iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Excellent. But do tell whose head is the popping into the screen upper left?

Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Fascinating of who exactly was in this institution hasn't been widely reported. 🥚 MOTHER AND BABY HOMES COMMISSION OF INVESTIGATION FINAL REPORT 30 October 2020 Chapter 15: The Tuam Children’s Home

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

@peacebird.bsky.social posted some screen shots of the post. Thank you! In the comment section they also say they are not sure what happened but they will update later.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Born into Care International Perspectives on the Removal of Babies at Birth 🥚 bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/edcollbook-o...

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

🥚I guarantee this adoptee would have no knowledge of their mother's tragic history of abuse. Image from the document dated Jan 26, 2026 Application to Institute Proceedings clg.org/Class-Action...

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I had no idea!! Almost 20,000 in psychiatric hospitals in Ireland!! What would Canada find? While I research the Mercer Reformatory, I have had a few touch base with me born in psychiatric hospitals and adopted. 🥚 Read the whole article here: theconversation.com/mother-and-b...

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Yr ending Mar 1964: 559 females imprisoned at Mercer—293 single, 266 married. Though framed as addressing a “child in need of protection,” the Ontario Child Welfare Act disproportionately impacted imprisoned single mothers, effectively treating sole caregiving as grounds for child removal.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

🥚The removal of thousands of children from Ireland for adoption in the United States between the 1940s and 1970s was ‘revealed’ to Irish society by the news media in 1996. The ‘Banished Babies scandal’ has never been formally investigated by the Irish state. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

🥚An introduction to the Adoptee Birthright Archive, with an attached curated selection of over 70 short and feature documentaries which offer a brief history of the impact of sealed records... Click here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTaV...

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

🥚Fascinating… 1970 vital statistics for marriages of girls aged 16 and under in Ontario (Table 18, p. 83). This is only a snippet, but the total number of such marriages was 1,913. In 1950, marriages for girls aged 16 and under numbered 1,014, with one bridegroom aged 50–54.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

I (L. Mayhew) was interviewed, along with two other descendants of criminalized & incarcerated women & girls connected to the Andrew Mercer Reformatory, for the study “Keeping Mum” on its historical & contemporary legacy & gaps in the current literature. 🥚 Read: queensu.scholaris.ca/items/82ec50...

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

🥚There has been no federal apology or inquiry to date regarding the 60s Scoop in Canada. Read more at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation here nctr.ca/uncategorize... @moonlyfe.bsky.social

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

Justice for Girls promotes social, economic and environmental justice and an end to violence in the lives of Canadian teenage girls who live in poverty. Learn more here: www.justiceforgirls.org/about/our-mi...

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

🥚Where did the babies placed for adoption come from? The maternity home scandal, not yet fully told, and the girls at Mercer Reformatory expose a hidden history of state control, confinement, and forced adoption—shielded behind the YCJA and the CFSA.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

🧵Where did the money come from? The witness fumbles her way through the question but does admit it came from girls from families of significant means and from the provincial government. But why the provincial government if families were paying? See next thread. 1/2 🥚

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

🥚Reading Criminalized Mothers, Criminalizing Mothering. In my experience, most women incarcerated at the Mercer Reformatory lost their children to adoption. Alarming: youth disclosure laws bar info to adoptees if their mother was criminalized under 18. #HiddenHistories

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

🥚Who was in maternity homes? Wards of the Children’s Aid Society, Ontario Training School girls, and girls the Salvation Army diverted from a sentence. Disclosure laws hide wardship and sentencing records. Other girls? Parents of means. The truth about maternity homes is not being told correctly.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

🥚The Child Welfare Act, 1965 provides that the Children's Aid Society gains temporary or permanent custody of a child when a parent is imprisoned. In the year ending March 1964, 559 women and girls were imprisoned in Mercer; once CAS took custody, it was often difficult for mothers to regain it.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

Economic ideology of the child-saving movement: women’s reformatories & prisons functioned as institutional pipelines within a system that controlled, institutionalized, and redirected labor & lives, including using their children as a supply for the placing-out system. 🥚 archive.org/details/proc...

