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The ‘Culture of Life’ is Also a Culture of Shame & Trauma

‘Prolifers’ want to turn back the clock on compassion

Amber Fraley
5 min readJul 4, 2023
Photo by Joey Thompson on Unsplash

In 2012, a class-action lawsuit was brought against the Canadian Government for all the coerced adoptions of babies of single and teen moms from 1940 to 1990. Plaintiffs were able to bring the lawsuit against the government because taxpayer dollars were funneled into maternity homes for unwed mothers, which were usually run by churches.

As this was going on in Canada, American broadcast journalist Dan Rather began looking into the broad phenomenon of coerced adoptions that occurred all across Europe, the US, Australia and Canada, and he found a similar pattern. The white, Western culture from post-World War II up until about the early 1990s was the same: Shame white girls for getting pregnant out of wedlock, send them away to a maternity home, take their babies from them immediately or soon after birth, and adopt those babies to married couples.

He called the piece Adopted or abducted? Veil of secrecy lifts slowly on decades of forced adoptions for unwed mothers around the globe.

Rather details how most of those girls were flat-out lied to and told they weren’t legally allowed to keep their babies. While they stayed in those maternity homes waiting to give birth, they were often…

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Amber Fraley
Amber Fraley

Written by Amber Fraley

Writing about abortion rights, mental illness, trauma, narcissistic abuse & survival, politics. Journalist, novelist, wife, mom, Kansan, repro rights activist.

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