Hey Florence, another shot of Phenobarbital!

Forty three years ago today I took my first breath in Ohio Valley General Hospital in Wheeling, WV.

From there I was off to the Florence Crittenton Home. This Home was a place where unwed mothers prepared for the birth of their babies and dodged the glare of the shameful looks that would assuredly have been cast their way had they stayed at home. Once at Florence Crittenton the girls were browbeaten into giving up their babies for adoption.

After the children were surrendered to the Home the staff began the daily routine of not paying attention to them, feeding them by propping a bottle into their mouth and letting them fend for themselves, as well as lacing their formula with Phenobarbital (as you may recall, this is the stuff that the Heaven’s Gate cult mixed with applesauce to kill themselves in a mass suicide in the spring of 1997 – it is also used to treat epileptic dogs and cats…) in order to get them to shut up, when picking them up was all it would have taken.

The staff then became very creative and invented biographies of the birth parents to give to prospective adoptive parents – either that or the only people having premarital sex back then were football coaches or pre-med students and nurses or college girls…

I’d like to think that this type of abuse no longer occurs, but for a generation of adoptees the predisposition to chemical dependency and lifelong abandonment issues are here to stay.