, interprovincial, and international child transfers. The case studies show child welfare professionals, politicians, prosecutors, and bureaucrats struggling to ‘fuse their activities’ across state, provincial, and national borders. The Declaration of Interdependence reminds us that this work was part of a larger move towards inter-jurisdictional governance within

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Conclusion: ‘A “No Man’s Land” of Jurisdiction’  233

and across Canada and the United States in the twentieth (and now the twenty-first) century. Over time, informal collaborations, agreements, compacts, and regional commissions connecting states and provinces have become more and more important as a way of managing the flow of people, goods, natural resources, and pollutants across the many borders inside and between Canada and the United States.2 It is not surprising that female reformers led the march into the ‘No Man’s Land’ in child welfare. Across Western nations in the early twentieth century, female reformers used their personal and professional networks and their close association with the needs of other women and dependent children to shape emerging welfare systems.3 The Canadian-American coalition on cross-border adoption was formed through such networks. In the period up to 1950, senior women at the CWC and the USCB worked with their state and provincial colleagues to control or stop most border-crossing adoptions and to build better, more professional adoption systems within individual jurisdictions. Katharine Lenroot, Charlotte Whitton, Maud Morlock, Nora Lea, and their colleagues understood that fighting back against the traffic in babies meant changing child welfare laws and practices, and also creating new relationships between adoption professionals in different jurisdictions. These were not easy tasks. Strengthening state regulation in adoption was controversial in both countries and was sometimes resisted by state/provincial and local government officials, as well as by members of the public clamouring for access to children. Because the shortcomings and scandals associated with the Canadian half of the cross-border problem were more immediately visible, it was tempting to construct the issue as one of Canadian backwardness. This approach fed defensiveness on the part of some Canadian officials and a smug sense of superiority on the part of some Americans. The nationalist objection to ‘baby exports’ in Canada in the late 1940s and again in the 1960s could also strain cross-border relations. From the late 1960s forward, protests from racialized minorities about adoptions that crossed borders of race, as well as geography, made the politics and process of adoption across borders the more complex and difficult to manage. To complicate matters still further, neither the CWC nor the USCB had any statutory authority in the regulation of adoption at the state, provincial, or federal level. CWC and USCB leaders could in no way force states and provinces to enact or enforce domestic adoption reforms. They certainly could not force these governments to enter formalized interprovincial, interstate, or international agreements, although some

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234  The Traffic in Babies

states and provinces asked the USCB and CWC to establish such agreements. The CWC and USCB (backed by states and provinces) tried to pull the passport office of the Canadian Department of External Affairs, the US consular system in Canada, and the INS into the regulation of cross-border adoption, but had only limited success. The adoption reformers believed that the border-policing power of these federal agencies could be used, very effectively, to regulate the movement of children across borders. The reformers made some inroads at the passport office and with the consulates, but their success was limited in scope or temporary in duration. Time and again, the federal agencies argued that the regulation of adoption was a provincial/state responsibility and a field in which they had little authority, and perhaps even less inclination, to act. USCB and CWC leaders turned their attention to more limited negotiations between the partners in border-crossing adoptions. Here, the leaders found considerable space within which to prod, pressure, and influence states and provinces to work directly with each other or to cooperate through the USCB and CWC, and later through exchanges like ARENA. These informal, ad hoc, and often personalized strategies could be quite effective. This approach was particularly suited to working between established institutions and around the constitutional division of powers between states/provinces and federal governments. The problem was that a coalition based on personal contacts was impermanent. Those ties could be broken, or at least weakened, when individuals retired or were replaced and as welfare systems expanded. New members drafted into the cross-border network, for example, the USCB’s Evelyn Smith, did not necessarily share the convictions or the preferred strategies of those who came before. And even among pairs of committed friends and allies, there was not always an equal commitment to the task at hand. Within this limited space, and with these restrictions, what was accomplished? By 1947, the Ideal Maternity Home was an unpleasant memory. There were significant modifications to adoption law and practice in the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, though these changes did not prevent the resurgence of a smaller-scale baby black market between New Brunswick and the New York–New Jersey region in the late 1940s. In Alberta, the provincial Department of Public Welfare resisted any changes to its cross-border practices and refused (well into the 1960s) to meet requests for cooperation from US states. In Quebec, the standards of the Catholic adoption agencies im-

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Conclusion: ‘A “No Man’s Land” of Jurisdiction’  235

proved considerably in the 1950s. Still, the 1954 black market scandal exposed the underside of adoption practices in Quebec (and New York) and the very difficult challenge of regulating border-crossing adoptions through criminal law. Inside Canada, Whitton pushed the provinces towards a voluntary inter-agency and interprovincial agreement on child placement in the mid-1930s, though it seems this agreement was not widely enacted. In the 1950s, the provincial directors of child welfare (from most provinces) negotiated bilateral agreements on child transfer covering placements made by public agencies, and the CWC’s Committee on Adoption produced a national statement on standards in inter-jurisdictional placement. Along the way, CWC and USCB officials mediated dozens of individual cases of cross-border adoption, connecting Canadian and American child welfare workers at the state/provincial and local levels in the hope of providing the safest cross-border placements possible. By the 1950s, child welfare reformers in Canada and the United States, working together and then separately, turned their attention to promoting professionally controlled border-crossing adoptions for hard-to-place children. In the 1950s and 1960s, public and private adoption agencies joined adoption exchanges operating inside each country and across the national border, culminating with Canadian and American participation in ARENA. Parallel developments in interstate governance led to the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children. In New Jersey in the 1940s, the director of child welfare used the IMH scandal to make her case for stricter state adoption laws. Likewise, the CWC’s Lea and the USCB’s Morlock folded the IMH campaign into a broader push for adoption reform in both countries. Whitton and her allies used the Alberta scandal to make adoption reform a national issue in Canada and prompt state officials in the United States to work together on interstate and international adoption issues. Controversy arising from the IMH, Alberta, and Quebec scandals fed into the USCB effort to bring the states together to improve interstate adoption practices. In Canada, these cases all contributed to domestic deliberations on adoption reform, most specifically in the work of the CWC’s Committee on Adoption and the provincial directors of child welfare in the 1950s. The collaboration between the CWC and the USCB was imperfect – both in its strategies and its results – but it was an important example of both the need for and the utility of transborder work on social

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welfare. In terms of both the approach to cross-border work and the specific application of cross-border thinking to adoption, the work of CWC and USCB pioneers set important precedents. The legislators and criminal prosecutors who tried to use criminal law to control illicit border crossings were influenced by the child welfare reformers, and the USCB had direct input as the ICPC was drafted. ARENA was, itself, based on trust, collaboration, and communication between social agencies sharing a professional culture and working across borders, though it was not based on the same kind of intense personal connections that marked the earlier USCB-CWC coalition. Adoption across the Canada-US border often seems other than, or separate from, intercountry adoption as popularly imagined. The standard narrative in the history of intercountry adoption to the United States begins with European refugees and ‘orphans’ in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and then proceeds to children entering the United States from war-torn Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.4 The popular Canadian story is similar, though it begins later (in the 1960s), in part because of the racial restrictions in Canadian immigration legislation.5 Canadian adoptions to the United States are international – they cross an international border – but the geographic, cultural, and assumed racial proximities of the two countries have shaped the meaning and the administrative structures governing this particular border crossing. Most significantly, there was no annual quota on migration from Canada to the United States before the 1965 Immigration Act took effect.6 As a consequence, adoptions across the Canada-US border were often treated as more akin to interstate and interprovincial (rather than international) child transfers, despite the fact that the children required passports and visas. The political and administrative struggles over the regulation of international adoption from other countries to the United States were played out through immigration law and various exemptions to racial/national immigration quotas in the 1940s and 1950s.7 Because of the interplay between immigration law and international adoption, the US State Department and the INS had an unquestioned, legislatively defined, role in the regulation of most intercountry adoptions that was largely missing in the Canadian case. This distinction is crucial to understanding why the federal-state division of constitutional responsibility was breached (with little question) in most international adoptions, but not (for the most part) in adoptions from Canada to the United States.

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Conclusion: ‘A “No Man’s Land” of Jurisdiction’  237

The histories of adoption across the US-Canadian border and of other international adoptions to the United States are, nonetheless, linked. Here, we might note the explicit connections made by the delegates at the USCB-sponsored conferences on interstate and international adoption in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The most important and long-lasting ties, however, came through the development of best practices and models of professional procedure in inter-jurisdictional child placement. A shared analysis of sound adoption practice connected Canadian and American child welfare leaders as far back as the League of Nations and the Report on the Placing of Children. A specific model for safeguards in adoptions across borders was first developed in 1933 by Katharine Lenroot and Agnes Hanna at the USCB, working at the request of the CWC’s Whitton. This model was developed further in negotiations and agreements between states and provinces, in reaction to publicly visible scandals, in discussions at the USCB conferences, in the CWC’s A Policy Statement on Adoption across Borders, and in the guidelines for adoption exchanges developed in the 1940s and 1950s. The point is that child welfare professionals working across the Canada-US border identified, early on, a clear vision of the domestic reforms and transborder connections crucial to the safe, professionally managed transfer of children across borders. There is, in fact, a remarkable continuity in the basic standards (if not the specific procedures) underlying the Canada-to-US reform effort, the statement of ‘Fundamental Principles in the Inter-country Adoption Process’ developed by a European working group in 1960, and the core requirements of the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption.8 The great challenge for the reformers in this study, the one they could never entirely overcome, was how to ensure these standards were enacted and enforced. A similar challenge remains as the United States, Canada, and other sending and receiving nations adjust to an intercountry adoption system regulated through the Hague Convention, negotiated between 1988 and 1993.9 Richard Carlson notes there was intense controversy during the negotiations over whether the primary purpose of the convention would be to facilitate or to restrict (through very tight regulation) adoptions across borders. Disagreements on this issue played out in debate over the relative ranking of intercountry adoption versus other options for caring for children, such as domestic adoption, foster care, or institutional care in the home country.10 Article 4 of the convention entrenches the principle of subsidiarity in adoptions across borders, declaring that

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238  The Traffic in Babies

intercountry adoption should be contemplated only ‘after possibilities for placement of the child within the State of origin have been given due consideration.’ But, the convention preamble also recognizes that ‘intercountry adoption may offer the advantage of a permanent family to a child for whom a suitable family cannot be found in his or her State of origin.’11 The head of the US negotiating team, Peter Pfund, subsequently argued that the convention preamble was ‘an important and possibly the first clear intergovernmental endorsement of intercountry adoption.’12 Nonetheless, there is a tension between restricting and facilitating – between emphasizing child placement in the home nation and smoothing the path to intercountry adoption – throughout the convention. This tension is replayed, with varying emphases, in the implementation plans of sending and receiving nations.13 The body of the convention lays out basic procedures to be followed by outgoing and incoming nations participating in intercountry adoption, specifying standards which must be followed in connection with consent and relinquishment, background reports on children and prospective adoptive parents, procedures in cases of disrupted adoption, monitoring of accredited and approved adoption providers, mutual recognition of legal proceedings, and limits on compensation and payment of fees in intercountry adoptions. The convention sets important and laudable goals, but some of the standards are quite general and key terms related to the commercialization of intercountry adoption (‘non-profit motives,’ ‘reasonable fees,’ ‘improper financial gain’) are not defined.14 As one commentator has noted, ‘like any international treaty, it [the convention] has to be ambiguous if it is to be adopted worldwide.’15 Within this broad outline, the details of implementation are left to the contracting nations. Each contracting nation is required to set up a central authority responsible for communication and cooperation with the central authority in the partner nation. The central authority must also create and police the domestic process for accrediting or approving adoption providers. The convention applies when both the sending and receiving nations are contracting parties.16 The Canadian federal government signed the Hague Convention in 1995. The convention was then enacted through provincial/territorial legislation and each province or territory now has its own central authority, coordinated through Intercountry Adoption Services at Human Resources and Social Development Canada. Most of the provinces acceded to the convention between 1997 and 1999; the last, Quebec, joined in 2006.17 The implementation process in the United States was far more

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Conclusion: ‘A “No Man’s Land” of Jurisdiction’  239

complex and controversial. The United States signed the convention in 1994. In 2000, Congress passed the Intercountry Adoption Act, which authorized US participation, set the basic terms for US implementation, and designated the State Department as the central authority responsible for developing and then enforcing the US system. It took over six years for the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to develop the complex rules governing Hague adoptions to and from the United States. With the rules in place, the State Department selected two accrediting entities responsible for the core work of accrediting or approving adoption service providers and then overseeing their compliance. The convention finally took effect for adoptions connecting the United States with other Hague parties as of 1 April 2008.18 As early as 1994, Pfund predicted a divide between two camps as the United States moved towards ratification. On one side, he placed those viewing the convention as an opportunity to fundamentally reform US adoption practices from the top down through a significant federal regulatory process enforcing the highest standards for all adoption service providers. On the other side, Pfund identified those wanting little change in the current system, with limited regulation at the federal level and most supervision of providers remaining in the hands of the states.19 Indeed, Pfund’s basic division roughly captures the opposing sides in subsequent debates in the implementation process around limiting fees paid to adoption service providers in the United States, limiting fees paid for services in the sending country, standards for accreditation, the Hague complaint registry, medical and financial disclosure to adoptive parents, and the responsibility US providers would hold for the activities of their agents in sending nations.20 The compromises and complex negotiations around these issues are laid out in the detailed comments the State Department published alongside its ‘Final Rule’ document. As the Final Rule makes clear, the State Department veered away from any broad attempt to remake adoption standards across the country; the regulations were designed to mirror existing standards rather than raise the bar.21 In addition, adoption service providers are not required to meet all the standards for accreditation laid out in the regulations. Instead, they are evaluated against the less stringent standard of ‘substantial compliance.’22 As is often the case in such protracted negotiations, few seem entirely pleased with the US plan for Hague. Critics looking for a tighter regulatory regime have described the ‘Failure of Promise’ in the US model; critics from the other side deplore the ‘Ill Effects’ of a US ratification

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240  The Traffic in Babies

model that involves an unconstitutional assertion of federal power in an arena of state responsibility.23 Looking more broadly, the Hague system as a whole has been critiqued for creating a regulatory morass that makes intercountry adoption more difficult, thus hurting children in need of permanent homes.24 Conversely, the convention has also been criticized for being too wide open and for lacking the specificity and enforcement teeth that might more effectively combat child trafficking.25 As of December 2010, there were eighty-three contracting parties to the Hague Convention, including Canada and the United States. Among major sending nations, China ratified only in 2005, while Guatemala is considered non-compliant. South Korea, Russia, and Ethiopia remain outside the system.26 In the period since 2004, there have been striking changes in the worldwide demographics of intercountry adoption. The top twentythree receiving states took in 41,530 children in 2004, as compared to 37,526 in 2007. The United States received 22,884 children in 2004, but only 12,753 in 2009. Some commentators expect the annual figure in the United States to fall below 10,000 soon.27 It is tempting, but far too simplistic, to link these declines to the US progress towards Hague implementation. David Smolin argues the changes were led by a declining supply of children from China, South Korea, Russia, and Guatemala. Changes in adoption practices in these countries were certainly influenced by the expanding Hague system (this is most clear in the case of Guatemala), but domestic policy considerations are perhaps more significant.28 In truth, it is simply too soon to determine the full implications of the United States entering the Hague system. There are still many unanswered questions about the Hague process as it functions inside the United States, and in relation to adoption practices of other nations participating, or not, in the convention. Both the short-term and long-term effects of the Hague Convention on adoptions between Canada and the United States remain unclear. Since at least the early 1990s, the flow of babies has reversed and Canada has been receiving children from the United States through intercountry adoption. Between 1993 and 2008, Canadians adopted 1420 children from the United States, out of a total of 30,738 from across the globe. In 2000, there were seventy-eight adoptions from the United States. In 2008, there were 189 Canadian adoptions of US children and the United States was the second largest supplier of children to Canada, behind China (429 placements) and just ahead of Ethiopia (183).29 In comparison, US reports to the Hague conference list between two and

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Conclusion: ‘A “No Man’s Land” of Jurisdiction’  241

four children entering the United States from Canada each year from 2005 through 2009.30 Before it ratified the Hague Convention, the US federal government did not collect statistics on outgoing adoptions. Most media reports estimated that 300 children left the United States each year in the 1990s and 2000s, though recent research from Peter Selman suggests 100–200 per year was more accurate, with an unusual peak of just over 300 in 2008 and 2009. In addition to Canada, American children have been placed in the Netherlands, England, Germany, Switzerland, New Zealand, Sweden, Ireland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Australia, and Peru.31 The long-standing pattern of Canada exporting children to the United States might prick at the Canadian sense of national pride, but the contemporary reality of the United States as a sending nation startles Americans and others because it so directly contradicts dominant ideas about intercountry adoption. The children leaving the United States in intercountry adoption are always described as African American or mixed race in heritage, and the vast majority of the adopting parents are clearly white. In the 1960s ARENA staffers hoped, in vain, that Canadians would welcome the hard-to-place African American children they could not place in the United States because of deep-seated patterns of racial prejudice. US birth parents are now described as seeking out Canadian homes for their children because Canada is imagined as a nation with far less racism than the United States. The US agencies that specialize in these placements support this flattering view of Canadian society, and also argue that it remains very difficult to place African American children, even healthy infants, in US homes.32 In 2005, one journalist celebrated Canada as a ‘Haven for Black US Babies’ and then described the home of an adopting family in British Columbia’s lower mainland as ‘light years from the muggy heat and segregation of the Deep South where [the children] were born.’ Whether or not individual adopting families accept this romanticized vision of Canada as a racism-free zone, Canadians have responded enthusiastically to the chance to adopt children from the United States.33 As the United States became known as a relatively easy source for babies, more and more Canadian parents looked south for children in a remarkable reversal of earlier patterns. The Hague ratification process required that, for the first time, the United States develop a system for regulating outgoing adoptions.34 The convention, as noted, mandates that sending nations explore options for placement in the home nation before considering intercoun-

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try adoption. The tortuous translation of this principle in the US Final Rule requires that state courts determine ‘reasonable efforts’ have been made to look for a home in the United States before a child is released for an intercountry placement. Interpreting the ‘reasonable efforts’ standard (and the various exceptions to it) requires a careful layering of state child welfare law, the authority of judges in state courts, the right of birth parents to choose specific adoptive parents in other countries, the requirements of the Intercountry Adoption Act, and the terms of the convention.35 From the initial US State Department reports, it appeared that the number of outgoing adoptions from the United States fell precipitously as soon as the Hague rules took effect. The State Department reported twenty-five outgoing adoptions processed under the new Hague system between 1 April and 30 September 2008, with only one child headed to Canada; between 1 October 2008 and 30 September 2009, twenty-six outgoing cases were reported, with five children placed in Canada.36 When Canada reported 189 incoming cases for the period 1 January through 31 December 2008, the first assumption of researchers was that a large number of cases were initiated in the first months of 2008 in an effort to avoid the new Hague regulations.37 In the lead-up to the US Hague implementation and through 2008–9, Canadian adoption agencies warned potential Canadian adoptive parents that the period of relatively easy access to US babies was likely at an end.38 The 2009 Canadian data on incoming intercountry adoptions from the United States place these assumptions about decline in serious doubt. In 2009, Canadians adopted an all-time high of 253 children from the United States. Indeed, the increase in Canadian adoptions from the United States in 2009 (253 vs 189 in 2008) was the largest single contributor to the upswing in intercountry adoptions to Canada in 2009 (2122) over 2008 (1915).39 Thus, with an influx of children adopted from the United States, Canada continues to buck the recent wider trend of decreasing numbers of intercountry adoptions in most Western industrialized countries.40 It is, however, becoming more and more difficult to square the US outgoing reports – listing seven children sent to Canada between 1 October 2008 and 30 September 2009 – with the Canadian reports of 253 incoming children during 2009. Without question, there is a great need for research exploring the state-by-state implementation of the ‘reasonable efforts’ standard in US outgoing adoptions, as well as the reporting process connecting accredited agencies and approved practitioners to the Office of Children’s Services at the Department of

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Conclusion: ‘A “No Man’s Land” of Jurisdiction’  243

State. The opportunities for domestic placements and the relative costs and fees for US-based practitioners placing African American or mixedrace children outside of the United States versus in domestic placement also require much greater scrutiny. In the interim, Canadian adoption agencies are once again giving more positive messages to potential adoptive parents looking to the United States, noting, in particular, that the United States stands out as a location where newborn infants are available, and where the process will seem more like a domestic adoption for Canadian parents.41 How might the reformers in this book view the Hague system as it operates across the Canada-US border? As it functions more broadly? The convention text lays out best practices in intercountry adoption, and attaches those practices to the enforcement power of national governments in Canada and the United States. Thus, the convention puts in place much of what the earlier reformers sought. The ‘No Man’s Land’ in adoptions between Canada and the United States has been largely filled by formalized collaboration between the Canadian and American central authorities, although the earlier reformers would certainly recognize the limitations and slippery spaces (like the uncertain US outgoing data and questions surrounding the ‘reasonable efforts’ standard) that still exist as babies move between Canada and the United States and across the wider Hague system. While the scale of child transfer is obviously much different, there are many parallels between the mid-twentieth-century experience of regulating adoption across the Canada-US border and the contemporary Hague process. The mid-twentieth-century reformers were more than familiar with the pull between facilitating and restricting adoption across borders, with public and political resistance to tighter regulation of adoption, and with concerns about the division of power between state/provincial and federal levels of government. They would understand the hopeful, frustrating, incremental, backsliding process of translating best principles in adoption practice into domestic law that states, provinces, and federal governments are willing to enforce. Pointing to some of these parallels (the list could be much longer) contextualizes current debates and helps us understand just why it remains so difficult to regulate the movement of children across borders. There are specific moments, however, where more direct connections can be made, and where the mid-twentieth-century experience can speak directly to contemporary developments. Canadian and American reformers began their work with the knowledge that babies moved

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across borders because there were differences in the way adoption was regulated in various jurisdictions. Adoptive parents and adoption operators were attracted to jurisdictions with the lightest or most easily finessed regulatory systems, to what might be called regulatory havens. Regulatory havens operate in (at least) two ways in contemporary adoptions between nations. First, nations with less-developed controls over intercountry adoption attract the attention of adoption facilitators and adoptive parents, feeding a self-reinforcing increase in the number of adoptions from that country. The cycle is often broken when evidence of exploitation or a nationalist backlash leads to a more restricted system.42 Second, many countries (including some of the most significant sending countries) are entirely outside the Hague system because they choose to stay outside or because they do not have the necessary infrastructure to meet the Hague standards. Depending on the national bureaucracy in various sending and receiving countries (including Canada and the United States), adoption agencies and adoptive parents can opt out of the Hague regulatory system by pursuing an adoption from a non-Hague state, although these adoptive parents also forfeit the protections offered to them by the Hague rules.43 The earlier Canada-to-US example reminds us that sub-national regulatory havens can also affect intercountry adoptions. If we stay with examples from the United States and Canada, this issue seems most relevant to the United States as a sending nation. In 1994 Carlson warned that many state laws regulating the payment of expenses to birth mothers were ‘surprisingly deficient and possibly inadequate to satisfy the Convention’ where it bars inducements and payments to a birth parent in consideration of a consent to adoption.44 The state laws did not, in the end, stand in the way of a US ratification, but Canadian adoptive parents are warned by their agencies that payments for birth mother expenses (and payments to agencies) vary widely from one US state to another.45 As well, the State Department regulations on ‘reasonable efforts’ empower state courts to determine what counts as a reasonable effort and when and how the various exceptions apply. This creates at least the possibility that as the system develops, particular states may become known as ‘easier’ locales from which to secure a child for adoption to Canada. Applying this model to the mix of national/subnational regulation in other sending and receiving nations would require a very specific knowledge of the relevant pairs of nations, but the example is instructive and reminds us to think and work across many borders in intercountry adoption.

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Conclusion: ‘A “No Man’s Land” of Jurisdiction’  245

One way to overcome regulatory havens is, quite obviously, to raise the general standard of adoption services across jurisdictions. This, of course, is the general intent and aspiration of the Hague Convention. It was also the specific practice of the mid-twentieth-century reformers who viewed state-by-state and province-by-province reform as both critical to controlling adoptions across borders, and as an independent good. Thus, a troubling traffic in babies was also an opportunity to spread their model of professionally regulated adoptions within, as well as across, jurisdictions. In the US path to Hague implementation, there was an affirmative choice not to seize this opportunity. The political barriers to a more aggressive approach were, and remain, substantial.46 Still, Lenroot, Whitton, Morlock, Lea, and their successors would surely have viewed this as a squandered opportunity. The situation is far from static, however. The Hague Convention – with its flaws, exclusions, tensions, and compromises – is still the best model we have to manage adoptions across the Canada-US border and in the much wider context of intercountry adoption. The next few years will reveal much as children move across the US-Canada border and circulate around the world in intercountry adoption. The job of scholars, activists, and adoption reformers is to insist that wherever, and for as long as, children move across borders in adoption they are surrounded with as much protection as possible.

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Notes

Abbreviations APWA BANQ CCSD CJCA CWC CWD CWLA CWP DEA DHW FJP FSIMH HCSP ISS JLCIC

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American Public Welfare Association Records, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Bibliothèque et Archives nationales de Québec Canadian Council on Social Development, Canadian Welfare Council Papers, Library and Archives of Canada Canadian Jewish Congress Archives Canadian Welfare Council Child Welfare Division of British Columbia, Archives of British Columbia Child Welfare League of America Papers, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Charlotte Whitton Papers, Library and Archives of Canada Department of External Affairs Papers, Library and Archives of Canada Department of Health and Welfare Papers, Library and Archives of Canada Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, Canadian Jewish Congress Archives Friends and Survivors of the Ideal Maternity Home, private archive House of Commons Sessional Papers, Library and Archives of Canada International Social Service Records, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Joint Legislative Committee on Interstate Cooperation, New York, annual reports

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248  Notes to pages 3–6 JLCMFL  Joint Legislative Committee on Matrimonial and Family Law, New York, annual reports KLP Katharine Lenroot Papers, Columbia University Special Collections LBJ Legislative Bill Jackets, New York State Archives and Records Administration NYSA New York State Archives PANS Public Archives of Nova Scotia RMGR MacGregor Dawson Papers, Dalhousie University Archives SARA State Archives and Records Administration, New York USCB United States Children’s Bureau Introduction   1 Lea to Morlock, 14 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3.   2 The numbers are imprecise because state, provincial, and federal adoption data were incomplete in both countries through this period, and because some adoptions discussed here were deliberately hidden. My estimate reflects contemporary observations, plus rough counts from the bestknown cross-border operations. Individual chapters contain more specific data. Social workers distinguish between relative adoptions (the adoption of children by other members of their existing biological kin network) and stranger adoptions (the adoption of children into a previously unrelated family). Except where otherwise specified, references in this book are to non-relative (stranger) adoption.   3 On US adoptions for First Nations and Métis children, see Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 135–73.   4 The provincial government in Quebec has carefully enumerated powers with respect to the selection of immigrants entering that province. On the constitutional division of powers and social welfare in Canada, see Smiley, The Rowell-Sirois Report; Owram, The Government Generation, esp. 221–53; and Paul, ‘Federalism, Social Policy.’ On the United States, see Hart, Bound by Our Constitution and Mettler, Dividing Citizens.   5 US data (1945–2009) from Weill, ‘International Adoption’; Pilotti, ‘Intercountry Adoption’; US Department of State, ‘Immigrant Visas’ and ‘Total Adoptions’ (these websites are no longer posted, but were archived by K. Balcom); Canadian data (1978–2008) from Strong-Boag, Finding Families, tables 7.5 and 7.6, and Adoption Council of Canada, ‘2008 International Adoption Statistics.’ The Canadian data omit the years 1989–92.   6 Hague Conference on Private International Law, ‘Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption’;

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Notes to pages 7–10  249

  7   8

  9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17

18

Daniel, ‘Intercountry Adoption’; Hamilton, ‘Privatizing International Humanitarian Treaty Implementation.’ Ramirez, Crossing the 49th Parallel, ix–xii. Jane Armstrong, ‘A Canadian Haven for Black US Babies,’ Globe and Mail, 1 October 2005, A7; Karen Balcom and Karen Dubinsky, ‘Babies across Borders,’ Globe and Mail, 13 October 2005, A8; Adoption Council of Canada, ‘2008 International Adoption Statistics.’ In 1933 the New York State Department of Child Welfare identified twenty children placed by New York social agencies with Canadian families. In 1960, eight British Columbia families applied to adopt families from the United States. There is no mention of the presence or absence of family ties in either instance, and it appears that these are isolated examples. Southto-north adoptions passed otherwise unnoticed in the records explored for this study. James Foster to Agnes Hanna, 1 November 1933, USCB, 1933–6, 543/7.3.1.3; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 253. Morlock to Ernest Blois, 19 May 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 191/10.2.5. Nora Lea to J.L. Waters, 27 December 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 166–7, 185–9. Nora Lea to Lawrence Cole, 14 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. The image of babies as an exported natural resource was inspired by Whitton, ‘Better Controls for Baby Adoption,’ 6–7. For work theorizing the varied meanings of the Canada-US border, see Sadowski-Smith, ‘Canada-US Border Narratives’; Luna-Firebaugh, ‘The Border That Crossed Us’; and Jameson, ‘Dancing on the Rim.’ These sources were supplemented by media reports; criminal trial proceedings; congressional, parliamentary, provincial and state assembly debates, testimony, and investigations; oral histories; memoirs; and the professional social work literature on adoption. This study is not based on individual case records from adoption agencies, although excerpts from or descriptions of case histories were often a part of the government and organization records I consulted. Likewise, the institution and government records also contained letters from birth mothers, adoptive families, and the public at large. Unless the case details I discuss came from published sources, I have changed or omitted the names of birth mothers, adoptive parents, and adopted children. On the perspective of birth mothers, see Solinger, Beggars and Choosers, 22. On transracial and transnational adoptees telling their own stories, see Willing, ‘Beyond the Vietnam War Adoptions,’ 261–2. My comments here are restricted to the academic field of adoption history, but adoption studies in the humanities and social sciences is an exploding

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250  Notes to pages 10–20

19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30

field that includes important contributions from literary scholars, sociologists, and anthropologists, alongside the memoirs and autobiographies of relinquishing mothers, adoptive families, and adopted children. Herman, Kinship by Design; Melosh, Strangers and Kin; Strong-Boag, Finding Families; Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own; Solinger, Beggars and Choosers and Wake Up Little Susie; Kunzel, Fallen Women. Carp, Adoption Politics and Family Matters; Trenka, Oparah, and Shin, Outsiders Within; Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Dubinsky, Babies without Borders; Briggs, ‘Mother, Child, Race, Nation’; Choy, ‘Institutionalizing International Adoption’; Oh, ‘A New Kind of Missionary Work’; Brookfield, ‘Maverick Mothers and Mercy Flights’; Marre and Briggs, eds, International Adoption. Herman, ‘Paradoxical Rationalization,’ 355. Ibid., 349–50; Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own, 133–7; Kunzel, Fallen Women. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled; Ladd-Taylor, Mother Work; Koven and Michel, eds, Mothers of a New World; Wikander et al., eds, Protecting Women. Liggett, ‘Red Tape and Run Around’; Katz, ‘Why You Can’t Adopt a Baby.’ Balcom, ‘The Logic of Exchange’; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 161–73; Briggs, ‘Communities Resisting Transracial Adoption.’ Balcom, ‘Constructing Families.’ Strong-Boag, Finding Families, xii. On personal-professional networks among US reformers, see Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled; Boris, ‘The Power of Motherhood’; Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion; and Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work. On Canadian women’s networks see Rooke and Schnell, ‘Making the Way More Comfortable’; and Struthers, No Fault of Their Own, 75. Howe, ‘Women’s Reform Networks’; Wikander, ‘Some “Kept the Flag Waving.”’ Whitton, Welfare in Alberta, 93.