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

🧵In Ontario, Canada, the scandalous Female Refuges Act was amended in 1958 but not fully repealed until 1964. Dymond claimed the repealed sections were unnecessary because they were “adequately dealt with in the Criminal Code.” 1/2🥚 #FemaleRefugesAct #Incorrigible 👇

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

History shows that when children are transferred—through placing-out or adoption—abuse follows. Orphan Trains, British Home Children, Convict Orphans… what about kids of incarcerated women in Canada? No one has studied this. Hidden history!!🥚 www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/...

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

1953: Members of the Legislature made a surprise visit to Mercer and praised it, even touring the “hole.” Less than three weeks later, my mother—newly confined in the Ontario Training School wing—escaped with three other “incorrigibles.”👇🥚1/2 Source: The Globe and Mail, May 23, 1953 ·Page 5

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

🥚This is not the first article I’ve encountered documenting the incarceration of adoptees and their portrayal as incorrigible or a menace. Contemporary punitive frameworks increasingly take psychiatric form, with adoptees often diagnosed with BPD and, in some cases, subjected to chemical restraint.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

🥚 Why did child-saving organizations in Canada and the United States shift from informal “placing out” practices to legally sanctioned adoption through provincial and state Adoption Acts?

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

🥚In the early 1900s, the privacy and informality of the newly established juvenile court system were instrumental in allowing the state to remove children and place them in rural labor environments, often under the guise of “saving” them. 1/5

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Orders came Oct 23, 2025 for three of our appeals; by Nov 26, a stay was placed pending reconsideration. What—Parliament’s intentions weren’t clear? We wait again. Archives of Ontario (Re), 2025 CanLII 110355 (ON IPC), canlii.ca/t/kg667 @kpateonthehill.bsky.social @amreformatory.bsky.social

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

🥚In Ont, hidden behind the disclosure of adoption records—sealed under the guise CYFSA and the YCJA protections—are scores of mothers criminalized as “juvenile delinquents,” as well as wards of the Children’s Aid Society, many of whom were literally incarcerated in maternity homes. What did I miss?

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

Read the whole paper if you can bare it. "The free-born infant is worth more than the slave child, because we may reckon upon its mental and moral capabilities as well." archive.org/details/proc...

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

🥚Kelso in 1897, "We have in Ontario the same system that they have in Minnesota, except that we haven’t got the institution, but we are introducing the system there." It gets worse once I realized that Kelso's buddy was H. H. Hart, a leading figure in the United States child-saving movement.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

I’m not very good at constructing a family tree, particularly because many of the records are in French. But if I did it correctly, this would be my ancestor, suggesting Acadian ancestry supported by both records and DNA. #AcadianExpulsion

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

🥚Am I the only adoptee who eagerly anticipates Ancestry updates? For many adoptees, genetic genealogy has become a critical supplement to incomplete or obscured records.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

🥚Do your adoption records reflect the circumstances of your birth? At Mercer Reformatory, incarcerated mothers were transferred to Toronto General Hospital; elsewhere, to maternity homes. If carceral origins were obscured, what else was erased from the record?

"Prison Maternity Cases," The Leader-Post, Sep 06, 1930, 24.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

🥚“They were informed that babies were shipped out of the State when only a few hours old and their mothers were hired out to nurse the infants of the wealthy.” Source: "Are Sold Before Birth," The Times-Democrat, Apr 19, 1913, 13.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

🥚In a 1909 publication called Canadian bookman : a monthly review of contemporary literature devoted to the interests of Canadian book buyers, J. J. Kelso promotes a book, called "Your Boy ; His Nature and Nurture," Can anyone find this book for me by George A. Dickinson.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

🥚1/4 Around the world, countries are confronting and exposing historical abuses and human trafficking carried out through adoption systems. Yet in Canada, there has been no national inquiry into adoption practices.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

