Her newborn son was taken away from her against her will: 'It is inhumane'

In the 1960s, then 22-year-old Trudy Gertsen gave up her son against her will. Today, she holds the State responsible.

The first big blow came in November 1967. Trudy Gertsen (21) was five months pregnant and unmarried. She had completed her nursing training without telling anyone about her pregnancy. If the nuns with whom the women lived during nursing training had known, she would have been kicked out immediately. She has no doubts about that.

Now she's back with her parents, fully expecting to give birth there. After that, she'll look for a job and a home to raise her son. Her boyfriend, the baby's father, turns out to have another girl. So be it, she thinks, I'll do it alone.

But instead, her mother takes her out for a walk and tells her she has to give up the child. Trudy is not welcome in her childhood home.

Trudy Scheele-Gertsen, now 73, falls silent as she recounts that walk, taking a sip of water. "And home was quite a big house. But it wasn't possible. It was impossible." "I've arranged something for you," her mother said on that autumn day, more than fifty years ago. She sent her daughter to the Paula Foundation in Oosterbeek, a home for unwed mothers.

"I never expected this to happen to me," Scheele-Gertsen recalls. "I'd never really considered giving up my life. I thought: how could my mother possibly be involved? And I immediately thought: that's not going to happen." But she had to go somewhere. "I still had three months to go. What was I supposed to do?" An unmarried pregnant woman wouldn't be hired anywhere, let alone rent a house.

Colorful rooms, beds painted in pastel shades

Trudy ended up in one of the many homes for unmarried mothers in the Netherlands. The Paula Foundation home was situated on a spacious property on the edge of the woods in Oosterbeek. "Ultra-modern," the Leidsch Dagblad raved in the summer of 1967, with "pastel-colored lacquered beds" and "colorful rooms," and run by the Little Sisters of Saint Joseph.

Trudy, now 22, hasn't been happy there in the three months she's lived there. "There I was," she says. She remembers that most of the other women, like her, stayed in their rooms, that she didn't trust the foundation, and that the nuns were rude. She wanted to keep her baby. "I was very clear about that," she says firmly. This is also reflected in the file she requested about her time at the home. "They intend to keep the child," the nuns wrote to the Child Protection Council in January 1968.

Things turned out differently. Scheele-Gertsen estimates that during the time she lived in Oosterbeek, there were between fifteen and twenty women in the house. They all gave up their babies. All had to give birth blindfolded. "But I insisted on seeing my child." Even though she gave birth blindfolded, her son was taken away from her immediately after birth, in February 1968. "That was standard procedure. And then they would also talk very loudly to drown out the sound of the child."

Trudy was not allowed to see her son by the nuns, she recalls, but she insisted and saw him only once during those days. Nine days after his birth, her mother picked her up, leaving her son behind at the Paula Foundation.

15,000 children adopted between 1956 and 1984

Scheele-Gertsen's son is one of thousands of children relinquished between 1956—when the Adoption Act made it possible to legally regulate adoptions—and 1984, when abortion was legalized. More than 15,000 Dutch children were adopted during that period, Radboud University wrote in a 2017 study on domestic adoptions, commissioned by the Scientific Research and Documentation Centre of the Ministry of Security and Justice. That's more than five hundred per year. These figures likely represent between 13,000 and 14,000 women, Radboud University estimates.

It's unbelievable that all these women voluntarily gave up their children, says Scheele-Gertsen. "Women don't do that on that scale; it only happens in very exceptional circumstances." Radboud University wrote in 2017 that there was no formal coercion during that period, but that the pressure from doctors, social workers, parents, and other involved parties to give up the child could be so intense that it was very difficult for women to maintain their own desire to keep the baby.

According to Scheele-Gertsen, that's putting it mildly. Today, as the first mother to give up her child, she is holding the state accountable for the suffering inflicted on her. She was forced to give up her son, she says, even though she had repeatedly stated her intention to raise him herself.

The files Scheele-Gertsen requested show, among other things, that the Paula Foundation, even though it had written in January that Trudy wanted to keep her child, wrote to child protection services in March that the mother should be removed from parental rights because she wanted to relinquish her child herself, because "she believes that she cannot care for the child alone."

Scheele-Gertsen wants recognition for the suffering that has been inflicted on her.

Urgently removed from parental authority

This is one of the reasons Scheele-Gertsen is holding the Dutch state liable. Child protection services, part of the state, should have known that Trudy didn't want to give up her child at all, says attorney Lisa-Marie Komp of the law firm Prakken d'Oliveira.

