"Phony Mothers" and Border-Crossing Adoptions: The Montreal-to-New York Black Market in Babies in the 1950s

In February 1954, newspapers across North America announced that a transborder "Baby Black Market" had been uncovered through the collaborative efforts of American and Canadian police and prosecutors. Headlines screamed that for the previous ten years a massive "traffic in babies" had been operating in Montreal, selling the infant children of unwed, Catholic, French Canadian mothers to desperate Jewish couples from the New York City area. The "selling price" for children was said to range from $2,500 to $10,000, and the baby trade was described as a $3,000,000 or sometimes $5,000,000 operation.¹ The Montreal black market had been under investigation for at least two years by New York City Assistant District Attorney Ernest Mitler, who had previously prosecuted several baby-selling cases and testified before the U.S. Senate as an emerging expert on the baby black market.²

There were, in fact, a series of independent but nonetheless highly organized baby rings in Montreal. The rings had their own maternity boarding houses where children were born and utilized a series of baby depots where children were housed while they awaited parents. Spotters trolled the city for pregnant women, and contacts or legmen approached pregnant women who seemed in need of help. Potential adoptive parents heard about the baby rings through word of mouth, or through salesmen who worked in New York City apartment blocks. Lawyers helped parents secure documents (false birth registrations and/or fraudulently obtained adoption court orders) which could then be used to obtain Canadian passports and U.S. entry visas for the children. In some cases, pregnant women were sent to U.S. cities to give birth, or newborn children were simply smuggled across the border by couriers with alleged connections to organized crime.³

The Montreal-to-New York baby black market was the most sensational episode in a longer history of cross-border adoption between Canada and the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Between 1930 and 1975, several thousand Canadian-born children were adopted by families in the United States. Most of these children were very young infants, and most were the children of unwed mothers. The majority of the children were white, but the border-crossing group also included hundreds of First Nations and Métis children placed in the United States.⁴ While many of the Canada-to-U.S. adoptions were completely legal, some were clearly illegal, and many others were highly questionable in terms of American or Canadian child welfare, citizenship, or immigration law. In many cases (including the Montreal black market) the adoptions were contracted very quickly, with little or no attention to the conventions of "sound adoption practice" as understood by professionally trained child welfare workers in both countries. As babies crossed borders, they slipped between legal jurisdictions and arenas of governmental responsibility. Between U.S. states and Canadian provinces, child providers, adoptive parents, and birth parents could disappear into the spaces separating two (or more) different sets of child welfare policies and laws; child providers methodically exploited the gaps that opened when babies and parents crossed borders. Illicit, border-crossing, Canadian adoptions appealed to American parents who wanted to avoid the long wait for a (healthy, white) child adopted through a U.S. or Canadian social agency following professional standards, or who worried they would be rejected by those agencies because of their religion, financial standing, or personal histories.⁵

I use "borders" to refer first and most literally to the cartography of states, provinces, and nations; the Montreal black-market babies and their adoptive parents crossed the geographic/political borders between the province of Quebec and the state of New York, between Canada and the United States. The story, from this perspective, is about the complicated intergovernmental logistics involved in the regulation of domestic and international adoption. But there are other, equally important, borders and border-crossings to be considered. As historian Barbara Melosh has argued, all adoptions take place on the borders of a society—testing, pushing, pulling at, sometimes changing, sometimes...