Adoption practices after unwed teenage pregnancy

Adoption practices after unwed teenage pregnancy are first presented as the expected solution imposed on sixteen-year-old Maribeth Robertson: carry the pregnancy, leave home for the Sisters of Charity, and surrender the baby to adoptive parents. The arrangement promises concealment and a swift return to ordinary life, but its institutional routines make clear how little space it initially allows for the young mother’s own wishes. The plot later transforms that prescribed route into a more intimate decision: Maribeth asks Liz Whittaker and John Whittaker to adopt her child, signs the legal papers, and confronts the grief of leaving the baby she has chosen to place with them.

The prescribed route: secrecy, delivery, and surrender

When Maribeth asks her doctor about abortion, he tells her that it is costly, dangerous, and illegal, refuses to discuss it further, and recommends that she have the baby and give it up for adoption. He says that this is what most girls her age do. Since the baby is due in December, he proposes that she enter the Sisters of Charity once her pregnancy begins to show and remain there until the birth. The advice frames adoption as a conventional solution to an unwanted teenage pregnancy, but Maribeth senses that the apparently simple instruction to give the baby away conceals a more complicated process.

Maribeth tries to imagine a different course. She tells her father she does not want to keep the baby, explaining that at sixteen she cannot provide for it and wants a life of her own. She proposes attending school with the nuns and returning to school after the birth, perhaps presenting her absence as illness. Her father answers that the pregnancy will become the family’s public disgrace. He insists that she have the baby and put it up for adoption, forbids her to remain at home, and orders her to go to the Sisters of Charity. He also bars her from seeing her mother and sister until after the birth and adoption. The plan is therefore not simply a practical arrangement for the baby: it is also a punishment intended to hide Maribeth and restore the family’s reputation.

Her father makes the separation immediate and tangible. He calls the doctor and the convent, pays eight hundred dollars for six months of room, board, expenses, and delivery, and receives assurances that the baby will be given to a loving family. He expects Maribeth to return a week after the birth, provided there are no complications. The money is handed to her in crisp bills in a white envelope, while her mother retreats to her bedroom in tears. Maribeth is told to leave the next morning, to say nothing to Noelle, and to understand that she will be away for six months. What the adults arrange as a managed period of absence feels to her like banishment from the only home she has known.

The convent and the limits of the system

At the Sisters of Charity, Maribeth finds two other pregnant girls sent there for the same reason. The convent is cavernous, dark, and gloomy; the girls eat with the nuns, attend prayers and vespers, and may speak only at certain times. The first girl, seventeen and close to giving birth, has a daughter on Maribeth’s second day. The baby is quickly taken to waiting adoptive parents, and the mother does not even see her. To Maribeth, the process seems barbaric, as if the pregnancy and birth are shameful secrets that must be hidden.

The other girl is fifteen, and her pregnancy carries a still more disturbing story: the baby’s father is her uncle. She is desperate and frightened of childbirth. On Maribeth’s fifth night, the girl’s screams continue for two days before she is taken to a hospital for a cesarean section. Maribeth later learns that the baby was born safely, but the girl will not return. The other girls disappear from the convent one by one, leaving Maribeth alone with the sisters and the institution’s routines. Their stories make the supposedly standard adoption pathway appear less like a single orderly procedure than a system that separates young mothers from their babies while leaving their fear and vulnerability largely unaddressed.

The local newspaper intensifies Maribeth’s sense of injustice. Two weeks after arriving, she sees the notice of Paul Browne and Debbie’s wedding. He is on his honeymoon while she remains at the convent, bearing the consequences of their prom-night encounter alone. The contrast sharpens her awareness that the social and practical burden of the pregnancy falls on her. She cannot stay in the convent, and eventually leaves, taking a bus toward Chicago in search of work. When the bus stops for dinner, she sees the hiring sign in Jimmy D’s window, gets a job, and remains in town. The expected sequence—convent, birth, adoption, return home—has already been disrupted by her decision to leave.

Consent, capacity, and the meaning of a choice

After she finds work, Maribeth explains that she plans to place the baby for adoption because she is sixteen, cannot support a child, and hopes to continue her education. She wants the baby to have a family that genuinely wants it. Yet she has not arranged an adoption where she now lives, and she admits that she does not know whether she wants to give the baby up. She can feel the baby moving, but also knows that her parents will not help her, that her wages cannot support a child, and that she does not want to become a mother at this point in her life. Her uncertainty is not indifference: she is trying to judge what care she can realistically provide and what future the child could have.

Maribeth’s reasoning also resists the notion that marriage is an adequate remedy. She does not want to marry the baby’s father simply because she is pregnant, and she does not want to be pushed into a marriage with someone she does not love. Later, she tells Liz that she will not marry Tommy Whittaker merely to avoid surrendering the baby. She values his friendship, but believes they are both too young for marriage and parenthood. She sometimes wishes she could keep the baby, especially as the pregnancy becomes physically undeniable, but worries about what she could offer in the months and years ahead. In her account, love for the child includes acknowledging her own limits instead of pretending that affection alone will supply money, help, maturity, or time.