Chapter 1: Charlotte Whitton and Border Crossings in the 1930s   1   2   3   4   5

Lucie Browning to Charlotte Whitton, 23 July 1934, CCSD, 44/219 (1934). Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own, 128–54. Browning to Whitton, 23 July 1934, CCSD, 44/219 (1934). Quoted ibid. In both countries, federal-provincial/state responsibility in social welfare was subject to constant negotiation through the twentieth century as the welfare state expanded and then retrenched. The fiscal power of the federal level has always been a key factor in these negotiations. See Introduc-

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Notes to pages 21–4  251

  6

  7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23

tion, n. 4, above; Owram, The Government Generation, 251–3; and Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood, 31–2, 252–3. The CCCW changed its name to the Canadian Welfare Council (CWC) in 1935. I use the period-appropriate abbreviation when discussing the organization, applying the amalgam CCCW/CWC when my comments cover the pre- and post-1935 period. Charlotte Whitton to B.W. Heise, 4 July 1941, CCSD, 44/405 (1941–5). Quoted in Hareven, ‘An Ambiguous Alliance,’ 94. On professional and personal ties connecting leading white women in US social welfare networks, see Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 67–110. On the USCB to 1946, see Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood. Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood, 12–13; Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 3–21. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 67; Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion, 38–65. Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work, 73–6; Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 81–2, 92–8. USCB, Four Decades of Action for Children, 3. Canadian scholars note the strong influence of the Social Gospel and of specifically religious and agrarian organizations in the social welfare wing of Canadian progressivism. Allen, The Social Passion; Christie and Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity; Commachio, Nations Are Built of Babies. Schnell, ‘Female Separatism and Institution-Building,’ 26. Schnell, ‘“A Children’s Bureau for Canada,”’ 95–110. Whitton is both a fascinating and frustrating historical figure. She was hard working, brilliant, and dedicated to her work, but also judgmental, stubborn, and even vindictive. She was in some senses a highly progressive figure in social welfare, although in other areas her social thought was deeply conservative and at times racist. On Whitton’s political and social thought and her influence on Canadian social welfare and politics, see Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart; and Struthers, ‘A Profession in Crisis.’ Canadian Conference on Child and Family Welfare, Canadian Cavalcade, 1; USCB, The Children’s Bureau. Hareven, ‘An Ambiguous Alliance,’ 92. See also Rooke and Schnell, ‘Child Welfare in English Canada,’ 491; and Sutherland, Children in English Canadian Society, 229. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 92–3, 103–6. Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood, 76–108; Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work, 167–96. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 255–85; Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 123–46;

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252  Notes to pages 24–6

24

25

26 27

28 29

30 31 32 33 34

Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood, 187–95; Poole, The Segregated Origins, 140–73. USCB, Four Decades of Action, 90; US Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Annual Report, 1958, 53; Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood, 187–92, 194; Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 256–9. In 1946 the bureau became a subsection of the Social Security Administration, one of four agencies inside the Federal Security Administration. This was a demotion, as the USCB chief no longer reported directly to a cabinet secretary. Lindenmeyer argues that the bureau lost control of the Title V grant-in-aid programs in this move. This is true – the enabling legislation for the reorganization routed Title V funds and responsibilities through the Federal Security Administrator – but in practical terms the bureau continued to administer the Title V programs. The change does not appear to have materially affected the bureau’s activities with respect to adoption reform. In 1953 the bureau was transferred into the new Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood, 249–61; USCB, Four Decades of Action, 65–83, 89–90; US Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Social Security Administration, Your Children’s Bureau, 22–36. Hareven, ‘Ambiguous Alliance,’ 82–98; Allen, Social Passion, 286; Sutherland, Children in English Canadian Society, 234. Bradford, ‘Atlantic City Conference Full of Interest to Canadian Welfare,’ 25–9; Whitton, ‘Our Neighbour’s Mothers’ and ‘Our Neighbour’s Children.’ Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 73. Quotation from US President Harding’s 1922 letter approving Grace Abbott’s appointment, as quoted in Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice, 91–2. On USCB at the League, see ‘Letter of January 7, 1974 concerning the international activities of the United States Children’s Bureau, up to and including the fiscal year 1951,’ 7 January 1974, 9–16, KLP, 11 / International Activities of the Children’s Bureau. Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 63–6, 98. Julia Lathrop to Charlotte Whitton, 3 July 1926, CCSD, 2/15 (1926). Whitton, ‘Grace Abbott’s Work,’ 54–5; Marshall, ‘The Construction of Children,’ 145. For example, see Julia Lathrop to Charlotte Whitton, 13 January 1929, CCSD, 2/15 (1929); and Marshall, ‘Conflicting Ideas,’ 8–9. Marshall, ‘Conflicting Ideas,’ 8–9. This study was eventually published as League of Nations, Advisory Committee on the Protection and Welfare of Children and Young People, Enquiry into the Question of Children.

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Notes to pages 26–8  253 35 Marshall, ‘Conflicting Ideas,’ 8, 19; Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 77–8; Tucker, ‘The Third International Conference,’ 33–6. 36 Charlotte Whitton to Grace Abbott, 29 May 1933, USCB, 1934–6, 465/0.1.0.7.1(1); Charlotte Whitton to Julia Lathrop, 30 July 1926, CCSD, 2/15 (1926). 37 Rupp describes how international meetings intensified the ties connecting women in transnational organizations. Rupp, Worlds of Women, 10, 180–204; Bosch, ‘Gossipy Letters,’ 138. 38 Gordon describes the interwoven personal and professional ties linking key figures (including Lenroot) in the white women’s welfare network in the United States, stressing how the mostly single women in the network drew both personal and professional sustenance from each other. Gordon notes that many of the women in the network lived in long-term relationships with other women who shared their lives and their homes. Both Whitton (who lived with Margaret Grier for twenty-five years) and Lenroot (who lived with Emma Lundberg for forty years) fit this pattern. Gordon, ‘Black and White Visions of Welfare,’ 559–90; Rooke, ‘“Public Figure, Private Woman,”’ 412–28; Duder, ‘The Spreading Depths’; Rooke and Schnell, ‘Chastity as Power,’ 389–403. 39 Rooke and Schnell, ‘Internationalizing a Discourse,’ 75; League of Nations, Advisory Committee on Social Questions, The Placing of Children; Canada, Report of the Canadian Delegation to the League of Nations, 1938, 17. On the role of USCB staff and CWC staff and allies in the report, see Charlotte Whitton to Robert Mills, 21 January 1937, CCSD, 130/2359 (1936–8); and ‘Letter of January 7, 1974 concerning the international activities of the United States Children’s Bureau, up to and including the fiscal year 1951,’ 15a, 7 January 1974, KLP, 11 / International Activities of the Children’s Bureau. 40 Castendyck was another single, professional woman of the same generation as Lenroot and Whitton. Elsa Castendyck to Charlotte Whitton, 2 June 1939, CCSD, 129/2344 (1935–40); Charlotte Whitton to Elsa Castendyck, 28 March 1940, USCB, 1937–40, 665/0.1.0.7.1 (1). 41 Mills, ‘The Placing of Children in Families,’ 28. 42 Wikander, ‘Some “Kept the Flag Waving,”’ 29–62; Charlotte Whitton to Katharine Lenroot, 3 May 1937, USCB, 1937–40, 820/7.3.3.2. 43 Presser, ‘The Historical Background,’ 443–8. 44 Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 16, 135–40, 176–7. 45 On the colonial and early national United States, see Kawashime, ‘Adoption in Early America,’ 677–96; Ben-Or, ‘The Law of Adoption in the United States,’ 259–72; and Zainaldin, ‘The Emergence of Modern Ameri-

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254  Notes to pages 28–30

46

47 48

49 50

51

52 53

54

55

can Family Law,’ 1038–89. On early English Canada, see Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 9–24. For New France, see Roch, L’adoption dans la Province de Québec, 25; and Goubau and O’Neill, ‘L’adoption, l’Église et l’État,’ 98–101. The discussion that follows highlights the development of adoption law in the United States and English Canada; variations in the development of adoption law in Quebec are discussed in chapter 4. Presser, ‘The Historical Background,’ 465–88, 515–16; Ben-Or, ‘The Law of Adoption,’ 259–72; Zainaldin, ‘The Emergence of Modern Family Law,’ 1039–46, 1084–6. Herman, ‘The Paradoxical Rationalization,’ 354. See also USCB, Adoption Laws in the United States. Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 25–40. CCCW, Comparative Summary of the Canadian Adoption Laws, 1924; CWC, Comparative Summary of the Canadian Adoption Laws, 1938. On specific provinces, see Strong-Boag, ‘Interrupted Relations,’ 6–14; Aitken, ‘Criteria of Adoptability in Ontario, 1945–1961,’ 26–71; Goubau and O’Neill, ‘L’adoption, l’Église et l’État,’ 98–130; Chambers, ‘Adoption, Unwed Mothers’; and Phillips, ‘“Financially Irresponsible and Obviously Neurotic.”’ Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own. This section draws on Balcom, ‘Constructing Families,’ 221, 223. See also Carp, Family Matters, 15–35; Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 15–36; Hough, ‘To Conserve the Best of the Old,’ 190–202; Phillips, ‘Blood Not Thicker than Water,’ chap. 2; and Chambers, ‘Adoption, Unwed Mothers.’ Morlock, ‘Chosen Children,’ 3–8. Conversely, British Columbia child welfare workers felt the increased prosperity of the war years meant fewer children were relinquished for adoption. Strong-Boag, ‘Interrupted Relations,’ 16. Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land, 3, 139–47. Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 105–57 (quotation, 106); Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie; Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 82–7. USCB numbers were based on voluntary reporting from a limited number of states (6 in 1934, 22 in 1944, 39 in 1955) extrapolated to a national estimate. Colby, Problems and Procedures in Adoption; Zarefsky, ‘Children Acquire New Parents,’ 142–4; US Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Social Security Administration, Children’s Bureau, Adoption of Children in the United States and Its Territories, 1955, 1. In some years, the NCSS data were also an extrapolation based on incomplete reporting from the states. Stolley, ‘Statistics on Adoption in the United States,’ 26–42; Bonham, ‘Who Adopts,’ 295–306.

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Notes to pages 30–1  255 56 J.J. Kelso to Charlotte Whitton, 29 October 1929, CCSD, 41/179 (1931); ‘Adoption Statistics Province of Ontario,’ CCSD, 60 / Child Care and Protection 1951–63; Aitken, ‘Criteria of Adoptability,’ 95. 57 Both the National Health and Welfare and CCSD numbers were based largely on the published annual reports of provincial (but not territorial) departments of public welfare. C.L. Francis to M. Murphy, 24 October 1955, CCSD, 60 / Child Care and Protection (1951–63); Hepworth, Foster Care and Adoption in Canada, 135, table 51. 58 Zarefsky, ‘Children Acquire New Parents,’ 143; Stolley, ‘Statistics on Adoption,’ 30. There are no national data on this issue in Canada. Hepworth records the percentage of relative adoptions among all adoptions in British Columbia as varying between 34% and 50.5% between 1961 and 1977. Hepworth, Foster Care and Adoption in Canada, 134. 59 Leacy, Historical Statistics of Canada, A2-14; US Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007; Hepworth, Foster Care and Adoption in Canada, 135; Bonham, ‘Who Adopts,’ 298. 60 On problems interpreting US adoption data, see Stolley, ‘Statistics on Adoption,’ 28; and Bonham, ‘Who Adopts,’ 295. 61 In both countries, waiting times were longest in urban areas. Nora Lea to Lawrence Cole, 14 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3; Spielberg, ‘Dollars and Adoption,’ 45; Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own, 128–66. 62 CWC, Comparative Summary of the Canadian Adoption Laws, 1938; CWC, Essentials in Adoption Service; ‘Comment re Proposals for Child Protection Legislation in Quebec,’ 6 December 1939, CCSD 48/431; John Laycock to Carol McInnes, 26 March 1942, CCSD 45/404 (1935–42). 63 Colby, Problems and Procedures in Adoption. 64 USCB, Adoption – What It Means; US Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Secretary of Labor, 1938, 138; New York, Report of the New York State Board of Social Welfare, 1938, 22; Nora Lea to Mrs H. Nelson, 21 March 1944, CCSD, 45/404 (1943–8). 65 USCB, Preliminary draft of ‘Essentials of Adoption Law and Procedures.’ Republished in 1949 as USCB, Essentials of Adoption Law and Procedure. 66 There is an extensive literature on what this process looked like from the perspective of pregnant women encountering social workers, and on the way race, class, social welfare systems, and cultural scripts of ‘appropriate’ womanhood conditioned the choices realistically available to the pregnant women. See Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie; Kunzel, Fallen Women; Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 105–57; Solinger, Beggars and Choosers, 65–101; StrongBoag, Finding Families, 58–63, 82–9; and Chambers, ‘Adoption, Unwed Mothers.’

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256  Notes to pages 32–4 67 CWC, Essentials in Adoption Service; USCB, ‘Preliminary draft’; Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 51–104, 112–20; Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own, 120–65; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 61–2; Phillips, ‘“Financially Irresponsible and Obviously Neurotic,”’ 329–61. 68 CWC, Essentials in Adoption Service; USCB, ‘Preliminary draft’; Herman, ‘Families Made by Science,’ 687–92, 699–704, esp. 690 nn. 11, 12; Spielberg, ‘Dollars and Adoption,’ 45; Schapiro, Study of Adoption Practice, 1: 61–3; Montreal Council of Social Agencies, Report of the Committee on Unmarried Parenthood, 5, BANQ. 69 Herman, ‘The Paradoxical Rationalization of Modern Adoption,’ 350–5; Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 54–105. 70 CWC, Essentials in Adoption Service; USCB, Essentials of Adoption Law; Schapiro, Study of Adoption Practice, 1: 18; Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own, 128–65; Carp, Family Matters, 15–35. 71 Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 54–105. 72 Herman, Kinship by Design, 1. See also Herman, ‘Paradoxical Rationalization,’ 355. 73 Social workers sometimes, as at the Children’s Bureau of Delaware, relaxed rules related to working mothers and economic stability to recruit African American adoptive families. Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 117–20, 149–50. 74 Chapter 6 addresses the relaxation of racial matching in the 1950s, with a particular focus on the adoption of First Nations, Métis, and Native American children. Virtually all scholars working in the history of adoption point to the under-servicing of African American and African Canadian communities, the greater ‘value’ placed on white children available for adoption in both countries, and the strict adherence to racial matching (until the 1950s) in both Canada and the United States. On the United States, see Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 149–53; and Solinger, ‘Race and Value,’ 343–63. On Canada, see Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 61–2, and ‘Today’s Child,’ 674–8; and Dubinsky, ‘“We Adopted a Negro,”’ 268–88. 75 Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own, 3. 76 ‘News from the Field,’ 9; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 31. 77 Schapiro, Study of Adoption Practice, 1: 20. 78 Liggett, ‘Red Tape and Run Around,’ 29–32; Katz, ‘Why You Can’t Adopt’; Herman, ‘Paradoxical Rationalization,’ 341, 350. 79 Zarefsky, ‘Children Acquire New Parents,’ 143; Stolley, ‘Statistics on Adoption,’ 31; Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 108–9; Herman, ‘Paradoxical Rationalization,’ 369–70. Daly and Sobel document a steady decrease in public adoption placements and a corresponding increase in private adop-

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Notes to pages 34–8  257

80

81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89

90 91

92 93

94 95

tion placements in Canada since 1981, a trend particularly pronounced for infant adoptions. However, their categories of public and private map imperfectly onto the agency/independent distinction. Daly and Sobel, ‘Adoption in Canada,’ 5. In 1961–2 in British Columbia, where professional adoption practices were well entrenched and supported by provincial law, there were only 108 independent placements among 908 non-relative adoptions (12%). Hepworth, Foster Care and Adoption, 134. State and provincial laws varied widely on the level of oversight provided in independent adoptions. Schapiro, Study of Adoption Practice, 1: 18, 110–12. Ibid., 1: 20, 113–16. Morlock, ‘Babies on the Market,’ 67–9; Johnson, ‘Why Babies Are Bootlegged,’ 176–7. Morlock, ‘Chosen Children,’ 3–8. Dorothy Waite to Charlotte Whitton, 21 September 1941, and Ann Bracken to Charlotte Whitton, 29 October 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5); Juanita Perkins to Hazel Hendricks, 29 May 1941, USCB, 1941–4, 170/7.3.3.4; Morlock, ‘Chosen Children.’ ‘Memorandum for Miss Lenroot,’ 13 July 1933, USCB, 1933–6, 481/0.5.4.10.3. D.W. MacCormack to Grace Abbott, 29 May 1933, ibid. Case descriptions ibid. Charlotte Whitton to Grace Abbott, 20 June 1933; Charlotte Whitton to Katharine Lenroot, 19 September 1933; Katharine Lenroot to Daniel MacCormack, 26 July 1933, USCB, 1933–6, 481/0.5.4.10.3; Katharine Lenroot to Charlotte Whitton, 25 July 1933, CCSD, 44/219 (1933). Edward Shaughnessy to Katharine Lenroot, 31 October 1933, USCB, 1933–6, 481/0.5.4.10.3; Hutchinson, ‘Citizenship and Domicile,’ 680. Whitton’s long-standing animosity towards the Social Credit government of Alberta and its highly centralized social welfare system is discussed in chap. 3. Charlotte Whitton to Grace Abbott, 30 June 1933, USCB, 1933–6, 481/0.5.4.10.3. ‘Points to Be Covered Regarding Placement of Children from One Province or State to Another Province or State,’ 25 July 1933, ibid. These provisions are remarkably like those in the 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. See USCB, Laws Relating to Interstate Placement. C.C. Carstens to Katharine Lenroot, 21 December 1928, USCB, 1929–32, 403/7.3.1.3.

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258  Notes to pages 38–40   96 ‘Memorandum for Miss Lenroot,’ 13 July 1933, USCB, 1933–6, 481/0.5.4.10.3.   97 Abbott’s notes as written on ‘Memorandum’ above (n. 96). Lenroot passed these comments to Whitton in Lenroot to Whitton, 25 July 1933, CCSD, 44/219 (1933).   98 On transnational connections and the reform of domestic social policy, see Wikander, ‘Some “Kept the Flag Waving.”’ The articles in the collection Wikander et al., eds, Protecting Women, describe a more general process of discussion in international congresses, whereas the Canadian-American case suggests a more specific process of mutual policy building.   99 ‘Memo re Placement of Children,’ 7 September 1933, CCSD, 44/219 (1933). 100 ‘Letter to the Provincial Ministers / Letter to the Child Caring Agencies,’ 7 September 1933, CCSD 44/219 (1933). 101 Charlotte Whitton to O.D. Skelton, 7 September 1933, CCSD, 44/219 (1933). 102 ‘Minutes: Interprovincial Placement of Children,’ May 1934, CCSD, 44/219 (1934). 103 ‘Conference re Agreement Interprovincial and Inter-Agency Placement of Children,’ May 1934, ibid. 104 ‘Proposed Reciprocal Agreement. Canadian Child Placing Services,’ 1934, ibid. The new Canadian draft had specific provisions advising agencies to ensure that the child could obtain legal residence or be formally adopted under the laws of the new province. This provision was aimed at the restricted definition of a legally adoptable child in the Quebec legal code, an issue that was also discussed at the 1934 meeting. 105 Katharine Lenroot to Charlotte Whitton, 21 June 1934, ibid. 106 F.J. Lymburn to Charlotte Whitton, 18 September 1933, CCSD, 44/219 (1933). 107 Katharine Lenroot to Charlotte Whitton, 21 June 1934, CCSD, 44/219 (1934). 108 Grace Abbott to Kathleen Snowdon, 25 April 1934, ibid. 109 Katharine Lenroot to Howard Knight, 11 December 1934, and Katharine Lenroot to Charlotte Whitton, 26 December 1934, USCB, 1933–6, 471/0.2.0.4 (9). 110 Charlotte Whitton to Grace Abbott, 15 June 1934, and Charlotte Whitton to Katharine Lenroot, 25 June 1934, CCSD, 44/219 (1934). 111 Howard Knight to Katharine Lenroot, 10 April 1935, USCB, 1933–6, 471/0.2.0.4 (9). 112 Hutchinson, ‘Citizenship and Domicile’; O’Connor, ‘Citizenship and Domicile.’

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Notes to pages 40–2  259 113 Elizabeth S.L. Govan to A.H. Miller, 24 February 1951, CCSD, 183/7 (1951). 114 ‘Revised Reciprocal Agreement re Interprovincial Placement of Children,’ 10 June 1935, USCB, 1941–4, 171/7.3.3.4. 115 ‘Minutes of Meeting of Child Welfare Officials,’ 4 June 1949, CCSD, 183/6 (1948–9). 116 Struthers, ‘A Profession in Crisis.’ 117 Whitton, ‘War and the Social Services in Canada’; Whitton, ‘Children on Loan.’ 118 Anna Sundwall to Aleta Brownlee, 26 March 1940, USCB, 1941–4, 165/7.3.1.3; Juanita Perkins to Hazel Hendricks, 29 May 1941, USCB, 1941–4, 170/7.3.3.4; Anna I. Griffith to Katharine Lenroot, 17 October 1940, USCB, 1941, 171/7.3.3.4; Charlotte Whitton to Esther J. Stuart, 29 May 1941, and Alfred Whitman to Charlotte Whitton, 29 October 1941, CCSD, 245/5; Ann Bracken to Charlotte Whitton, 29 October 1941, and Dorothy Waite to Charlotte Whitton, 27 September 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 119 T.R. Blaine to Virginia Lee Bennett, 18 March 1940, USCB, 1940, 165/7.3.1.3. 120 Ann Bracken to Charlotte Whitton, 29 October 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 121 The general Alberta process is detailed in Anna Sundwall to Mary Ruth Colby, 17 April 1940, USCB, 1941–4, 165/7.3.1.3; Charles Hill to Marie G. Smith, 15 May 1921, 170/7.3.3.4; and Ann Bracken to Charlotte Whitton, 29 October 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 122 The home approval requirement varied over time and was unevenly applied. W.A. Bickers to E.W. Neilson, 15 February 1940, USCB, 1940, 165/7.3.1.3. 123 Virginia Lee Bennett to T.R. Blaine, 19 April 1940, CWP 31 / Correspondence 1946–7; Ann Bracken to Charlotte Whitton, 29 October 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 124 Dorothy Waite to T.R. Blaine, 10 November 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 125 A couple (both of whom were Canadian citizens) residing in Colorado approached state officials to arrange to adopt a child who had lived with them in Alberta, but whom they had left with friends in Saskatchewan when they moved to the United States. While Colorado child welfare workers were considering the family’s application, Alberta officials informed them the adoption had already been processed in Alberta, without the knowledge of the new adoptive parents. Juanita Perkins to Hazel Hendricks, 29 May 1941, and Agnes Hanna to Marie Smith, 21 June 1941,

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260  Notes to pages 43–7 USCB, 1941–4, 170/7.3.3.4; Ann Bracken to Charlotte Whitton, 29 October 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 126 Dorothy Waite to Charlotte Whitton, 27 September 1941, and Dorothy Waite to T.R. Blaine, 10 November 1941, USCB, 1941–4, 170/7.3.3.4. 127 Charles Hill to Dorothy Waite, 24 November 1941, USCB, 1941–4, 170/7.3.3.4. 128 Charles Hill to Marie G. Smith, 15 May 1941, USCB, 1941–4, 170/7.3.3.4; T.R. Blaine to Virginia Lee Bennett, 18 March 1940, USCB, 1937–40, 165/7.3.1.3. 129 Ann Bracken to Charlotte Whitton, 29 October 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5); Agnes Hanna to Anna Sundwall, 19 June 1941, USCB, 1941–4, 165/7.3.1.3. 130 Agnes Hanna to Charlotte Whitton, 24 March 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5); Anna I. Griffith to Katharine Lenroot, 17 October 1940, USCB, 1941–4, 171/7.3.3.4. 131 Anna I. Griffith to Katharine Lenroot, 17 October 1940, USCB, 1941–4, 171/7.3.3.4. 132 Dorothy Waite to Charlotte Whitton, 27 September 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5); Anna I. Griffith to Katharine Lenroot, 9 January 1941, USCB, 1941–4, 171/7.3.3.4; Anna Sundwall to Mary Ruth Colby, 17 April 1940, USCB, 1941–4, 165/7.3.1.3. 133 Colby noted that the American consul in Edmonton actually stepped beyond his official responsibilities when he requested information on the home into which the child was to be placed. Mary Ruth Colby to Anna Sundwall, 8 May 1940, USCB, 1941–4, 165/7.3.1.3. 134 Colby, ‘Responsibility of the State in Child Adoption,’ 194–8. 135 Agnes Hanna to Charlotte Whitton, 24 March 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 136 Agnes Hanna to Anna I. Griffith, 20 February 1941, USCB, 1941–4, 171/7.3.3.4. 137 Charlotte Whitton to Agnes Hanna, 3 April 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 138 Agnes Hanna to Charlotte Whitton, 24 March 1941, ibid. 139 Memorandum on Desirable Procedures and Standards for Placement of Children within Another State or Province, 13 July 1933, USCB, 1933–6, 543/7.3.1.3; Agnes Hanna to Whitney C. Jansen, 26 January 1937, and Agnes Hanna to Olive Chandler, 2 February 1937, USCB, 1937–40, 814/7.3.1.3. 140 Agnes Hanna to Charlotte Whitton, 24 March 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 141 Charlotte Whitton to Agnes Hanna, 3 April 1941, ibid.

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Notes to pages 47–52  261 142 Agnes Hanna to Anna Sundwall, 19 June 1941, USCB, 1941–4, 165/7.3.1.3; Agnes Hanna to Marie Smith, 21 June 1941, USCB, 1940–1, 170/7.3.3.4. 143 Juanita Perkins to Hazel Hendricks, 29 May 1941, USCB, 1941–4, 170/7.3.3.4. 144 Agnes Hanna to Anna Sundwall, 19 June 1941, USCB, 1941–4, 165/7.3.1.3; Agnes Hanna to Marie Smith, 21 June 1941, USCB, 1941–4, 170/7.3.3.4. 145 Agnes Hanna to Robert Mills, 21 October 1941, ibid. 146 Charlotte Whitton to Alfred P. Whitman, 4 November 1941, CCSD, 245/5. 147 There was no equivalent of the director of child welfare in Quebec, and thus Whitton’s request went directly to the placing agencies. ‘Placement of Children across the International Boundary – Summary of Provincial Replies,’ 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 148 Isobel Harvey to Charlotte Whitton, 25 June 1941, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 149 Ibid. 150 The consuls could not issue an immigration visa unless the adoption was finalized. This meant that adoptive parents could not bring their just-adopted children to the United States during the six-month-to-one year probationary period standard in the adoption law of most provinces unless courts or provincial officials waived the probationary period. This was very unsatisfactory for adoption professionals. Under the northwest agreement, the INS allowed adoptive parents to bring their children into the United States as visitors rather than immigrants, provided the parents posted a departure bond. Thus, the adoptive placement could still be probationary, and the new family could be supervised by a US social agency that would report back to Canadian officials. After the adoption was finalized in Canada, the adopted child could re-enter the United States with the consul-issued immigration visa. ‘Memo to All Immigration Inspectors, District 18,’ 31 March 1938, and Isobel Harvey to Lillian Johnson, 9 February 1939, CWD, 3/44. 151 Isobel Harvey to Charlotte Whitton, 25 June 1941, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 152 ‘Proposed Controls in Respect to the Movement of Children for Adoption or Free Home or Boarding Home Care from Canada to the United States and from the United States to Canada,’ November 1941, ibid. 153 Charlotte Whitton to Katharine Lenroot, 10 November 1941, ibid. 154 IM to Mrs Canine, 22 November 1941, ibid.; Katharine Lenroot to Charlotte Whitton, 4 December 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 155 United States Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Secretary of Labor, 1942; Rooke and Schnell, ‘Making the Way More Comfortable.’ 156 NGC to Miss Lenroot, 30 January 1942, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3.

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262  Notes to pages 54–7 Chapter 2: Border-Crossing Responses to the Ideal Maternity Home Parts of this chapter draw on Balcom, ‘Scandal and Social Policy’ and ‘BabySelling.’ Except where expressly noted, the names of adoptive parents and adopted children have been changed or omitted.   1 Ernest Blois to Maud Morlock, 19 December 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 171/8.4.2.   2 Morlock, ‘Problems in Adoption Procedure,’ 75–86; Nora Lea, ‘Discussion,’ 94–5.   3 Morlock, ‘Problems in Adoption Procedure,’ 86.   4 Sarah Scott to Maud Morlock, 1 November 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 445/7.3.1.3.   5 Nora Lea to Ellen Potter, 10 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3.   6 William P. Young to manager, Classified Advertising Department, Elizabeth (NJ) Daily Journal, 6 November 1944, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5).   7 ‘Petition,’ 22 November 1945, NSARM, MG2, 897/17–1/3; Senator William Duff, quoted in The Child of Today Is to Become the Man or Woman of Tomorrow (1944), NSARM, RG2C, 9/7, 5.   8 In 1945, the ‘illegitimacy’ rate in Nova Scotia rose to a peak of 7.9% – or 1228 births – against a national average well below 5%. ‘Number of Illegitimate Live Births and Percentage of All Births in Canada by Province, 1926–48,’ CCSD, 60/491.   9 C.F. Longley to Mrs Martin Cerillo, 26 February 1945, and William Young to (McMunn), 19 July 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5); F.R. MacKinnon, interview with author, 3 December 1993. 10 ‘Evidence Heard in Maternity Home Case,’ Halifax Herald, 2 May 1946, 18(c); Cahill, Butterbox Babies, 87, 116. A second edition of Butterbox Babies was published in 2006. All citations here are to the 1988 edition. 11 The racial exclusiveness of the IMH was typical of maternity homes across North America in this period. Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie, 66–76. 12 ‘Ideal Maternity Home: No Publicity – Mother’s Refuge,’ 1944, NSARM, MG100, 100/59; Halifax Chronicle, ‘HOME FOR UNMARRIED MOTHERS. NO PUBLICITY’ (classified advertisement), 9 April 1940, 11. 13 On women pregnant out-of-wedlock in mid-twentieth-century Nova Scotia, see Balcom, ‘Scandal and Social Policy,’ 14, 23–33; and Morton, ‘Nova Scotia and Its Unmarried Mothers.’ On Canada more widely, see Lévesque, Making and Breaking the Rules; Petrie, Gone to an Aunt’s; Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem, 53–88; and Savage, ‘Perspectives on Illegitimacy.’ On the United States, see Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls; Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie; M. Morton, And Sin No More.

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Notes to pages 57–9  263 14 Birth mothers recount their experiences at the IMH in Hartlen, Butterbox Survivors, 13–31; and ‘“Never Heard So Many Lies,” Lila: Mothers, Character Witnesses Take Up Third Day of $25,000 Libel Suit,’ Halifax Chronicle, 14 May 1947, 3(a–b). 15 ‘Ideal Maternity Home and Sanitarium Limited Price List, 1944’ and ‘Power of Attorney, 1944,’ NSARM, RG39C, 934/SC13226; Cahill, Butterbox Babies, 43–9, 147–8. 16 T.D. MacDonald to F.R. MacKinnon, 11 July 1946, FSIMH; ‘“Never Heard So Many Lies,”’ 3(a–b). The support group Friends and Survivors of the Ideal Maternity Home maintains an archive of IMH-related material that includes some of the research material gathered for this project. Materials found only in this archive are cited here as the FSIMH collection. For access to this material, contact the author or see the group’s website at http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/bhartlen. 17 The adoption transfer plan had no standing as a legal consent to adoption (this would be signed later), but it is likely many women did not understand this distinction. ‘Transfer Agreement, 1944,’ NSARM, RG39C, 934/ SC1213226. 18 George Davidson, quoted in Nora Lea to Jane Rinck, 31 May 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 19 Cahill drew on interviews with local people (including a handyman who worked for the Youngs and sometimes buried babies) to support these charges, but did not provide documentary evidence. Cahill, Butterbox Babies, esp. 225–7. Cahill’s rendering was the basis for the 1994 docudrama that has played frequently on Canadian and American television, Butterbox Babies. 20 Ruth Brenner to State Department of Social Welfare, 29 November 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 445/7.3.1.3. 21 ‘Libel Action May Go to Jury This Afternoon,’ Halifax Herald, 13 May 1947, 7. 22 Davidson quoted in Nora Lea to Jane Rinck, 31 May 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. The epidemic alluded to here may be the source of rumours about mass murders at the IMH. 23 Dr J.C. Button to Mildred L. Trotman, 18 August 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5); ‘Libel Action May Go to Jury,’ 7. 24 Hartlen, Butterbox Survivors, 13–28; ‘Defence Closes Case in Libel Action at Halifax,’ Halifax Herald, 14 May 1947, 7. 25 Hartlen, Butterbox Survivors, 15, 74, 121. 26 Ibid., 32–4. Parents’ memories of the poor health of their children may be trusted, but conclusions about saving the lives of the children came after the publication of Cahill’s work.

