For decades, a nationwide network of institutions erased the identities of 1.5 million mothers and their children. Now, through a paper trail of medical files and documents, women like Kyla Selsor are piecing things back together.
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Kyla Selsor was not invited to her mother’s funeral. She was not listed in the obituary. She was not sitting beside her siblings in the funeral pews when her mother, Carolyn Ann Duke, was laid to rest in the spring of 1998.
Six years prior, Selsor had ignored her family’s wishes and married a Black man. That choice led to a complete cut off of communication, specifically by her older brother, who happened to be funding the funeral. He refused to include Selsor on the list of relatives.
Still, Selsor was desperate to say goodbye to her mother. In hopes of persuading the funeral director to allow her attendance, she expedited a new version of her birth certificate to her house. Her original document, printed on a sleek yellow paper, was slightly smeared and hard to decipher. She hoped that with a new printed document — clear proof of her biological relationship to her mother — she would be allowed to attend.
$65 and a few days later, a newly printed certificate arrived. Selsor scanned the document, but her eyes latched onto a line of small black type on the bottom left side.
What stuck out to her that day didn’t have to do with her age or her name or her birthplace. It had to do with one statistical tally: “Previous Deliveries to Mother (Do Not Include this birth) 4.”
For thirty-two years, Selsor believed she was the third-born child — which meant that number should have been two. But the certificate was clear: four previous deliveries. “I was absolutely emotionally, physically, spiritually exasperated,” Kyla recalled. Four previous deliveries meant that two children were missing from the family tree. So where were these other two children? And what else had her mother been hiding?
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Those questions would follow her for the next three decades as she searched for birth records, medical documents, family trees, and DNA tests to try to answer them. They would also be the same questions I would ask her during our first phone call, almost 28 years later, on a late afternoon in October of 2025.
That day, Selsor told me about a large red brick building in Little Rock, Arkansas, now standing barren with closed blinds and barbed wire lining the fence around the perimeter. It was once far from empty, housing countless unwed girls during their premarital pregnancies. These stays often resulted in the pressured relinquishment of their newborn children — an experience so emotionally intense that many women, like her mother, carried the secret to their graves.
This house was just one branch of a nationwide network of American maternity homes called Florence Crittenton Homes. From their start in 1883 until the mid-late 20th century, there were approximately 73 homes across the country. They were advertised and treated as charities for young pregnant women.
“The world of children having children is a world without goals, a world without vision… The Florence Crittenton Home offers a change in that world,” a Florence Crittenton Home flyer from the Arkansas location read, with a cover featuring the dark silhouette of a pregnant woman in a window. “The Door is Open” was printed in white letters underneath the image. On the back page of the flyer, they requested donations.
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Different forms of maternity institutions and programs that perpetuated forced adoption have existed globally for centuries in Spain, Ireland, Germany, and Argentina, just to name a few.
In Spain, from the 1930’s to the 90’s, as many as 300,000 newborns were separated from their mothers and placed into the arms of families loyal to dictator Francisco Franco. Germany had the Lebensborn program, which targeted unmarried, pregnant, “Aryan” women, discouraging the women from abortions, hoping to expand the births of the “racially elite.” In Argentina between 1956 and 1980, two midwives set up a child trafficking network, selling at least 40 babies to adoptive parents and falsifying their birth certificates.
It took years for these unethical systems to be investigated. But most Americans have yet to fully confront the inner workings of their own institutions.
For decades, systems like Florence Crittenton Homes were an unspoken but institutionalized practice, where an estimated 1.5 million girls surrendered their children, and then returned to their previous lives, pressured by the system and often too traumatized to ever say a word. This silence, pain, and secrecy continues to impact generations to this day, as people like Selsor try to solve, and share the homes’ impacts. Today, a new generation of researchers and survivors are fueled by the same clinical evidence that haunted Selsor on the day her birth certificate arrived. They are using DNA technology, persistent investigation, and the stories of the women who were once held inside, to dismantle a century of institutional silence.
Recent legislation is only pushing us further into the past. The federal constitutional right to abortion was eliminated in 2022. Today, abortions are illegal in Arkansas, along with 13 other states across the country. Modern maternity homes have increased 23% in the past four years. The nation is currently returning to the legal frameworks of an era we have yet to fully acknowledge.
