FRANCINE GURTLER SAT before the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in December 2025, unsure of what he would say. For more than three years, Gurtler has called for the denomination to investigate its role in forcing women in church-operated or -supported maternity homes to relinquish their children for adoption.
In 1971, Gurtler was living in St. Faith’s Home for Unwed Mothers, operated within the New York diocese of the Episcopal Church, when she was coerced into giving up her newborn son. “I was not given a choice,” she said.
Some estimate that up to 1.5 million mothers were forcibly separated from their children in the “Baby Scoop Era” (1945 to 1972). According to research by the Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative, there was a post-war rise in pregnancies of unwed women and extremely limited access to birth control. Unmarried women who had children at that time were deemed “deviant,” sinful, and unfit for motherhood. The leading psychological, social work, and church view was that most children of unmarried mothers would be better off raised by others. In that same era, white infertile married couples seeking the perfect “nuclear family” increased the demand for adoptions.
In the U.S., two-thirds of the maternity homes for unwed mothers were affiliated with the Florence Crittenton League, the Salvation Army, or the Catholic Church. The remainder were run by independent agencies or other religious groups, including by Episcopal church members or clergy. According to Gurtler’s research, Episcopal churches ran at least seven maternity homes across the country, while local churches may have offered financial or social support to the larger network of maternity services.
Gurtler, who moderates social media groups where people with similar stories find each other, said many don’t recognize a broader narrative in their circumstances. They blame themselves. They blame their parents. But never the maternity homes, she said.
“When you live with a secret and a shame for decades, it becomes embedded in your DNA,” Gurtler told Sojourners. Later, she realized even people responsible for coercing her, like her own mother, had been pressured to allow the adoption to go through. “It took me years to realize that she didn’t want to do it,” Gurtler said.
In 2022, Gurtler and retired Episcopal priest and adoptee Mark Diebel presented a resolution at the Episcopal Church’s general convention that acknowledged the church’s role in running maternity homes where forced adoption took place. That resolution passed. An investigation was requested and funded. Then, in 2023, the Episcopal Church became the first organization in the U.S. to open an investigation into its own involvement in coercing unwed mothers to relinquish their babies for adoption.
The Episcopal Church is investigating its involvement in coerced adoptions.
Church spokesperson Amanda Skofstad said that the research has not yet identified any maternity homes run at the denomination level. The next step is to refer the matter to the diocesan level for investigation. However, Skofstad said, the research did uncover a 1930s policy document on adoption for the Church Mission of Help, which offered social work for unwed mothers and sometimes referred cases to maternity homes.
Church Mission of Help was founded by Episcopal priest James Huntington in 1911 as an agency affiliated with Trinity Church in New York City. By the 1940s, the mission had as many as 18 branches in 10 states. Huntington also founded St. Faith’s, where Gurtler lived and was forced to give up her child.
In 2025, Gurtler and Diebel became frustrated with the loss of momentum on the investigation. They organized a postcard campaign in November, during Adoption Remembrance Month, aimed at presiding bishop Sean Rowe and Julia Ayala Harris, a top lay leader in the Episcopal Church. The campaign prompted an invitation to meet.
But Rowe and Harris could only give a partial response to Gurtler’s demands. They apologized to Gurtler for her personal pain and shared their plan to request archival research from the bishops. But they stopped short of apologizing for any systemic wrongdoing on the part of the church—instead, they sought greater clarity on what responsibility the church might hold for the forced adoptions of that era.
Following the meeting, Gurtler acknowledged the honor of speaking with Rowe. “How many people are given the opportunity directly to tell their story to the presiding bishop?” But she and Diebel remain discouraged. “I thought after three long years since the resolution had been passed, there would have been more concrete information to hand us,” Gurtler said. “I was expecting more direct information about what the church knows and knew and didn’t know. We didn’t get that.”
Rowe has asked bishops to initiate archival research in the dioceses of New York, Pennsylvania, Long Island, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. He told Sojourners, “What Francine Gurtler experienced at St. Faith’s should never have happened anywhere, much less in a place with ties to The Episcopal Church. I am grateful for the honesty with which she has shared her story and her persistent advocacy for other women who experienced similar suffering during this era.”
Gurtler keeps pushing for a broader apology and acknowledgement because she believes the church can help rewrite the story and diminish the shame many parents carry. “This is a story that is so embedded into the American psyche—that this was best for the child. [That] it’s the woman’s fault. And you just live with that,” she said. “These women are going to go to the grave with that. I want education, so they know.”
Gurtler, who was reunited with her son in 2017, wants to see the church address the pain of people like her, no matter how culpable it finds itself to be. The Baby Scoop Era could be highlighted on Mother’s Day, or churches could offer therapy and resources for assisting in reunions. The church “can still be makers of peace,” Gurtler said.
Rebecca Randall, an independent reporter and editor, is a Black and Korean U.S. domestic adoptee. She writes on the environment, religion, and adoption. Her first mother is an adoptee from South Korea.
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