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264  Notes to pages 59–63 27 Sarah Scott to Nora Lea, 17 September 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 28 As of October 2000, the membership roll of FSIMH (an organization best known inside Nova Scotia) included seventy-two former IMH children placed in the United States out of 228 members. These numbers can be compared to a mid-range estimate of 1200 children born at the Home (see n. 10 above). Hartlen’s text includes the search stories of twenty-four IMH children who were adopted by Canadian families and twelve who were adopted by US families. Eleven of the twelve children in this group were adopted into Jewish families and nine of those families were from New Jersey. In January 1945 William Young reported thirty pending US adoption applications in a letter to Canadian passport officials. Elsewhere, he referred to the ‘large number [of babies] found in your state [New Jersey].’ Hartlen, Butterbox Survivors; William Young to A.L. Cooper, 10 January 1945, HCSP, 533 / Reel T-3541 / Sessional Paper 205b, 85; William Young to Ellen Potter, 27 November 1944, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 29 The Child of Today Is to Become the Man or Woman of Tomorrow, 1944, NSARM, RG2C, 9/7; William P. Young to manager, Classified Advertising Department, Elizabeth (NJ) Daily Journal, 6 November 1944, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5); Make Yours a Happy Home by Adopting a Baby, 1943, 6, NSARM, MG100, 54/59. 30 Cahill, Butterbox Babies, 87, 111–13, 116, 121–2. 31 ‘3 Accused Here in Adoption Ring,’ New York Times, 6 December 1949, 38; ‘Says Black Market Deals in Infants: Maud Morlock Reports Illicit Sales of Babies Run as High as $2,000 Each,’ ibid., 2 January 1945, 22; ‘$10,000 Price Quoted for Child Adoption,’ ibid., 18 May 1945, 16. 32 Sarah Scott to Maud Morlock, 1 November 1945, and Sarah Scott to Ernest Blois, 13 August 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3; ‘Ideal Maternity Home,’ 3 April 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). 33 ‘Special Project on Independent Adoptions,’ 1 April 1955, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3. 34 Balcom, ‘Baby-Selling,’ 91; Mitler and Slocum, ‘Babies: Our Remaining Black Market,’ 90–4. See also chap. 5 below, nn. 4–6, 65–6. 35 Balcom, ‘Baby-Selling,’ 90; Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 169–207. 36 Morlock, ‘Babies on the Market,’ 67–8. 37 In some jurisdictions, adoption and child placement laws preferred, rather than required, same-religion placement. Some jurisdictions allowed birth mothers to sign religious waivers releasing their children for placement in families of any religion. Schapiro, A Study of Adoption Practice, 1: 59; Herman, ‘The Difference Difference Makes,’ 63–9; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 113–17. 38 Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 80–1.

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Notes to pages 63–6  265 39 The most obvious examples were the orphan trains organized by Charles Loring Brace. Herman, ‘The Difference Difference Makes,’ 64–5; ‘Survey of New Jersey Adoption Law,’ 410–15; Dehler, ‘Church and State,’ 66–85. 40 Herman, ‘The Difference Difference Makes,’ 72–7; Schapiro, A Study of Adoption Practice, 1: 58. 41 ‘Special Project on Independent Adoptions,’ 1 April 1955, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.3.4; Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 81–6; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 115. Some orthodox rabbis apparently agreed that it was immoral to bring a child into the Jewish faith through adoption because that child would then experience anti-Semitism. Duker, ‘Jewish Attitudes to Child Adoption,’ 142–3. 42 For example, Mrs Harry Spinner to Mrs Roosevelt, 3 January 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 161/7.3.3.4.1; Nora Lea to Rose Weinheimer, 6 August 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). 43 ‘Special Project on Independent Adoptions,’ 1 April 1955, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3. 44 Statutes of Nova Scotia, 1923, c. 166, s. 30. In Ontario, as well, religious stipulations in child protection legislation were presumed to apply in adoption, without specific religious criteria in the Adoption Act. Aitken, ‘Criteria of Adoptability in Ontario,’ 131–7. 45 Ellen Potter to C.F. Longley, 31 July 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. IMH adoptees discuss conflicted religious identity and outsider status in Cahill, Butterbox Babies, 119–24; and Hartlen, Butterbox Survivors, 99. 46 Charles Longley to Ellen Potter, 8 August 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. 47 Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 114–17; ‘Interfaith Adoption: A Symposium,’ 14–35; ‘Survey of New Jersey Adoption Law,’ 410–15. 48 Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 78–80; Paquet, ‘Study of Current Adoption Law and Practice,’ 6–7; Schapiro, A Study of Adoption Practice, 1: 59. 49 Attitudes towards adoption varied between Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative communities, but some Orthodox rabbis were sceptical as to whether the adopted child could ever be considered fully Jewish, even if born of a Jewish mother. See Duker, ‘Jewish Attitudes to Child Adoption,’ 134–50. 50 ‘“Never Heard So Many Lies,”’ 3. 51 Sarah Scott to Ernest Blois, 13 August 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. 52 The earliest known US placement among members of the FSIMH is 1934. Bob Hartlen, email message to author, 26 October 2000. 53 William Young to Ellen Potter, 27 November 1944, CCSD, 45/405 (1941– 5). 54 ‘Baby “Farm” Sales Here,’ Newark Evening News, 1 June 1945, 1.

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266  Notes to pages 66–70 55 William Young to Mr and Mrs Longman, 18 September 1945, FSIMH. 56 William Young to Gertrude Silverman, 5 December 1945, FSIMH. 57 Attached to Sarah Scott to Maud Morlock, 1 November 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. 58 For two versions of this story, see Hartlen, Butterbox Survivors, 208, and David William Vosburgh (Rex McBride), interview with author, April 1997. William Vosburgh (born Rex McBride) specifically requested that his birth name and adopted name be listed in these notes. 59 Sarah Scott to Ernest Blois, 13 August 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. 60 Charles Longley to Mr and Mrs Longman, 26 February 1945, FSIMH; Cahill, Butterbox Babies, 87. 61 Charles Longley to Mr and Mrs Longman, 26 February 1945, FSIMH. 62 Hartlen, Butterbox Survivors, 32. 63 See note 20. 64 Ruth Brenner to State Department of Social Welfare, 29 November 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. 65 Hartlen, Butterbox Survivors, 21. 66 Cahill, Butterbox Babies, 75–7. 67 Statutes of Nova Scotia, 1943, c. 18, in effect from 1 January 1944. 68 In the 1940s, Canadian child welfare leaders regularly referred to New Brunswick as being without an adoption law, and several CWC reports and legislative summaries reported that New Brunswick had no adoption statute as such. CWC, Adoption Laws of the Canadian Provinces, 18–20. On the adoption regulations in the Judicature Act, see Statutes of New Brunswick, 1927, c. 113, order 56, rule 56-62 as amended in Statutes of New Brunswick 1943, c. 113, order 56, rule 58, and as amended in Statutes of New Brunswick, 1944, c. 113, order 56, rule 57. On the 1873 New Brunswick law, see Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 25–7. 69 William Young to Mr and Mrs Longman, 18 September 1945, FSIMH; Cahill, Butterbox Babies, 121–2. 70 William Young to A.L. Cooper, 10 January 1945, HCSP, 533 / reel T-3541 / Sessional Paper 205b, 90–2. On problems with Young’s passport applications, see chap. 3, nn. 50–1. 71 George Davidson to Charlotte Whitton, 8 April 1947, DEA, 3937/9463–40 (1947–9). 72 Ugo Carusi to Katharine Lenroot, 8 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 159/7.3.3.4. 73 William Young to Dear Friend, February 1945, FSIMH. 74 Charles Longley to Ellen Potter, 8 August 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3.

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Notes to pages 70–4  267 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90 91 92

93

94 95 96

97 98

Ellen Potter to Nora Lea, 7 August 1945, ibid. Sarah Scott to Nora Lea, 17 September 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). Nora Lea to Ellen Potter, 10 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. ‘Morris County Children’s Home – Morris-Allen Adoption Report,’ 23 October 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). William Young to Ellen Potter, 27 November 1944, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5); Ruth Brenner to State Department of Social Welfare, 29 November 1945, ibid. Sarah Scott to Ernest Blois, 13 August 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. Morlock, ‘Problems in Adoption Procedure,’ 82–3. Sarah Scott to Ernest Blois, 13 August 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3; ‘“Never Heard So Many Lies,”’ 3. William Young to Ellen Potter, 27 November 1944, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). Sarah Scott to Ernest Blois, 13 August 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. Sarah Scott to Maud Morlock, 12 December 1945, ibid. Morlock, ‘Babies on the Market,’ 67–9; Balcom, ‘Scandal and Social Policy,’ 6. On the unwed mother in the adoption transaction, see Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie. Maud Morlock to Ellen Potter, 2 June 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. Citizenship of Child Adopted in Canada by US Parents, 24 March 1945, ibid. Sarah Scott to Ernest Blois, 13 August 1945, ibid. Nora Lea to E.B. MacLatchy, 12 December 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). Sarah Scott to Ernest Blois, 13 August 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. Nova Scotia, Report on Public Welfare Services, introduction and numbered paragraphs 120–3, 185, 376–81, 385–6, 391–6. Many additional and explicit critiques of the IMH appeared in Davidson’s early drafts, as discussed in Balcom, ‘Scandal and Social Policy,’ 11–22. William P. Young to manager, Classified Advertising Department, Elizabeth (NJ) Daily Journal, 6 November 1944, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5); Ellen Potter to Mary Labaree, 15 March 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.1. Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 31–4; Balcom, ‘Scandal and Social Policy,’ 13. Cahill, Butterbox Babies, 34–40. Statutes of Nova Scotia, 1943, c. 18; 1940, c. 9; 1945, c. 68; 1946, c. 8. My ‘Scandal and Social Policy’ tells the intra–Nova Scotia story, as does MacKinnon, Reflections: 55 Years in Public Service, 44–50. The remainder of this chapter follows the IMH story outside the province and across national borders. Cahill, Butterbox Babies, 159–79. Nora Lea to Maud Morlock, 14 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3.

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268  Notes to pages 75–80   99 William Young to Dear Friend, January 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 100 Charles Longley to Ellen Potter, 8 August 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. 101 F.R. MacKinnon to Nora Lea, 12 December 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 102 Nora Lea to Ellen Potter, 10 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 103 Nova Scotia, Report on Public Welfare, numbered paragraphs 123, 157, 377. 104 As expressed in George Davidson to Ernest Blois, 14 April 1944, RMG, 256/F.1.C.39. 105 Balcom, ‘Scandal and Social Policy,’ 20–2; Cahill, Butterbox Babies, 132–9. 106 Nora Lea to Maud Morlock, 14 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 107 I have no evidence that either Lea or Morlock shared their lives with long-term female partners, as did Lenroot and Whitton. See chap. 1, n. 38. 108 Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 38, 204; Struthers, No Fault of Their Own, 75. 109 See chap. 1, nn. 39–42; ‘Conference on Refugee Children, Ottawa, Canada, June 3 and 4, 1940,’ KLP, 17 / War Refugee Problems. 110 ‘Minutes: Interprovincial Placement of Chidren,’ May 1934, CCSD, 44/219 (1934). 111 ‘Miss Nora Lea,’ 2–3. 112 ‘Maud Morlock, Was Pioneer Welfare Aide,’ Washington Post, 25 July 1980. 113 See chap. 1, n. 146. 114 Nora Lea to Maud Morlock, 21 January 1943, USCB, 1941–4, 29/0.2.0.7.2. 115 Nora Lea to Maud Morlock, 26 April 1943, ibid. A separate, personal correspondence (not available to the researcher) can be inferred from the USCB files. 116 Nora Lea to Katharine Lenroot, 30 January 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 169/8.2.3.5. 117 ‘State Curbs Asked on Baby Brokers,’ New York Times, 22 January 1945, 20. 118 Nora Lea to Maud Morlock, 28 February 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 169/8.2.3.5. 119 Morlock, ‘Chosen Children,’ 3–8. 120 Marie Hamel to Maud Morlock, 23 June 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 169/8.2.3.5; Mary Labaree to Ellen Potter, 29 March 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3; Nora Lea to Hon. J.B. McNair, 18 August 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 121 Ellen Potter to Mary Labaree, 15 March 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. 122 Ernest Blois to Maud Morlock, 26 April 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 191/10.12.5. 123 Maud Morlock to Ernest Blois, 19 May 1945, ibid. 124 Nora Lea to Maud Morlock, 16 May 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 169/8.2.3.5. 125 Wayne Carp argues that the approach of the social welfare professionals to sharing adoption information with members of the triad (children, adoptive parents, and birth parents) changed over time, though the

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Notes to pages 80–3  269 immediate post-war period was one in which increasing emphasis was placed on restricting access to information. This is a somewhat different issue than that which I touch on here: distributing confidential case records beyond the immediate parties. Carp, Family Matters, 102–37. 126 Nora Lea to Ellen Potter, 10 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 127 Maud Morlock to Ellen Potter, 2 June 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. 128 ‘Dr Ellen Potter Dies,’ New York Times, 10 February 1958, 23. 129 On this relationship, see Maud Morlock to Sarah Scott, 6 December 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. 130 Ellen Potter to Maud Morlock, 17 May 1945, ibid. 131 Nora Lea to Maud Morlock, 8 December 1945, ibid. 132 Nora Lea to Sarah Scott, 12 December 1945, ibid.; Nora Lea to F.R. MacKinnon, 27 November 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 133 Nora Lea to Sarah Scott, 25 April 1945, Freda Ring Lyman to Ellen Potter, 18 April 1946, Sarah Scott to Nora Lea, 23 April 1946, and ‘Telegram, 17 May 1946,’ CCSD, 45/405 (1946); ‘Ideal Maternity Home,’ 3 April 1946, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. 134 Clifford Levy to Ann Gershenson, 7 March 1946, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3; Sarah Scott to Nora Lea, 26 March 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). 135 Sarah Scott to Maud Morlock, 12 December 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/ 7.3.1.3; Nora Lea to Jane Rinck, 31 May 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 445/7.3.1.3; Nora Lea to Rose Weinheimer, 6 August 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). 136 ‘Re: Ideal Maternity Home,’ 27 February 1947, CCSD, 45/405 (1945–8). 137 Nora Lea to Sarah Scott, 28 March 1946, and Ellen Potter to Nora Lea, 21 May 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). 138 Canada–US Adoptions, 10 August 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 139 Nora Lea to Sarah Scott, 1 November 1945, ibid. 140 Ernest Blois to Maud Morlock, 26 April 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 191/10.12.5. 141 Ellen Potter to Maud Morlock, 17 May 1945, and Maud Morlock to Ellen Potter, 2 June 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. 142 Sarah Scott to Ernest Blois, 13 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 191/10.2.5; Morris County Children’s Home – Morris-Allen Adoption Report, 23 October 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 143 George Davidson to Ernest Blois, 14 April 1944, RMG, 256/F.1.C.39. 144 Rooke and Schnell, ‘Child Welfare in English Canada,’ 498. 145 Charlotte Whitton to Agnes Hanna, 3 April 1941, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 146 ‘Annual Report: War without End 1941 (Draft),’ 36, CCSD, 276/17. 147 Nora Lea to Ellen Potter, 18 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 148 F.R. MacKinnon to Nora Lea, 18 December 1945, CCSD, 216/13. 149 F.R. MacKinnon to Nora Lea, 21 December 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5).

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270  Notes to pages 83–7 150 Charlotte Whitton to Robert Mills, 2 August 1940, CCSD, 216 / Dept. of Health and Social Services, 1935–50. 151 Nora Lea to Hon. J.B. McNair, 18 August 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 152 Lea presents this view as held by herself, Morlock, and Henrietta Gordon of the CWLA in Nora Lea to Irene Poulos, 1 October 1946, ibid. 153 Nora Lea to Hon. J.B. McNair, 18 August 1945, ibid. 154 Nora Lea to Hon. J.B. McNair, 28 November 1945, ibid. 155 E.B. MacLatchy to Nora Lea, 5 December 1945, ibid. 156 F.R. MacKinnon to Nora Lea, 21 December 1945, ibid. 157 Nora Lea to E.B. MacLatchy, 27 December 1945, ibid. 158 F.R. MacKinnon to Nora Lea, 12 December 1945, ibid.; Nora Lea to W.J. Brawders, 19 December 1945, and P.S. Fielding to Nora Lea, 15 February 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). 159 Nora Lea to Sarah Scott, 19 December 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 160 Statutes of New Brunswick, 1946, c. 17. 161 Nora Lea to E.B. MacLatchy, 19 April 1946, CCSD, 216 / New Brunswick Dept. of Health and Social Services, 1935–50. 162 E.B. MacLatchy to Nora Lea, 2 May 1946, ibid. 163 Nora Lea to J.B. McNair, 29 April 1946, ibid. See also CWC, Welfare Service in New Brunswick, 83–9. 164 Nora Lea to R.H. Scott, 31 January 1947, CCSD, 216 / New Brunswick Dept. of Health and Social Services, 1935–50; K.M. Jackson to I. Evelyn Smith, 8 February 1947, CCSD, 45/405 (1945–8). 165 Paul Pfuetze to Brian McMahon,13 January 1947, and Katharine Lenroot to Brian McMahon, 4 February 1947, CCSD, 45/405 (1945–8). 166 R.H. Scott to Maud Morlock, 6 March 1947, USCB, 1945–8, 145/7.3.1.3; Ellen Potter to Mila Schwartzbach, 3 December 1947, and Ellen Potter to Mary Labaree, 3 June 1947, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. 167 Re: Saint John Children’s Aid Society, 30 November 1946, CCSD, 245/7. 168 ‘Adoption as a Social and Health Problem,’ reprint from New Jersey State Department of Health, Public Health News, February 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 159/7.3.3.4. See also Silberman, ‘Adoption in New Jersey,’ 250–87; and ‘Survey of New Jersey Adoption Law,’ 379–415. 169 ‘Laws on Adoption Termed Adequate,’ New York Times, 23 January 1945, 16. 170 ‘Baby “Farm” Sales Here,’ Newark Evening News, 1 June 1945, 1. 171 ‘Many Adoptions Held Illegal in New Jersey,’ New York Times, 2 June 1945, 12. 172 Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 54–105; Herman, ‘Paradoxical Rationalization,’ 355. 173 Ellen Potter to Maud Morlock, 8 June 1945, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3.

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Notes to pages 87–93  271 174 See nn. 170–1 and ‘Residents Cautioned on Adoption Rulings,’ Daily Home News (New Brunswick, NJ), 1 June 1945, 4; see also ‘Adoption Routine Warning Given,’ Elizabeth (NJ) Daily Journal, 1 June 1945, 12. 175 ‘Memo for Miss Lea,’ 1 June 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 176 ‘Warns of Illegal Child Placements,’ Mail and Empire, 2 June 1945. 177 ‘Memo to File,’ 5 June 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5). 178 ‘Memo for Miss Lea,’ 1 June 1945, ibid. 179 See chap. 1, nn. 88–90. 180 Ugo Carusi to Katharine Lenroot, 8 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 159/7.3.3.4. 181 Nora Lea to Maud Morlock, 28 September 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 182 Maud Morlock to Nora Lea, 18 August 1945, CCSD, 45/405 (1941–5); Maud Morlock to Nora Lea, 19 September 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 183 ‘Monthly Report, Social Service Division, October 1945,’ 19 October 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 76/1.3.4.5. 184 Maud Morlock to Charles Gordon, 7 September 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3; Ellen Potter to Maud Morlock, 1 March 1946, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. 185 Nora Lea to Lawrence Cole, 14 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 186 ‘Proposed Controls in Respect to the Movement of Children for Adoption or Free Home or Boarding Home Care from Canada to the United States and from the United States to Canada,’ November 1941, ibid. 187 No copy of Whitton’s 1941 proposal remains in the CWC files. 188 Charlotte Whitton to Alfred P. Whitman, 4 November 1941, CCSD 245/5. 189 Nora Lea to Evelyn Hersey, 27 May 1946, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 190 Evelyn Hersey to Nora Lea, 25 June 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). 191 Nora Lea to Evelyn Hersey, 9 August 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). 192 McKay, ‘Discussion,’ 87–9. 193 Maud Morlock to Lawrence Cole, 22 August 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). 194 See, for example, Charlotte Whitton to I. Evelyn Smith, 14 April 1947, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3; George Davidson to Charlotte Whitton, 8 April 1947, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9); Ruth Bowen to Bess Craig, 14 December 1956, USCB, 1953–7, 675/7.3.1.3; Canadian Adoptions, 4 March 1957, USCB, 1953–7, 675, 7.3.1.3. 195 Ernest Blois to Maud Morlock, 19 December 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 171/8.4.2. 196 Maud Morlock to F.R. MacKinnon, 12 June 1946, ibid. 197 Nora Lea to Maud Morlock, 12 June 1946, USCB, 1945–8, 168/8.2.2.5. 198 Maud Morlock to Lawrence Cole, 22 August 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). 199 Nora Lea to Maud Morlock, 14 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3.

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272  Notes to pages 94–9 Chapter 3: The Alberta Babies-for-Export Scandal   1 Rooke and Schnell, ‘Charlotte Whitton Meets “The Last, Best West,”’ 152–3; Rooke and Schnell, ‘Child Welfare in English Canada,’ 495, 498–9.   2 Hazeldine Bishop to Nora Lea, 27 September 1946, CCSD, 214 / IODE Study (1947–8).   3 Whitton, Welfare in Alberta, 93.   4 ‘Cross-Border Adoption Files: Significant Points of Figures,’ May 1948, CWP, 33 / Welfare in Alberta working file (copy 2).   5 Whitton, Welfare in Alberta, 103–4.   6 Thompson, Forging the Prairie West, 149–50; Hesketh, Major Douglas and Alberta Social Credit; Finkel, Social Credit.   7 Rooke and Schnell, ‘Babies for Export,’ 11; Rooke and Schnell, ‘Charlotte Whitton Meets “The Last, Best West,”’ 149–50.   8 Dr Cross, quoted in Charlotte Whitton to Nora Lea, 16 January 1947, CCSD, 214/Alberta (IODE Study) (1947–8).   9 Martha Chickering to George Davidson, 19 July 1943, CCSD, 214 / Alberta Dept. of Public Welfare (1943). 10 George Davidson to Martha Chickering, 26 July 1943, ibid. 11 Ruth Lohmoelder to Ruth Bartlett, 17 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 159/7.3.3.4; Nora Lea to Maud Morlock, 14 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 12 ‘Department’s Strange Attitude,’ Edmonton Journal, 11 February 1947. Copies of most newspaper articles cited here are collected in CWP, 34–5 / Clippings scrapbooks for 1947–9. 13 ‘Summary – Outline of Study Given to Municipal Chapter IODE, Edmonton Alberta, January 13, 1947,’ CWP/32, IODE press releases 1946–7. 14 Some Wrongs That Need Righting (draft), 24, CWP/33, 1947; ‘Serious Charges Call for Serious Inquiry,’ Calgary Herald, 23 April 1947; ‘Dr Whitton’s Charges,’ Calgary Albertan, 23 April 1947. 15 For example, A.W. Hobbs to Charlotte Whitton, 29 May 1947, CWP/31, Correspondence (1947). 16 Nora Lea to Charlotte Whitton, 2 January 1947, CWP/31, Correspondence (1946–7). 17 K.M. Jackson to Charlotte Whitton, 26 February 1947, CCSD, 214/Alberta (IODE Study 1947–8). 18 Charlotte Whitton to Child Welfare Division, State Department of Welfare, Montana, 13 January 1947, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 19 Katharine Lenroot to Charlotte Whitton, 21 January 1947, ibid. 20 Katharine Lenroot to Paul C. Seddicum, 8 April 1947, ibid.

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Notes to pages 99–103  273 21 John Farr Larson to Charlotte Whitton, 10 February 1947, ibid. 22 Charlotte Whitton to John Farr Larson, 28 February 1947, CWP, 31/Correspondence (1946–7). 23 Virginia Lee Bennett to Charlotte Whitton, 1 April 1947, ibid. On Alberta unwed mothers, see Savage, ‘Perspectives on Illegitimacy.’ 24 Charles Wollenberg to Charlotte Whitton, 14 February 1947, and Charles Wollenberg to Charlotte Whitton, 12 March 1947, CWP, 31/Correspondence (1946–7). 25 Charlotte Whitton to George Davidson, 2 April 1947, USCB, 1954–8, 154/7.3.1.3; Dorothy Seligman to Charlotte Whitton, 6 May 1947, CWP, 31/Correspondence (1946–7). 26 Charlotte Whitton to Katharine Lenroot, 15 June 1947, and ‘Miss Whitton’s Report – Cross-Border Placement of Alberta Children,’ USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 27 Whitton, Some Wrongs That Need Righting, Summary of Findings and Recommendations, and Welfare in Alberta. In the following section I summarize findings from the three reports. 28 ‘Dr Whitton’s Charges.’ 29 Charlotte Whitton to Katharine Lenroot, 15 June 1947, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 30 There were no other authorized adoption placement agencies in the province, but independent placements (by lawyers, doctors, or family members) were possible under Alberta law. Whitton, Some Wrongs That Need Righting, 20. 31 ‘Let Love Not Science Rule in Adoption,’ Toronto Daily Star, 9 December 1944; ‘Adoption of 12,000 Babies,’ ibid., 18 September 1945; ‘Let Child Know Facts,’ ibid., 11 December 1944. 32 Whitton did not specify how she came to the conclusion about severe neglect. Whitton, Welfare in Alberta, 103. 33 Whitton, Welfare in Alberta, 94, 110; CWC, Comparative Summary of the Canadian Adoption Laws, 4. 34 Whitton, Welfare in Alberta, 106–7, 110. 35 Ibid., 114, 113, 105. 36 Merle Beebe to Dorothy Cassutt, 8 March 1948, CWP, 31/Correspondence (January–February 1948). 37 Whitton, Welfare in Alberta, 13–14, 112. 38 Ibid., 111–12, see also 103, 108. 39 Ibid., 106. 40 Nora Lea to F.R. MacKinnon, 22 November 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). On children as bearers of national meaning, see Dubinsky, ‘Babies without Borders.’

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274  Notes to pages 104–8 41 Nora Lea to Charlotte Whitton, 2 January 1947, CWP, 31/Correspondence 1946–7; Whitton, ‘Better Controls for Baby Adoption,’ 6–7. 42 ‘Cross Replies,’ Calgary Albertan, 22 April 1947. 43 ‘Challenges Words of Dr Whitton,’ Calgary Albertan, 29 April 1947. 44 Mrs Y to Charlotte Whitton, 14 July 1947, CWP, 31/Correspondence (1946–7); ‘Social Worker Charges Graft in Baby Market,’ Hush Free Press, 24 May 1947. 45 For example, ‘Dr Whitton’s Charges.’ See also ‘Something Rotten in the Province of Alberta,’ Calgary Herald, 20 May 1947. 46 Some birth mothers or adoptive parents may have applied for passports directly, instead of working through Hill, and this would increase the number. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 28 April 1947, 2466; ‘Adoption Figures Prove Contention,’ Calgary Herald, 27 May 1947. DEA officials thought that because of a midyear change in filing procedure the 1947 figure was probably an undercount. Nonetheless, they consistently used this number. ‘Memorandum for the Secretary of State for External Affairs,’ 26 November 1947, DEA, 3937/9643-40 (1947–9). 47 Evelyn Smith to Charlotte Whitton, 21 March 1947, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 48 Charlotte Whitton to George Davidson, 2 April 1947, ibid. 49 Charlotte Whitton to George Davidson, 11 April 1947, ibid. 50 George Davidson to Charlotte Whitton, 8 April 1947, ibid. 51 Davidson was alerted to this issue by a DEA passport officer who received a series of applications (improperly) signed by William Young and made the connection to the IMH. George Davidson to Charlotte Whitton, 8 April 1947, ibid. 52 George Davidson to Charlotte Whitton, 8 April 1947, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9). 53 Ugo Carusi to Katharine Lenroot, 8 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 159/7.3.3.4; Evelyn Hersey to Nora Lea, 25 June 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). See also chap. 2, nn. 180–93. 54 ‘Passport Applications on Behalf of Orphans and Illegitimate Children without Known Parents,’ 4 February 1947, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9). 55 W.A. Goodfellow to F.V. Johns, 25 February 1947, DEA, 3939/9463-40 (1947–9). 56 H.E. Kendall to W.P.J. O’Meara, 5 March 1947, ibid. 57 H.E. Kendall to W.P.J. O’Meara, 5 March 1947, ibid. 58 ‘Re: Infant Passports and Adoption,’ 2 May 1947, ibid. 59 See, for example, Guest, The Emergence of Social Security; Paul, ‘Federalism, Social Policy and the Constitution’; Ursel, Private Lives, Public Policy, 252–5; and Marshall, The Social Origins of the Welfare State, 61–70.

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Notes to pages 108–12  275 60 McKay, ‘Discussion,’ 89. 61 Ruby McKay to F.W. Griffith, 28 February 1947, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9). 62 Ibid. 63 ‘Re: Infant Passports and Adoption,’ 2 May 1947, and Ruby McKay to F.W. Griffith, 28 February 1947, with note from Chance, DEA, 3939/9463-40 (1947–9). 64 ‘Re: Infant Passports and Adoption,’ 2 May 1947, ibid. 65 Ironically, DEA officials still felt they did not have clear guidance on exactly what constituted legal guardianship in several provinces. ‘Memorandum from Minister of Public Welfare,’ 25 February 1947, and ‘Re: Infant Passports and Adoption,’ 2 May 1947, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9). The new rules appear as annex A to ‘Memorandum for the Secretary of State for External Affairs,’ 26 November 1947, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9). 66 ‘Memorandum for the Secretary of State for External Affairs,’ 26 November 1947, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9). 67 Alberta, Howson, Royal Commission, 2–3; ‘Epistle to the Soucians,’ 15 June 1948, CWP, 32/Correspondence (April–May 1948). 68 Phyllis Burns to R.E.G. Davis, 4 December 1947, CCSD, 214/Alberta (IODE Study 1947–8); Charlotte Whitton to C.H. Young, 17 March 1948, CWP, 31/ Correspondence (March 1948). 69 Phyllis Burns to Dear Everybody, 4 December 1947, CCSD, 214/Alberta (IODE Study 1947–8). 70 Ibid.; Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 132–6. 71 Whitton to Castendyck, quoted in Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 133; Charlotte Whitton to Rev. A.J. Macdonald, 4 January 1948, CWP, 31/ Correspondence (January–February 1948). 72 ‘Re: New Liberty,’ n.d., 7–9, CWP/32, Memoranda and Clippings (1947–8); ‘Re: Conspiracy Charge’; ‘Special Notes to Counsel re: Article,’ n.d., part C, CWP, 32 / Memoranda and Clippings Re: Conspiracy Charge #1 1947–8. 73 Dingman, ‘Babies-for-Export,’ 5, 34. 74 ‘Alberta Welfare Survey Brings Court Imbroglio,’ Toronto Financial Post, 14 February 1948; ‘Calls Alberta Suit Blow at Free Press,’ Chicago Tribune, 20 January 1948; ‘Press Freedom Sabotaged in Libel Misuse, House Told: Diefenbaker Holds Attention of Commons as He Points to Alberta Case,’ Montreal Star, 31 January 1948. 75 ‘Resolution,’ 13 February 1948, and ‘Confidential Memorandum,’ 31 January 1948, CCSD, 214/Alberta (IODE Study, 1947–8). Inside the CWC, Eurith Goold and Phyllis Burns supported Whitton strongly. Kate Jackson and R.E.G. Davis were more hesitant. 76 Nora Lea to Charlotte Whitton, 7 April 1948, and ‘Minutes, Board of Gov-

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276  Notes to pages 112–15

77

78

79 80 81

82 83

84

85

86

87 88 89

ernors of the CWC,’ 25 February 1948, CWP/32, Correspondence (April– May 1948). ‘Telegram,’ 8 March 1948, CWP/31, Correspondence (March 1948). See also Elsa Castendyck to Katharine Lenroot, n.d., with handwritten reply from Lenroot, and Elsa Castendyck to Charlotte Whitton, 25 February 1948, CWP/31, Correspondence (March 1948). ‘Notes on Miss EC’s talk with Charlotte Whitton,’ 17 March 1948, ‘Materials Prepared for Charlotte Whitton,’ 23 March 1948, Anna Kalet Smith to Elsa Castendyck, 22 March 1948, and Elisabeth Shirley-Enochs to Ranulfo Castro, 12 February 1948, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. Evelyn Smith to Charlotte Whitton, 5 March 1948, CWP, 31/Correspondence (January–February 1948). Charlotte Whitton to Evelyn Smith, 4 February 1948, CWP, 31/Correspondence (January–February 1948). Charlotte Whitton to Director, Children’s Services, Nevada, 4 February 1948, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. This letter also went to California, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Illinois. William Rose to Charlotte Whitton, 13 February 1948, CWP, 31/Correspondence (January–February 1948). William Rose to Martha Wood, 27 February 1948, ‘Canadian-US Adoptions,’ 9 April 1948, and Evelyn Smith to Ruth Bartlett, 15 April 1948, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. Dorothy Cassutt to Charlotte Whitton, 18 February 1948, and Virginia Lee Bennett to Charlotte Whitton, 20 February 1948, CWP, 31/Correspondence (January–February 1948). Cases cited: Virginia Lee Bennett to Charlotte Whitton, 20 February 1948, CWP, 31/Correspondence (January–February 1948); and Betsy Edy to Dr W. Cross, 3 March 1948, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. The director of the California Department of Social Welfare wished to help Whitton, but was prevented from releasing information by state law. Virginia Lee Bennett to Mrs Y, 18 February 1948, and Charlotte Whitton to Virginia Lee Bennett, 27 February 1948, CWP, 31/Correspondence (March 1948). ‘Epistle to the Soucians,’ 15 June 1948, CWP, 32/Correspondence (April– May 1948). ‘Alberta Fiasco,’ Montreal Star, 10 April 1948; ‘Alberta Learns a Lesson,’ ibid., 8 April 1948. Rooke and Schnell, ‘Babies for Export,’ 14. ‘Memo re Adoptions,’ 17 March 1948, CWP, 31/Correspondence (March 1948); ‘Cross-Border Adoption Files: Significant Points of Figures,’ May 1948, CWP, 33 / Welfare in Alberta working file (copy 2).