In order for Selsor to even think about finding her lost siblings, she first needed to grasp how the homes functioned.
The first Florence Crittenton home opened in New York City in 1883. Right on Bleecker Street, in downtown Manhattan, a man named Charles Crittenton felt he had found his evangelical purpose: assisting unwed mothers.
Maternity homes, however, were not his first business venture. Crittenton moved to New York City in 1854 to work as a music teacher, but after being offered a job as a clerk at a drug company, he quickly changed paths. He opened his own drug business in 1861, and by 1893, it was valued at $800,000. That’s equivalent to over $28 million today.
At the same time that his business and finances were thriving, Crittenton was grieving his personal life. His wife died in 1882, followed by his daughter, Florence, who died at just four years old. His grief of their death brought him to Christianity. He quickly converted and began attending prayer meetings where he met evangelist Smith Allen. It was Allen who one day invited Crittenton to tour the so-called ‘red light district’ in New York City. This area referred to the span from Times Square to 42nd Street, where sex shops and prostitution were prominent. Crittenton was shocked by the prostitutes’ lifestyles, specifically with the idea that they had no other options, both for income and shelter.
His revelation launched him into a solution: founding that first ever Bleecker Street home, named after his late daughter. The first home aimed to help an assortment of “fallen women,” including those who had committed sins of sex, gambling, alcohol, and prostitution. The mission was to preach salvation and hope through Christian evangelism.
But things didn’t truly take off until Dr. Kate Waller Barrett came into the picture. Barrett, a physician from Virginia, had a separate experience that brought her to feel moved to help unmarried, pregnant girls.
After marrying a reverend and having a child of her own, Barrett didn’t have the best outlook on unmarried mothers. They were sinners, after all. But one cold, winter night, a young unmarried girl with a baby showed up at Barrett’s door. Barrett recalled being surprisingly moved by the young girl’s situation. According to the Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries Social Welfare History Project, Barrett explained her empathetic revelation: “Almost unknown to myself, there entered into my heart…a covenant with God that, so long as I lived, in my voice would always be lifted in behalf of this outcast class and my hand always held out to aid them.”
Barrett was aware of Crittenton’s work, and in 1893 the two connected in Atlanta, Georgia. Crittenton confessed his dream of starting a national network of homes just like the Florence Crittenton mission, and Barrett hopped right on board.
From there, the two began a national tour, preaching evangelical Christian attitudes towards unwed mothers. They aimed to bring attention to the sins of prostitution, and in 1895, the national network, the National Florence Crittenton Mission, was established. Just two years later, there were fifty-one Florence Crittenton homes across the country.
Each home operated under the same charter, but were primarily autonomous, governed by their own board, and responsible for their own funding. By 1898 Congress granted a national charter to the Mission, supporting their authority to provide shelter to women and girls who had “been betrayed from the path of virtue.”
Charles Crittenton and Kate Waller Barrett allegedly preached the need to assist women who had strayed from Christianity. They tailored their mission as a form of social work, at a time when unmarried pregnant women were a failure of God. But as they were emphasizing the needs of these homes, they were simultaneously perpetuating them as the only option.
“My granny used to say the path to hell was paved with good intentions,” said Selsor, referring to Crittenton and Barrett. “And I think that this is a very good example of that.”
Other branches of unwed mother institutions also existed across America during the same time. The Salvation Army owned 15. Others existed within orphanages or the Catholic Church, run by Nuns. Unmarried girls were sent to these institutions during their pregnancy, explicitly, to hide. After their births, they were told to go back to their lives and move on.
Selsor’s mom, Carolyn Ann Duke, was one of these women. The Florence Crittenton Home network expanded to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1903, when Charles Crittenton held a series of meetings in the city’s churches. By 1904, Little Rock Florence Crittenton Home location opened and began taking their first “clients.”
Understanding the inner workings of the Florence Crittenton Homes are not simple. “I had such a hard time understanding what was going on,” said Selsor as she recalled the beginning of her search process. Most homes went through massive shifts and changes throughout their time being open. It is imperative to understand how the institutions evolved in order to understand the direct impact on the women themselves. Not everyone had the same experience. Timing was key.
