Fifty-two years ago today, a teenage girl in Richmond, Virginia\u00a0gave birth to a healthy baby boy.<\/p>\n
She knew he\u00a0would never again see her smiling at him, or hear her voice say “I love you.”<\/p>\n
She gave him a name, knowing that he would never use that name.<\/p>\n
And then she let him go.<\/p>\n
Today, on Tom’s birthday, we toasted his birth mother.<\/p>\n
Back in 1963, pregnant girls who were\u00a0under 18 were virtually forced to give up their babies.<\/p>\n
A pregnant single woman’s choices weren’t great. They could try to force the father into marriage; resort to an illegal and dangerous abortion; or give the\u00a0child up for adoption. Single parenthood was rare and shunned.<\/p>\n
Before 1973, when\u00a0abortion was legalized,\u00a09 percent of all newborns<\/a>\u00a0were given up for adoption. By 2002, it had dropped to\u00a0only 1 percent.<\/p>\n Tom recently began the search for his birth mother. I hope that she is still alive, and that she’s willing to re-open that long-closed door, so that she can see what a wonderful man her son turned out to be.<\/p>\n But more than that, I hope her life was as good as she wished her baby’s to be.<\/p>\n Day 106: The penny is from the watershed year of 1973.<\/p>\n May there be compassion for the millions of\u00a0women who have had to make that difficult choice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fifty-two years ago today, a teenage girl in Richmond, Virginia\u00a0gave birth to a healthy baby boy. She knew he\u00a0would never again see her smiling at him, or hear her voice say “I love you.” She gave him a name, knowing that he would never use that name. And then she let him go. Today, on … read more The mother in Virginia<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[317],"tags":[387,388,386,385,390,389,20],"class_list":["post-5961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beauty","tag-387","tag-abortion","tag-adoption","tag-birth","tag-mother","tag-pregnancy","tag-tom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5961"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5967,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5961\/revisions\/5967"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}