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Notes to pages 115–19  277   90 ‘Cross-Border Adoption Files: Significant Points of Figures,’ May 1948, CWP, 33 / Welfare in Alberta working file (copy 2); ‘Examination of Adoption Files (extracts),’ May 1948, CWP, 32 / Notes and Memoranda re Specific Charges (#2).   91 ‘11,018 Illegitimate Births in 14 Years,’ Calgary Herald, 19 May 1948; ‘728 Children Are Available for Adoption,’ ibid., 9 June 1948; ‘Full-Scale Attack on Alberta Welfare,’ Edmonton Bulletin, 24 June 1948.   92 ‘Declares Alberta System Blocks Baby Black Market,’ Edmonton Journal, 23 June 1948; ‘Admits Homes Not Inspected of Americans Adopting Babies,’ ibid., 24 June 1948; ‘11,018 Illegitimate Births in 14 Years,’ Calgary Herald, 19 May 1948.   93 ‘Declares Alberta System Blocks Baby Black Market.’   94 ‘Admits Homes Not Inspected of Americans Adopting Babies’; ‘Special Notes to Counsel re: Article,’ n.d., 46, CWP, 32 / Memoranda and Clippings Re: Conspiracy Charge #1 1947–8.   95 Alberta, Howson, Royal Commission, 52–3.   96 Ibid., 6, 12–13, 36–48, 66–9. See also Rooke and Schnell, ‘Babies for Export,’ 14–15, and ‘Charlotte Whitton Meets “The Last Best West,”’ 152–3.   97 Howson, Royal Commission, 51–2.   98 Ibid., 52–3, 48.   99 Charlotte Whitton to KFL, 1 January 1949, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3; ‘Child Welfare Reforms Needed in Alberta,’ Montreal Star, 3 January 1949; ‘Alberta’s Critics Win,’ Ottawa Citizen, 1 January 1949; ‘Changes Are Suggested after Welfare Inquiry,’ Edmonton Journal, 30 December 1948. 100 ‘Adoptions Curbed of Alberta Babies,’ Montreal Gazette, 23 June 1948; ‘Dr Cross Defends Welfare Policies,’ Calgary Herald, 2 March 1949. 101 ‘Some Recommendations “Almost Impossible”: Child Welfare Report Not Fully Implemented,’ Calgary Herald, 28 January 1949; ‘Whitton Charges Report Ignored,’ ibid., 1 March 1949. 102 Canada, House of Commons (21 June 1948), 5614 (Hon. Louis St Laurent). 103 Whitton, Welfare in Alberta, 114–15. 104 Dorothy Cassutt to Charlotte Whitton, 18 February 1948, CWP, 31/Correspondence (January–February 1948); Dorothy Cassutt to Charlotte Whitton, 14 April 1948, CWP, 32/Correspondence (April–May 1948). 105 ‘Memo re More Adequate Placement Safeguards in the Cross-Border Placement of Canadian Children in the United States of America,’ April 1948, CWP, 32/Correspondence (April–May 1948). 106 Ibid. 107 On post–Second World War adoptions into the United States from Europe and Asia, see Choy, ‘Institutionalizing International Adoption’;

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278  Notes to pages 119–21 Oh, ‘A New Kind of Missionary Work’; Zeppa, ‘Let Me In, Immigration Man’; Lovelock, ‘Intercountry Adoption as a Migratory Practice’; and emerging research from Laura Briggs, Heidi Fehrenbach, and Kori Groves. 108 Penner, ‘Comparative Analysis of International Child Adoption,’ 9–10; United Nations, Technical Assistance Office, European Seminar on Intercountry Adoption and Intercountry Adoption: Report of a European Expert Group; ‘Inter-country Adoption,’ 3–68. 109 ‘Midwest Conference on Interstate and International Placement, Chicago Illinois: Minutes,’ May 1948, CWP, 32/Correspondence (April–May 1948), and ‘Salt Lake Conference on Interstate and International Placement; Minutes (Draft),’ June 1951, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3; Smith, ‘To Safeguard Children,’ 122–3. 110 It is likely that some children adopted from Alberta to Central America were First Nations or Métis children, though Whitton never made this accusation explicit. Alberta sent Métis children to this region (and to the United States) in the 1960s, when many provinces were placing First Nations and Métis children outside the country. Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 188–9. 111 ‘Salt Lake Conference,’ June 1951, 7, and ‘Children’s Bureau – Report of Midwest Conference,’ 13 October 1947, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3; ‘Problems in the International Placement of Children,’ July 1948, 13–17, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.1. 112 ‘Interstate Placement Laws,’ February 1948, CWP, 32/Correspondence (April–May 1948), ‘Summary Report of the Midwest Conference on Interstate and International Placement of Children,’ March 1948, 3, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3, and ‘Children’s Bureau – Report of Midwest Conference’; Smith, ‘To Safeguard Children,’ 122–3. 113 In 1947–8 Evelyn Smith was at work on a USCB statement on interstate adoption practices (linked to discussions at the USCB-sponsored conferences), but the USCB never distributed a final version of this statement. Evelyn Smith to K.M. Jackson, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 114 ‘Summary Report of the Midwest Conference,’ March 1948, 2, 5–8; ‘Salt Lake Conference,’ June 1951, 7. 115 ‘Interstate Placement Laws,’ February 1948, CWP, 32/Correspondence (April–May 1948); ‘Salt Lake Conference,’ June 1951, 2–4; ‘Children’s Bureau – Report of Midwest Conference,’ 13 October 1947, 3. 116 ‘Summary Report of the Midwest Conference,’ March 1948, 4–5; ‘Salt Lake Conference,’ June 1951, 2. See also Hunt, Obstacles to Interstate Adoption, 1.

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Notes to pages 121–6  279 117 ‘Salt Lake Conference,’ June 1951. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid.; Agnes Hanna to Charlotte Whitton, 24 March 1941, USCB, 154/7.3.1.3. 120 ‘Black Market in Babies is Revealed: Saint John Group Tells of Heartless Selling of Infants,’ Saint John Telegraph Journal, 21 May 1948, 1, 5; ‘Ring Extends to Other Provinces,’ Halifax Chronicle, 22 May 1948; John B. McNair to Louis St Laurent, 16 March 1948, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9). 121 ‘Re: Saint John Children’s Aid Society,’ 30 November 1946, and ‘Re: Saint John Children’s Aid Society,’ 14 April 1948, CCSD, 245/7; ‘Ring Extends to Other Provinces’; ‘Society Stresses Amendment Need in Order to Put an End to Alleged Saint John Baby Black Market,’ Saint John Telegraph Journal, 23 May 1948. 122 ‘Improving Adoption Procedures,’ Globe and Mail, 26 May 1948; ‘BabySelling Ring Found,’ New York Times, 22 May 1948, 4; ‘To Declare Law for Protection of Babies Soon,’ Saint John Telegraph Journal, 14 June 1948; ‘Regula­tions: Boarding Houses for Children,’ ‘Regulations: Solicitation of Custody of Children,’ The Royal Gazette: New Brunswick 106 (23 June 1948), 178–9. 123 John B. McNair to Louis St Laurent, 16 March 1948, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9); ‘Widen Scope of Baby Ring Probe: Premier Seeks Dominion’s Aid in Investigation,’ Saint John Telegraph Journal, 22 May 1948, 1. 124 Leslie Chance to David Johnson, 22 March 1948, and Leslie Chance to Mr Reid, 22 March 1948, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9). 125 ‘Improving Adoption Procedures.’ 126 Canada, House of Commons Debates, 24 May 1948, 4289–90; 31 May 1948, 4553; 21 June 1948, 5614–15; 24 June 1948, 5765. 127 ‘Memorandum for Mr O’Brien,’ 17 June 1948, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9). 128 Chance’s reference to ‘parents’ here could include either a birth mother applying for a passport before relinquishing custody of her child, or new adoptive parents applying after a completed adoption. ‘Memorandum for the Secretary of State for External Affairs,’ 15 June 1948, DEA, 3937/946340 (1947–9). 129 Ibid. 130 ‘Memorandum for the Secretary of State for External Affairs, 9 June 1948, and ‘Memorandum for the Secretary of State for External Affairs,’ 15 June 1948, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9); Cahill, Butterbox Babies, 116. On the 1947 figures for Alberta, see n. 46 above. 131 ‘To Declare Law for Protection of Babies Soon,’ Saint John Telegraph Journal, 14 June 1948.

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280  Notes to pages 126–33 132 ‘International Baby Adoption Queried in Commons Debate,’ Saint John Telegraph Journal, 22 June 1948. 133 Canada, House of Commons Debates, 21 June 1948, 5614. 134 Ibid. 135 ‘Memorandum for Mr Reid (with comments from Chance),’ 22 June 1948, DEA, 3937/9463-40 (1947–9). 136 ‘Memorandum for the Secretary of State for External Affairs,’ 26 May 1948, ibid. 137 ‘Memorandum for Mr Reid (with comments from Chance),’ 22 June 1948, ibid. 138 ‘Memorandum for the Secretary of State for External Affairs,’ 13 September 1948, ibid. 139 Canada, House of Commons Debates, 16 March 1949, 1532. 140 ‘Ottawa Fights Baby Traffic,’ Montreal Star, 17 March 1949. 141 John B. McNair to L.B. Pearson, 18 March 1949, and L.B. Pearson to John B. McNair, 18 March 1949, DEA, 4269/9463-40. 142 John Farr Larson to Evelyn Smith, 26 January 1951, USCB, 1958–62, 445/7.3.1.3; Marion Murphy to Sibyl Thompson, 7 November 1955, CCSD, 214 / Alberta Department of Public Welfare (1944–61). 143 Alberta, Patterson, Royal Commission on Adoption in Alberta, 42. 144 See chap. 5, nn. 44–7. 145 Charlotte Whitton to Dorothy Cassutt, 6 April 1948, CWP, 32/Correspondence (April–May 1948). 146 Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 143–87. 147 Katharine Lenroot to Marguerite V. Pohek, 16 July 1951, USCB, 1949–52, 362/1.1.4. Chapter 4: Cross-Border Placements for Catholic Children from Quebec    1 Nora Lea to Lawrence Cole, 14 August 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. Lea’s comments assume a discussion about healthy, white infants.    2 Nora Lea to Evelyn Smith, 12 November 1946, ibid.    3 Nora Lea to Laura Noya, 9 November 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 159/7.3.3.4.    4 Nora Lea to Evelyn Smith, 1 October 1946, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3; Evelyn Smith to Lawrence Cole, 25 September 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946).    5 This story is told in chapter 5.    6 Statutes of Quebec, 1924, c. 75; Revised Statutes of Quebec, 1925, c. 196; Revised Statutes of Quebec, 1941, c. 324; Roch, L’adoption dans la Province de Québec, 25–9; The legal system of Quebec was based largely on the 1804 Napoleonic civil code. This code placed a great deal of emphasis on the

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Notes to pages 134–5  281

  7   8   9

10 11

12 13 14

15

16

17

right of parents (especially fathers) to their children and made no provision for the adoption of children, although it did provide for the adoption of one adult by another. France passed its first child adoption law in 1923. Goubau and O’Neill, ‘L’adoption, l’Église et l’État,’ 98–101. Canadian Council on Child Welfare, Comparative Summary of the Canadian Adoption Laws; Colby, Problems and Procedures in Adoption. Roch, L’adoption dans la Province de Québec, 55, 73–7; Goubau and O’Neill, ‘L’adoption, l’Église et l’État,’ 99–101, 110–14. By 1946, the list of exceptions included full orphans not cared for by ascendants, children whose surviving parent(s) was incurably insane, and children to be adopted by the father or mother of the deceased parent. The major group of children excluded from adoption in Quebec but included in other provinces were the children of married parents who voluntarily surrendered their parental rights or whose parental rights had been involuntarily severed by a legal proceeding. CWC, The Adoption Laws of the Canadian Provinces, 39. Nora Lea to Lawrence Cole, 2 January 1947, CCSD, 45/405 (1945–8). Bourgeois, The Protection of Children, 32, 253; Ontario, Report Relating to the Registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths, 18; Leacy, ed., Historical Statistics of Canada, A2–14. Lévesque, Making and Breaking the Rules, 14. Statistics from Canada Year Book 1931, quoted in ‘Review of Arthur SaintPierre,’ 62. Herman, ‘The Difference Difference Makes,’ 57–98; ‘Survey of New Jersey Adoption Law,’ 410–15; Schwartz, ‘Religious Matching for Adoption,’ 171–92; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 113–17; Dehler, ‘Church and State,’ 66–85. By the mid-1950s, there was more talk of ‘extra’ or ‘surplus’ Catholic children across the United States and Canada, and a Catholic religious identity (especially as combined with disability or minority racial status) became part of the definition of the hard-to-place child. Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 114–15. On ‘surplus’ Catholic children in Vancouver in the 1940s, see Hamilton, ‘The Concept of Non-adoptability,’ 26. The Miséricorde in Montreal and its counterpart in Quebec City confined close to 40% of women giving birth out-of-wedlock in Quebec between the wars. Lévesque, ‘Deviants Anonymous,’ 96; Cliché, ‘Morale chrétienne et “double standard sexuel,”’ 85–125. On the Church’s attitude towards unwed motherhood, see Bourgeois, The Protection of Children, 30–4; and Germain, Faut-il encourager la fille-mère à élever elle-même son enfant? Nora Lea to Laura Noya, 9 November 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 159/7.3.3.4.

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282  Notes to pages 135–7 18 Nora Lea to Evelyn Smith, 12 November 1946, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 19 Quebec established a Ministry of Social Welfare and Youth in 1946, but most issues we might identify as child welfare–related remained under the Department of Health. In 1957, most child welfare concerns were transferred to the Ministry of Social Welfare and Youth. The exact content of the Children’s Protection Act varied from province to province. Some provinces had separate legislation for juvenile courts or the regulation of maternity homes; others rolled these measures into a single act. Quebec had legislation to cover some of these matters, scattered among nine different statutes which most outside commentators regarded as outmoded, unclear, or insufficient. Joyal and Chatillon, ‘La loi québécoise de protection de l’enfance de 1944,’ 33–63; Malouin, L’univers des enfants, 19–54. 20 The greatest complaint professional social workers had against the Quebec system was that the province took no responsibility (either directly or indirectly through provincially regulated Children’s Aid Societies) for legal guardianship and care of neglected and dependent children. In Quebec, only specially designated ‘Foundling Hospitals’ and the adoption agencies described below could hold legal guardianship (‘tutorship’ under the Quebec Civil Code) of children, and this only in the case of the children of unwed parents who held a legal designation as ‘the children on no-one.’ Otherwise, institutions caring for children exercised only a ‘moral tutorship’ over their charges. Joyal and Chatillon, ‘La loi québécoise de protection de l’enfance de 1944,’ 33–63; Malouin, L’univers des enfants, 19–54. 21 ‘Review of Saint-Pierre, L’oeuvre des congrégations religieuses,’ 62. 22 Mildred Kensit to Charlotte Whitton, 19 September 1933, CCSD, 44/219 (1933). 23 ‘The Quebec Conference,’ 5; Marie Hamel to Lawrence Cole, 4 June 1947, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. See also Marshall, The Social Origins of the Welfare State, 32, 59–60. 24 After the 1944 royal commission, the provincial legislature passed a Children’s Protection Act, but this legislation was never enacted. Allaire, ‘The Child without Legal Parents,’ 50; Vigod, ‘The Quebec Government and Social Legislation,’ 59–69; Joyal and Chatillon, ‘La loi québécoise,’ 33–63. On Church opposition to state authority in social welfare, see Bourgeois, The Protection of Children; and Saint-Pierre, Témoignages sur nos orphelinants. 25 Goubau and O’Neill, ‘L’adoption, l’Église et l’État,’ 102–3. 26 This trend was a major theme in the report on child placement that Whitton and Lenroot prepared for the League of Nations in 1938. See chap. 1, nn. 39–42; Rooke and Schnell, Discarding the Asylum, 309–11, 392–6; and Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood, 19–20, 22.

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Notes to pages 137–9  283 27 Baillargeon, ‘Orphans in Quebec,’ 305–26. 28 League of Nations, Advisory Committee on Social Questions, Report on the Placing of Children in Families, 176; Bourgeois, The Protection of Children, 120–35, 263–7. 29 Adoptable children were those for whom there were no ‘legitimate’ parents with a legal and moral claim. Most children in the province’s orphanages had at least one living parent and were legally ineligible. On the relationship between the institutional culture of childcare and the emerging Catholic adoption practices, see Baillargeon, ‘Orphans in Quebec’; Malouin, L’univers des enfants, 384–96; and Bourgeois, The Protection of Children, 149–61. 30 Church leaders also pushed for the 1925 revisions. Goubau and O’Neill, ‘L’adoption, l’Église et l’État,’ 98, 105–6, 110–14. 31 ‘The Adoption Bureau of the Youville Crèche,’ Child and Family Welfare 7, no. 1 (May 1931): 82; Allaire, ‘The Child without Legal Parents,’ 51; Malouin, L’univers des enfants, 120–1. 32 Bourgeois, The Protection of Children, 149–61; SAPE, ‘Pour protéger l’enfance a Montréal,’ January 1963, CCSD, 238/1. 33 ‘Memo Re: SAPE,’ 5 June 1946, CCSD, 238/1; ‘Illegitimate Care on Improved Basis,’ Montreal Gazette, 30 July 1943; ‘Unique Education Experiment Carried out at Local School,’ ibid., 31 July 1945. 34 SAPE, Solitude à plénitude par l’adoption; ‘Illegitimate Care on Improved Basis,’ Montreal Gazette, 31 July 1945. 35 ‘Adoption – Additional Evidence from C. Whitton,’ 1947, CWP, 33 / Submission to the Alberta Royal Commission. 36 SAPE’s share was 2796 legal adoptions. The major Protestant placement agency in the province, the Children’s Service Association in Montreal, completed 270 legal adoptions in this period. Bourgeois, The Protection of Children, 152–60. 37 CWC, Committee on Adoption, Report of the Committee on Adoption, 1950. 38 SAPE, L’adoption des enfants abandonnés; Germain, Les prêtres devraient-ils prôner les adoptions?; Dragon, Jacquot demande un foyer. 39 Bourgeois, The Protection of Children, 149–61; ‘Illegitimate Care on Improved Basis.’ 40 Nora Lea to Laura Noya, 9 November 1945, USCB, 1945–8, 159/7.3.3.4. The SAPE trains mirrored the Protestant and Catholic ‘orphan trains’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Holt, The Orphan Trains. 41 In addition, CWC meetings conducted in English were not welcoming for francophones, and representatives from Quebec social agencies complained that English Canadian social workers made unreasonable com-

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284  Notes to pages 139–42

42

43

44 45 46

47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

parisons between the very different child welfare systems in Quebec and the rest of the country. ‘Visit to Father Paul Contant,’ 12 October 1947, and ‘Report of Field Visits to Montreal,’ 15–16 November 1951, CCSD, 381 / Field Reports from Quebec 1947–52. This number included 130 passports issued to legal guardians that were certainly adoption-related, and an additional sixty-seven passports issued to children under five years of age on application of parents (see table 3.2). DEA officials assumed many of these children were also bound for US adoptive homes. See chap. 3, nn. 128–30; ‘Memorandum for the Secretary of State for External Affairs,’ 15 June 1948, DEA, 3937/9463–40 (1947–9). ‘Field Visit to SAPE,’ December 1947, CCSD, 238/1; Lawrence Cole to Marie Hamel, 17 December 1947; Janet Storey to Phyllis Burns, 16 June 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 675/7.3.1.3; ‘Interview in Canada in August 1952, Regarding Placement of Canadian Children in Indiana,’ December 1953, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3; E. de W. Mayer to Frederick Farnsworth, 11 August 1953, USCB, 1953–7, 676/7.3.1.3. R.T. Wilbur to Paul-Émile Marquis, 23 June 1955, USCB, 1953–7, 675/7.3.1.3. Dorothy Waite to R.E.G. Davis, 12 November 1947, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. Lawrence Cole to Maud Morlock, 25 May 1945 and 8 August 1945, USCB, 1953–7, 675/7.3.1.3. Until mid-1946, adoptions were finalized when the parents came to Montreal to choose children. This means that SAPE officials convinced Quebec judges to ignore provincial law specifying a minimum probationary period of six months. Nora Lea to Evelyn Smith, 12 November 1946, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. Lawrence Cole to Maud Morlock, 19 August 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). ‘Field Visit to SAPE,’ 24 August 1946, CCSD, 238/1. Lawrence Cole to Maud Morlock, 20 September 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). Examples from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in Donna Becker to Evelyn Smith, 11 June 1947, Charlotte Parrish to Mary Labaree, 20 October 1947, and Dorothy Waite to R.E.G. Davis, 12 November 1947, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. Evelyn Smith to Lawrence Cole, 25 September 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). Ibid. Margaret Emery to Lawrence Cole, 27 October 1947, USCB, 1953–7, 675/7.3.1.3. Evelyn Smith to Lawrence Cole, 25 September 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). On the Cradle Society, see Pfeffer, ‘Homeless Children, Childless Homes,’ 51–65; and Berebitsky, ‘“To Raise as Your Own,”’ 135–41.

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Notes to pages 142–6  285 55 Nora Lea to Evelyn Smith, 12 November 1946, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 56 Nora Lea to Lawrence Cole, 2 January 1947; Marie Hamel to Lawrence Cole, 23 January 1948, CCSD, 45/405 (1945–8). 57 Nora Lea to Evelyn Smith, 1 October 1946, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 58 Nora Lea to Lawrence Cole, 2 January 1947, CCSD, 45/405 (1945–8). Lea believed that if the Quebec social agencies employed trained social workers to do high-quality casework with unmarried mothers (key to gathering a social history of the child) fewer women would choose to relinquish their children. Other historians have argued, however, that post-WWII caseworkers working with white unmarried mothers often emphasized relinquishment as the only responsible choice. Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie; Petrie, Gone to An Aunt’s. 59 Dorothy Spotton to Paul Contant, 3 October 1946, Ignatius Donnelly to Paul Contant, 7 October 1946, Lena Parrott to Paul Contant, 9 October 1946, and Henry Page to Paul Contant, 24 September 1946, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 60 ‘Memorandum of la Societe d’Adoption et de Protection de l’Enfance Field Visit,’ October 26, 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946); Paul Contant à Marie Hamel, 12 November 1946; Marie Hamel à Paul Contant, 18 November 1946, CCSD, 238/1. Quotations from Contant translated by the author. 61 Nora Lea to Evelyn Smith, 1 October 1946, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 62 Nora Lea to Irene Poulos, 1 October 1946, CCSD, 45/405 (1946). 63 Evelyn Smith to Donna Becker, 19 June 1947, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 64 Evelyn Smith to Nora Lea, 4 November 1946, ibid. 65 Nora Lea to Evelyn Smith, 12 November 1946, ibid. 66 Evelyn Smith to Lawrence Cole, 6 January 1947, and Margaret Emery to Lawrence Cole, 27 October 1947, USCB, 1955–6, 675/7.3.1.3; Marie Hamel to Lawrence Cole, 23 December 1947, CCSD, 45/405 (1945–8). 67 Nora Lea to Lawrence Cole, 2 January 1947, and ‘Cover Letter for Outline of Material Requested before Placement of Canadian Children for Adoption in Rhode Island,’ 2 April 1947, CCSD, 45/405 (1945–8). 68 Lawrence Cole to Paul Contant, 27 March 1947, ibid. 69 Lawrence Cole to K. Phyllis Burns, 21 May 1948, ibid. 70 Lawrence Cole to Marie Hamel, 17 December 1947, USCB, 1953–6, 675/7.3.1.3 (Rhode Island); Dorothy Waite to R.E.G. Davis, 12 November 1947 (Wisconsin), and Donna Becker to Evelyn Smith, 11 June 1947 (Michigan), USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. 71 Paul Contant to Dorothy Waite, 19 November 1947, CCSD, 45/405 (1945– 8). 72 ‘Memo to Miss Burns,’ 19 December 1947, CCSD, 238/1; ‘Field Visit to

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286  Notes to pages 146–9

73

74

75 76 77

78 79

80

81 82 83

84

SAPE,’ 21 January 1948, CCSD, 45/405 (1945–8); Evelyn Smith to Mary Weaver, 18 August 1947, USCB, 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3. Lawrence Cole to Adoption Consultant, 20 October 1947, USCB, 1945–48, 675/7.3.1.3; Lawrence Cole to K. Phyllis Burns, 21 May 1948, CCSD, 45/405 (1945–8). Lawrence Cole to R.H. Scott, 31 October 1947, USCB, 1953–7, 675/7.3.1.3; K. Phyllis Burns to Evelyn Smith, 10 July 1947, USCB 1945–8, 154/7.3.1.3; Lawrence Cole to S. Marie Ange de L’Euchriste, 29 May 1947, CWP, 31/ Corresp. 1947. Lawrence Cole to Paul Contant, 26 January 1949, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. Evelyn Bell to Phyllis Burns, 26 May 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 676/7.3.1.3; Janet Storey to Phyllis Burns, 16 June 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 675/7.3.1.3. Lawrence Cole to Paul Contant, 26 January 1949, and ‘Rhode Island Adoptive Placements of Canadian Children,’ 7 February 1949, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. ‘Field Visit to the Service Social De La Miséricorde,’ 12 October 1949, CCSD, 238/1. Lawrence Cole to Margaret Emery, 8 April 1949, and ‘R.I. State Department of Social Welfare – Children’s Division,’ May 1949, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. CWC, Committee on Adoption, Interim Report of the Committee on Adoption, 4; CWC, Child Welfare Division, Annual Report: Child Welfare Division, 1953, Minutes, 5. Evelyn Smith to Mila Schwartzbach, 30 July 1951, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. ‘Rhode Island Adoptive Placements of Canadian Children,’ 7 February 1949, ibid. ‘Nebraska – Placements from Canada,’ 23 April 1953, and ‘Kansas – Intercountry Adoptions, Missouri – Intercountry Adoptions,’ 20 June 1957, USCB, 675/7.3.1.3; ‘Interviews in Canada in August 1952, Regarding Placement of Canadian Children in Indiana Homes,’ August 1952, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3; ‘Problems in Placement in California and Other States and Canada,’ 28 February 1952, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3. On Irish adoptions to the United States, see Maguire, ‘Foreign Adoptions and the Evolution of Irish Adoption Policy,’ 387–404. Martha Schurch to Marie Hamel, 28 November 1952, and Proctor Carter to Mildred Arnold, 17 May 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 676/7.3.1.3; ‘Nebraska – Placements from Canada,’ 23 April 1953, and Mayme Stukel to Phyllis Burns, 17 May 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 675/7.3.1.3.

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Notes to pages 149–53  287   85 SE, ‘To Prospective Foster Parents in the United States,’ ISS, 29/ISS Affiliate CWC – Adoption 1956–7.   86 Before 1950, copies of state, provincial, and CWC or USCB correspondence relative to cross-border adoption usually appeared in the files of both the CWC and the USCB, evidence of routine sharing of materials. This is not the case after 1950.   87 If the children were not Jewish (as is likely) these adoptions were not legal under Quebec law. ‘Canadian Requests for Investigations of Homes for Adoptions – Social Welfare Court, Montreal,’ 9 May 1951, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3.   88 ‘Adoption Study – Referrals from Social Welfare Court Montreal, Quebec,’ 22 May 1951, ibid.   89 Robert Lansdale to George Davidson, 13 June 1951, ibid.   90 R.E.G. Davis to R. Lansdale, 25 July 1951, and R.E.G. Davis to R. Lansdale, 18 October 1951, ibid.   91 Evelyn Smith to Mila Schwartzbach, 30 July 1951, ibid.   92 Evelyn Smith to K. Phyllis Burns, 7 August 1951, and K. Phyllis Burns to Evelyn Smith, 20 August 1951, ibid.   93 Francis Jordan to Grace Reeder, 18 June 1951, Grace Reeder to Mila Schwartzbach, 13 July 1951, and ‘Problems of Placement in California and Other States and Canada,’ 28 February 1952, ibid.   94 Grace Reeder to Francis Jordan, 25 June 1951, ibid; Alice Scott Hyatt to Frederick Farnsworth, 16 September 1953, USCB, 1953–7, 676/7.3.1.3. Puerto Rico child welfare officials also told the Quebec consul they could not meet the requirements. Guillermo Arbona to Dorothy Barker, 18 July 1952, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3.   95 E. de W. Mayer to Charles Schottland, 4 December 1951; Charles Schottland to F.W. Hunter, 19 February 1952, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3.   96 W.A. Bickers to E.W. Neilson, 15 February 1940, USCB, 1940, 165/7.3.1.3.   97 Paul Seddicum to Mrs F.L., 12 February 1951, USCB, 1949–52, 445/7.3.1.3.   98 Alice Scott Hyatt to Benjamin Habberton, 25 November 1952, USCB, 1949–52, 451/7.3.3.4. On the McCarran-Walter Act in the broader context of US immigration history, see Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 302–14; and Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 311–20.   99 See chap. 1, nn. 148–51. 100 Marion Murphy to Evelyn Smith, 29 August 1953, and Evelyn Smith to Marion Murphy, 29 August 1953, USCB, 1953–7, 676/7.3.1.3. Another implication of Public Law 82-414 was that state departments of child welfare were now less likely to become aware of cross-border adoptions if they did not receive notice directly from Canadian agencies. This is because

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288  Notes to pages 153–6 US child welfare agencies would not, now, be approached by US adoptive parents looking for a readoption in the United States in order to secure citizenship for the adopted child. (Parents might still seek readoption for other reasons, such as securing inheritances.) Public Law 82-414 meant that Canadian and American reformers could no longer use the argument that children adopted across the border might be left ‘stateless’ in the absence of a readoption in the United States. 101 ‘Canadian Adoptions,’ 12 February 1957, USCB, 1953–7, 675/7.3.1.3. 102 Alice Scott Hyatt to Frederick Farnsworth, 16 September 1953, and Marguerite Windhauser to Susan T. Pettiss, 29 March 1955, USCB, 1953–7, 676/7.3.1.3; ‘Procedure in Processing Applications for Visas for Canadian Children, Adopted or to be Adopted by United States Citizens,’ 7 January 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3. 103 ‘Procedure in Processing Applications for Visas for Canadian Children,’ USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3; Frederick Farnsworth to Alice Scott Hyatt, 19 August 1953, and Alice Scott Hyatt to Frederick Farnsworth, 16 September 1953, USCB, 1953–7, 676/7.3.1.3. 104 E. de W. Mayer to Frederick Farnsworth, 11 August 1953, USCB, 1953–7, 676/7.3.1.3; Alice Scott Hyatt to Frederick Farnsworth, 16 September 1953, and ‘Procedure in Processing Applications for Visas for Canadian Children, Adopted or to be Adopted by United States Citizens,’ 7 January 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3. The Quebec City office preferred its earlier, less complex procedure and in some cases continued to use the old method until state departments of child welfare requested the consul adopt the standard procedures. ‘New Mexico – Canada Adoption,’ 20 May 1954, and George Renchard to Alice Folsom, 8 April 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 676/7.3.1.3. 105 Evelyn Smith to K. Phyllis Burns, 9 November 1953, USCB, 1953–7, 676/7.3.1.3. 106 K. Phyllis Burns to Mildred Arnold, 8 February 1954, and Evelyn Smith to K. Phyllis Burns, 8 February 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3. The INS agreement negotiated on the west coast (chap. 1, nn. 148–51) was a localized arrangement that seems not to have involved the central INS bureaucracy. 107 Harold Granata to Roman Haremski, 21 July 1955, and ‘Canadian Adoptions,’ 12 February 1957, USCB, 1953–7, 675/7.3.1.3. 108 On the complex evolution of US immigration law and the regulation of transnational adoption in the 1940s and 1950s, see Forbes and Weiss Fagen, ‘Unaccompanied Refugee Children’; Oh, ‘Into the Arms of America’; Choy, ‘Institutionalizing International Adoption’; and Fehrenbach, ‘How to Handle a Birthparent.’