During the first few decades of the Arkansas home, most of the women chose to mother their own children, hoping that the home would help them prepare to reenter society after their sins. This sentiment didn’t last forever though, and soon enough, people began to reevaluate the homes’ intended purpose.
After only six years of operation, the institution began to face political backlash. During a City Council meeting in 1910, Mayor William R. Duley explained his concerns for the staff’s “anti-prostitution attitudes.” In 1916, a fire destroyed the new building recently acquired for the home. Foul play was suspected.
After World War II, the Little Rock Florence Crittenton Home began to publicly encourage their clients to give their children up for adoption, rather than mother them themselves. Selsor’s mother, according to documents, was confined to the home in 1953.
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According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, in the 1940s and 50s, “white women who were single and pregnant were diagnosed as mentally ill and deemed unfit to be mothers; they were told, however, that they could achieve rehabilitation by relinquishing their babies to a thriving adoption market.”
According to Rickie Solinger, a leading historian of reproductive justice, these homes represented a system larger than just providing shelter for girls in need, like they advertised. The institutions were performing a specific type of social surgery.
“If a girl living in Arkansas in 1920 got pregnant without having a husband, this was seen as a mark of her sexually disordered mind, of her low intelligence,” Solinger explained.
In Solinger’s research, the pregnancy wasn’t the only “problem” being solved — it was the woman’s status in a racially stratified society. While the homes were advertised as sanctuaries, Solinger noted that they were tailored almost exclusively to white women. In an era of rigid segregation and eugenics, white Christian girls were not supposed to be “fallen.” This even further pushed the need for white women to enter these homes if their baby was half-Black; a suspicion Selsor holds for her own mother’s situation.
“Everything about putting these girls into maternity homes was a way of defining whiteness… “ said Solinger. “[White babies] were a very, very hot commodity… sexuality and female sexuality in particular was a very important route for defining whiteness.”
By “curing” the white mother through hiding her away, doing chores, and the forced relinquishment of her child, the system allowed her to return to society with her racial and social status ostensibly scrubbed clean.
For Selsor, looking back at her mother’s life, the “cure” was an uneven burden of guilt. “There was no accountability for the person who was getting them pregnant, right?” Selsor asked. “And so they carried this shame throughout their entire life for doing what biologically is normal for us as human beings.”
That female targeted shame is what fueled the silence of the 1950s and 60s. Between 1945 and 1973, an estimated 4 million mothers in the U.S. surrendered their newborns for adoption. By the mid-1960s, 80 to 90 percent of white unwed mothers who entered maternity homes ended up relinquishing their children.
Internal archives from the Little Rock branch, located at the Roberts Library of Arkansas History and Art, reveal that the home’s downfall was a slow financial collapse. In the early 1960s, the Arkansas home relied on community donations to maintain their budget. Later that decade, fixed costs for the massive West 11th Street property began to outrun the income generated by resident fees. This forced the home into a dangerous dependency on community grants; any shortfall immediately threatened the facility’s operations.
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In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to abortion under the 14th Amendment’s right to privacy in Roe v. Wade. While abortions continued to be a contentious subject in Arkansas, birth control expanded, and the number of legally reported abortions slowly began to rise. With this came a move towards the acceptance of single mothers. The Florence Crittenton Home in Arkansas failed to keep up with the evolution of these public opinions, and in return, plummeted financially. The community stopped donating.
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The 1982 and 1983 records show a desperate attempt to pivot from a “Home” to a “Services” model to please community members and maintain donations. There was a major budget crisis and the board was desperate to fix it. This forced the Florence Crittenton Home to abandon its residential mission for good. The organization officially transitioned into Florence Crittenton Services of Arkansas. They moved away from the secrecy and shelter model of the early 20th century and toward outpatient counseling, family preservation, and support for single parents.
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Still, the home continued taking in unwed mothers. Valery Burns was one of them. She spoke more highly of her experience there as things began to shift.
Burns spent a few months in the Little Rock Florence Crittenton Home in 1991. She was 18 and a ward of the state when she arrived. Her pregnancy was far from intentional — she was sexually assaulted. She had no one around her to give a helping hand when her pregnancy test showed positive. Other than the street, her only option was the Florence Crittenton Home — and for that, she was grateful.