The file shows how Trudy repeatedly stated her desire to care for her child. However, child protective services temporarily removed her parental rights in March and then permanently in November 1968. The latter occurred urgently, shortly after Trudy had reported back to child protective services and the home in Oosterbeek, stating her desire to care for her child. She had rented a room in progressive Amsterdam and worked as a nurse in the maternity ward of the Wilhelmina Gasthuis.

Child protective services still consider the unmarried mother unfit to care for her child. This decision is being made without consulting Trudy, who will then be an adult, says attorney Komp.

Scheele-Gertsen is annoyed that the file contains inaccuracies. For example, she did have contact with her child's father, her parents did know the man in question, and she hadn't, as child protective services claimed, resigned from the hospital where she trained as a nurse: her contract expired because her training had been completed. "I was never asked if any of this was accurate." The state is also blamed for never being told that Trudy was entitled to social assistance or money from the child's father.

Mother-child relationship is sacred

But attorney Komp's main argument is that even in the 1960s, Dutch law and the Convention on Human Rights, signed by the Netherlands, already recognized the bond between mother and child as sacrosanct. Only in exceptional circumstances should children be removed from their mothers, and especially if this occurs immediately after birth. "Care should have been focused on keeping mother and child together," says Komp.

Until the 1950s, care for unmarried mothers was also geared towards this. But under the influence of the then-progressive psychiatrists Han Heijmans and Kees Trimbos, this changed. In 1953, Trimbos wrote for the first time in the brochure "Zorgenkinderen" (Children with Problems) that it is better for unmarried mothers to relinquish their child, "not only for mentally disturbed unmarried mothers, but also for those who lack sufficient social and educational resources to represent their child's interests."

The mood then quickly shifted. In 1961, the Hendrik Pierson Association, which operates homes for unmarried Protestant mothers and children, called keeping mothers and children together "an extremely dangerous and perilous undertaking" and called for "propaganda" to be designed to convince mothers that relinquishing their child is best for their baby. Fiom, the federation of institutions for unmarried mothers, was also convinced of this. Newspapers adopted this position. In 1965, Trouw also called the book "The Unmarried Mother and Her Child," in which Heijmans and Trimbos explain why divorce is preferable to raising a child with a single mother, "an excellent guide."

Her son suffered from 'mother-lack'

Trudy regularly visited her son in Oosterbeek from the summer of 1968 onward. Although child protective services had removed her parental rights, arguing it would be better for her son not to live with her, things weren't going well for her child even then, Scheele-Gertsen read in the files last year. He was suffering from "mother-missing," it said, homesickness, and crying a lot. "I've never been as upset as when I read that," she says.

His file also contains abbreviations: 2T, 4T, and 8T. Scheele-Gertsen believes the boy was given thioridazine twice a day to calm him down. Thioridazine, an antipsychotic drug that has been withdrawn from the market due to serious side effects, was taken off the market.

Ultimately, Scheele-Gertsen gave permission for adoption to prevent her son from growing up in the home. The boy won't be placed with a family until he's two years and eight months old. From that point on, his biological mother isn't allowed to see him anymore; she doesn't know where he's going. "Another trauma," says Scheele-Gertsen. It will be 48 years before they see each other again.

Fifty years of silence

Public opinion shifted again during this period. Single mothers suddenly no longer had to feel ashamed, the contraceptive pill came onto the market, and sexual morality changed. It became unimaginable for mothers to give up their children.

Scheele-Gertsen is so ashamed that she kept quiet about her experiences for fifty years. Only the man she married in the early 1970s and with whom she had three more children knew about it all those years. Until a year ago, when she told her three youngest children about her eldest son, and, encouraged by her eldest daughter, she sent him a message. They kept in touch, but it never became completely natural again.

"What happened to me and him is dehumanizing," says Scheele-Gertsen. "That's why I want to expose it." She felt immense shame, and she still seems stunned by what happened to her.

She demands not only recognition for the suffering inflicted on her, but also wants to know exactly what happened during the period when more than 10,000 women relinquished their children. Was there an incentive to provide children to as many childless couples as possible? Why did maternal and childcare disappear from the homes of unmarried mothers? She demands that these and other questions be included in the investigation announced earlier this year by Minister of Legal Protection Sander Dekker into the circumstances in which women relinquished their children.

Also read: Trudy Scheele-Gertsen holds the State liable for the forced surrender of her child

More than ten thousand mothers gave up their children in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Trudy Scheele-Gertsen (73) is now the first of them to go to court. "What happened to me and him  is inhumane ."

'I am a given child.' On the consequences of an adoption

In the summer of 2018, writer and poet Eke Mannink published her debut novel, "Zo stroom ik van je over" (So I Flow From You), about the consequences of adoption. Her own, that is.  The intention was to put an end to a long story; it became a new beginning . 

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Sander Dekker is the State Secretary. He is the Minister of Legal Protection.