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Notes to pages 156–7  289 109 The Refugee Relief Act of 1953, the Refugee Escapee Act of 1957, and subsequent extensions of this legislation provided special non-quota entrance visas for children adopted or to-be-adopted by American citizens who could not secure a visa through the regular allotment of their home nations. Thus, although the legislation provided an exemption from the quota system, the procedures it laid out applied to children from quota nations (like Korea) and not to children from non-quota nations (like Canada). 110 There was a slide here from a specific discussion of the INS to the related but not specifically addressed issue of the responsibilities held and not held by the State Department / Consulates in Canadian vs. other international adoptions. The switch between agencies (INS and State Department / Consulates) was not remarked on in the meeting record, indicating the participants saw the two agencies as linked in the regulation of (some) international adoptions and followed the logic from the INS role to the consular procedures. ‘Canadian Adoptions,’ 10 August 1955, USCB, 1953–7, 675/7.3.1.3. 111 Indeed, some consulates had developed more extensive procedures for working with provincial departments of child welfare. ‘Release of August 28, 1956 on Procedure in Processing Applications for Visas for Canadian Children, Adopted or to be Adopted by United States Citizens,’ 11 September 1956, ibid. 112 Oh, ‘Into the Arms of America’; Choy, ‘Institutionalizing International Adoption.’ For a wider perspective on the development of transnational adoption in this period (with more emphasis on Europe), see Fehrenbach, ‘How to Handle a Birthparent.’ 113 ‘Draft of 1947 Annual Report by Nora Lea,’ CCSD, 276/23, 2–3; CWC, Committee on Adoption, Report of the Committee on Adoption, 1948. 114 See chap. 3, nn. 111–19. 115 On McCrae’s role pioneering transracial adoptions and adoptions for children with disabilities, see Dubinsky, Babies without Borders, 61–2. 116 The second major focus of the McCrae committee was the security of legal consents to adoption in Canada. CWC, Committee on Adoption, Interim Report of the Committee on Adoption, 1949. The results of McCrae’s adoption survey provide the best available profile of Canadian adoption practices at mid-century. However, because this was a voluntary survey (with a disproportionate number of responses from Quebec), the statistical findings must be interpreted with care. For the detailed results, see CWC, Committee on Adoption, Report of the Committee on Adoption, 1950. 117 ‘Report of Field Visits to Montreal,’ 15–16 November 1951, CCSD, 381 / Field Reports from Quebec 1947–52.

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290  Notes to pages 158–60 118 Other members of McCrae’s committee were initially much more uncertain about the utility of border-crossing placements. CWC, Committee on Adoption, Interim Report of the Committee on Adoption, 1952, 1953. 119 CWC, Family and Child Welfare Division, Report of the Committee on Adoption, 1955. 120 CWC, A Policy Statement on Adoption across Borders. 121 Relations between the CWC and the Alberta government remained strained and Alberta representatives were generally reluctant to attend any CWC events. Quebec officials attended only sporadically, and it was impossible for those who came to speak on behalf of the provincial child welfare structure or enact proposals debated at the director’s meetings. ‘Minutes of Meetings of Child Welfare Executives,’ 7–10 June 1948, CCSD, 186/6 (1948–9), 7; ‘Child Welfare Division,’ 31 May 1951, CCSD, 183/6 (1951); ‘Minutes of the Interprovincial Conference Directors of Child Welfare,’ 12–13 June 1952, CCSD, 60/491. 122 ‘Minutes of Meeting of Child Welfare Officials,’ 4 June 1949, CCSD, 183/6 (1948–9); ‘Minutes of the Interprovincial Conference Directors of Child Welfare,’ 12–13 June 1952, CCSD, 60/491; ‘Minutes of the Meeting of Child Welfare Directors (continued),’ 13 June 1952, CCSD, 183/8; ‘Minutes of Directors of Child Welfare Meeting,’ 14 October 1955, CCSD, 183/10. 123 ‘Minutes of Meeting of the Directors of Child Welfare,’ 1958, CCSD, 183/13; ‘Minutes of Meeting of the Directors of Child Welfare,’ 1961, CCSD, 183/16. 124 From 1949, the Maternity Boarding Houses Act in Nova Scotia required any person taking a child out of Nova Scotia for adoption to obtain a special certificate from the director of child welfare. This provision still did not require the person placing the child to follow agreements worked out between Nova Scotia and other provinces. Balcom, ‘Scandal and Social Policy,’ 27. 125 See chap. 3, n. 114. 126 ‘Minutes of the Meeting of Child Welfare Directors (continued),’ 13 June 1952, CCSD, 183/8; ‘Minutes of Meeting of the Directors of Child Welfare,’ 16–17 June 1956, CCSD, 183/11. 127 ‘Minutes of Meeting of the Directors of Child Welfare,’ 1960, CCSD, 183/15. In the 1960s, the directors explored a less strict approach to religious matching in order to find homes for children, though they were very wary of significant local resistance. In the United States, many states also moved towards a ‘permissive’ standard in the 1950s. ‘Minutes of Meeting of the Directors of Child Welfare,’ 1962, CCSD, 183/17; ‘Minutes

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Notes to pages 160–4  291 of Meeting of the Directors of Child Welfare,’ 1963, CCSD, 183/9; ‘Minutes of Meeting of the Directors of Child Welfare,’ 1964, CCSD, 184/1; Dehler, ‘Church and State,’ 66–85; ‘Survey of New Jersey Adoption Law,’ 379–415. 128 Schapiro, A Study of Adoption Practice, 3: 6–7; Herman, ‘The Paradoxical Rationalization of Modern Adoption,’ 362; Lansdowne, ‘The Concept of Non-adoptability,’ ii; Strong-Boag, ‘Today’s Child,’ 675–6; Brookfield, ‘Maverick Mothers.’ 129 Dubinsky, Babies without Borders, 57–79. 130 CWC, Family and Child Welfare Division, Annual Report: Family and Child Welfare Division, 1954. 131 CWC, Family and Child Welfare Division, Report of the Committee on Adoption, 1955, 3; ‘Minutes of Meeting of the Directors of Child Welfare,’ 16–17 June 1956, CCSD, 183/11; Dubinsky, ‘“We Adopted a Negro,”’ 268–88. 132 K. Phyllis Burns to Mildred Arnold, 8 February 1954, Mildred Arnold to K. Phyllis Burns, 3 March 1954, and ‘Memo to Administrators of Public Welfare,’ 5 May 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3. 133 The expanding importance of the ISS facilitating transnational adoptions and intervening in national policy debates in the United States, Canada, and other countries is laid out in Oh, ‘Into the Arms of America,’ and Fehrenbach, ‘How to Handle a Birthparent.’ The increasing role of the CWLA and the continuing participation of the USCB in US policy and practice with respect to transnational adoption have received comparatively less attention. 134 ‘Across-Border Placement Meeting,’ 10 August 1954, ISS, 12 / Children in Migration; ‘Meeting Regarding Adoption Placements across the International Border between Canada and the United States,’ 28 July 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3. 135 ‘Traffic international des bébés mis à jour,’ La Presse, 12 February 1954, 1. 136 On CWLA and adoption reform, see Herman, ‘The Paradoxical Rationalization,’ 348, 355–65. 137 Phyllis Burns to Joseph Reid, 13 August 1954, CCSD, 66 / Inquiries 1955– 7; ‘Intercountry Adoptions,’ 26–9 January 1955, CWLA, SW55/16/10; CWC, Family and Child Welfare Division, Annual Report, 1955. 138 ‘Report of a Field Visit to Father Contant,’ 8 September 1950, CCSD, 238/1. 139 Malouin, L’univers des enfants, 44–5, 402–15. See also Hamel, ‘Adoption: A Quebec Symposium,’ 8–10. 140 M. Hamel to Miss Murphy, 12 April 1962, ‘Field Visit Report,’ 12 December 1959, and ‘Pour protéger l’enfance à Montréal,’ January 1963, CCSD, 238/1.

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292  Notes to pages 164–8 141 ‘Montreal Journal: Orphans Who Weren’t Recall Care That Wasn’t,’ New York Times, 5 March 1999; ‘Duplessis Orphans Accept Settlement,’ Globe and Mail, 2 July 2001; Gill, Les enfants de Duplessis. For an effort to defend the Church by contextualizing child welfare services and resources in the province, see Malouin, L’univers des enfants. Chapter 5: Criminal Law and Baby Black Markets    1 ‘Traffic international des bébés mis à jour,’ La Presse, 12 February 1954, 1; ‘International Ring Uncovered in City,’ The Gazette, 13 February 1954, 1; ‘1,000 Canadian Babies Sold by $5,000,000 Ring – Montreal,’ Toronto Daily Star, 12 February 1954, 1; ‘Canadian Is Seized in Baby Sale Racket,’ New York Times, 13 February 1954, 30; ‘Charge Thousand Quebec Babies Sold in US at Prices Ranging to $10,000,’ Montreal Star, 12 February 1954, 1.    2 ‘Canada, US Police Investigate: Nab Couple at Airport, Say Birth Note Fraud; Child Sent to Hospital,’ Globe and Mail, 26 February 1953, 5; ‘Canadians Say Ring Sold Babies to the US,’ New York Times, 27 February 1953, 1; Phillips, ‘“Financially Irresponsible and Obviously Neurotic,”’ 330–3.    3 ‘Toronto Area Infants Sold across Border,’ Globe and Mail, 13 February 1954, 1.    4 Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 169–207.    5 Balcom, ‘Baby-Selling,’ 93. See also Freundlich, The Market Forces in Adoption. I use the term ‘black market’ as it was used by contemporaries to describe baby transfers involving significant exchanges of money, even as I recognize that the very meaning/status of the black market in babies was always contentious. Similarly, I use ‘adoption’ to describe the relationship between parents and the children they acquired ‘on the black market,’ even though this is often technically inaccurate. In many cases, there was no legal adoption proceeding or the legal adoption was obtained on the basis of fraudulent documents.    6 ‘The Markets – Black and Grey – in Babies’; testimony of Ernest Mitler in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, Investigation of Juvenile Delinquency in the United States, 1953, 62.    7 Canada, House of Commons Debates, 19 February 1954, 2244 (Hon. Stuart Garson).    8 ‘Ampleur considérable du “Racket” des bébés,’ Le Soleil, 13 February 1954, 1.    9 The Gazette, ‘Strict Ban Sought on “Baby Farming,”’ 7 December 1939; Fromer, ‘Smuggled Babies for Sale,’ 75–80; Malouin, L’univers des enfants en difficulté, 393–4.

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Notes to pages 168–70  293 10 See chap. 4, n. 87. 11 ‘More Arrests Expected in Black Market Baby Case,’ The Gazette, 13 February 1954, 1. 12 ‘Baby Adoption Agencies Warn against Racketeers,’ Montreal Star, 13 February 1954, 3. 13 On the appeal of the black market women pregnant out of wedlock, see Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie, 177–86. 14 ‘Conference Cites Peril in Adoption,’ New York Times, 21 August 1948, 8; ‘New Albany Bills Seek Infant Help,’ ibid., 1 March 1949, 28; ‘Baby Racket Bills Signed by Dewey,’ ibid., 22 April 1949, 27. On the Joint Committee on Interstate Cooperation, see chap. 6. 15 Black market operators often claimed that the birth mothers were making the actual placements, and they were only charging for legal/medical services. 16 Testimony of Ernest Mitler in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955, 8–9. 17 ‘Arrestation d’un avocat de Montreal, accusé de traffic de nouveaux-nés,’ Le Devoir, 13 February 1954, 1; ‘Report of a Field Visit to the New York Regional Office Regarding the Black Market in Babies,’ 17 November 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3. 18 Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Investigation of Juvenile Delinquency, 1953, 58–63. 19 ‘New York Probe Started Last November,’ Montreal Star, 19 February 1954, 2. 20 ‘More Arrests Expected,’ Montreal Star, 13 February 1954, 1; ‘La police réussit à acheter un bébé,’ La Presse, 13 February 1954, 1. 21 The three women were involved in the maternity-home side of the black market. All were released without charges. ‘Arrestation d’un avocat de Montréal.’ 22 ‘“Baby Mills” Gave “Supplies,” Police Charge,’ The Gazette, 16 February 1954, 3; ‘Child Kidnapped from “Courier” by Rival Ring,’ Montreal Star, 16 February 1954, 1. 23 Fromer, ‘Smuggled Babies for Sale,’ 75–80; ‘Rows of Full Cribs: Secluded Farm Said Showroom for Ring,’ Toronto Daily Star, 13 February 1954, 1–2. 24 Early on, there were intimations – never proved – that children were conceived specifically for sale on the black market. ‘Woman with “Days-Old” Baby for Sale 1 of 3 More Held in Smuggling,’ Toronto Daily Star, 13 February 1954, 1–2; Fromer, ‘Smuggled Babies for Sale.’ 25 Fromer, ‘Smuggled Babies for Sale’; ‘Enquête Préliminaire, Déposition de

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294  Notes to pages 170–3

26

27 28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39

Denise LaChance (name changed),’ 31 March 1954, BANQ, TP12, S2, SS1, SSS1, file 500 (1955). ‘Baby Ring Used Loopholes of Law, Preyed on Ignorance, Helplessness,’ The Gazette, 15 February 1954, 21. See also Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie, 177–86. McKeown, ‘We Bought a Canadian Baby, Part One,’ 26. The father brought a doctor back to the maternity home the next day to question the birth mother on her medical history and test her for communicable diseases. The focus was on medical problems the mother might have transmitted to the child and not on her health and recovery. Testimony of Mr Boyd in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955, 86. Fromer, ‘Smuggled Babies’; ‘Several City Women Quizzed on Baby Ring,’ The Gazette, 18 February 1954, 10. This sale price was less than that reported in most headlines. ‘Send Smuggled Babies Back to Enter Legally,’ Toronto Daily Star, 15 February 1954, 1–2; ‘Arrestation d’un avocat de Montréal.’ McKeown, ‘We Bought a Canadian Baby, Part One,’ 2. See also Herman, ‘The Difference Difference Makes,’ 157–98. ‘Parents in Adoption Racket Clam Up on Facts,’ Montreal Star, 16 February 1954, 23. See chap. 2, nn. 41–4. ‘NY Witness Details False Registration, $3000 “Sale,”’ The Gazette, 10 February 1954, 1. ‘Baby Rings Used Loopholes of Law,’ The Gazette, 15 February 1954, 21. ‘Rows of Full Cribs Secluded Farm Said Showroom for Ring,’ Toronto Daily Star, 13 February 1954, 1–2; Sam Bodnoff as told to McKeown, ‘I Smuggle Babies across the Border,’ 2–4; Sam Bodnoff as told to McKeown, ‘Black Market Babies,’ 12–14, 32; testimony of Eugene Moyneur in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955, 50–7. Another approach was to send pregnant women to the United States to give birth. Fromer, ‘Smuggled Babies,’ 75, 79. There were rumours the phony mothers were organized by one Outremont woman, offering this specialized service to various black market operators. ‘Different Faith Given to Babies,’ Montreal Star, 17 February 1954, 3; ‘Police Question Phony Mothers in Baby Racket,’ Globe and Mail, 18 February 1954, 11. McKeown, ‘We Bought a Canadian Baby, Part Two,’ 30–2. ‘Arrestation d’un avocat de Montréal’; ‘Une question sans réponse: Qui est l’âme dirigeante du traffic des bébés?’ Le Devoir, 16 February 1954, 1.

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Notes to pages 173–6  295 40 ‘In the Court of Preliminary Inquiry, Evidence of Sam Karakofsky,’ 31 March 1954, BANQ, TP12, S2, SS1, SSS1, file 500 (1955). 41 ‘Report of a Visit to the New York Regional Office Regarding the Black Market in Babies,’ 17 November 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3. 42 McKeown, ‘We Bought a Canadian Baby, Part Two,’ 30; ‘Black Market Sale of Canadian Babies,’ 12 March 1954, DEA, 8279/9463-D-40. 43 ‘Issuance of Canadian Passports to Minor Canadian Children Who Have Been Adopted in the United States by United States Citizens,’ 23 October 1953, DEA, 8279/9463-D-40. 44 It is not clear from the DEA files how parents from the Montreal black market with missing or false documentation would secure an adoption in the United States. ‘Black Market Sale of Canadian Babies,’ 12 March 1954, and ‘Issuance of Canadian Passports to Minor Canadian Children,’ 23 October 1954, ibid. 45 O’Brien argued that the DEA should refuse the passport if the US adoption was one the relevant provincial officials would not have approved, although this approach could leave children stranded as illegal immigrants in the United States. This was a vast departure from the DEA attitude in 1948. ‘Black Market Sale of Canadian Babies,’ 12 March 1954, and ‘Issuance of Canadian Passports to Minor Canadian Children,’ 23 October 1954, DEA, 8279/9463-D-40. 46 ‘Issuance of Canadian Passports to Minor Canadian Children,’ ibid. 47 ‘Passport Applications for Canadian Children,’ 27 November 1953, and ‘Illegal Traffic in Canadian Infants,’ 2 June 1954, ibid. 48 ‘New York–Canadian Black Market Ring,’ 10 March 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3. On the protocol, see chap. 4, nn. 102–3. 49 ‘New York–Canadian Black Market Ring – Your Memorandum of March 10, 1954,’ 29 March 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3. 50 ‘Baby Ring Used Loopholes’; ‘Woman with “Days-old” Baby for Sale,’ Toronto Daily Star, 13 February 1954, 1, 2; ‘Send Smuggled Babies Back’; ‘US Officials “Sympathetic” on Adoptions,’ Montreal Star, 9 March 1954, 8. 51 ‘Across-Border Placement Meeting,’ ISS, 12 / Children in Migration, 10 August 1954. 52 See chap. 4, nn. 115–18. 53 ‘Baby Adoption Agencies Warn against Racketeers,’ Montreal Star, 13 February 1954, 3. 54 Morlock, ‘Babies on the Market,’ 67–8. 55 ‘State Curbs Asked on Baby Brokers,’ New York Times, 22 January 1945, 20; ‘Offers Plan to Aid the Unwed Mother: Aide at Children’s Bureau Asks Extension of Pre-Natal care, Better Medical Service,’ ibid., 8 March 1947, 16.

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296  Notes to pages 176–9 56 ‘Drive Spurred to Block “Baby Market,”’ Christian Science Monitor, 6 November 1951; ‘US Child Bureau Swears in Chief,’ New York Times, 5 September 1951, 51. 57 Testimony of Martha Eliot in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Commercial Child Adoption Practices, 1956, 100. 58 ‘New York–Canadian Black Market Adoption Ring,’ 10 March 1954, and ‘Report of a Visit to the New York Regional Office Regarding the Black Market in Babies,’ 17 November 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.1. 59 ‘Summary of Discussion of “Black Market” in Babies by Division of Social Services,’ 12 April 1954; ‘Report of a Visit to the New York Regional Office Regarding the Black Market in Babies,’ 17 November 1954; ‘Progress Report Project on Prevention of Black Market in Babies and Other Unprotected Adoptive Placements,’ 5 April 1955; ‘Special Project on Independent Options,’ 1 April 1955, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3. 60 ‘Progress Report Project on Prevention of Black Market in Babies and Other Unprotected Adoptive Placements,’ 5 April 1955, ibid. 61 ‘Summary of the Baron de Hirsch Institute Joint Study,’ 3 May 1954, 4, FJP, MB1/C/4/13. Through the 1950s, adoption placements varied from four to thirteen children per year; Annual Report of the Federation of Jewish Community Services, 1951–9, FJP, MB1/B/11 – MB1/C/1/19. 62 ‘Baby Adoption Agencies Warn against Racketeers’; ‘Foster Homes Find Good Parents, Give Good Care to Unlucky Babies,’ Montreal Star, 16 February 1954, 3; ‘Catholic Welfare Flays “Grey Market” Adoptions,’ ibid., 24 February 1954, 24. 63 ‘Baby Adoption Agencies Warn against Racketeers’; ‘Pas de marché noir pour les enfants des crèches,’ La Presse, 19 February 1954, 3; ‘Grey Market for Babies Operating,’ The Gazette, 24 February 1954, 17; ‘Pour une loi d’adoption: La Catholic Welfare est prête à collaborer avec le gouvernement,’ Le Devoir, 24 February 1954, 1. 64 George Hill, quoted in ‘Woman Sought as Key Figure in Baby Case,’ Montreal Star, 15 February 1954, 1. 65 Ernest Mitler with Bill Slocum, ‘Babies: Our One Remaining Black Market,’ 91. See also Balcom, ‘Baby-Selling,’ 91. 66 K. Phyllis Burns to Ernest Mitler, 11 May 1953, USCB, 1953–7, 676/7.3.1.3. The new Ontario law was part of larger revision of child welfare law in the province in the works for over a year. ‘Ontario Acts to Prevent Baby Trade,’ Globe and Mail, 4 March 1954, 1. 67 ‘Un commerce répugnant,’ Le Devoir, 17 February 1954, 2; ‘Baby Adoption Agencies Warn against Racketeers.’

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Notes to pages 179–81  297 68 ‘Baby Adoption Agencies Warn against Racketeers’; ‘Police “Buy” Infant with Marked Bills,’ Montreal Star, 13 February 1954, 1. 69 ‘Canadian Seized in Baby Sale Racket,’ New York Times, 13 February 1954, 30. 70 ‘Stolen Baby Recovered from Racket,’ Montreal Star, 16 February 1954, 1; ‘Les deux poupons arrachés depuis vendredi aux trafiquants du marché noir,’ La Presse, 16 February 1954, 2. 71 ‘Baby Ring Used Loopholes of Law,’ The Gazette, 15 February 1954, 21. 72 ‘Send Smuggled Babies Back,’ 1–2. 73 ‘Charge Thousand Quebec Babies Sold,’ Montreal Star, 12 February 1954, 1; ‘Police “Buy” Infant,’ ibid.; ‘Montreal Lawyer Arrested, Doctors Linked to Baby Ring,’ Toronto Daily Star, 12 February 1954, 1. 74 ‘Charge Thousand Quebec Babies Sold.’ 75 On narratives of rescue and kidnap in adoption, see Dubinsky, ‘Babies without Borders,’ 147–8. See also Balcom, ‘Phony Mothers,’ 112. 76 ‘Glazer, Buller to Be Tried on Falsification Charges,’ Montreal Star, 14 May 1954, 10; ‘Charge Thousand Quebec Babies Sold.’ 77 ‘Send Smuggled Babies Back’; ‘Charge Thousand Quebec Babies Sold.’ 78 Despite an extensive search of the Canadian and American media, I found almost no criticisms of the adoptive parents, or suggestions that the children they adopted should be removed from their care. I found only one article that could be interpreted as an anti-Semitic attack on the adopting parents, and this came in an avowedly right-wing and anti-Semitic newspaper. ‘Le marché noir des bébés de filles chrétiennes,’ L’Unité Nationale, March 1954, 6. Montreal columnist Walter O’Hearn criticized adoptive parents for not anticipating the psychological crisis that might face teenagers discovering they were not born to the Jewish faith. ‘Parents in Adoption Racket Clam Up on Facts,’ Montreal Star, 16 February 1954, 16. For a contrasting analysis of media portrayals of parents in a Toronto case, see Phillips, ‘“Financially Irresponsible and Obviously Neurotic,”’ 330–3. 79 Ernest Mitler, quoted in ‘More Arrests Expected in the Black Market Baby Case,’ The Gazette, 13 February 1954, 1; Mitler, quoted in ‘Woman with “Days-Old” Baby for Sale,’ 1. 80 ‘Baby Ring Used Loopholes of Law’; ‘Several City Women Quizzed on Baby Ring,’ The Gazette, 18 February 1954, 10. 81 McKeown, ‘We Bought a Canadian Baby, Part Two.’ 82 Testimony of Ernest Mitler in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Investigation of Juvenile Delinquency, 1953, 62. 83 On Mitler’s crusade, see below and ‘Report of Visit to the New York

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298  Notes to pages 181–3

84 85

86

87 88 89 90 91

92 93

94 95

96

97

98

Regional Office Regarding the Black Market in Babies,’ 17 November 1954, USCB, 1953–7, 674/7.3.1.3. ‘Glazer, Buller to Be Tried on Falsification Charges,’ Montreal Star, 14 May 1954, 10. ‘The Winning Team in Baby Black Market Case,’ Montreal Star, 13 February 1954, 2; ‘Police Check Over Clues in Baby Selling Case,’ ibid., 22 February 1954, 3. ‘Arrest Second Lawyer in Baby Racket Probe,’ Globe and Mail, 15 February 1954, 2; ‘Black Market in Babies Is Revealed’; Montreal Lawyer Is First Arrested,’ Globe and Mail, 13 February 1954, 1. ‘Woman Sought as Key Figure in Baby Case,’ Montreal Star, 15 February 1954, 1. ‘Quatre autre arrestations dans l’affaire du traffic des bébés,’ Le Devoir, 15 February 1954, 1. In addition to Buller and Glazer, three women who worked on the maternity home side of the rings were arrested, but never charged. Ibid. ‘Glazer, Buller to Be Tried on Falsification Charges.’ Similar strategies were used by police and prosecutors in other jurisdictions, as in the ‘Shinder’ black market case in Toronto in 1953. See n. 2, above. ‘Pas de marché noir pour les enfants des crèches,’ La Presse, 19 February 1954, 3. Hill and the presiding judge in the criminal trial accused Filion of libel. ‘Un commerce répugnant,’ Le Devoir, 17 February 1954, 2; ‘Le directeur du “Devoir” accusé de mépris de cour,’ ibid., 20 February 1954, 2. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 18 February 1954, 2206 (J.T. Richard). Canada, House of Commons Debates, 19 February 1954, 2244–5 (Hon. Stuart Garson). See also 26 February 1954, 2480–2 (Hon. Stuart Garson); and ‘Baby Selling Law Delayed by Trial Here,’ The Gazette, 27 February 1954, 16. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 19 February 1954, 2245 (Hon. Stuart Garson); ‘Les lois d’adoption relevant de la juridiction provinciale,’ Le Devoir, 20 February 1954, 1. ‘New Charges in Baby Sale Case Filed,’ Montreal Star, 24 February 1954, 3; ‘Baby Case Probe Shifts to New York,’ ibid., 6 March 1954, 3; ‘Crown Drops Two of Its Charges against Glazer in Baby Case,’ The Gazette, 8 April 1954. Buller’s lawyer argued that the appropriate charge was that of violating a City of Montreal bylaw that penalized giving false information to a registrar with a $40 fine. ‘Glazer, Buller to Be Tried on Falsification Charges.’

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Notes to pages 184–5  299   99 ‘Buller Pleads Guilty, Fined $2,000, 1 Day,’ The Gazette, 12 February 1955; ‘“Cet homme n’a fait que de bien and il demande justice”: Herman Buller et le racket de bébés,’ Le Devoir, 12 February 1955, 2. It is not clear if Buller left the legal profession at this point, but by the 1960s he was living in Toronto and working as a teacher of English literature and creative writing and as a writer, publishing fiction and non-fiction works on the history and politics of Quebec. See CJCA, Clipping collection, ‘Buller, Herman.’ 100 Cohen was well known for taking on publicly unpopular cases and for finding loopholes in the criminal code. CJCA, Clipping collection, ‘Cohen, Joseph.’ 101 ‘Criminal File for the Prosecution of Louis Glazer,’ BANQ, TP12, S2, SS1, SSS1, file 500 (1955). See esp. ‘Depositions of Mrs Theresa Heath [Theresa Bogatta] and Mrs Hilda Birdcage,’ 6 December 1955. 102 ‘Different Faiths Given to Babies,’ Montreal Star, 17 February 1954, 3. 103 ‘More Arrests Expected,’ The Gazette, 13 February 1954, 1. 104 Testimony of Ernest Mitler in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Investigation of Juvenile Delinquency, 1953, 62. 105 Remarks by George Smathers in 81st Congress, 1st sess., Congressional Record 95, part 16 (14 October 1949), 6302–3. On the Slater case, see testimony of Ernest Mitler in Senate Committee of the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955, 8–9; ‘Lawyer Gets Year in Baby Adoptions,’ New York Times, 1 November 1950, 52. 106 HR6506 (1949), 80th Congress, 2nd sess.; HR6533 (1950), 81st Congress, 1st sess.; S1123 (1955), S2281 (1955), 84th Congress, 1st sess.; S3201 (1956), HR9347 (1956), 84th Congress, 2nd sess.; HR687 (1957), S588 (1957), 85th Congress, 1st sess.; HR526 (1959), S720 (1959), 86th Congress, 1st sess.; S624 (1961), 87th Congress, 1st sess.; S654 (1962), 87th Congress, 2nd sess.; S1541 (1963), 88th Congress, 1st sess.; S1541 (1964), HR11915 (1964), 88th Congress, 2nd sess.; S624 (1965), 89th Congress, 1st sess.; HR15260 (1976), 94th Congress, 2nd sess.; HR117 (1977), HR2826 (1977), HR6779 (1977), S1473 (1977), S1498 (1977), 95th Congress, 1st sess.; HR12400 (1978), 95th Congress, 2nd sess.; HR501 (1979), S1237 (1979), 96th Congress, 1st sess. Bills which passed the Senate were: S3021 (1956), 84th Congress, 2nd sess.; S654 (1962), 87th Congress, 2nd sess.; S1541 (1964), 88th Congress, 2nd sess.; S624 (1965), 89th Congress, 1st sess. 107 Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955; Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, November 1955; Senate Committee on the Judiciary,

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300  Notes to pages 185–6 Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, Commercial Child Adoption Practices, 1956; Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings on S. 1451 before a Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 1964; Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Subcommittee on Children and Youth, Baby Selling, and Adoption of Children with Special Needs, 1975; House Committee of the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Sale of Children in Interstate and Foreign Commerce, 1977. See also House Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Law, Immigration and Refugees, Romanian Adoptions, 1991. 108 Testimony of Estes Kefauver in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955, 2–3. 109 Ibid. 110 Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955; Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, November 1955; Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Commercial Child Adoption Practices, 1956. 111 S1123 (1955), 84th Congress, 1st sess.; S2281 (1955), 84th Congress, 1st sess.; S3201 (1956), 84th Congress, 2nd sess.; S588 (1957), 85th Congress, 1st sess.; S720 (1959), 86th Congress, 1st sess.; S624 (1961), 87th Congress, 1st sess.; S654 (1962), 87th Congress, 2nd sess.; S1541 (1963), 88th Congress, 1st sess. On Kefauver’s lingering influence, see remarks by Senator Dodd, 88th Congress, 2nd sess., Congressional Record 110, part 17 (25 September 1964), 22930. 112 Testimony of Ernest Mitler in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955, 18. 113 Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955, 11. 114 Ibid. 115 Tollett, Babies for Sale, 109–25; Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie, 164–86. 116 For example, S1123 (1955) and S2281 (1955), repr. in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955, 6–8; S3021, repr. in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Commercial Child Adoption Practices, 1956, 2–4. 117 Testimony of Ernest Mitler in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Commercial Child Adoption Practices, 1956, 9–10.