“There was a lot of uncertainty surrounding me, and a lot of fear,” she remembered. She remembered her stay there as a period of intense depression, but credited it to her own situation and fragile state. “All I wanted to do was do my time and get out.”
She painted the picture of the home vividly: The red brick exterior. The entrance that led into a formal living room filled with antiques, wing back chairs and two office cubicles. A kitchen and a dining room down the hall. Upstairs — the living spaces, two girls to a room. A little chest of drawers, no closet. Lockers in the hallway for valuables, community bathrooms and showers She compared the rooms to college dorms.
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During her time there, the youngest resident was 13. The oldest was 23. In the morning, the girls had chores: Dusting, vacuuming, cleaning the floors. During the day, they would walk across the street to a metal building for school. There, Burns continued her junior year curriculum. “I was in 11th grade, the 13 year old, I think was like eighth or ninth grade…we were all in the same room doing our own work.”
A few years after Burn spent time there, things went downhill for good. In the early 2000s, the home struggled to meet modern building codes and the specialized requirements of 21st-century social service grants. The Little Rock Florence Crittenton Home officially closed its doors in 2005.
By March of 2026, the small black type on Selsor’s birth certificate had transformed from a statistical shock into a physical destination. I was standing on the sidewalk of 3610 West 11th Street in Little Rock, staring at the very place where her mother once lived.
The Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers sits there like a tomb of 20th-century morality. To a passerby, it looks like a forgotten school or a decommissioned hospital.
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It was impossible to see into the windows, the blinds were drawn tight. Barbed wire lined the perimeter. The neighborhood was quiet. Stray cats wandered by. Five minutes away sits St. Vincent Hospital, where the girls were shuttled off to for their births. A giant cross is plastered to the wall.
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I first began my research on American maternity homes that fall. I had learned about the tragedy of “stolen babies” in Spain after reading Ana Belén Pintado’s story a few years previously. I had also heard rumblings of Ireland’s history with cruel Church-run “baby-mom homes.”
In 2015, the Irish government conducted major investigations on mother-baby homes in Ireland after hearing claims of children buried in mass graves across the country. There were 18 homes across Ireland where nearly 35,000 pregnant women were confined between 1922 and 1998. Roughly 9,000 children died in these homes. According to the BBC, the findings forced the country to face their harmful attitudes “towards sexuality and intimacy.” The homes reinforced a system of shame and the need to hide “illegitimate” pregnancies. “Young mothers and their sons and daughters were forced to pay a terrible price for that dysfunction,”the BBC quoted. After these investigations came to light in the media, the catholic church’s authority weakened, and Ireland faced a major shift. The country was forced to face their harmful past.
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The impact of America’s maternity homes, however, remain confined to online spaces: Facebook groups, Reddit threads, and even Google Map Reviews — all with extremely varied opinions and experiences.
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A Facebook Group titled “Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers,” made that even more than clear. There, I read posts of all kinds, written by people all across the country with varying connections to these homes. Mothers who gave birth, children who were searching for family members, siblings who were longing for connections. I read of confusion, loss, grief, and pain. I also read of hopefulness and reconnection.
Selsor was one of these entries. “I Pray that I can reunite with the brother that I have never met but will love until my last breath,” she wrote.
Selsor has the kind of Southern warmth that makes you feel like you’re family. I was surprised she was so eager to tell me about something so personal, so emotional. Then I realized I was the first person who had ever seemed to ask.After a few hours, I was up to date on her 28-year search.
After the initial shock of her birth certificate, Selsor started digging. She called cousins, aunts and neighbors — anyone who might know the slightest of details about her mom’s life from before she was born. One cousin vaguely remembered Selsor’s mother possibly being pregnant, but other than that, wasn’t much help.
From there, Selsor turned to Census reports. Through them, she was able to see that her mother was confined at the Arkansas State Reformatory School for Girls, listed as an “inmate” on the 1950 census, and also spent time at the state psychiatric hospital. Her listed offense? Being pregnant.
Since unwed pregnant girls were considered mentally ill, Crittenton homes would receive referrals from the state mental hospital and reformatory schools, where they were first sent for rebelling.
