To the editors:
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John Moynihan helps to put the “Girl in Trouble” in historical perspective. As recently as 25 to 30 years ago, there were throughout the Western world what were called foundling homes and orphanages, filled with the infants and children of unwed mothers and others who could not care for their children, institutions that hold few happy recollections for those who grew up in them. There were also homes for unwed mothers, for girls who had been turned out of their homes.
But the Catholic church and its allies in the antiabortion movement have never accepted the fact of the sexual revolution or the legitimacy of the pill or any other contraceptive method or abortion, and would seem to prefer that we return to the good old days when young girls had sex only at great risk and with great punishments and when unwanted babies grew up in institutions. There are those who think that those unwanted babies were quickly adopted. In the good old days, only a tiny percentage of those babies were adopted; their numbers far exceeded the number of adoptive parents.