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Notes to pages 187–90  301 118 Statement of Senator Kefauver in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955, 4–5. 119 The ‘Warrens’ were one of the families Bogatta interviewed in New York. This case led to one of Buller’s guilty pleas. Testimony of Theresa (Bogatta) Heath, in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955, 57–63. 120 Moyneur was a pseudonym for Sam Bodnoff. Testimony of Eugene Moyneur in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955, 51–7. See also Bodnoff as told to McKeown, ‘I Smuggle Babies across the Border,’ 2–4; and Bodnoff as told to McKeown ‘Black Market Babies,’ 12–14, 32. 121 In Boyd’s telling, the rejected, abandoned first child and the suffering birth mother functioned as props to support the central narrative of rescue and risk. Boyd testified anonymously and behind a screen. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Interstate Adoption Practices, July 1955, 84–9. 122 Ibid., 89–90. 123 ‘Baby Sale Curb Urged: Kefauver Group to Offer Bill to Check Interstate Deals,’ New York Times, 16 November 1955, 31. 124 S3021, repr. in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Commercial Child Adoption Practices, 1956, 3. 125 Ibid. 126 Remarks by Senator Kefauver in 84th Congress, 2nd sess., Congressional Record 103, part 1 (23 January 1956), 1016; remarks by Senator Kefauver in 84th Congress, 2nd sess., ibid., part 2, 26 July 1956, 14709. 127 O’Grady was also fighting a last-ditch battle over the relative status of trained social work professionals vs priests and other untrained social welfare workers. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Commercial Child Welfare Practices, 1956, 56–70. 128 For a similar argument against a federal black market law (objecting to a federal government active in the private space of the family) see Grove, ‘Independent Adoptions,’ 116–36. 129 Testimony of Florence Brown in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Commercial Child Adoption Practices, 1956, 128–30. See also testimony from Elizabeth Townsend, Children’s Bureau of Delaware (131–2); Kathryn Pennypacker, Department of Public Welfare of Delaware (132); and John Theban, Child Welfare League of America (133–4). 130 Testimony of Martha Eliot in Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcom-

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302  Notes to pages 191–3 mittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Commercial Adoption Practices, 1956, 100. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid., 101–7. Interstate compacts are discussed in chap. 6. 133 Oettinger’s 1964 testimony as discussed in Grove, ‘Independent Adoptions,’ 127. 134 See S1541 as printed in 89th Congress, 1st sess., Congressional Record 110, part 17 (25 September 1964), 22930–1. 135 Remarks by Senator Kefauver in 87th Congress, 1st sess., Congressional Record 107, part 2 (30 January 1961), 1378; remarks by Senator Kefauver in 88th Congress, 1st sess., Congressional Record 109, part 7 (15 May 1963), 8630. 136 Testimony of Joseph Reid in Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Subcommittee on Children and Youth, Baby Selling, and Adoption of Children with Special Needs, 1975, 19–20. 137 Few politicians would go on record opposing anti-black-market legislation, lest they be seen as somehow condoning the sale of babies. The specific concerns of legislators (and evidence of background opposition) can be read through the congressional speeches of the legislation’s supporters, and through the trail of amendments and refinements to the legislation. See statements already cited and 85th Congress, 1st sess., Congressional Record 103, part 1 (14 January 1957), 482–3; 87th Congress, 2nd sess., Congressional Record 108, part 15 (18 September 1962), 19769–70; 88th Congress, 1st sess., Congressional Record 109, part 7 (15 May 1963), 8632–3; 89th Congress, 1st sess., Congressional Record 110, part 17 (25 September 1964), 22931; 89th Congress, 2nd sess., Congressional Record 111, part 1 (19 January 1965), 906–8, 1294–5; 89th Congress, 2nd sess., Congressional Record 111, part 4 (22 March 1965), 5517–20. 138 Interview with Mitler, as discussed in Tollett, Babies for Sale, 124–5. In the mid to late 1970s, Representative Henry Hyde repeatedly backed black market legislation in the House, but by this time congressional attention with respect to child welfare and adoption had turned in a decidedly different direction. Bills sponsored by Hyde included HR15260 (1976), 94th Congress, 1st sess.; HR117 (1977), 95th Congress, 1st sess.; HR2826 (1977), 95th Congress, 1st sess.; HR6779 (1977), 95th Congress, 1st sess.; HR501 (1977), 95th Congress, 1st sess. See remarks by Henry Hyde, 94th Congress, 2nd sess., Congressional Record 122, part 22 (25 August 1976), 27786–7. 139 In 1958–9, Mitler worked for the New York State Legislative Committee

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Notes to pages 193–7  303 on Matrimonial and Family Law studying the domestic and international black market in New York. In 1960, he was employed by the Child Welfare League of America for a study of the adoption black market in California. In 1961, he was hired by the attorney general of Nevada to study the black market in that state. He later completed a PhD at Oxford, and spent the rest of his career as a professor of law at Westminster University in Fulton, Missouri. 140 Tollett, Babies for Sale, 125. 141 Extensive black market operations across the United States are detailed in Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Subcommittee on Children and Youth, Baby Selling, 1975; and House Committee of the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Sale of Children in Interstate and Foreign Commerce, 1977. 142 New York, Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Matrimonial and Family Law, 1959, 42. 143 Balcom, ‘Baby-Selling,’ 93. Connecticut, Delaware, and Massachusetts are always named as states prohibiting independent placements, while Colorado, Minnesota, and North Dakota appear on some lists but not on others. The reason for this discrepancy is that adoption laws, their exceptions, and their definitions of what constitutes a placement or assistance in a placement can be very complex. See Evan B. Donaldson Institute, ‘Private Domestic Adoption Facts.’ Chapter 6: Promoting and Controlling Cross-Border Adoption    1 Hunt, Obstacles to Interstate Adoption, 1. Parts of this chapter are excerpted from Balcom, ‘The Logic of Exchange.’    2 ‘Essential Considerations in Establishing a State Adoption Index,’ May 1956, CWLA, SW55.1/12/2.    3 Hunt, Obstacles to Interstate Adoption, 2.    4 Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 29–50, 148–53; Solinger, ‘Race and Value,’ 343–63.    5 ‘Essential Considerations in Establishing a State Adoption Index,’ May 1956, CWLA, SW55.1/12/2; Schapiro, A Study of Adoption Practice, 3: 8, 7.    6 ‘Minutes of the Meeting of the Child Welfare Directors (continued),’ 13 June 1952, CCSD, 183/8; Canadian Welfare Council (CWC), Committee on Adoption, Report of the Committee on Adoption, 1950, 7; CWC, Family and Child Welfare Division, Report of the Committee on Adoption, 1955, 8.

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304  Notes to pages 197–200   7 Dubinsky, Babies without Borders, 62.   8 Herman, ‘The Paradoxical Rationalization,’ 362; Schapiro, A Study of Adoption Practice, 3: 6–7.   9 Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 158–200; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 109–34, 150–74, 179–210; Dubinsky, Babies without Borders, 57–92. 10 Dubinsky, ‘“We Adopted a Negro,”’ 268–88. 11 Dubinksy, ‘Babies without Borders,’ 142–3. 12 Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 159. 13 Strong-Boag, ‘Today’s Child,’ 674. 14 Weltha Kelley, ‘Adoption of Older Children and Children with Special Needs,’ unpublished paper delivered at the CWLA National Conference on Adoption, 1955, quoted in Schapiro, A Study of Adoption Practice, 3: 42. 15 ‘Adoption Clearance Service,’ Child Welfare (June 1953), 11. 16 Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 172–5; Dubinsky, ‘“We Adopted a Negro.”’ See also Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 129–31; and Ward, The Adoption of Native Canadian Children, 4. 17 On the child adoption campaign in Delineator magazine, see Berebitsky, ‘“To Raise as Your Own,”’ 4–26. 18 Aitken, ‘Criteria of Adoption in Ontario,’ 90–100; ‘Ontario Will Advertise Children for Adoption,’ New York Times, 14 April 1959, 3. 19 The flurry of US interest led to a brief renewal of CWC–USCB correspondence, disconnected from earlier joint efforts. ‘Adoption Statistics on Classified Advertising from May 1959 – February 1962,’ 4 May 1962, CCSD, 183/12; ‘Adoption of Canadian Children,’ 29 June 1959, and ‘Canadian–US Adoptions,’ 28 October 1960, USCB, 1958–62, 884/7.3.1.3. 20 Strong-Boag, ‘Today’s Child.’ 21 Ward, The Adoption of Native Canadian Children, 8–9. Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 152–3. 22 By the 1950s, the USCB was more likely to fund adoption research by other bodies (like the CWLA) than to engage in its own research. On the CWLA’s adoption initiatives, see Herman, ‘The Paradoxical Rationalization,’ 347, 354–64; and CWLA, Standards for Adoption Service (1958). 23 Felten, ‘Adoption Resource Exchanges,’ 32. 24 ‘Guide for Establishing and Operating an Adoption Resource Exchange,’ January 1957, 1, CWLA, SW55/18/2. 25 Swan, ‘Adoption Exchange in New York,’ 22–5; ‘Adoption Clearance Service in Ontario,’ 19. 26 ‘A Brief Report of the Meeting on a National Index,’ 2 June 1953, CWLA, SW55/18/2.

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Notes to pages 200–4  305 27 Joseph Reid to State Departments of Public Welfare, 1955, CWLA, SW55/18/2; ‘Guide for Establishing and Operating an Adoption Resource Exchange,’ January 1957, 1, CWLA, SW55/18/2. 28 ‘Minutes of the Directors of Child Welfare,’ 16–17 June 1956, CCSD, 183/11. 29 ‘Minutes of the Interprovincial Conference of Directors of Child Welfare,’ 12–13 June 1952, CCSD, 60/491; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 131. 30 ‘Minutes of the Interprovincial Conference of Directors of Child Welfare,’ 1955, CCSD, 183/10; ‘Minutes,’ 1956, CCSD, 183/11; ‘Minutes,’ 1961, CCSD, 183/16; ‘Minutes,’ 1962, CCSD, 183/17; ‘Minutes,’ 1963, CCSD, 183/19; ‘Minutes,’ 1964, CCSD, 184/1; ‘Minutes,’ 1965, CCSD, 184/2. 31 ‘Minutes,’ 1952, CCSD, 183/8; Alberta, Patterson, Royal Commission on Adoption in Alberta, 42; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 188–9. 32 In some states and provinces, the state/provincial department of public welfare was the only child-placing agency, and hence a de facto exchange existed. See Felten’s lists in CWLA, SW55, 18/2–4. 33 Herman, ‘The Paradoxical Rationalization’; Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 74. 34 ‘Essential Considerations in Establishing a State Adoption Index,’ May 1956, CWLA, SW55.1/12/2; Swan, ‘Adoption Exchange’; Herman, ‘The Paradoxical Rationalization,’ 362. 35 Schapiro, A Study of Adoption Practice, 2: 42; ‘Subject Report on Index Project,’ 17 August 1956, 3, CWLA, SW55/18/2; Felten, ‘Adoption Resource Exchanges,’ 32. 36 Lansdowne Hamilton, ‘The Concept of Non-adoptability,’ 26. 37 Arlene Nash, ‘Unusual Adoptions – Interstate,’ 1973, 30, CWLA, SW55/23. 38 ‘A Brief Report of the Meeting on a National Index,’ 2 June 1953, CWLA, SW55/18/2. 39 Felten, ‘Adoption Resource Exchanges,’ 32–3; Nash, ‘Unusual Adoptions.’ 40 Felten, ‘The Use of Adoption Resource Exchanges,’ 27. 41 Lyslo, ‘Adoption for American Indian Children,’ 32. The IAP is considered in more detail in Balcom, ‘The Logic of Exchange.’ 42 Fanshel, Far from the Reservation, 24. 43 Lyslo, ‘The Indian Adoption Project,’ 12. 44 Lyslo, ‘Background Information on the Indian Adoption Project,’ 33; Lyslo, ‘Indian Adoption Project – 1958–67,’ CWLA, SW55, 16/2. 45 The top releasing states were Arizona (112), South Dakota (104), Wisconsin (48), Washington (21), Minnesota (19), and California (17). Minnesota and California were the only states that both relinquished and received children through IAP. Lyslo, ‘Background Information,’ 40, 34–5. 46 Lyslo, ‘Indian Adoption Project – 1958–67.’

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306  Notes to pages 204–9 47 Lyslo, ‘Adoptive Placement of American Indian Children,’ 4. 48 Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 135–73; Sinclair, ‘Identity Lost and Found,’ 68–79; Unger, ‘The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.’ 49 Unger, The Destruction of American Indian Families, iii–iv; Blanchard, ‘The Question of Best Interest,’ 57–60; Turner Strong, ‘To Forget Their Tongue,’ 480–1. 50 Fanshel, Far from the Reservation, 21. 51 Lyslo, ‘Indian Adoption Project – 1958–67.’ 52 Strong-Boag, ‘Today’s Child,’ 679; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 131. 53 Fanshel, Far from the Reservation, 122, 166–7. 54 Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 159–60. 55 Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 128. 56 Joseph Reid to Philleo Nash, 19 October 1963, CWLA, SW55/17. 57 Lyslo, ‘Background Information,’ 42–3; Lyslo, ‘Adoptive Placement of American Indian,’ 4. 58 Ward, The Adoption of Native Canadian Children, 5–6. 59 Lyslo, ‘1966 Year End Summary of the Indian Adoption Project,’ 15 March 1967, CWLA, SW55/17/4. 60 ‘Adoption Service,’ 204; A.D. Ross to George Caldwell, 19 December 1967, CCSD, 19/ARENA. 61 ‘A Proposal of the Child Welfare League of America to Establish a National Adoption Resource Exchange,’ 1966, CWLA, SW55/18/3. 62 Ibid. 63 Responses to Swan in CCSD, 198/ARENA 1967–8. 64 See CCSD, 198/ARENA/1967–8. 65 ‘Unwanted Negro Children Shipped Abroad for Adoption, Agencies say,’ Globe and Mail, 3 October 1967, 1; ‘Babies for Export,’ ibid., 3 October 1967, 6; ‘RC Director Unrepentant on Adoptions,’ ibid., 6 October 1967, 1. 66 ‘Ontario Catholic Babies Sent Abroad,’ Toronto Daily Star, 2 October 1967, 1; ‘A Childless Couple’s Hopeless Quest for a Colored Boy,’ Toronto Telegram, 3 October 1967, 7; ‘CAS Hit Back on Bay Exports,’ ibid., 3 October 1967, 27; ‘Adoptions: Church vs. State,’ Toronto Daily Star, 3 October 1967, 6. 67 ‘Directors of Child Welfare Meeting, Edmonton, 24–28 June 1968’; ‘Proposed Canadian Adoption Exchange,’ 22 November 1968, CCSD, 184 / Directors of Child Welfare Meetings, 1968. 68 ‘Notes on a Staff Meeting of the Division of Field Operations, March 25–6, 1970,’ CWLA, SW55/18/4. 69 ARENA News 30 (February 1973), 2; ARENA News 35 (March 1974), 1–2. Before 1973, ARENA included various transracial combinations when it listed the racial heritage of the children. From 1973, children were placed

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Notes to pages 209–15  307

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84

85 86 87

88

in a singular category. I have changed the terms used for the racial categories to reflect more contemporary usage and to underline that some of the children came from natal communities in Canada. ARENA News 5 (November 1969), 1. ARENA News 27 (August 1972), 2. ARENA News 5 (November 1969), 1. ARENA News 17 (March 1971), 4–5. ARENA News 27 (August 1972), 2. ARENA News 9 (November 1969); CWLA, ‘1976 ARENA Annual Report,’ 2, CWLA, SW55.1/7/ARENA Annual Reports. ‘Interview at ARENA,’ 10 December 1968, CCSD, 198/ARENA. ARENA News 20 (August 1971). Ward, The Adoption of Native Canadian Children, 9. Study cited in Dubinsky, Babies without Borders, 156 n. 95. ‘The Operation of the Exchange and Its Use by Agencies,’ 1968, CCSD, 198/ARENA. Florestano, ‘Past and Present Utilization of Interstate Compacts,’ 14. The legal foundation for the compact in the US federation is found in article 1, section 10 of the US Constitution, which states: ‘No State shall, without the Consent of Congress … enter into any Agreement or Compact with another state, or with a foreign power.’ This article implies that states can enter into such agreement with the consent of Congress or (as the practice has developed) when Congress does not intervene to disapprove a compact. Florestano, ‘Past and Present Utilization of Interstate Compacts,’ 14–15. See also Council of State Governments, ‘Understanding Interstate Compacts.’ Zimmerman and Wendell, The Interstate Compact since 1925, 1–29; Barton, Interstate Compacts in the Political Process, 3–7. Florestano, ‘Past and Present Utilization of Interstate Compacts,’ 18. As of 2007, there were 200 interstate compacts in place. Council of State Governments, ‘Understanding Interstate Compacts.’ ‘Activities of the Committee on Interstate Problems, 1931–1939,’ APWA, 5/17. New York, Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Interstate Co-operation, 1938 (JCLIC Annual Report), 31. Council of State Governments, Interstate Compacts 1783–1966, xi. On reciprocal agreements, see ‘Reciprocal Agreements in the Eastern States,’ September 1939, APWA, 5/17. Interstate compacts often replaced reciprocal agreements connecting two states. JCLIC Annual Report, 1961, 207.

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308  Notes to pages 215–18   89 JLCIC Annual Report, 1938, 219–23.   90 See chap. 5, n. 14; New York, Report of the Special Committee on Social Welfare and Relief of the Joint Legislative Committee on Interstate Co-operation, 1948, 22–33 and 1949, 48–60.   91 ‘Resolutions adopted by the Regional Conference on Social Welfare and Relief Problems,’ 7–8 January 1944, NYSA, Papers of Governor Dewey, 1st term, reel 142.   92 ‘Regional Conference on Social Welfare, called by the Joint Committee on Interstate Cooperation and the Council of State Governments,’ 19–20 August 1948, NYSA library.   93 See chap. 3, nn. 105–15.   94 Resume: Meeting of the Regional Welfare Continuing Committee on Social Welfare, April 22 1954, NYSA library; Resume: Meeting of the Regional Welfare Continuing Committee on Social Welfare, January 19, 1955, 2, NYSA library. JLCIC Annual Report, 1953, 194; JLCIC Annual Report, 1954, 195–6.   95 R.A. Howe, ‘Adoption Practice, Issues, and Laws, 1958–1983,’ 173–89. See also Hollinger, ‘Uniform Adoption Act of 1994,’ 653–6. On the difference between a uniform act and a model act, see Howe, ‘Adoption Practice, Issues and Laws,’ 194 n. 80.   96 ‘Minutes of Meeting of the Directors of Child Welfare,’ 16–17 June 1956, CCSD, 183/11; USCB, Legislative Guides for the Termination of Parental Rights. Since the mid-1970s, the USCB has drafted or commissioned a series of model adoption acts designed to promote the adoption of specialneeds children, some of which were mandated by Congress. See Howe, ‘Adoption Practices, Issues and Laws,’ 188–95.   97 New York, Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Matrimonial and Family Law, 1959 (JLCMFL Annual Report), 45, 47.   98 Governor Rockefeller, quoted in Elisha T. Barrett to Robert McCrate, 25 March 1960, and ‘Legislative Memorandum to Accompany Bill Enacting Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children,’ NYSA, LBJ, L. 1960, C. 708.   99 Hagen, ‘The Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children,’ 12. 100 ‘Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children,’ NYSA, LBJ, L. 1960, C. 708. 101 Expressions of support from the JLCIC, the Department of Social Welfare, and the Bar Association of New York City can be seen in the bill jacket. The most developed opposition came from the New York Catholic Welfare Committee, which was concerned that the law would inject state authority into the existing interstate practices of Catholic adoption agencies. The Catholic committee was also upset that the compact did not

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Notes to pages 218–23  309 contain language protecting religious heritage in adoption. Charles Tobin to Robert McCrate, 19 April 1960, ibid. 102 JLCIC Annual Report, 1960, 211. 103 Hagen, ‘Interstate Compact,’ 14. See also JLCIC Annual Report, 1960, 211; JLCMFL Annual Report, 1960; and Association of the Bar of the City of New York to Robert McCrate, 28 March 1960, NYSA, LBJ, L. 1960, C. 708. 104 Hagen, ‘Interstate Compact,’ 14, 11; ‘Interstate Placement Laws,’ February 1948, CWP, 31/Correspondence April–May 1948. See also JLCMFL Annual Report, 1959, 47. 105 JLCIC Annual Report, 1960, 214; Hagen, ‘Interstate Compact,’ 11. 106 Hagen, ‘Interstate Compact,’ 11. On Whitton’s vision, see chap. 1. 107 Hagen, ‘Interstate Compact,’ 11. 108 Ibid., 13. 109 JLCIC Annual Report, 1964, 116; JLCMFL Annual Report, 1963, 303; Council of State Governments, Interstate Compacts 1783–1966. 110 Hunt, Obstacles to Interstate Adoption, 24, 7. 111 Ibid., 2. 112 Ibid., 22–4. 113 Ibid., 1, 2, 6. 114 Boyd, ‘Immigration Policies and Trends,’ 86, 98–100; ‘Interview at ARENA,’ 10 December 1968, CCSD, 198/ARENA 1967–8. 115 Hunt, Obstacles to Interstate Adoption, 12; chap. 1, n. 3. 116 Hunt, Obstacles to Interstate Adoption, 13. This accusation seems out of step, however, with New Jersey’s approach to interstate adoption at the Regional Continuing Committee in the 1940s. See n. 92. 117 New Jersey did not join until 1990. Council of State Governments, Interstate Compacts and Agencies 1998, 31. 118 Hunt, Obstacles to Interstate Adoption, 16, 19. 119 Ibid., 21. 120 Ibid., 24. 121 Fournier and Crey, as cited in Sinclair, ‘Identity Lost and Found,’ 66. 122 Unger, ‘The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978,’ 185–9. On child placement protests and the Native self-determination movement, see Mannes, ‘Factors and Events Leading to the Passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act,’ 264–70; Johnson, ‘The State and the American Indian,’ 197–214; Sinclair, ‘Identity Lost and Found,’ 67–8. 123 US Congress, Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, Hearings on the Indian Child Welfare Program, 8–9 April 1974. 124 Unger, ‘Indian Child Welfare,’ 1–7.

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310  Notes to pages 223–5 125 National Association of Black Social Workers, ‘Position Paper Developed from Workshops Concerning Transracial Adoption,’ 649. The history of the statement and its link to a wider vision of family preservation is traced in National Association of Black Social Workers, ‘Preserving Families of African Ancestry.’ 126 Statistics from Rita Simon, ‘Transracial and Intercountry Adoption,’ 632. 127 For example, ‘Seeing beyond Race in Canadian Adoptions,’ Globe and Mail, 11 October 2005, A18. On the ‘palpable hostility’ towards the NABSW statement, see Laura Briggs, ‘Communities Resisting Transracial Adoption,’ 2. 128 Briggs, ‘Communities Resisting Transracial Adoption,’ 2. 129 Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 117. Elizabeth Bartholet argues that the NABSW statement was influential because it offered professional social workers who were reluctant converts to transracial placement an excuse to revert to their earlier preference for in-race placements. See Bartholet discussed in Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 176–7. 130 For a critique of the NABSW statement and of subsequent race-matching policies, see Bartholet, ‘Where Do Black Children Belong?’ 1174–82. 131 Chupik-Hall, ‘Good Families Do Not Just Happen’; Timson, ‘Four Decades of Child Welfare Services to Native Indians in Ontario.’ 132 As cited in Dubinsky, ‘Babies without Borders,’ 156 n. 96. See also Sinclair, ‘Identity Lost and Found,’ 79 n. 2. 133 Strong-Boag, ‘Today’s Child,’ 690–1; Strong-Boag, ‘Interrupted Relations,’ 10–11; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 150–2; Ward, The Adoption of Native Canadian Children, 8–11. 134 Strong-Boag, ‘Interrupted Relations,’ 24–6; Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 150–1, 165; Ward, The Adoption of Native Canadian Children, 11–14. 135 Kimelman’s report was particularly influential. British Columbia, Berger, Royal Commission on Family and Children’s Law in British Columbia; Manitoba, Kimelman, No Quiet Place; Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, vol. 3, Gathering Strength; Johnson, Aboriginal Children and the Child Welfare System. 136 Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 163–72; Sinclair, ‘Identity Lost and Found,’ 67–8. 137 Strong-Boag, Finding Families, table 6.1 (151). The statistics on First Nations adoptions do not include non-status First Nations adopters. See also Ward, The Adoption of Canadian Native Children, 15–24, 39. Sinclair notes there are many unresolved issues, including the prevalence of long-term foster care for children removed from parents in the ‘millennium scoop.’ Sinclair, ‘Identity Lost and Found.’

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Notes to pages 225–9  311 138 Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 166–8. 139 Lyslo, ‘Background Information on the Indian Adoption Project,’ 32. 140 Lyslo, ‘Adoption for American Indian Children,’ 32. For a more detailed discussion of race, culture, and tribal heritage in IAP, see Balcom, ‘The Logic of Exchange.’ 141 Castañeda, ‘Incorporating the Transnational Adoptee,’ 283. 142 Arlene Nash, ‘Unusual Adoptions – Interstate,’ 1973, 25–6, CWLA, SW55/23. 143 ‘CWLA Standards on Transracial Adoptions,’ CWLA, SW55/16/3. 144 Ibid. 145 The percentage of children placed with African American families in 1972 does not appear in the annual report, though the 1973 figures are described as an improvement. ARENA News 35 (March 1974); 30 (February 1973). 146 Arlene Nash to Executive Director and Members of the Board of Directors, 11 May 1973, CWLA, SW55/18/4; ‘Placement of Minority Children in Homes of Their Own Racial and Ethnic Backgrounds,’ 21 December 1973, CWLA, SW55.1/7/ARENA. 147 University of Denver, Center for Social Research and Development, Indian Child Welfare, 277. 148 ARENA News 34 (November 1973). 149 See Stolley, ‘Statistics on Adoption in the United States,’ 26–42; Bonham, ‘Who Adopts,’ 295–306; and Hepworth, Foster Care and Adoption in Canada, 135. 150 Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 239. 151 Much of the impetus for the National Adoption Desk came from the increasing involvement of Canadians as adopting parents in international adoption. In 2000, the National Adoption Desk was folded into the Intercountry Adoption Service at Health and Human Resources Canada. ‘Minutes of Adoption Mini Conference,’ DHW, 28 January 1977, 3539/4122-12, part 2. 152 ‘Statement Presented to the Select Committee on Indian Affairs, US Senate,’ 10 August 1977, CWLA, SW55/22 / Minorities Project – ICWA. Other opposition to ICWA is discussed in Unger, ‘Indian Child Welfare Act.’ 153 These developments were a response to federal mandates in PL 95-266, the 1978 Adoption Opportunities Act. National Adoption Information Exchange System, Final Report to the Children’s Bureau, September 1982, CWLA, SW 55.1/10 / NAIES Reports; Balcom, ‘Logic of Exchange,’ 60 n. 46.

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312  Notes to pages 230–6 154 US Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Bureau, ‘Adopt US Kids.’ 155 National Association of Black Social Workers, ‘Adoption Exchange.’ 156 Association of Administrators of the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children, ‘Interstate Compact for the Placement of Children.’ 157 Slaughter, Indian Child Welfare; Kreisher, ‘Coming Home’; First Nations Orphan Association, ‘Welcome to the First Nations Orphan Association Website.’ 158 Dubinsky, Babies without Borders, 79. 159 Bilchik, ‘Working Together to Strengthen Supports.’ 160 Sinclair is highly critical of the past and present of child welfare for Aboriginal children in Canada, but she insists that there are more stories to tell from adoptees’ lives. Sinclair, ‘Identity Lost and Found,’ 78. On a similar point, see Dubinksy, Babies without Borders, 86–8. 161 Hollinger, ‘The Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA),’ 408–13; Melosh, Strangers and Kin, 177–82; Pine, ‘Child Welfare Reform and the Political Process,’ 340–6. 162 The links between the adoption legislation of the 1990s, welfare reform, and attacks on poor women of colour are explored in Solinger, Beggars and Choosers, and Roberts, Killing the Black Body. 163 See US Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Bureau, Interjurisdictional Placements of Children in the Child Welfare System. Conclusion: ‘A “No Man’s Land” of Jurisdiction’    1 Declaration of Interdependence of the Governments within the United States of America in Common Council January 22, 1937, repr. in JLCIC, 1938, 29–30.    2 Swanson, State/Provincial Interaction; Malcomson, ‘Province–State Legislative Relations,’ 10–12; Rutan, ‘Legislative Interaction of a Canadian Province and an American State’; Irwin, ‘American States and Canadian Provinces: Growing Ties,’ 118–24. See also Duckacek, ‘International Competence of Subnational Governments,’ 11–28.    3 Key contributions to the literature are collected in Koven and Michel, eds, Mothers of a New World; and Wikander et al., eds, Protecting Women. See also Commachio, Nations Are Built of Babies; and Schnell, ‘Female Separatism and Institution-Building,’ 14–40.    4 Forbes and Weiss Fagan, ‘Unaccompanied Refugee Children,’ 3–36; Choy, ‘Institutionalizing International Adoption,’ 25–42.    5 Strong-Boag, however, includes First Nations’ adoption of war captives, as well the influx of home children and evacuees, and the rising incidence

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Notes to pages 236–40  313

  6   7   8

  9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21 22 23

of Canadian adoptions to the United States in her history of intercountry adoption in Canada. Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 174–210. See also Brookfield, ‘Maverick Mothers,’ 307–30. Boyd, ‘Immigration Policies and Trends,’ 98–100. Oh, ‘Into the Arms of America’; Choy, ‘Institutionalizing International Adoption,’ 25–42. United Nations, Technical Assistance Office, European Seminar on Intercountry Adoption; Hague Conference on Private International Law, ‘Convention on Protection of Children.’ Pfund, ‘Intercountry Adoption: The 1993 Hague Convention,’ 53–5. Carlson, ‘The Emerging Law of Intercountry Adoption,’ 6–8. See Carlson’s comparison of the convention wording to the 1987 UN Declaration on Social and Legal Principles Relating to the Protection and Welfare of Children and the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Hague Conference, ‘Hague Convention on Protection of Children.’ Pfund, ‘Intercountry Adoption,’ 57. McKinney, ‘International Adoption and the Hague Convention,’ 363–70. On the language around commercialization and child trafficking, see Kennard, ‘Curtailing the Sale and Trafficking of Children,’ 623–49. Dickens, ‘Social Policy Approaches to Intercountry Adoption,’ 601. See also E.J. Graff, ‘The Baby Business,’ 3. Hague Conference, ‘Hague Convention on Protection of Children.’ Daniel, ‘Intercountry Adoption.’ There has been little scholarly attention given to the Canadian implementation process, but see Intercountry Adoption Services, ‘International Adoption Policy Research Roundtable’; and Worontynec, Child Interrupted. Maskew, ‘The Failure of Promise,’ 487–8. Pfund, ‘Intercountry Adoption,’ 66–8. These issues are described in greatest detail in law-review articles parsing various elements of US rules and the implementation process. See, for example, Maskew, ‘The Failure of Promise,’ 487–512; Hamilton, ‘Privatizing International Humanitarian Treaty Implementation,’ 1053–73; and Croft, ‘The Ill-Effects of a United States Ratification,’ 623–53. United States, Federal Register, part II, 22 CFR, parts 96–8; part II, 8 CFR, parts 103, 104, 213a, 4 October 2007. See esp. 22 CFR 96, II A, 8065. Hamilton, ‘Privatizing International Humanitarian Treaty Implementation,’ 1063–7. Maskew, ‘The Failure of Promise,’ 487–512; Croft, ‘The Ill-Effects of a United States Ratification,’ 623–53. Reviewing both sides, see Estin, ‘Families across Borders,’ 80–9.

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314  Notes to pages 240–2 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33

34 35

Bartholet, ‘International Adoption,’ 151–203, esp. 154. Smolin, ‘Child Laundering and the Hague Convention,’ 3–12. Hague Conference, ‘Hague Convention on Protection of Children.’ Selman, ‘The Rise and Fall of Intercountry Adoption,’ 575–6; Smolin, ‘Child Laundering and the Hague Convention,’ 1. Smolin, ‘Child Laundering and the Hague Convention,’ 13–24; Selman, ‘The Rise and Fall of Intercountry Adoption,’ 578–91. Strong-Boag, Finding Families, table 7.6 (201); Adoption Council of Canada, ‘2008 International Adoption Statistics.’ Hague Conference on Private International Law, Permanent Bureau, ‘Annual Adoption Statistics Forms, United States, 2005–2009.’ Ativan, ‘Protecting Our Children or Our Pride,’ 499; Pertman, Adoption Nation, 68; Stolley, ‘US-Born Children Adopted by Non-US Parents,’ 663–4. Selman’s research is based on incoming adoptions reported by thirteen receiving states; Peter Selman, email messages to the author, 2 June and 16 December 2010. See also Selman, ‘Recent Trends in Intercountry Adoption.’ Dawn Davenport, ‘Born in America, Adopted Abroad,’ Christian Science Monitor, 27 October 2004, 11; Jane Armstrong, ‘A Canadian Haven for Black US Babies,’ Globe and Mail, 1 October 2005, A7. Balcom and Dubinsky challenge the smooth narrative of US children rescued from racism in Canadian adoptions in ‘Babies across Borders,’ Globe and Mail, 13 October 2005, A21. Jane Armstrong, ‘A Canadian Haven for Black US Babies,’ Globe and Mail, 1 October 2005, A7. US adoptions, while expensive, appeal to Canadian parents because the process is very quick and reliable, and the children are very young and generally healthy when placed. Birth parents and adoptive parents also appreciate the chance for an open adoption, an option that has been rare in other intercountry placements. Avitan, ‘Protecting Our Children or Our Pride,’ 499–506. Pfund, ‘Intercountry Adoption: The 1993 Hague Convention,’ 73; Carlson, ‘The Emerging Law of Intercountry Adoption,’ 287–91. The key provisions are at US, Federal Register, part II, CFR 96.54 and 97.3 (c), 15 February 2006, along with section 303 (b) of the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000. Avitan, ‘Protecting Our Children or Our Pride,’ 504–9. In March 2009, the State Department tried to clarify the ‘birth parent exception’ in the outgoing regulations by noting that the ‘reasonable efforts’ standard does not apply when ‘only the birth parents’ select specific adoptive families. Although the new explanation stresses that ‘only birth parents can identify the specific prospective adoptive parent(s),’ adoption agencies may still provide ‘access to information on prospective adoptive

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Notes to pages 242–5  315

36 37

38

39

40 41

42 43

44 45 46

parents.’ This appears to be a very wide interpretation of the birth parent exception that hollows out much of the reasonable-standards test. US Department of State, ‘Outgoing Cases.’ US Department of State, Office of Children’s Services, Intercountry Adoption Annual Report FY 2008, 19, and FY 2009, 17. Cases initiated before 1 April 2008 would not fall under the US Hague rules, and thus would not be become part of the official US count. This conclusion reflects ongoing discussions between researchers at the Intercountry Adoption Summit hosted by the University of Waterloo in September 2010, as prompted by Selman, ‘Recent Trends in Intercountry Adoption.’ Sunrise Adoption, ‘United States’; Canada Adopts, ‘International Adoption: US’; Christian Adoption Services, ‘Adopting from the United States.’ As noted below, some agencies have since modified their websites again to indicate a more open process. There were also modest increases in the number of children adopted from China (451 vs 431), Vietnam (159/111), and Russia (121/97) to offset decreases from other countries such as Ethiopia, Haiti, South Korea, and the Philippines. Hilborn, ‘Canadians Adopted 2122 Children from Abroad in 2009.’ Selman, ‘The Rise and Fall of Intercountry Adoption.’ Changes in the wording of websites are difficult to document, since old versions disappear with updates. For a current positive message (though couched in the warning that adoptions must take place under the Hague guidelines), see Sunrise Adoption, ‘United States.’ Smolin, ‘Child Laundering and the Hague Convention,’ 23. Some countries (like South Korea, and China before 2005) adopted Hague-like controls from outside the system. The US system, which has led to separate regulatory tracks for Hague and non-Hague adoptions, is critiqued in Graff, ‘The Baby Business.’ Carlson, ‘The Emerging Law of Intercountry Adoptions,’ 291. Canada Adopts, ‘International Adoption: U.S.’ Carlson, ‘The Emerging Law,’ 268; Craig, ‘Debating the Hague Convention,’ 2.