In 1998, Selsor tried to go to the Little Rock Florence Crittenton Home to ask questions about her mother’s time there, but the staff explained to her that the records were lost in a fire.
Despite this, Selsor managed to connect with an adoption coordinator through the state around 2002. “The only thing that she could tell me,” Selsor recounted, “was that I received your documentation in your records, and I can confirm by the information that you included, that yes, your mother gave birth to one male child.”
This made it clear to Selsor that only one of her lost siblings was connected to the maternity home. The other sibling must have been given up for adoption separately.
The coordinator further confirmed that the birth had been recorded while Selsor’s mother was at the Florence Crittenton Home, and the state adoption agency had a record of it.
Adoption records in Arkansas are sealed forever, inaccessible to anyone but the adoptee. Selsor was forced to navigate the Mutual Consent Adoption Registry, a state-operated system designed to facilitate contact between people separated by adoption. The catch is that this connection can only be made if all parties input their information and explicitly agree to a reunion. So, all she could do was wait.
For the next few years, Selsor continued to collect documents, records, and photos. She was even able to find the sibling separate from the maternity homes after taking a DNA test in 2017. The test connected her to a sister in Chicago. Selsor was even able to call her. Her sister, however, was not interested in having a relationship. “She said, you know, ‘Our mother has been out there all these years, and she hasn’t come looking for me. So what do I care?’” Selsor recalled.
She put everything she found in a dark blue binder. But even after finding her sister, she couldn’t get the mysteriousness of the Florence Crittenton Home out of her mind. She was desperate to find her other sibling.
The breakthrough finally came from a medical records office at St. Vincent Hospital — the same facility that had partnered with the maternity home decades prior. After 27 years of being told “no,” a hospital staffer called her with the impossible: “Don’t scream in my ear, but I have your mother’s medical record, and there is a lot of information about the baby in there.”
“I’m just overwhelmed,” Selsor told me, her breath shaky over the phone. “I was almost at a point where I just felt so defeated.” Selsor now holds her brother’s birth certificate; proof that the person she’s been searching for all these years really exists. On the bottom left hand side of the certificate is her brother’s small, newborn footprint.
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Selsor was overjoyed to have found this piece of him. But more importantly, this piece of her mother. “I’m just thinking, Lord, she’s such a survivor. And I understand now.”
For decades, the culture that enforced these maternity homes seemed to have relied on a hope of happy endings, both for the mothers, and for their kids. The system assumed that the women would go home cleansed, the children would be absorbed into new families, and the missing paperwork would remain unquestioned. But none of this remained true, especially as technology, and the internet, began to make the investigation process finally within reach. While Selsor was digging through census reports, Ann Fessler was sitting down for interviews.
One regular day in 1989, Fessler was walking to see an exhibit at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she had taught for the last seven years. Once there, a woman approached her. “‘You could be my long-lost daughter,’” she said.
The woman thought that Fessler might have been her adopted daughter that she was forced to surrender 40 years previously. Fessler, although an adoptee herself, was not her daughter — their birth dates did not match. However, she was moved and intrigued by the woman’s story. She thought she knew and understood adoption. After all — she was adopted. But it suddenly struck her that there was a whole category of perspectives she had never heard: women who surrendered their children.
“When she told me her story — when I talked to her — I was like, ‘Why have I never heard this story before?’” said Fessler.
From there, Fessler was hooked on learning more. As she began searching for information on forced adoption, she began to realize how urgent it was that she hear as much as she could, and as soon as possible. There was, quite literally, a ticking clock — it was from 1945 to 1973 that there was a major spike in adoption, and maternity homes were in full swing. “These women are aging out, and they’re going to die, and these stories are going to be gone from history,” explained Fessler.
Fessler came to find out that there were no public, accessible records of their experiences because they were simply “told not to tell.” Fessler wanted to change that.
Soon she came across an article about a building being torn down in Hartford, Connecticut that was a former maternity home. She reached out to the reporter, who had managed to talk to a few women who had once been in that building. She told the reporter that if the women were interested, she wanted to talk to them.
Soon, Fessler was sitting down for her first interview. “I was absolutely blown away by what she told me. I was absolutely flabbergasted,” recalled Fessler. “ I mean, she just poured her heart out, dumped all these emotions out, and it was incredibly emotional.”