Liz presses Tommy to listen to Maribeth’s stated wishes rather than turn his desire to help into a decision for her. Tommy loves Maribeth and wants to marry her and keep the baby, but Liz warns him that marriage and parenthood cannot be entered into lightly or as a rescue gesture. She recognizes that Maribeth has no dependable family support and that keeping the baby could become a burden for both mother and child. At the same time, Liz does not treat Maribeth’s plan as settled merely because adoption appears sensible to others. She tells her that she need not surrender the baby to have a good life: she could stay with the Whittakers, who would help her. That offer makes room for a genuine alternative and places the decision back with Maribeth.

A private adoption and its emotional cost

The meaning of adoption changes when Maribeth decides to ask Liz and John to adopt her baby. By then, her attachment has become harder to keep at a distance. A shower organized by Julie at Jimmy D’s gives her knitted booties and a sweater set, a pink-and-blue blanket patterned with ducks, a teddy bear, toys, diapers, and a high chair from Jimmy. The gifts make the baby concrete in a new way: Maribeth can see the life those things are meant to accompany and realizes that she will not be the one watching the child use them. Overwhelmed, she calls Dr. MacLean to ask about prospective parents. He has considered three couples, but one prospective father has admitted to a drinking problem, another couple have learned that they are expecting a child themselves, and the third have not yet decided whether they want to adopt. With only two weeks remaining, the uncertainty of the impersonal matching process becomes urgent.

Maribeth turns instead to the family whose care she has come to trust. Near Annie Whittaker’s Christmas decorations, she tells Liz that she wants Liz and John to adopt the baby. Liz is initially stunned and worries that taking another woman’s child may not be right. Maribeth explains that she wants the child to have a future with people able to provide love and stability; she cannot support a baby on her restaurant wages, and her parents will not let her bring the child home. Liz responds that Maribeth could stay with them and raise the baby there, making clear that financial hardship does not obligate her to surrender it. Maribeth repeats that she cannot manage motherhood and asks Liz to make the baby hers. The adoption is presented as her request, not as a condition imposed by the Whittakers.

Liz also tries to protect the relationship from being reduced to a transaction. She tells Maribeth that she need not disappear from their lives if they adopt the baby and that they love her and do not want to lose her. The arrangement would preserve Maribeth’s connection to the family while establishing Liz and John as the child’s parents. The question of the child’s origins is not resolved openly: the three agree that Maribeth will be described as their friend, and that the child need not know the truth for the time being. The secrecy that first appeared as social concealment imposed by Maribeth’s father thus returns in a different form, now negotiated among people who hope to spare one another pain, though it leaves the child’s knowledge of her birth mother deferred.

Signing, mourning, and the future

After Kate is born, John and Liz make clear that they will understand if Maribeth changes her mind. She remains firm that adoption is right for her and for the baby, although she is sad to give her up. A lawyer explains the adoption papers at length. Three days after the birth, Maribeth signs them with a shaking hand and waives the waiting period. She asks the nurses not to bring the baby to her that day: she needs time to mourn. The legal act does not settle her feelings; it formalizes a choice that still entails grief.

When Maribeth leaves the hospital on New Year’s Day, she goes home with the Whittakers and Kate. Liz carries the baby to the car, and John takes pictures. At home, whenever Kate cries, Liz goes to her while Maribeth tries not to respond. Maribeth forces herself to maintain distance because she is no longer the child’s mother in the daily, caregiving sense. She imagines the ordinary acts she will not perform—comforting Kate in the dark, caring for her during a bad cold, or reading her a story—and understands that she may be a friend if their lives remain entwined, but not her mother. The adoption creates a loving family for Kate, yet its cost is not erased by the warmth of the new home.

The Whittakers’ support extends beyond the adoption itself. After Thanksgiving, Liz and John drive 250 miles to meet Maribeth’s parents and ask whether she will be allowed to pursue an education. Her father says that her mother stayed home to care for her children and that Maribeth can do the same, revealing the narrow future he imagines for her. John and Liz offer the money they had set aside for Annie’s education to fund Maribeth’s college plans. They also agree with her father that she will return home to finish school in the spring, while making clear that she can come back to stay with them or attend college elsewhere. The support addresses a condition that had shaped her adoption decision from the start: her fear that keeping the baby would end her schooling and leave her without the means to provide.

As a rule within the story, adoption therefore moves from an adult-directed mechanism of concealment and removal toward a more deliberate arrangement grounded in Maribeth’s expressed judgment and the Whittakers’ continuing care. The contrast does not make the choice painless or simple. Maribeth’s decision reflects age, poverty, isolation, limited educational opportunity, and a genuine concern for the baby’s future; the alternative of raising the child remains available in principle, but she does not believe she can do so. The eventual arrangement gives Kate a home with adoptive parents who love her while allowing Maribeth a path back to school and a continued place in the Whittakers’ lives. Its emotional truth lies in holding those outcomes together with the loss Maribeth must consciously accept.