BLACK-MARKET BABIES SEEK MONTREAL ROOTS
Hundreds of Quebec-born babies were sold to childless couples across North America as part of a clandestine "baby business" that flourished in Montreal in the 1940’s and '50’s.
Raised by an Edmonton couple who adopted her in Montreal as an infant, Esther Segal has found out that she came with a $10,000 price tag attached; that her Jewish roots might be a lie; and that her birth records, if they exist, are probably sealed forever. Segal and other women from across North America gathered in Montreal to shed light on a fascinating and bizarre episode of the city's past.
It hinged on a $3-million illicit-baby ring, and it was all vividly recorded in the newspapers at the time. Behind the sensational accounts lay a more complex story. Adopting a child of another religion in Quebec was against the law, so schemes were devised to let non-Jewish children become Jewish on paper. The system worked because it met many people's purposes. On one side were unwed mothers shamed into surrendering their babies and on the other, desperate couples willing to pay for them. In between were people willing to exploit both sides for cash. It is a story of deception and subterfuge, and the secrets were locked away for years. But now Segal and her fellow adoptees want the story told.
Newspapers at the time reported that more than 1,000 babies born in Montreal in the '40’s and '50’s were sold to families in Canada and the United States. Lawyers falsified birth certificates, Jewish women gave their names to French- Canadian babies and children were smuggled across the U.S. border: "Mothers Were Shamed Into Silence; Couples Paid Thousands.”
Montreal was crawling with baby "mills" - homes for unwed mothers - where women "in trouble" could turn to in exchange for signing over their babies for adoption right after birth. There were even accounts of thugs kidnaping babies from rival homes.
One woman was photographed outside her flat on Laval Street and said she had done nothing wrong at her home for unwed mothers. "All I ever did was help unfortunate girls and find nice babies for nice people," she told a Gazette reporter in 1955. And lawyers always got their "cut.”
Central to the operation were Quebec laws stipulating that parents could only adopt children of their religion. At the time, many Jewish couples were eager to adopt children, but few Jewish babies were available. So couples paid $3,000 to $10,000 for a child, according to evidence cited at the time, and the children were spirited to points outside Quebec, or south of the border, where waiting lists for adopting babies were long. Though most of the babies were born to French-
Canadian women, the couples were told the children were Jewish. Segal said her parents traveled from Edmonton to Montreal "because it was the only place you could get Jewish babies.”
Donna Roth grew up in a Jewish household in Michigan. She, too, was told that her mother went to Montreal in 1946 and adopted her from a Jewish mother. Roth always believed it, but everyone who met her said she looked Irish or French.
In Ottawa, Sharon Edelson asked her adoptive mother about her roots. Her mother had also traveled to Montreal to adopt her in the 1940’s; she, too, was told her birth mother was Jewish.
One Ottawa woman, now 85, who did not want her name published, said she and her husband approached a Montreal doctor in the 1940s "because we knew he had children for adoption. One day, the doctor called us to say the baby was being born," recalled the woman. To the woman's astonishment, the doctor offered the couple the baby only hours after its birth. As desperate as she was for a child, she felt that was wrong. "You don't take a 4-hour-old baby home," the woman said. She insisted on waiting overnight, then took the baby back by train the next day - no questions asked. "I don't know if it was legal," the woman said. "This doctor had babies, and I assume he got money for them."
By the mid-fifties, the baby ring appeared to have broken up and publicity about it faded.
Pat Danielson, head of the Montreal chapter of Parent Finders, estimates that in three years she has fielded calls from 150 adoptees across the country who have similar stories linking them to Montreal. The adoptees were all born in the city in the 1940’s and '50’s and were all adopted into Jewish homes. They went through private adoptions that left few records, though many have birth records issued by Montreal synagogues. And in many cases money changed hands.
"One (adoptive) father called, and I openly asked him if he was from the black-market days?" Danielson said. And he said, "Oh yes, we wanted a child, and in our community we knew where to go." He was very honest about it; he said that he paid money. "This was the only way couples knew to get a baby. It was a business, a baby business. I don't know who was making money off it - the doctors or lawyers or both - but these parents were paying money to somebody.”
In some cases, doctors "brokered" adoptions legitimately and in good faith, and the money that changed hands was merely enough to cover the birth mother's medical expenses. But in other cases, the money amounted to a small fortune.
Legitimate social-service agencies did oversee adoptions in Montreal at the time. But they weren't allowed to carry out adoptions across religious lines, and could refuse if the couple were considered too old - in those days, in their forties.
So, many couples turned to private adoptions that left fewer traces. The problem was that the transaction omitted so much. The child was handed over like a new appliance, with nothing about his or her background, such as the medical history of the birth mother. On the other side, little was known about the adopting couples. Unless follow-up checks were made, children were at the mercy of couples, good or bad, who paid for them.
Adoptees like Segal say they grew up in loving, supportive families. But it's as if part of their lives is missing. They have asked a lawyer to see whether the courts will open their original birth records. But they have been told judges won't open sealed birth records unless it's a life-and-death situation. Even if they succeeded, they would probably find little information. It was in the interest of those in the baby racket to keep information scarce.
Donna Roth hired a lawyer in Michigan who requested birth and adoption records from Quebec courts; "He has not even received a response," she said, "it's all so clandestine.”
The adoptees may never discover the whole truth about what went on in Montreal in the 1940’s and '50’s, but perhaps they can unearth some secrets about themselves.
Thirty-three year-old Andre Desaulniers had started in 1991 by contacting Quebec's justice minister Paul Began and has kept up a steady pressure ever since by relentlessly petitioning the government to have an open-file policy. Having learned about his adoption when he was eighteen, after his adoptive parents died, he has spent almost two decades researching the status of adoptees across Canada and in other countries. He became most intrigued by what New Zealand and British Columbia have done.
The B.C. law, which has featured open adoption files since 1996, is an adaptation of the New Zealand one which contains a veto for the birth mother. Only an average of 3.2% of birth mothers have ever used the veto. In 1995 Desaulniers began aggressively campaigning for the Quebec government to consider adoption- law reforms, adapted from the B.C. model, that would result in open files. This is revolutionary news for the province's 300,000 adoptees, 100,000 of whom were never legally adopted by anyone after being given up.
Two days later Esther sent this story off the internet. There were more than a few girls whose babies were fathered by their Jewish boyfriends, helped by the "Grey Nuns:"
In 1959 Eileen, a new immigrant from Ireland, was looking for a place to have her wedding reception. Because she didn't know many people, she went to the priest of St. Kevin's Church in Montreal who indicated the Grey Nuns on Dorchester Street had a room which would be suitable. Eileen's mother was visiting from Ireland for the wedding. One of the nuns asked Eileen if her mother would do a great favor by taking a male baby named Danny to a couple in Ireland (the nuns wanted to get the baby out of the country as soon as possible). The story was that there was an Irish girl, a new immigrant, who had been forced to have sex with men for the purpose of having children. The young ladies like her usually had no relatives and were locked up in a brothel situation in the Eastern Townships. According to the nuns, the man who had fathered the child felt guilty and told the girl he would pay for the baby and give it to her. She came to the nuns and asked to have the baby sent to her parents in Ireland. Eileen's mother agreed. The nuns said not to worry about papers, they would take care of everything. Eileen picked up the three-week-old baby from the nuns late at night and her mother was given a sealed envelope which the nuns said if she was questioned, to give to the authorities. Eileen's mother was met at the Dublin airport by two people who asked "Is this our Danny?" Eileen's mother was not paid for taking the<