After that first conversation, she knew she had to hear more of these stories. But she needed a way to find these women.
Helpfully, the Providence Journal published a piece about Fessler’s project. From there, people began reaching out to her. But it wasn’t usually the moms themselves. Rather, it was others who said, “‘That happened to my aunt. That happened to my college roommate. That happened to my mother. That happened to my grandmother.’” Then, The Boston Globe published a feature article on the project. Soon, Fessler was flooded with so many responses that she had to organize everyone into an Excel spreadsheet to keep track.
In 2007, Ann Fessler published the book “The Girls Who Went Away,” with the voices of over 100 women who were pressured to surrender their babies between 1945 and 1973.“I did more than 100 interviews,” Fessler said.” I don’t think I got through anyone without tears running down my face.”
During her interviews, Fessler would ask the women to think back to that time, to take her into that space with them. For most of the women, it was their first time ever talking about it. She recalls a few women visibly shaking as they tried to remember. “Most of them said it was the biggest thing that ever happened to them in their life.”
All of Fessler’s work revolves around the gap between written authoritative histories, and how that same history is understood by the people who lived it. “I do my best to get this information out into the world, but a lot of people just don’t think they have any connection to adoption,” Fessler explained. “Little do they know, there’s a very good chance everybody in the family is keeping it a secret.”
Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh was told to keep that secret at just 16. She was living in Northern Virginia when she got pregnant by her high school boyfriend. After spending two months hiding at a wage home doing chores and taking care of children, she was sent to the Florence Crittenton Home in Washington, D.C. for her final two months of pregnancy.
“We were inmates, and that’s how they referred to us,” said Wilson-Buterbaugh. “We were just tossed out like yesterday’s garbage.”
During her stay, boyfriends were not allowed to visit, and leaving the home was a rarity. “If we wanted to go anywhere, we had to go in a group. We had to wear a fake wedding ring,” said Wilson-Buterbaugh.
Her boyfriend at the time wanted to get married, but he couldn’t find her during her pregnancy. He failed his senior year. He carried her picture in his wallet. After she gave birth, she was allowed to spend 10 days with her daughter. Then, she was forced to say goodbye.
“In order to have a choice in this country, you have to be given at least two options to choose from. We were given one,” said Wilson-Buterbaugh, “surrender.”
In 2017, she published The Baby Scoop Era, a book that meticulously chronicles the coercive adoption practices used by maternity homes nationwide between World War II and 1972.
“When you go through an experience like that and you have to research it, you are reliving it,” she told me. “For 25 years, I had exposed myself to reliving them every day…because I realized other mothers, like me, need to know the truth.”
Wilson-Buterbaugh also made it clear that she was not the only one in her family impacted. “it isn’t just to the mother and the baby — it’s to our subsequent children.”
Selsor is just one example of this subsequent child. But while Selsor continues looking for the missing pieces of that history, Liz Latty represents the piece that was taken. She was the baby at the center of the transaction, the one the maternity homes moved from one family to another.
Her mother was confined to a Catholic maternity home in suburban Detroit in 1978. It was a 30-acre institution. As the oldest of six in a strict Catholic family, her father made the decision to send her away. Her sisters were told she was visiting her grandmother. To this day, they still believe that to be true. “It was a secret at the time, and 47 years later, it’s still a secret. It’s just buried so deep.”
Latty was adopted into a two-parent, Catholic family after her birth. She remembers being told the joyful story of her adoption all the time growing up. She recalled her experience in a piece for The Rumpus. It went something like: “We drove through the snow that morning to pick you up at the adoption agency. We were so excited. We’d been waiting so long for you; had prayed so hard. We held you in our arms. Your new brother made silly faces at you and you smiled and laughed at him. We took you home with us and our family was finally complete.”
But despite this fairytale story, she knew since she was young that one day she would search for her mother. “I was always in my head about it. Always sort of living with her absence,” she remembers.
It wasn’t until she was at her lowest that she felt it was time to find her.
Latty told her adopted parents she was gay her senior year of high school. When they tried to send her to conversion doctors, she left home. Latty was houseless and transient for the next four years. She describes herself at this time as a disaster. “I had no family, I had no support,” Latty recalled. “I mean, I was a fucking mess.”
