The Price of Children

It's a stunning image: a pregnant woman knitting shoes for the baby who will be snatched from her arms soon after he is born. Yet it was all too common a sight in Italy's homes for unwed mothers and orphanages from which the Church launched its cruel adoption scheme.

Between 1950 and 1970, the Vatican and the American Catholic Church sent nearly four thousand children to the United States for adoption into "good" Catholic homes. With the religious stigma of unwed motherhood turning families against daughters and a Church and State wanting "illegitimate" children sent abroad, mothers were lied to, given forms to sign that they didn't understand, or even told their baby had died, all to further supply this international adoption pipeline.

Maria Laurino uncovers archival correspondence among priests who ran this program; provides testimonies from birth mothers and their adopted children; and with passion and insight, considers how the intersection of Catholicism, women, sex, and sin shaped private lives. The Price of Children is a moving and brilliant story about the tenacity of people searching for their origins and trying to answer long-buried questions. It is a chilling lesson for post-Dobbs America as the author describes the danger of a powerful church and acquiescent government dictating the shape of a woman's life.

"By shedding light on the mistreatment suffered by single mothers of that time, The Price of Children] invites all women to defend those civil rights which, today, are questioned in many parts of the world." --Vanity Fair Italia

"I could not put this book down. An amazing read. Laurino eloquently unfolds the nefarious history of the Italian 'war adoptions' in a manner that is entirely readable and clear as a bell, her research precise and well rendered. I was spellbound by the variety of stories revealed here of heartache, of children longing for their mothers and mothers forced to give up their children. Lives were changed irrevocably, and Laurino] warns us that they can be changed again in a similar, though more-up-to date manner. One of the best books I've recently read." --Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge