Hidden Girls
A Birth Mother’s Story of Reunion and Reckoning
The story opens when the son Julia had relinquished to closed adoption in 1967 found her via a quick Google search, and emailed her. Soon after, they met for lunch, the first time they’d seen one another since he was taken from her arms by a caseworker in the hallway of a Boston Hospital. Instead of a days-old infant wrapped in soft blankets, he was a white-haired middle-aged man, closing in on 50, with a booming voice and most of his life already lived.
Hidden Girls dives into the emotional heart of adoption loss.
It toggles back and forth between lyrical chapters focused on MacDonnell’s personal experience and chapters of journalism about what she calls the Unholy Trinity of family, church and state.
She tells how the original birth certificates of the children of unmarried mothers are sealed away and new ones created, a pure form of identity theft. She analyzes the fairy-tale of adoption as a win/win and touches upon the havoc DNA commercial databases are wreaking on the secrets of adoption.
At first, MacDonnell envisioned a straightforward narrative about a witty and ambitious girl who got ahead of herself in the cultural confusions of the late 1960s. But complexities piled up as soon as she began to write. She wasn’t just revealing a secret that had festered in her for most of her life, but also that her big secret contained a snarl of smaller secrets. There was no simple story, only a complicated many-layered story that switches back and forth in time. Hence, her story reflects the century’s feminist battles for reproductive rights and healthcare.
