Born into Care International Perspectives on the Removal of Babies at Birth 🥚 bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/edcollbook-o...

🥚I guarantee this adoptee would have no knowledge of their mother's tragic history of abuse. Image from the document dated Jan 26, 2026 Application to Institute Proceedings clg.org/Class-Action...

I had no idea!! Almost 20,000 in psychiatric hospitals in Ireland!! What would Canada find? While I research the Mercer Reformatory, I have had a few touch base with me born in psychiatric hospitals and adopted. 🥚 Read the whole article here: theconversation.com/mother-and-b...

Yr ending Mar 1964: 559 females imprisoned at Mercer—293 single, 266 married. Though framed as addressing a “child in need of protection,” the Ontario Child Welfare Act disproportionately impacted imprisoned single mothers, effectively treating sole caregiving as grounds for child removal.

🥚The removal of thousands of children from Ireland for adoption in the United States between the 1940s and 1970s was ‘revealed’ to Irish society by the news media in 1996. The ‘Banished Babies scandal’ has never been formally investigated by the Irish state. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

🥚An introduction to the Adoptee Birthright Archive, with an attached curated selection of over 70 short and feature documentaries which offer a brief history of the impact of sealed records... Click here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTaV...

🥚Fascinating… 1970 vital statistics for marriages of girls aged 16 and under in Ontario (Table 18, p. 83). This is only a snippet, but the total number of such marriages was 1,913. In 1950, marriages for girls aged 16 and under numbered 1,014, with one bridegroom aged 50–54.

I (L. Mayhew) was interviewed, along with two other descendants of criminalized & incarcerated women & girls connected to the Andrew Mercer Reformatory, for the study “Keeping Mum” on its historical & contemporary legacy & gaps in the current literature. 🥚 Read: queensu.scholaris.ca/items/82ec50...

🥚There has been no federal apology or inquiry to date regarding the 60s Scoop in Canada. Read more at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation here nctr.ca/uncategorize... @moonlyfe.bsky.social

Justice for Girls promotes social, economic and environmental justice and an end to violence in the lives of Canadian teenage girls who live in poverty. Learn more here: www.justiceforgirls.org/about/our-mi...

🥚Where did the babies placed for adoption come from? The maternity home scandal, not yet fully told, and the girls at Mercer Reformatory expose a hidden history of state control, confinement, and forced adoption—shielded behind the YCJA and the CFSA.

🧵Where did the money come from? The witness fumbles her way through the question but does admit it came from girls from families of significant means and from the provincial government. But why the provincial government if families were paying? See next thread. 1/2 🥚

🥚Reading Criminalized Mothers, Criminalizing Mothering. In my experience, most women incarcerated at the Mercer Reformatory lost their children to adoption. Alarming: youth disclosure laws bar info to adoptees if their mother was criminalized under 18. #HiddenHistories

🥚Who was in maternity homes? Wards of the Children’s Aid Society, Ontario Training School girls, and girls the Salvation Army diverted from a sentence. Disclosure laws hide wardship and sentencing records. Other girls? Parents of means. The truth about maternity homes is not being told correctly.

🥚The Child Welfare Act, 1965 provides that the Children's Aid Society gains temporary or permanent custody of a child when a parent is imprisoned. In the year ending March 1964, 559 women and girls were imprisoned in Mercer; once CAS took custody, it was often difficult for mothers to regain it.

Economic ideology of the child-saving movement: women’s reformatories & prisons functioned as institutional pipelines within a system that controlled, institutionalized, and redirected labor & lives, including using their children as a supply for the placing-out system. 🥚 archive.org/details/proc...

🧵In Ontario, Canada, the scandalous Female Refuges Act was amended in 1958 but not fully repealed until 1964. Dymond claimed the repealed sections were unnecessary because they were “adequately dealt with in the Criminal Code.” 1/2🥚 #FemaleRefugesAct #Incorrigible 👇

History shows that when children are transferred—through placing-out or adoption—abuse follows. Orphan Trains, British Home Children, Convict Orphans… what about kids of incarcerated women in Canada? No one has studied this. Hidden history!!🥚 www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/...

1953: Members of the Legislature made a surprise visit to Mercer and praised it, even touring the “hole.” Less than three weeks later, my mother—newly confined in the Ontario Training School wing—escaped with three other “incorrigibles.”👇🥚1/2 Source: The Globe and Mail, May 23, 1953 ·Page 5

🥚This is not the first article I’ve encountered documenting the incarceration of adoptees and their portrayal as incorrigible or a menace. Contemporary punitive frameworks increasingly take psychiatric form, with adoptees often diagnosed with BPD and, in some cases, subjected to chemical restraint.

🥚 Why did child-saving organizations in Canada and the United States shift from informal “placing out” practices to legally sanctioned adoption through provincial and state Adoption Acts?

🥚In the early 1900s, the privacy and informality of the newly established juvenile court system were instrumental in allowing the state to remove children and place them in rural labor environments, often under the guise of “saving” them. 1/5

Orders came Oct 23, 2025 for three of our appeals; by Nov 26, a stay was placed pending reconsideration. What—Parliament’s intentions weren’t clear? We wait again. Archives of Ontario (Re), 2025 CanLII 110355 (ON IPC), canlii.ca/t/kg667 @kpateonthehill.bsky.social @amreformatory.bsky.social

🥚In Ont, hidden behind the disclosure of adoption records—sealed under the guise CYFSA and the YCJA protections—are scores of mothers criminalized as “juvenile delinquents,” as well as wards of the Children’s Aid Society, many of whom were literally incarcerated in maternity homes. What did I miss?

Read the whole paper if you can bare it. "The free-born infant is worth more than the slave child, because we may reckon upon its mental and moral capabilities as well." archive.org/details/proc...

🥚Kelso in 1897, "We have in Ontario the same system that they have in Minnesota, except that we haven’t got the institution, but we are introducing the system there." It gets worse once I realized that Kelso's buddy was H. H. Hart, a leading figure in the United States child-saving movement.

I’m not very good at constructing a family tree, particularly because many of the records are in French. But if I did it correctly, this would be my ancestor, suggesting Acadian ancestry supported by both records and DNA. #AcadianExpulsion

🥚Am I the only adoptee who eagerly anticipates Ancestry updates? For many adoptees, genetic genealogy has become a critical supplement to incomplete or obscured records.

🥚Do your adoption records reflect the circumstances of your birth? At Mercer Reformatory, incarcerated mothers were transferred to Toronto General Hospital; elsewhere, to maternity homes. If carceral origins were obscured, what else was erased from the record?

🥚“They were informed that babies were shipped out of the State when only a few hours old and their mothers were hired out to nurse the infants of the wealthy.” Source: "Are Sold Before Birth," The Times-Democrat, Apr 19, 1913, 13.