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Bibliography

Major Archival Collections American Public Welfare Association Records, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Bibliothèque et Archives nationales de Québec British Columbia, Child Welfare Division, Archives of British Columbia Canada, Department of External Affairs Papers, Library and Archives of Canada Canada, Department of Health and Welfare Papers, Library and Archives of Canada Canada, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, Library and Archives of Canada Canadian Council on Social Development, Canadian Welfare Council Papers, Library and Archives of Canada Child Welfare League of America Papers, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Charlotte Whitton Papers, Library and Archives of Canada Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, Canadian Jewish Congress Archives International Social Service Records, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Katharine Lenroot Papers, Columbia University Special Collections New York State, Legislative Bill Jackets Collection, State Archives and Records Administration Private archive of the Friends and Survivors of the Ideal Maternity Home, in author’s possession Public Archives of Nova Scotia R. MacGregor Dawson Papers, Dalhousie University Archives

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318  Bibliography United States Children’s Bureau Records, National Archives and Records Administration Newspapers ARENA News Austin (TX) Statesman Calgary Albertan Calgary Herald Chicago Sun Chicago Tribune Christian Science Monitor Daily Home News (New Brunswick, NJ) Le Devoir (Montreal) Edmonton Bulletin Edmonton Journal Elizabeth (NJ) Daily Journal Globe and Mail (Toronto) Gazette (Montreal) Halifax Chronicle Halifax Herald Halifax Mail-Star Hush Free Press (Calgary) Lethbridge Herald (Alberta) Montreal Standard Montreal Star Newark (NJ) Evening News New York Times Ottawa Citizen Ottawa Journal La Presse (Montreal) Saint John (NB) Telegraph Journal Le Soleil (Quebec City) Toronto Daily Star Toronto Financial Post L’Unité National (Montreal) Washington Post Printed Primary Sources ‘The Adoption Bureau of the Youville Crèche.’ Child and Family Welfare 7, no. 1 (May 1931): 82.

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320  Bibliography Canadian Conference on Child and Family Welfare. Canadian Cavalcade. Ottawa: Canadian Conference on Child and Family Welfare, 1935. Canadian Council on Child and Family Welfare. Annual Report. Ottawa: Canadian Council on Child and Family Welfare, 1934–5. Canadian Council on Child Welfare. Annual Report. Ottawa: Canadian Council on Child and Family Welfare, 1930–3. – Comparative Summary of the Canadian Adoption Laws. Publication no. 13. Ottawa: Canadian Council on Social Welfare, 1924. Canadian Welfare Council. The Adoption Laws of the Canadian Provinces. Ottawa: Canadian Welfare Council, 1935. – Annual Report. Ottawa: Canadian Welfare Council, 1935–70. – Comparative Analysis of Canadian Adoption Laws. Canadian Welfare Council Publication no. 13a (revised). Ottawa: Canadian Welfare Council, 1946. – Comparative Summary of the Canadian Adoption Laws. Publication no. 13 (revised). Ottawa: Canadian Welfare Council, 1938. – Essentials in Adoption Service. Ottawa: Canadian Welfare Council, 1943. – A Policy Statement on Adoption across Borders. Ottawa: Canadian Welfare Council, 1956. – Welfare Service in New Brunswick. Ottawa: Canadian Welfare Council, 1949. – Child and Family Welfare Division. Annual Report. Ottawa: Canadian Welfare Council, 1955–70. – Child Welfare Division. Annual Report. Ottawa: Canadian Welfare Council, 1948–54. – Committee on Adoption. Report of the Committee on Adoption. Ottawa: Canadian Welfare Council, 1948–53. – Family and Child Welfare Division. Report of the Committee on Adoption: Adoption across Borders. Ottawa: Canadian Welfare Council, 1955. Castendyck, Elsa. ‘The Advisory Committee on Social Questions of the League of Nations.’ The Child 4, no. 4 (October 1939): 101–4. Child Welfare League of America, Committee on Adoption Standards. Child Welfare League of America Standards for Adoption Service. New York: CWLA, 1958. Christian Adoption Services, ‘Adopting from the United States.’ http://www. christianadoption.ab.ca/international-adoptions/usa.html. Colby, Mary Ruth. Problems and Procedures in Adoption. Washington: United States Department of Labor, 1941. – ‘Responsibility of the State in Child Adoption.’ The Child 2, nos. 9–10 (March–April 1938): 194–8. Council of State Governments. Interstate Compacts 1783–1966: A Compilation. Chicago: Council of State Governments, 1966.

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Bibliography  321 – Interstate Compacts and Agencies. Lexington, KY: Council of State Governments, 1983. – Interstate Compacts and Agencies 1998. Lexington, KY: Council of State Governments, 1999. Dingman, Harold. ‘Babies-for-Export.’ New Liberty, 22 December 1947: 5–34. Doone, J.J. Hayes. ‘Order in Council.’ The Royal Gazette: New Brunswick 105 (29 January 1947). – ‘Regulations: Boarding Houses for Children, Regulations: Solicitation of Custody of Children.’ The Royal Gazette: New Brunswick 106 (23 June 1948): 178–9. Dragon, Antonio. Jacquot demande un foyer. Montreal: La Societé d’Adoption et de Protection de l’Enfance, 1951. Duker, Abraham. ‘Jewish Attitudes to Child Adoption.’ In A Study of Adoption Practice, vol. 2: Selected Scientific Papers Presented at the National Conference on Adoption, edited by Michael Schapiro, 134–50. New York: Child Welfare League of America, 1956. Evans, Robert. ‘The U.S. Buys Canadian Babies.’ Coronet, July 1949: 95–8. Fanshel, David. Far from the Reservation: The Transracial Adoption of American Indian Children. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1972. Federation of Jewish Community Services. Annual Reports. Montreal: FJCS, 1951–61. Felten, Zelma. ‘Adoption Resource Exchanges.’ Child Welfare (December 1956): 32–3. – ‘The Use of Adoption Resource Exchanges.’ Child Welfare (December 1958): 26–9. First Nations Orphan Association. ‘Welcome to the First Nations Orphan Association Website.’ Angelfire. http://www.angelfire.com/falcon/fnoa/. Forman, Robert. ‘She Battles for Babies.’ This Week, 21 September 1947. Fromer, Anne. ‘Smuggled Babies for Sale.’ Coronet, October 1954: 75–80. Germain, Victorin. Faut-il encourager la fille-mère à élever elle-même son enfant? On croit que non. Quebec: Édition de la Sauvegarde de l’enfance, 1944. – Les Prêtres devraient-ils prôner les adoptions? On les en implore? Quebec: Éditions de la Sauvegarde de l’enfance, 1947. Griffiths, Margaret. ‘Essentials in Adoption Service Part III: Supervision in Adoption.’ Canadian Welfare 19, no. 7 (January 1944): 27–30. Grove, Daniel. ‘Independent Adoptions: The Case for the Gray Market.’ Villanova Law Review 13 (Fall 1967): 116–36. Hagen, Harold. ‘The Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children.’ Child Welfare (December 1960): 11–17. Hague Conference on Private International Law. ‘Convention on Protection

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Bibliography  323 Lenroot, Katharine. ‘Social Work and the Community.’ Child and Family Welfare 12, no. 2 (July 1936): 1–13. Liggett, Edith. ‘Red Tape and Run Around in Adoption.’ The Woman, 15 June 1946: 29–32. Lyslo, Arnold. ‘Adoption for American Indian Children.’ Child Welfare (June 1960): 32–3. – ‘Adoptive Placement of American Indian Children with Non-Indian Families.’ Child Welfare (May 1961): 4–6. – ‘Background Information on the Indian Adoption Project.’ In Far from the Reservation: The Transracial Adoption of American Indian Children, 33–49. Metuchen. NJ: Scarecrow, 1972. – ‘The Indian Adoption Project: An Appeal to Catholic Agencies to Participate.’ Catholic Charities Review 48 (1964): 12–26. Manitoba. E.C. Kimelman. No Quiet Place: Review Committee on Indian and Métis Adoptions and Placements. Winnipeg: Manitoba Department of Community Services, 1985. McKay, Ruby. ‘Discussion.’ In Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Meeting of the Canadian Conference on Social Work, edited by Canadian Conference on Social Work, 87–9. Halifax: The Conference, 1946. McKeown, Robert. ‘We Bought a Canadian Baby, Part One.’ Weekend Picture Magazine 4, no. 24 (12 June 1954): 2–3, 26. – ‘We Bought a Canadian Baby, Part Two.’ Weekend Picture Magazine 4, no. 25 (19 June 1954): 12, 30–2. Mills, Robert. ‘The Placing of Children in Families. Part III: Considerations in the Organization of Child Placing Measures.’ Canadian Welfare Summary 14, no. 3 (September 1938): 14–34. ‘Miss Nora Lea.’ Canadian Welfare 18, no. 6 (December 1942): 2–3. Mitler, Ernest, and Bill Slocum. ‘Babies: Our Remaining Black Market.’ Look Magazine 18, no. 26 (28 December 1954): 90–4. Morlock, Maud. ‘Babies on the Market.’ Survey Mid-Monthly 81, no. 3 (March 1945): 67–9. – ‘Chosen Children.’ Canadian Welfare 21, no. 1 (15 April 1945): 3–8. – ‘Problems in Adoption Procedure.’ In Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Meeting of the Canadian Conference on Social Work, edited by Canadian Conference on Social Work, 75–86. Halifax: The Conference, 1946. – ‘Some Aspects of Illegitimacy.’ In Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Meeting of the Canadian Conference on Social Work, edited by Canadian Conference on Social Work, 60–9. Halifax: The Conference, 1946. National Association of Black Social Workers. ‘Adoption Exchange.’ http:// www.nabsw.org/mserver/AdoptionExchange.aspx?menuContext=793. – ‘Position Paper Developed from Workshops Concerning Transracial

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326  Bibliography Tucker, Muriel. ‘The Third International Conference on Social Work.’ Child and Family Welfare 12, no. 3 (September 1936): 33–6. Unger, Steve, ed. The Destruction of American Indian Families. New York: Association on American Indian Affairs, 1977. United Nations. Technical Assistance Office. European Seminar on Intercountry Adoption. Leysin, Switzerland, 22–31 May 1960. Geneva: United Nations, 1961. – Intercountry Adoption: Report of a European Expert Group. Geneva: United Nations, 1958. United States. Congressional Record. 1949–65. Washington. – Federal Register. Part II, 22 CFR, parts 96–8, 15 February 2006, and Part II, 8 CFR, parts 103, 104, 213a. 4 October 2007. United States. Bureau of the Census. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007: The National Data Book. Lanham, MD: Bernan Press, 2007. United States Children’s Bureau. Adoption – What It Means. Washington: Department of Labour, 1938. – Adoption Laws in the United States: A Summary of the Development of Adoption Legislation and Significant Features of Adoption Statutes, with Text of Selected Laws. Washington: Department of Labor, 1925. – The Children’s Bureau: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1937. – Essentials of Adoption Law and Procedure. Washington: Federal Security Agency, 1949. – Four Decades of Action for Children. Washington: Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1956. – Laws Relating to the Interstate Placement of Dependent Children. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1924. – Legislative Guides for the Termination of Parental Rights and Responsibilities and Adoption of Children. Washington: Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1961; rev. 1971. United States Congress. House. Committee on the Judiciary. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice of the Committee of the Judiciary, House of Representatives. On the Sale of Children in Interstate and Foreign Commerce. 95th Cong., 1st sess., 21 March and 25 April 1977. Washington: GPO, 1977. – Hearings before the Subcommittee on Law, Immigration and Refugees of the Committee of the Judiciary, House of Representatives. Romanian Adoptions, June 5, 1991. Washington: GPO, 1991. United States Congress. Senate. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Subcommittee on Indian Affairs. Hearings on the Indian Child Welfare Program, April 8–9, 1974. Washington: GPO, 1974.

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340  Bibliography – No Fault of Their Own: Unemployment and the Canadian Welfare State, 1914– 1941. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983. – ‘A Profession in Crisis: Charlotte Whitton and Canadian Social Work in the 1930s.’ Canadian Historical Review 62, no. 2 (1981): 169–85. Sunrise Adoption. ‘United States.’ http://www.sunriseadoption.com/ adoptive_parents/adoption/united_states. ‘Survey of New Jersey Adoption Law.’ Rutgers Law Review 17, no. 2 (Winter 1962): 379–415. Sutherland, Neil. Children in English Canadian Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. – Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Swanson, Roger Frank. State/Provincial Interaction: A Study of Relations Between US States and Canadian Provinces Prepared for the US Department of State. Baltimore: CANUS Research Institute, 1974. Thompson, John Herd. Forging the Prairie West. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998. Timson, J.B. ‘Four Decades of Child Welfare Services to Native Indians in Ontario: A Contemporary Attempt to Understand the “Sixties Scoop” in a Historical, Socioeconomic and Political Perspective.’ PhD thesis, Wilfrid Laurier University, 1993. Tollett, Linda Austin. Babies for Sale: The Tennessee Children’s Home Adoption Scandal. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993. Trenka, Jane Jeong, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin, eds. Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006. Turner Strong, Pauline. ‘To Forget Their Tongue, Their Name, and Their Whole Relation: Captivity, Extra-Tribal Adoption, and the Indian Child Welfare Act.’ In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, edited by Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, 468–93. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Tyler May, Elaine. Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Unger, Steve. ‘The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978: A Case Study.’ PhD thesis, University of Southern California, 2004. United States Department of Health and Human Services. Administration for Children and Families. The Children’s Bureau. ‘Adopt US Kids.’ http:// www.adoptuskids.org. Ursel, Jane. Private Lives, Public Policy: 100 Years of State Intervention in the Family. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1992.

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Bibliography  341 Vigod, B.L. ‘The Quebec Government and Social Legislation during the 1930s: A Study in Political Self-Destruction.’ Journal of Canadian Studies 14, no. 1 (1979): 59–69. Ward, Margaret. The Adoption of Native Canadian Children. Cobalt, ON: Highway Book Shop, 1984. Weill, Richard. ‘International Adoption: The Quiet Migration.’ International Migration Review 18, no. 2 (1984): 276–93. Wikander, Ulla. ‘Some “Kept the Flag Waving”: Debates at International Congresses on Protecting Women Workers.’ In Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880–1920, edited by Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis, 29–62. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Wikander, Ulla, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis, eds. Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Willing, Indigo Williams. ‘Beyond the Vietnam War Adoptions: RePresenting our Transracial Lives.’ In Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin, 259–66. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006. Worontynec, Zofia Sonia. Child Interrupted: International Adoption in the Context of Canadian Policy on Immigration, Multiculturalism, Citizenship and Children’s Rights. Toronto: CERIS Working Papers, April 2006. Zainaldin, Jamil Shaheen. ‘The Emergence of Modern American Family Law: Child Custody, Adoption, and the Courts, 1796–1851.’ Northwestern University Law Review 73, no. 6 (1979): 1038–89. – ‘The Origins of Modern Legal Adoption: Child Exchange in Boston, 1851– 1893.’ PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1976. Zelizer, Viviana A. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Zeppa, Stephania. ‘“Let Me In, Immigration Man”: An Overview of Intercountry Adoption and the Role of the Immigration and Nationality Act.’ Hastings International and Comparative Law Review 22 (1998): 161–85. Zimmerman, Frederick, and Mitchell Wendell. The Interstate Compact since 1925. New York: The Council of State Governments, 1951. Zolberg, A.R. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

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Index

An italic m following a page reference indicates a map; an italic t indicates a table. Abbott, Edith, 98 Abbott, Grace, 24, 25, 38, 39, 44, 47 abuse: of birth mothers, 170–1, 179–80, 187; of children in institutional care, 164, 224 adoptability: for ‘any’ child, 195; definitions of, 160, 196–7, 201, 258n104, 283n29 ‘Adopt-a-Child’ program, 198 Adopt Indian Métis (AIM, Saskatchewan), 199 Adoption Exchange Association, 229–30 adoption exchanges, 199–203, 206–7; for hard-to-place children, 199–203, 235; recent developments in, 229–30; samerace placements through, 227, 230; transracial placements through, 225–6. See also specific organizations and agencies adoption legislation. See legislation pertaining to adoption adoption practices, best or sound: case files for, 140–1; continuity and shared analysis of, 237; guidelines for, 31–2; in Hague Convention, 243; IMH violations of, 56, 70–2; link with social welfare reform, 4; provincial child welfare agreement on, 159; rationalization in, 201; Report on the Placing of Children in Families, 26–7; seen as ‘red tape,’ 143, 146; supervision in, 31–4, 49, 71, 73,

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82; USCB and CWC statements on, 21, 31–2, 120 adoption reform. See reformers and reform movement in child welfare Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA), 195–6, 207–12, 219–22, 226–9, 235, 241; Obstacles to Interstate Adoption, 196, 220, 228; Supply and Demand in ARENA, 210 adoptive parents: absence for adoption procedures, 68, 100, 115, 259n125; age of, 114; and black market adoptions, 180–1, 186–7; expectation of children available in Canada, 8–9, 43, 132; flexible assessment of, 202; for hard-to-place children, 198–9; investigation of (see investigations of adoptive parents); racial issues for (see specific racial groups); selected by birth parents, 314n34. See also Jewish adoptive families advertisements: for adoption exchanges, 200; for IMH, 57, 60, 66; for parent recruitment, 198–9 African American children: adoptive parents for, 198; community social services for, 33, 256n74; placements outside US, 241, 243; placements through ARENA, 209–10, 226–8, 241; transracial placements for, 196, 205–6, 241. See also racism and racial issues

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344  Index African Canadian children: community social services for, 160, 256n74; crossborder placements for, 4, 8, 209, 210; distance placements for, 200, 205, 206; as hard-to-place, 160; from Nova Scotia, 200, 208; placements through ARENA, 209, 210. See also racism and racial issues Alaska, 95m, 115 Alberta: adoption legislation, 74, 273n30; Child Protection Act, 102; Child Welfare Act, 98; Social Credit government, 97; US consul in Edmonton, 42, 68, 99, 100, 152, 260n133; Welfare in Alberta (Whitton’s IODE study), 14, 94–104, 109–15 – Child Welfare Branch, 35–6; adoption procedures, 35–6, 41–2, 99–100, 101, 115; baby export scandal, 94–122, 129–31; children’s passport applications, 125–6t; compared with Quebec practices, 149; dependent children in care of, 100–1; Howson Commission investigation, 96, 101, 110–17, 124, 129; placements in US, 95m; placements of First Nations and Métis children, 116, 201, 207; placements of Ukrainian children, 160; records, statistics, and case files relating to, 98–9, 101, 112–14; uncooperative attitude of, 43, 48, 129, 158; US complaints about, 41–3, 95, 114, 129, 152–3; and Whitton’s libel trial, 111–15 Allen, Helen, 199 Altmeyer, Arthur, 98 Ambrose, Rev., 178 American Public Human Services Association, 230 American Public Welfare Association (APWA), 48, 51, 214, 218, 219, 222 Arizona, 41, 114, 204, 305n45 Asian counties, adoptions from, 156, 206, 236, 240 Assistance à l’Enfant sans Soutien, L’ (Trois-Rivières), 138, 146, 157 Association of American Indian Affairs, 222 Audette, L., 107, 108–9

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babies. See children Baron de Hirsch Institute and Jewish Child Welfare Bureau, 177–8 Bartholet, Elizabeth, 310n129 Bartlett, Ruth, 118 Bennett, Virginia, 99, 114 Berebitsky, Julie, 28, 33 Berger, Thomas, 224 best adoption practices. See adoption practices, best or sound bilateral agreements, 158–9, 211, 213, 234, 235 birth mothers: abuse and exploitation of, 55, 59, 170–1, 179–80, 187, 294n28, 301n121; in Alberta, 99; babies relinquished by, 29, 33, 135, 164, 285n58; in black market operations, 168, 170–2, 179–80, 187; counselling and support for, 99; existence denied, 172; identification of, 149; at IMH, 57–9, 70–1, 72; investigation of, 31; medical care for, 57–9, 170, 179, 187, 294n28; as minors, 185; out-of-wedlock birth rates, 29, 134; payments to, 244; phony stand-ins for, 172, 179, 181, 294n37; placements made by, 190, 192; pre-adoption interviews, 145; punitive attitudes toward, 57, 135, 166; in Quebec, 135; racist attitudes toward, 29, 33 birth parent exception, 314n34 birth parents: children’s passport applications signed by, 124, 126t; choice of adoptive families, 242, 314n35; investigation of, 31–2, 71, 101, 149; payments to, 244; racist attitudes toward Native Americans, 205, 224; and religious matching, 63 birth registration: falsification of, 169–70, 182, 183; Quebec system for, 173; by rabbis, 172, 173 black market adoptions, 166–94; definitions of, 62, 181–4, 292n5; abuse and exploitation of birth mothers, 170–1, 172, 179–80, 187; Alberta placements seen as, 102; baby smuggling, 172, 175, 187; criminalization of, 193–4; criminal prosecutions for, 181–4; fees charged in, 60–3; guilt and innocence in, 179–81;

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Index  345 IMH placements seen as, 62; for interstate adoptions, 185–6, 188; for Jewish adoptive parents, 64, 149–50, 172–3, 178; legal arrangements with, 172–3; legislation relating to, 7–8, 168–9, 179, 181–93, 215–16, 302n137; in New York City, 60; ‘phony’ mothers in, 172, 179, 181, 294n37; practices of, 62; in Quebec, 133, 149–51; and reform of social services, 62–3, 77–8, 86–8, 177–8, 183, 193–4; supervision bypassed with, 34; US congressional hearings on, 185–90; vs grey market, 62, 177, 178, 179, 188. See also Montreal black market Blaine, T.R., 42, 43, 100 Blois, Ernest, 54–5, 79–80, 82, 88 Bodnoff, Sam, 301n120 Bogatta, Theresa, 169–70, 181, 184, 187, 301n119 borders, definitions of, 9 Bourgeois, Charles, 138 Briggs, Laura, 223 British Columbia: adoption agreement with Saskatchewan, 159; adoption legislation, 74; adoption practices, 257n80; and ARENA, 209; children’s passport applications, 125–6t; passport regulation, 108–9; placements of First Nations and Métis children, 207; working arrangement with northwestern states, 48–51, 89–91, 108–9 British common law, 27–8 Brown, Florence, 190 Buller, Herman, 149, 168–70, 181–4, 187, 298–9nn98–9 Burns, K. Phyllis: adoption work at CWC, 148, 155, 160, 161–2; and Whitton, 110, 275n75 ‘Butterbox Babies,’ 58 Cahil, Bette, 58, 60, 63, 263nn19, 26 California: adoptions through IAP, 305n45; Alberta placements in, 95m, 97, 99–100, 115, 152; Quebec placements in, 140m, 149, 152–3 Canada: adoption legislation (see under legislation pertaining to adoption); Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 225;

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Department of Health and Welfare, 30, 229; House of Commons, 104, 124, 126, 168, 182; Intercountry Adoption Services, 6, 238; National Adoption Desk, 229. See also specific provinces – Department of External Affairs (DEA): and Alberta scandal, 96, 109–10; and IMH, 68, 75, 96; and Montreal black market, 172–4; and New Brunswick black market, 96, 123–5; passport regulations, 68, 96, 106–10, 124–9, 174; and provincial-federal jurisdictions, 96, 107–9, 124–9, 130–1, 174; and Whitton’s cross-border adoption proposal, 38, 118. See also passports – provincial child welfare directors (discussions, meetings, statements): and adoption exchanges, 200–1, 207–9; bilateral agreements developed by, 213, 235; CWC-sponsored meetings of, 158–62, 197; model adoption act, 216; and USCB/State Department proposed agreement, 155–6; and Whitton’s crossborder agreement, 48 Canadian Association of Social Workers, 76 Canadian Civil Liberties Association, 208 Canadian Conference on Social Work (CCSW), 54, 91–2 Canadian Welfare Council (CWC; formerly Canadian Council on Child Welfare, CCCW): and adoption exchanges, 200– 1; adoption guidelines, 31–2; adoption statistics, 30; and Alberta scandal, 97–8, 110, 111–15, 118; background, funding, and status, 10, 20–1, 22–3, 233–4, 252n6; Child Welfare Division, 163; Committee on Adoption, 156–62, 176, 197, 235; Committee on Uniformity of Adoption Legislation, 156–7; Family and Child Welfare Division, 158; and IMH campaign, 55–6, 73–92; at League of Nations, 25–6; and Montreal black market, 150–1, 166–7, 175–7; and Quebec social agencies, 132–3, 138–9; and standard procedure for inter-jurisdictional placements, 40, 55, 155, 157–61, 175; USCB networking and links with, 20–7, 38–40,

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346  Index 55, 162–3, 233–7, 287n86; Whitton at, 18–19, 20–1, 51–2, 98–9 – publications: Comparative Summary of the Canadian Adoption Laws (1938), 31; Essentials in Adoption Service (1943), 31; A Policy Statement on Adoption across Borders (1955), 158, 237 Carlson, Richard, 237, 244, 313n10 Carp, Wayne, 268n125 Carusi, Ugo, 88, 90 case files (on adopted children): birth parents identified in, 149; for placements from Alberta, 98–9, 101, 112–14; for placements from SAPE, 141–2, 143, 145 Castendyck, Elsa: and Lea, 76; and Morlock, 77; and Whitton, 13, 21, 26, 48, 112 Catholic Children’s Aid Society, 208 Catholic Church. See Roman Catholic Church Catholic social services. See Roman Catholic Church Catholic Welfare Bureau of Montreal, 157, 178 Chance, Leslie, 108–9, 124, 127, 279n128 children (for adoption): adoptive parents’ selection of, 67, 70, 170; age of, 71, 105; baby couriers and smuggling, 100, 115, 172, 175, 187; baby ‘depots’ and ‘showrooms,’ 170; baby export scandals: in Alberta, 94–122, 129–31; in Toronto, 208; baby-selling, 167–8, 169, 176; border crossing as dangerous for, 18–20; disabilities of, 198, 308n96; investigation of, 32; for Jewish adoptive parents, 64, 157, 171, 177–8; from minority or mixed-race communities, 195, 197, 198, 204–5, 226; parents’ selection of, 67, 70, 170; placement supervision for, 31–4, 33, 49, 71; promised to parents preadoption, 146; sibling groups, 160–1, 209; twins ‘made to order,’ 99 – surpluses of: and ease of adoption procedures, 102; justification for IMH adoptions, 70; in Quebec, 132, 157, 164, 281n15; racialized children, 206; and religious issues, 64, 135; US perceptions of, 132 Children’s Aid Societies (CASs): in Can-

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ada, 19, 39, 76, 122, 135–6, 163, 208; in US, 18, 99 Children’s Service Centre (Montreal), 160, 197, 198, 199 Child Welfare Committee of the Advisory Commission on the Traffic in Women and Children (after 1935, Advisory Commission on Social Questions; League of Nations), 25–6 Child Welfare League of America (CWLA): adoption exchanges, 199–200; and federal black market legislation, 192; and ICWA, 229; and IMH campaign, 82; institutional records, 10; National Adoption Conference (Chicago, 1955), 162, 197, 198; National Adoption Exchange, 229; North American Center on Adoption (NACA), 229; policy on transracial placements, 226–7, 230; role in adoption reform, 199; role in transjurisdictional adoption discussions, 37, 161–2, 213. See also Adoption Resource Exchange of North America; Indian Adoption Project – publications: Guide for Establishing and Operating an Adoption Resource Exchange, 200; Obstacles to Interstate Adoption, 196, 220, 228 China, 240, 315n39, 315n43 citizenship issues: for adopted children in US, 35, 72–3, 78, 91, 103, 295n45; with black market adoptions, 172; children’s citizenship rights, 9, 126–7, 208; recognition as adopted child, 151–2, 158. See also immigration visas Cohen, Joseph, 184, 299n100 Colby, Mary Ruth, 31, 44–5, 46, 206n133 Cole, Lawrence, 140–1, 145–6 Collette, Sister Suzanne, 147, 157–8 Colorado: adoption legislation, 303n143; Alberta placements in, 41, 42, 43, 47, 95m, 259n125 Committee on Interstate problems, 213–14 conferences. See meetings and conferences Connecticut: adoption legislation, 303n143; at CWC meeting on cross-bor-

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Index  347 der issues (1954), 161; IMH placements in, 61m, 69m, 215; Quebec placements in, 140m, 143, 144, 215; and Regional Continuing Committee, 215 consuls and consulates: Canadian consuls in US, 173–4 consuls and consulates: US consuls in Canada: in Edmonton, 42, 68, 99, 100, 152–3, 260n133; in Halifax, 68, 75; in Montreal, 150, 175; in Quebec City, 151– 2, 154; adoptions blocked by, 47; adoption visas for Canadian children, 105, 150, 151, 153–4, 173; border policing authority of, 106, 154; and IMH adoptions, 68–9; inconsistent requirements and rulings, 47–8, 151–2, 156; role in cross-border adoptions, 42, 143–4. See also United States of America: State Department Contant, Father Paul, 141, 143–7, 163, 178, 182 Cooke, Jack Kent, 111, 114 Costa Rica, 112, 115 Council of State Governments (CSG), 214, 215, 216, 219, 230 crèches and infant schools (Quebec), 137– 8, 164, 168; La Crèche (Quebec City), 43; La Crèche de la Miséricorde, 137; La Crèche d’Youville, 137 Crey, E., 222, 224 Cross, W.W., 97, 104, 117 CWC. See Canadian Welfare Council Daly, Kerry, 256–7n79 Dana, Ruth, 118 Davidson, George: and British child evacuees, 97; and federal passport regulations, 105–6, 128; and IMH campaign, 58, 59, 80, 274n51; and Montreal black market adoptions, 150; Report on Public Welfare in Services, 59, 73, 80, 267n92 Davis, R.E.G., 98–9, 275n75 DEA. See under Canada deaths (of children), 58–9, 74, 102, 137–8 Delaware, 123m, 204, 215, 303n143 Denmark, 241 deportations (from US), 36–7, 79, 88, 172 Dewey, Thomas E., 215

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Dingman, Harold, 111 disabilities, children with, 160, 195, 198, 201, 308n96 distance placements, 34–5, 119, 132, 199– 200, 202–3, 241 Drew, George, 183 Dubinsky, Karen, 197, 225, 230 Eliot, Martha, 176, 190–2 El Salvador, 112, 115 Essentials in Adoption Service (CWC, 1943), 31 Fales, Mary Jane, 229 Fanshel, Richard, 205 fees (for adoption services), 60–3; in black market operations, 60–3, 166, 179; for doctors and lawyers, 60–1, 192; in grey market, 62, 177, 178, 179; IMH financial practices, 57–8, 60–1, 67, 68; paid by Jewish adoptive parents, 63, 122; payments to birth mothers, 244; pro­ fessional fees vs sales charges, 169, 179 Felten, Zelma, 200, 201, 202 Filion, Gérard, 182, 298n93 finalizations (of adoptions): under Alberta Child Welfare Branch, 42; home investigations after, 149–50 First Nations and Métis children: Adopt Indian Métis (AIM) program, 199; childcare traditions in indigenous communities, 27, 205, 225; child removal, institutional care, and the ‘Sixties Scoop,’ 224–5, 231; as hard-to-place, 160; placements from Alberta, 116, 201, 207; placements in Central America, 278n110; placements through ARENA, 209, 210–11, 212t; transracial placements in US, 116, 196, 201, 205, 207. See also Native American children; racism and racial issues Florida, 61m, 69m, 166, 185, 188 foster care, 163–4, 222, 310n137 Fournier, S., 222, 224 Free Synagogue Child Adoption Committee (New York), 150, 171. See also Louise Wise Services

