The September 21 Edition

It’s remarkable how the baby business has changed over the course of a single generation. In my mother’s day, getting pregnant in your late teens, out of wedlock, was cause for social ostracisation. The women were shamed and humiliated, their babies often whisked away at birth to be adopted out to the euphemistic “better home”. Today, thanks to the pill and other societal and governmental changes, the issues involving intervention often occur at the other end of the baby-making window – that is, when women in their 30s and 40s need help conceiving. Indeed, just as there was an entire industry built around what to do with babies born out of wedlock in the mid- 20th century, today there’s a booming business around how to make babies later in life. In both cases, the babies eventually grow up. And as Megan Norris writes in today’s cover story, their parents never forget the circumstances of their birth. Indeed, for many of the young mothers, barely out of childhood themselves when traumatised by the taking of their babies mid-last century, the grief, the rage, the enduring pain – and the sense of injustice – never really goes away. Editor, Katrina Strickland