EVELYN Robinson felt she had very little choice when she fell pregnant as a 19-year-old university student in Edinburgh in 1969.

Close to finishing her Arts degree, struggling to make ends meet and sharing a small two-room house, Ms Robinson was told she couldn’t raise a child alone.

So, she decided to give up her baby for adoption.

“One friend who was a medical student who went on to become a doctor actually said to me, ‘If you keep this baby it will turn into a juvenile delinquent’,” she says.

“That was very much the feeling of the time. I felt that not only could I not do it, I shouldn’t do it.”

After giving birth to a boy, Ms Robinson, who now lives in Christies Beach, discharged herself from hospital early to sit her final exams.

She eventually returned to Bermuda, an island off the east coast of the US where she grew up, found work as a teacher, married and had four children.

Giving birth to her first child with her husband, a boy, brought memories of her other son’s birth flooding back. “I was actually thinking, ‘I don’t deserve to have a child’,” she says. “It’s too good to be true that I could get to have a child of my own because I felt so guilty about everything that had happened.”

Ms Robinson moved to South Australia in 1982 and was reunited with her son Stephen Ferguson in 1991 through a Scotland-based adoption organisation. “The four children came with me to the airport and we were all lined up, all five of us,” she recalls of the reunion.

“What he said afterwards was, when he came off the plane and saw these five people all standing there, it was the first time in his life that he saw someone who looked like him.”

She now has a good relationship with Mr Ferguson, who came to live with her while studying teaching at Adelaide University in 2003.

Ms Robinson has worked as an adoption counsellor, spoken at conferences around the world and written two books, with a third to be released this month, titled Adoption Reunion: Ecstasy or Agony?.

To contact Relationship Australia’s (SA) Post-Adoption Support service call 8245 8100 or visit http://www.relationships.com.au