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348  Index Friends and Survivors of the Ideal Maternity Home, 60, 263n16, 264n28 ‘Fundamental Principles in the Intercountry Adoption Process’ (1960), 237 Garson, Stuart, 182–3 Germain, Father Victorin, 43 Girls’ Home (Hamilton, Ontario), 18 Glazer, Louis, 169–70, 173, 182, 183–4, 187 Goold, Eurith, 275n75 Gordon, Henrietta, 89, 90 Gordon, Linda, 253n38 Goubau, Dominique, 137 grey market adoptions, 62, 177, 178, 179, 188 Grier, Margaret, 111, 131, 253n38 guardianship (of adoptive children), 105– 9, 124–9, 275n65, 282n19, 284n42 Guatemala, 115, 240 Guss, Benjamin, 60, 68, 85–6, 122, 125 Hagen, Harold, 218, 219 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (1993), 6, 237–45, 315n37 Hamel, Marie, 148, 164 Hanna, Agnes: on Canadian placements in US, 42, 43, 121; on cross-jurisdictional issues, 45–7, 48; USCB report on deportations, 37–8; and Whitton’s cross-border adoption proposal, 46–7, 51, 77, 237 hard-to-place children: definitions and categories of, 160–1, 198, 281n15; model adoption acts for, 308n96; placement programs and adoption exchanges for, 198–203, 235 Hareven, Tamara, 23 Hartlen, Robert, 264n28 Harvey, Isobel, 48–9 Herman, Ellen, 11, 33, 87, 201 Hersey, Evelyn, 89–91 Hill, Charles, 41–3, 100–6, 109–10, 115–17, 125. See also Alberta: Child Welfare Branch Hill, George, 169–70, 182, 183, 184 Hoehler, Fred, 48

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Holland, Laura, 112 Hôpital de la Miséricorde (Montreal), 135, 137, 164, 281n16 Howson, W.R., and Howson Commission, 96, 101, 110–17, 124, 129 Hunt, Roberta, 196, 219–22, 228 Hyde, Henry, 302n137 Idaho, 95m Ideal Maternity Home (IMH, Nova Scotia), 54–93; background and establishment of, 54–7, 75; birth and care of babies at, 56–7, 58–9, 72; birth mothers at, 57–9, 70–1, 72; campaign against, 3–4, 54–6, 77–89; closure of, 74, 92, 124, 234; financial practices, 57–8, 60–1, 67, 68; Jewish clients of, 60, 63, 65–6; lack of regulatory authority over, 4, 73–4, 88; lawyers and legal procedures, 60, 68, 71, 75, 124; and New Brunswick black market, 75, 82–5, 122; parents adopting children from, 59–60, 66–7, 70, 75, 84; procedures and non-professional practices of, 54–5, 58–9, 66–70, 70–2; promotion and advertisements, 57, 60, 66; records and statistics for, 56–7, 60, 124–5; religious project of, 56, 71; US placements from, 7, 61m, 69m, 215. See also maternity homes; Nova Scotia; Young, William and Lila Illinois, 95m, 114, 142, 206 immigration quotas (US), 119, 155–6, 220, 236 immigration visas (US): for adopted Canadian children, 42, 49, 153–4, 261n150; with northwest agreement, 261n150; records and statistics for, 105, 154; requirements for, 151–2. See also citizenship issues; passports Indiana: Alberta placements in, 95m; at CWC meeting on cross-border issues (1954), 161; Quebec placements in, 139, 140m, 149 Indian Adoption Project (IAP), 195–6, 203–7, 225–6, 230, 305n45 INS. See under United States of America institutional care (of children): for African Americans, 222; for Native Americans,

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Index  349 First Nations, and Métis, 222; in Quebec, 132, 136–8, 145, 163–5, 282n19; tragedy of, 164–5, 222 interim adoption orders, 150, 151 international adoption. See transnational (overseas) adoption International Social Service (ISS), 161, 291n133 interprovincial child transfers: bilateral agreements for, 159, 213; child welfare directors plan for, 158–61; localized solutions vs inter-jurisdictional agreements, 45–6; through adoption exchanges, 201; Whitton’s model for, 37–8 interstate child transfers: bilateral agreements for, 234; for black market adoptions, 185–6, 188; Hunt’s study on, 219–22; legislation for, 213–20; link with cross-border transfers, 44–6, 142; national agreement on, 37–8; role of welfare systems, 120–1 interstate compacts, 213–14, 217–20, 307n82; Interstate Compact on Juveniles, 218; Interstate Compact on Parolees and Probationers, 218; Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC), 16, 217–22, 230, 236 investigations of adoptive parents: legal requirement for, 28, 191; for placements from Alberta, 152–3; for placements from Quebec, 141–2, 145, 149–50, 164; in sound adoption practice, 31–2, 33, 71 investigations of birth parents, 71 Iowa, 95m, 140m, 206 Jackson, Kate M., 148, 275n75 Japan, 236 Jewish adoptive families: black market adoptions, 166–7, 171–2, 178; placements for Jewish children, 208; rabbis, 172, 173, 265n41, 265n49; religious issues for, 265n41, 297n78; and religious matching, 54, 63–5, 149–50; shortages of children for, 64, 157, 171, 177–8. See also adoptive parents Jewish Child Welfare Bureau (Montreal), 177 Johnson, Lyndon, 193

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Johnson, Patrick, 224 Joint Legislative Committee on Interstate Cooperation (JLCIC), 214–19, 308n101 Joint Legislative Committee on Matrimonial and Family Law (JLCMFL), 216 juvenile delinquency, 100, 137, 185 Kansas, 95m, 129, 142, 188 Kefauver, Estes, 185–90, 192–4, 216, 218 Kelso, J.J., 19 Kentucky, 219 Kimelman, E.C., 225; No Quiet Place, 224 Korea, 236, 240 LaCombe, Father Leandre, 48, 138 Larson, John Farr, 99, 118, 129 Lathrop, Julia, 21, 24, 25, 26 Lea, Nora: and Alberta Child Welfare Branch, 97, 112; career at CWC, 3, 21, 54, 77, 93, 98; and Committee on Uniformity of Adoption Legislation (CWC), 156–7; and Evelyn Smith, 142–3, 144; and IMH campaign, 54–6, 72–3, 76–8, 80–5, 87, 89–93; and Maud Morlock, 3, 21, 54–5, 76, 91–2, 148; on nationalist issues in adoption, 103–4, 142–3; on Quebec placements and social agencies, 132, 135, 138, 142–3, 144–5, 285n58; and Charlotte Whitton, 13, 76, 112 League of Nations Child Welfare Committee (of Advisory Commission on Social Questions), 25–7, 88, 108, 131; Report on the Placing of Children in Families, 26–7, 31, 41, 76, 237 legislation pertaining to adoption: on black market adoptions, 7–8, 168–9, 179, 181–93; on child exportation, 119, 120, 218; on child importation (US), 37, 119, 142, 218, 221; on child welfare, 7–8; common law traditions, 27–8, 280n6; for First Nations, Métis, and Native American children, 222–7; and grey market adoptions, 188–9; on immigration (US), 152, 153; on independent placements, 188–91, 303n143; interstate compacts, 213–14, 217–20, 307n82; interstate issues with, 46–7, 188–91,

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350  Index 220–2, 232–7; model adoption acts, 216, 308n96; Napoleonic civil code, 27, 280n6; political issues with, 193; regulatory havens from, 244–5; on religious matching, 63–5, 134–5, 171–2, 265n44; uniform acts, 216, 218; variation between jurisdictions, 7–8, 34–5, 121, 144, 148; vs voluntary agreements, 39–40 – Canadian acts and bills: Adoption Act (New Brunswick, 1946), 84–5, 122, 146; Adoption Act (Nova Scotia), 64, 74, 106; Adoption Act (Quebec), 133–4, 140, 178; Child Protection Act (Alberta), 102; Children’s Protection Act (New Brunswick, 1930), 82–3, 135; Children’s Protection Act (Nova Scotia), 64; Children’s Protection Act (Quebec), 135–6, 178, 282n19, 282n24; Child Welfare Act (Alberta), 98; Criminal Code of Canada, 182–3; Judicature Act (New Brunswick), 68, 83; Maternity Boarding Houses Act (Nova Scotia), 74, 76, 81, 290n124 – US acts and bills: Adoption Act (New Jersey), 86; Adoption Opportunity Bills, 231; Immigration and Naturalization Act, 153, 155, 156, 220, 236; Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), 222–3, 224, 229, 230–1; Intercountry Adoption Act, 239; Interethnic Placement Act, 231; McCarran-Walter Immigration Act (Public Law 82-414), 153, 287–8n100; Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA), 231; Refugee Escape Act, 156, 288n109; Refugee Relief Act, 155–6, 288n109; Senate Bill S1541, 192; Senate Bill S3021, 188–91, 193; Social Security Act, 24, 41; Uniform Adoption Act (proposed), 216 Lenroot, Katharine: at Canadian child welfare conferences, 24; and IMH campaign, 75–8, 85, 88, 89–91; at League of Nations Child Welfare Committee, 25–6, 41; and Emma Lundberg, 253n38; on US adoption legislation, 33; and USCB work on cross-border issues, 13, 37–9, 48, 50–1, 176, 237; and Whitton, 21, 26, 41, 98–9, 112, 131, 148 Lévesque, Andrée, 134

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Lindenmeyer, Kristie, 22, 252n25 Longley, Charles, 60, 65, 67, 70, 75 Louise Wise Services (New York), 190, 204. See also Free Synagogue Child Adoption Committee Lyslo, Arnold, 203, 204, 225–6 MacKinnon, F.R., 59, 83, 84, 159, 162 Maine, 140m, 143, 161, 215, 219 Manitoba: children’s passport applications, 125–6t; placements of First Nations and Métis children, 207, 210–11; placements through adoption exchanges, 201, 206, 209 Massachusetts: adoption legislation, 28, 215, 219, 303n143; IMH placements in, 61m, 69m, 215; Quebec placements in, 140m, 143, 144 matching (of child with adoptive home): concept of, 31, 32–3; practices at IMH, 71; practices in Alberta, 116; racial, 33, 160, 197, 256n74; redefinition of, 202. See also religious matching; transracial placements Maternity Boarding Houses Act (Nova Scotia), 74, 76, 81, 290n124 maternity homes: run by Montreal black market operators, 168, 170, 181, 187, 194; run by Quebec Catholic agencies, 135. See also Ideal Maternity Home McCrae, Muriel, 157–8, 162, 197, 289n116, 290n118 McKay, Ruby, 91, 108–9, 159 McNair, J.B., 83–4, 122–4, 126, 128 medical care (for birth mothers): at IMH, 57–9; at Montreal black market maternity homes, 170, 179, 187, 294n28 meetings and conferences: Canadian adoption agencies (1934), 38–9; CCSW conference (Halifax, 1946), 54–5, 91–2; child welfare directors of northeast US, 144–5; CWC cross-border session (Montreal, 1935), 40; Intercountry Adoption Summit (University of Waterloo, 2010), 315n37; International Conference of Social Work (Toronto, 1954), 161–2; National Conference on Social Work (Montreal, 1935), 39–40; USCB

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Index  351 and CWC leadership (New Jersey and Ottawa, 1941), 48; USCB proposed meeting with INS (1946), 89, 90 Melosh, Barbara, 33, 63, 87, 205 Métis children. See First Nations and Métis children Michigan, 140m, 161 Midwest Adoption Facilitating Service, 201, 206, 210 Mills, Robert, 76, 112 Minnesota: adoption legislation, 28, 303n143; Alberta placements in, 95m, 129; IAP placements in, 305n45; Manitoba First Nations and Métis children placed in, 210–11; Midwest exchange placements in, 206, 210 minority or mixed-race children: community social services for, 197, 204–5; with disabilities, 198; as hard-to-place, 160, 195; in-race placements for, 226. See also specific racial groups Missouri: Alberta placements in, 95m, 129; Quebec placements in, 140m, 149 Mitler, Ernest: black market investigation in Montreal, 167, 169–70, 181, 183; black market investigations in US, 184–7, 194, 216; on black market legislation, 179, 180, 193; career, 302–3n139 Montana: adoption legislation, 216; Alberta placements in, 95m, 102, 114, 115; IAP adoptions in, 204; Whitton’s meeting with social workers, 117–18 Montreal black market, 166–84; criminal investigation of, 168–9; CWC and USCB responses to, 150–1, 166–7, 175–7; Jewish adoptive parents involved in, 167, 171–2, 173, 180–1; and legislation against black market practices, 162, 179, 186–7, 194, 235; system and procedures of, 170–3, 180–1; US consul’s role in, 150, 175. See also black market adoptions; Quebec Montreal Council of Social Agencies, 167, 178, 179 Montreal Social Welfare Court, 149–51, 172, 173, 178, 188 Morlock, Maud: on black market scandals, 62–3, 176; and Blois, 54–5, 79–80;

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‘Chosen Children,’ 77–9, 82, 92; and IMH campaign, 54–5, 72–3, 76–82, 88–93, 235; and Lea, 3, 13, 21, 54–5, 76, 91–2, 148; on wartime adoptions, 29; and Whitton, 13, 48 Moyneur, Eugene, 187, 301n120 Muller, Beth, 118 Nash, Arlene, 227, 230 National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW): adoption exchange, 230; statement on transracial placements, 223–4, 226, 228–9, 310n129 National Conference of Catholic Charities, 189, 192 National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, 216 National Conference on Social Work (NCSW), 25, 39–40, 77, 200 nationalist issues (with cross-border adoptions), 9, 103–4, 126–7, 142–3, 160, 208 National Jewish Welfare Board, 192 National Urban League, 198 Native American children: cross-border adoptions for, 195, 196; traditions of child transfer, 27; transracial placements for, 204–7, 222–3. See also First Nations and Métis children; racism and racial issues Nebraska, 140m, 149, 206 networking in social services. See social welfare leadership networks Nevada, 113, 204, 303n139 New Brunswick: adoption legislation, 28, 68, 71, 82–4, 266n68; Adoption Act (1946), 84–5, 122, 146; Children’s Protection Act (1930), 82–3; Judicature Act, 68, 83; black market in, 85–6, 122–4, 234; children’s passport applications, 125–6t New Brunswick Protestant Orphan’s Home (POH), 41, 83, 85 Newfoundland, 157, 179 New Hampshire, 215 New Jersey: adoption legislation, 86–7, 221; Alberta placements in, 123m; and IMH campaign, 65, 70, 73, 79, 80–1, 86;

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352  Index IMH placements in, 61m, 69m, 80–1, 264n28; Quebec placements in, 140m, 144, 147 New Mexico, 95m, 140m, 216 New York (state): adoption exchanges, 200; adoption legislation, 168–9, 214–19; Alberta placements in, 95m, 123m; black market prosecutions, 168–9, 185; at CWC meeting on cross-border issues (1954), 161; Department of Social Welfare, 141, 215, 308n101; IMH placements in, 61m, 69m; Joint Legislative Committee on Interstate Cooperation (JLCIC), 167, 214–19; Joint Legislative Committee on Matrimonial and Family Law (JLCMFL), 216; and Montreal black market, 149–51, 166–7, 168–9;   Ontario placements in, 221; Quebec placements in, 140m, 143, 144, 149–50, 161 New York Catholic Welfare Committee, 308n101 North Carolina, 204 North Dakota, 35, 95m, 206, 216, 219, 303n143 Northwest Territories, 208 Nova Scotia: adoption exchange, 200; adoption legislation, 28, 64–5, 68, 71; Adoption Act, 64, 74, 106; Children’s Protection Act, 64; Maternity Boarding Houses Act, 74, 76, 81, 290n124; African Canadian children from, 200, 208; CCSW conference in (Halifax, 1946), 54–5, 91–2; child and social welfare services, 59, 73–4; Report on Public Welfare in Services (Davidson), 59, 73, 267n92; children’s passport applications, 106–7, 125–6t; US consul in Halifax, 68, 75. See also Ideal Maternity Home O’Brien, J.W., 174, 295n45 Oettinger, Katharine, 192–3 O’Grady, Rt Rev. Monsignor, 189–90, 192, 301n127 O’Hearn, Walter, 297n78 Ohio: adoption exchange, 200; adoption legislation, 216; at CWC meeting on cross-border issues (1954), 161; Quebec

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placements in, 140m, 146, 149; SAPE placements in, 139 Oklahoma, 95m, 186, 216 O’Neill, Claire, 137 Ontario: adoption advertising, 199; adoption exchange, 200; adoption legislation, 28, 74, 265n44; adoption rates, 30; and ARENA, 209; out-of-wedlock births in, 134; passports for adopted children, 106–7, 125–6t; Toronto black markets and scandals, 166, 208; Toronto Children’s Aid Societies, 76, 208; Toronto meeting on cross-border issues (1954), 161–2, 175; US consuls in, 47;   US placements from, 19–20, 106–7,   207 Open Door Society (Montreal), 160, 197 Oregon, 48–51, 89–91 Orphelins de Duplessis, Les, 164–5 parents. See adoptive parents; birth mothers passports (Canadian), 104–10; for children adopted from Alberta, 104–5; for children adopted from New Brunswick, 122–4; for children adopted from Quebec, 139, 172, 173–4; control of cross-border adoptions through, 105–7, 130–1, 174; guardians’ applications for, 68, 124–9, 125–6t, 275n65, 282n19, 284n42; for probationary placements in US, 49, 109–10. See also Canada: Department of External Affairs; immigration visas Pearson, Lester B., 128–9 Pennsylvania, 61m, 69m, 140m, 215 Perkins, Frances, 36 Pfund, Peter, 239 policymakers, 10 Potter, Ellen: and IMH campaign, 65–6, 70, 73, 75, 80–3, 86–7; on interstate placements, 215–16; on Quebec placements in New Jersey, 144–5 press coverage: of adoption exchanges, 200; of Alberta baby exports, 98, 104, 111–15; of IMH campaign, 86–7, 88; of Montreal black market, 179–80, 182; of New Brunswick black market, 122

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Index  353 Prince Edward Island, 56, 75, 85, 125–6t, 146 probationary period (before finalized adoption): Alberta requirements for, 42, 102; and Canadian passport regulations, 109, 261n150; children in US during, 49, 261n150; legal requirements for, 28, 68, 133–4, 284n46; in sound adoption practice, 32 ‘Proposed Controls in Respect to the Movement of Children ...’ (1941), 49–50 Puerto Rico, 140m, 287n894 Quebec, 132–65; adoption legislation, 27–8, 133–4, 145, 258n104, 280–1n6, 281n9, 284n46; Adoption Act, 140, 178; Children’s Protection Act, 135–6, 178, 282n19, 282n24; birth registration, 173; Catholic agencies, 139–40, 141–6, 184; Catholic childcare institutions, 26, 132, 282n19; child and social welfare, 135–7, 163–4, 189–90, 282n19, 285n58; Children’s Aid Societies, 135–6; children’s passport applications, 125–6t; and child welfare directors’ plan for transjurisdictional placements, 158, 159; Duplessis government, 164, 182; placements through ARENA, 207. See also Montreal black market racial matching, 33, 51, 160, 197, 256n74. See also transracial placements racial pluralism, 199 racism and racial issues: with ARENA placements, 209, 210; desirability of white Protestant infants, 159–60; exchange of prejudices, 205; in international placements of US children, 241; in north vs south border crossing, 7, 119, 205, 241; racial preference hierarchy, 205–6; in social workers’ attitudes, 12, 29, 33, 204–5. See also African American children; African Canadian children; First Nations and Métis children; Native American children; transracial placements readoption (in US), 72–3, 82, 103, 152, 153 records and statistics (on adoption), 29–

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30; for adoption rates, 28–30, 228; for Alberta placements, 94, 104–5, 112–14, 115; for ARENA placements, 209; for Canadian passports, 105, 124–6, 139, 284n42; for IMH placements, 56–7; for institutional care in Quebec, 137; for international (overseas) adoptions, 6, 240; for outgoing US placements under Hague Convention, 241–2; for out-ofwedlock births, 29, 134; for Quebec placements, 138; US records used in Canada, 112–14; for US visas issued in Canada, 105 reformers and reform movement in child welfare: accomplishments and legacy of, 234–7; children as first priority for, 79–80, 90; criticisms of, 12, 34, 56–7; maternalist reformers, 22; role of adoption scandals in, 62–3, 77–8, 86–7, 95, 157; role of Hague Convention, 243 Regional Continuing Committee (northeast US), 215–16, 219 regulatory havens, 244–5 Reid, Joseph, 161, 192 religious matching: for Catholic children, 134–5; Catholic-Jewish transformations, 171–2, 180–1; challenges of, 65; jurisdictional variation in, 264n37; legislation on, 63–5, 265n44; for placements with Jewish families, 54, 63–5, 149–50, 297n78; segmentation of adoption marketplace, 176; and surpluses of children, 135; vs national heritage, 160. See also matching Revised Reciprocal Agreement re Interprovincial Placement of Children (1935), 40, 41, 47, 159, 258n104 Rhode Island: at CWC meeting on crossborder issues (1954), 161; and IMH campaign, 56, 82, 91; IMH placements in, 61m, 69m; New Brunswick placements in, 85; Quebec placements in,   41, 43–4, 48, 139–41, 140m, 144–7; and Regional Continuing Committee, 215 rights (of adopted children): adoptionrights movement, 228; to British/Canadian heritage, 103, 208; and civil rights

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354  Index discourses, 223; to cultural heritage, 9, 223–6; to indigenous heritage, 224–5, 231; to religious heritage, 63–4 Rockefeller (governor of New York), 216 Roman Catholic Church: Catholic children as hard-to-place, 160, 281n15; childcare institutions run by, 132, 136– 8, 145, 163–5, 282n19; children placed in Jewish families (see Jewish adoptive families); dominance in Quebec society, 133, 134–5, 145; maternity homes run by, 135; and out-of-wedlock births, 134; and professionalization of social welfare services, 301n127, 308n101; religious matching for, 63–4, 134–5; social and adoption agencies, 139–40, 141–6, 168, 184; and social welfare legislation, 189–90. See also Quebec Rose, William, 113 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 122 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 224 Royal Commission on the Child Welfare Branch, Department of Public Welfare, Province of Alberta (Howson Commission), 96, 101, 110–17, 124, 129 Royal Commission on Family and Children’s Law in British Columbia (Berger Commission 1975), 224 St Laurent, Louis, 104 Salt Lake Report, 121 Saskatchewan: adoption legislation, 74, 179; agreement with British Columbia, 159; AIM program, 199; passport applications in, 125–6t; placements of First Nations and Métis children, 199, 207; US consul in Regina, 47–8 Sauvegarde de l’Enfance, La (SE, Quebec City): adoption practices, 43, 138, 149, 164; placements in US, 139, 146, 148–9, 151–2, 157 Scott, R.H., 83, 85 Scott, Sarah, 81–3, 85 Second World War: British refugee children in North America, 48, 76, 97; impact on adoption patterns and practices, 29, 41–51, 119, 236

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Selman, Peter, 241 sibling groups, 160–1, 209 Sinclair, Raven, 231, 312n160 Slater, Irwin, 185 Smathers, George, 185 Smith, I. Evelyn: and Alberta baby export scandal, 105, 118; contacts with CWC, 150–1, 161; and Quebec Catholic agencies, 141–2, 144–5, 147–8, 150–1; and Salt Lake Report, 121; at USCB, 89, 90, 93, 112, 234; and Whitton, 112, 113 Smolin, David, 240 Sobel, Michael, 256–7n79 Social Service Council of Canada, 25 social welfare leadership networks: achievements of, 233–7; and federal institutions, 91–2, 96; limitations of, 96, 113–14, 129–30; role of individuals in, 89–90, 234; transborder information sharing through, 80, 82; weakening of, 148, 234. See also specific individuals and organizations social welfare services and agencies: lack of resources, 12; for minority or racialized communities, 33, 160, 197, 204–5, 256n74; US views of Canadian standards, 121–2, 154, 233. See also specific agencies and organizations social workers: attitudes to adoption, 11, 29, 34; attitudes to racial issues, 12, 29, 33, 204–5; and Catholic agencies, 301n127, 308n101; criticisms of, 12; professionalization of, 11, 22, 237; training and employment for, 25, 136 Société d’Adoption et de Protection de l’Enfance, La (SAPE, Montreal), 138–41, 143–9; case files, 141–2, 143, 145; child welfare role, 163–4; placements in US, 43–4, 48, 148–9, 157 Société de Réhabilitation, La (Sherbrooke), 138 sound adoption practices. See adoption practices, best or sound South Dakota, 204, 206, 305n45 Special Committee on Transborder Social Problems, 39, 49 State Department. See under United States of America

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Index  355 statistics. See records and statistics (on adoption) Strong-Boag, Veronica, 12, 223, 224, 312n5 Swan, Clara, 202 Tennessee Children’s Home Society, 185 Texas, 95m, 129, 186 ‘Today’s Child’ (Toronto Telegram), 199 transnational (overseas) adoption: in Canada, 240–1; demographic changes in, 240; post–Second World War, 119; SAPE involvement with, 164; from thirdworld or disadvantaged regions, 6; vs Canada-US placements, 6, 236 transracial placements: and adoptability definitions, 197; of African American children, 196, 205–6, 241; of African Canadian children, 200, 208, 209, 210; ARENA policies on, 226, 306n69; CWLA policy on, 226–7, 230; of First Nations and Métis children, 116, 196, 201, 205, 207; NABSW statement on, 223–4, 226, 228–9, 310n129; racialized communities’ objections to, 222–3; through adoption exchanges, 203–7, 225–6; tragic results of, 230. See also racial matching; racism and racial issues Ukrainian children, 116, 160 Unger, Steve, 222 Uniform Adoption Act (US, proposal), 216 United Nations, 119 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), 313n10 United Nations Declaration on Social and Legal Principles Relating to the Protection and Welfare of Children (1987), 313n10 United States Children’s Bureau (USCB): and adoption exchanges, 229–30; adoption guidelines, 31–2; and Alberta scandal, 97–9, 112–14, 118; and ARENA, 207; background, funding, and status of, 21–2, 24–5, 252n25; and black market legislation, 190–2; CWC networking and relationship with, 20–7, 38–40, 55, 162–3, 233–7, 287n86; deportation

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investigation and report, 36–8, 49; development of inter-jurisdictional adoption standards, 37–8, 49–51, 118–21, 120, 153–6; and IMH campaign, 55–6, 73–92; lack of statutory authority, 233–4; at League of Nations, 25–6; model adoption act, 308n96; and Montreal black market, 150–1, 166–7, 175–7; and Quebec placements in US, 132–3, 141–2, 144–5, 149; Social Service Division, 37, 51, 77, 89, 113, 161; Title V programs, 24, 31, 41, 252n25; and Uniform Adoption Act, 216 – publications: Adoption – What It Means, 31; Legislative Guides for the Termination of Parental Rights and Responsibilities and the Adoption of Children, 216; Preliminary Draft of Essentials in Adoption Law and Procedure, 31, 176 United States of America: adoption legislation (see under legislation pertaining to adoption); agencies with low standards in, 142; children placed in Canada, 241–2, 314n33; consulates (see consuls and consulates: US consuls in Canada); Declaration of Interdependence of the Governments within the United States of America, 232; deportations of adopted children from, 36–7, 79, 88, 172; federal vs state control of social welfare, 189–91; immigration quotas, 119, 155–6, 220, 236; naturalization for adopted children, 72–3, 82, 86; placements in Canada from, 314n33; readoption in, 72–3, 82, 103, 152, 153; transnational adoptions to, 240–1. See also specific states – government: Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 203–4, 206, 207, 209; Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 252n25; Department of Homeland Security, 239; Department of Labor, 21; National Center for Social Statistics, 30; Second Interstate Assembly, 214; Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, 185 – Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS): and Alberta placements,

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356  Index 106; and IMH adoptions, 70, 75, 77, 88; and international adoptions, 156, 236–7; and Montreal black market, 175; records of adoption visas, 105; regulatory role for, 48–9, 56, 79, 82, 88–91, 156, 234; and USCB family deportations report, 36, 49, 88; USCB’s discussions with, 36, 44–5, 88, 153; Whitton’s proposed role for, 49–51, 56, 106, 118; working arrangement with British Columbia, 48–51, 89–91, 108, 288n106 – State Department: birth parent exception, 314n35; and cross-border adoption regulation, 38, 118, 151, 153–6, 244; Final Rule, 239, 242; and immigration visas, 105; and international adoptions, 236, 239; Office of Children’s Services, 6. See also consuls and consulates: US consuls in Canada unwed mothers. See birth mothers Utah: Alberta placements in, 95m, 97, 99, 114, 115, 129; complaints about Alberta practices, 41, 42, 43, 44, 99; Quebec placements in, 140m Vermont, 144, 170, 215 Vietnam, 236 visas. See immigration visas Waite, Dorothy, 43, 44, 118 waiting children, 229 Ward, Margaret, 206 Washington: Alberta placements in, 95m, 115; IAP adoptions in, 206, 305n45; working agreement with British Columbia, 48–51, 89–91 Wendell, Mitchell, 217

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Whitton, Charlotte: career and achievements, 13, 24–5, 41, 52, 104, 129–30, 251n18; cross-border adoption proposal, 36–40, 44–51, 117–18, 159; at CWC, 18, 23, 51–2, 89–90; at League of Nations Child Welfare Committee, 25–6, 41, 108, 131; networking with USCB leadership, 36–40, 48, 112–14, 117–18, 148 – colleagues and friendships: Grace Abbott, 28, 44; Elsa Castendyck, 13, 21, 26, 48, 112; Margaret Grier, 111, 131, 253n38; Agnes Hanna, 44, 46–7; Julia Lathrop, 21, 26; Nora Lea, 13, 76, 112; Katharine Lenroot, 21, 26, 41, 98–9, 112, 131, 148 – in Alberta: and Howson Commission, 110–12, 129; libel proceedings against, 111–15; Welfare in Alberta (IODE study), 14, 94–104, 109–15 Willis, Edwin, 193 Wisconsin: Alberta placements in, 41, 43, 95m; IAP adoptions, 305n45; Quebec placements in, 140m, 145, 149 Wood, Martha, 113 Wright, H.H., 127, 128 Wyman, Sarah, 187, 194 Wyoming, 95m, 114, 219 Young, Charles, 179 Young, William and Lila, 55–62, 65–76, 81–3, 92, 125, 264n28, 275n51. See also Ideal Maternity Home Zelizer, Viviana, 22, 167 Zimmerman, Frederick, 217

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STUDIES IN GENDER AND HISTORY General Editors: Franca Iacovetta and Karen Dubinsky   1 Suzanne Morton, Ideal Surroundings: Domestic Life in a Working-Class Suburb in the 1920s   2 Joan Sangster, Earning Respect: The Lives of Working Women in Small-Town Ontario, 1920–1960   3 Carolyn Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880–1930   4 Sara Z. Burke, Seeking the Highest Good: Social Service and Gender at the University of Toronto, 1888–1937   5 Lynne Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in LateNineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario   6 Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791–1850   7 Mary Louise Adams, The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality   8 Linda Kealey, Enlisting Women for the Cause: Women, Labour, and the Left in Canada, 1890–1920   9 Christina Burr, Spreading the Light: Work and Labour Reform in LateNineteenth-Century Toronto 10 Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada 11 Deborah Gorham, Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life 12 Marlene Epp, Women without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War 13 Shirley Tillotson, The Public at Play: Gender and the Politics of Recreation in Postwar Ontario 14 Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson, Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) 15 Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Constructing Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 16 Valerie J. Korinek, Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties 17 Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 18 Robert A. Campbell, Sit Down and Drink Your Beer: Regulating Vancouver’s Beer Parlours, 1925–1954 19 Wendy Mitchinson, Giving Birth in Canada, 1900–1950

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20 Roberta Hamilton, Setting the Agenda: Jean Royce and the Shaping of Queen’s University 21 Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds, Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World 22 Linda Reeder, Widows in White: Migration and the Transformation of Rural Women, Sicily, 1880–1920 23 Terry Crowley, Marriage of Minds: Isabel and Oscar Skelton Re-inventing Canada 24 Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa, eds, Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History 25 John G. Reid, Viola Florence Barnes, 1885–1979: A Historian’s Biography 26 Catherine Carstairs, Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use Regulation and Power in Canada, 1920–1961 27 Magda Fahrni, Household Politics: Montreal Families and Postwar Reconstruction 28 Tamara Myers, Caught: Montreal Girls and the Law, 1869–1945 29 Jennifer A. Stephen, Pick One Intelligent Girl: Employability, Domesticity, and the Gendering of Canada’s Welfare State, 1939–1947 30 Lisa Chilton, Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s–1930 31 Esyllt W. Jones, Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg 32 Elise Chenier, Strangers in Our Midst: Sexual Deviancy in Postwar Ontario 33 Lara Campbell, Respectable Citizens: Gender, Family, and Unemployment in the Great Depression, Ontario, 1929–1939 34 Katrina Srigley, Breadwinning Daughters: Young Working Women in a Depression-era city, 1929–1939 35 Maureen Moynagh and Nancy Forestell, eds, Documenting First Wave Feminisms, Volume 1: Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents 36 Mona Oikawa, Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment 37 Karen Flynn, Moving beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora 38 Karen A. Balcom, The Traffic in Babies: Cross-Border Adoption and BabySelling between the United States and Canada, 1930–1972

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