Latty had no money to hire a private investigator, and no birth certificate to plug into DNA websites. Michigan, like Arkansas, is a closed record state.
One day, while scouring an AOL message board, Latty came across a discussion of Search Angels, a volunteer driven organization that helps adoptees locate their family members — for free. Latty signed up.
A month later, her search angel gave her a list of phone numbers and coached her through what to say on the phone. Latty began to make the calls. Eventually, her grandma picked up. Latty told her who she was.
She didn’t hear anything again for a month. It was a hard month. She remembers getting fired from her job, just being in emotional turmoil. “I never met anybody that had been through that. There was no roadmap.”
After a month, her biological mother’s husband called her. Latty talked to him for a while before her mom had the courage to pick up the phone. But she didn’t have much to say.
To this day, her mother cannot talk about her experience at the maternity home, or surrendering Latty to another family. Latty refers to her mom’s psychological blockade as a “black hole.” “She really just does not have access to her memories.”
“In 25 years, not much has changed from the initial conversation. She kind of just shuts down around me,” explains Latty. “She just can’t really say much.”
They tried to have a relationship for the first two years after the call. But then her mom stopped answering her messages. They didn’t talk again for 18 years.
In her 40s, Latty went up to Michigan to do research for a book she was working on. Her mother agreed to come meet her. But after those few days together, her mom, once again, stopped answering her messages. “Even when you have a great experience, there’s always some twinge of what you lost that is revealed,” says Latty. “You’re just reminded of what you can never get back. You can never repair that.”
Latty has been trying her best, however, to repair that for other women. In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, the threat of these kinds of systems coming back full force is higher than ever. “Adoption obscures what actually happens,” Latty said. “We are describing the processes by which we were displaced and commodified. People need to see it for what it is: a business transaction.” Today, the U.S. adoption industry has grown into a $25 billion-a-year business. As abortion access vanishes across the South and Midwest, crisis pregnancy centers — the modern descendants of maternity homes — now outnumber abortion clinics by a ratio of three to one.
Latty helped found Reproductive Justice and Adoption (RJA), a collective that functions as a mixed experience space, bringing together formerly fostered people, adoptees, and birth parents.
Through RJA, Latty is currently building a central online hub to counter the predatory marketing of adoption agencies, which she notes spend upwards of $10,000 a day on Internet ads to capture people in crisis. RJA just quietly launched a hotline, a direct line of peer support for pregnant people in crisis. They hope to help even in the simplest of ways: providing virtual accompaniments to women’s appointments, giving peer support. “Misinformation, coercion, shame — all of that happens in isolation,” explained Latty. “That happens when people are alone and don’t know what’s really going on.”
And that shame and misinformation? It continues into the next generation. “You just see the legacy, right?” said Latty.“I always say…a child just doesn’t go away or disappear. That shit will live. It lives. It’s alive in our bodies.”
I met Selsor in person for the first time at the Texas Roadhouse off the Little Rock Interstate on South Shackleford Road. She drove a pickup truck and she wore a sparkly grey blouse. Under her arm, she held her dark blue binder.
When we finally got a seat, she opened it. Inside held everything she’s collected since 1998, each document carefully laminated, hole punched, and perfectly in place. Every birth certificate, every request for information, every photograph; 27 years of research in one binder. She let me flip through, explaining each document to me in detail. She remembered when and how she got each one.
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She told me that everything she was collecting in this binder was how she wanted to honor her mom’s life. She handed me a copy of her moms funeral card and told me to keep it. Selsor reflected a lot about her mom’s life during that dinner. She told me that she felt her mothers’ time at the Florence Crittenton Home changed her forever, and that’s why she wasn’t going to give up on finding out the truth.
At the end of the dinner, she told me it was her mom’s birthday that day. Carolyn Ann Duke would have been 90 years old.
A few weeks later, back in New York, I called Selsor one last time.
I asked her to take me back to the spring of 1998, to the day she first saw the truth on that expedited birth certificate. I asked her how that younger version of herself would have felt knowing that she would one day hold proof of her brother’s existence, even if she had yet to meet him.
She answered bluntly.“My mother told me growing up [that] there’s something to be said for the women in our family,” Selsor said. “If you’re meant to know, you’ll find out.”