Karen Wilson Buterbaugh was 16 in the fall of 1965 when she got pregnant by her steady boyfriend. Terrified and in denial, she hid her growing body under an oversized sweater for five months. When she could no longer hide the pregnancy, she finally told her parents.
They shipped her off to a maternity home without telling her where she was going.
Janet Mason Ellerby, who grew up in California, was also 16 in 1965 and was so naive she didn’t realize she had had sex with her boyfriend. Three months later, her mother figured out Ellerby was pregnant.
“She packed all of my clothes and put me on a plane to Ohio,” Ellerby said.
Buterbaugh and Ellerby are among an estimated 1.5 million unwed mothers in the United States who were forced to have their babies and give them up for adoption in the two decades before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in 1973, according to Anne Fessler’s book “The Girls Who Went Away.”Mostly white, middle-class teens and young women were systematically shamed, hidden in maternity homes and then coerced into handing over their children to adoption agencies without being informed of their legal rights.