🥚Men advancing “child-saving” ideology that shaped modern adoption. This drawing shows some attendees of the 24th Annual National Conference of Charities and Correction—held in Canada for the first time in 1897 at J. J. Kelso’s invitation. Recognize anyone? 1/2

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

🥚If you’re an adoptee and your mother was a ward of a Children’s Aid Society, this won’t show in your records. Same if she was a "juvenile delinquent" or a ward of an Industrial/Training School—all of which means she was effectively incarcerated. Why did admissions to maternity homes decline?👇1/2

“Maternity homes aided,” North Bay Nugget, Jun 25, 1983, 2.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

🥚The Privilege of Not Being Adopted: Survival, Trauma, and the Closed Circuit of Ego Unconsciousness “Why Non-Adoptees Are Ignoring Adoptee Trauma – And It’s Hurting Everyone” Source: medium.com/thoughtless-...

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

🥚6-mth follow-up, breast exam. The dreaded question — your family history. “I’m adopted.” “Oh, sorry — yes, you are. I didn’t see that.” “What? It’s on my chart?” I exclaim. I check — literally a box ticked for Adopted. “New field,” she says. Digital progress: logged. Human noticing: still pending.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

🥚For all those adoptees punished in utero, whose carceral birth histories were hidden as they suffered innumerable harms and whose lives were cut short — may their truths be unearthed, their stories honored, and the silence end for those still unaware of their carceral beginnings.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

4 girls — including my mother — escaped Mercer’s OTS wing but were caught and locked in the dungeon, where another desperate escape was attempted. It’s time to end these brutal, inhumane isolation conditions that disproportionately affect Indigenous, Black, and disabled people. #S205 #EndSeg

“4 Young Girls Smash Window Escape Mercer," The Toronto Star, June 12, 1953, 3.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

🥚Statistics from the Children of Unmarried Parents Act were used to support claims of mass adoption among unmarried mothers. So how is it that only 562 out of 4,023 consented to relinquishment — or 562 out of 1,992 non-cohabiting mothers? Race? Age? Institution? Incarcerated mothers? See alt txt

Chambers, L. (2006). Adoption, unwed mothers and the powers of the Children’s Aid Society in Ontario, 1921-1969. Ontario History, 98(2), 161–182. https://doi.org/10.7202/1065824ar

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

🥚Adoptee born of a mother at a Salvation Army home? They ran a wide network of maternity and receiving homes, often with the courts, to house girls labeled “delinquent” or mothers on remand or released from jails or reformatories. YCJA prevents disclosure. #HiddenHistories

The Globe and Mail, Wed, Jun 26, 1946 ·Page 13

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

🥚Note to adoptees: Youth protection laws will prevent you from learning your mother’s circumstances—whether she was criminalized or not. As one account explains, "girls found wandering the city streets are picked up by police and convicted of vagrancy even though they committed no criminal offence.”

“Girls Expelled,” The Sault Star, Oct 01, 1968, 1.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

🥚Very few adoptees know we were born in prison. I suspect thousands share this history — but it’s hidden behind youth privacy laws worldwide. Upcoming event with Deborah Jiang-Stein, author of Prison Baby.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

🥚Canada's "placing-out" system for indentured domestic and farm labour often secured the children of criminalized and incarcerated women and girls. Full story of the D’Andrea, case coming soon. Re D'Andrea, 1916 CanLII 479 (ON SC), <https://canlii.ca/t/gw6np>, retrieved on 2025-09-27

Sixth Annual Report of the Children's Aid Society of Toronto - 1897
Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/r01098_1896_97/page/11/mode/1up?view=theater&q=%22indenture%22

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

🥚Full article discusses unmarried mothers in maternity homes & ends with a focus on those in Mercer. One of them—my mother—was imprisoned there from Mar/53–Oct/54. Records state her firstborn was being adopted, yet the Ministry holds no record of the agency involved. #disappeared Title in ALT text

"Treating Spots to Cure Measles," The Globe and Mail, Nov 24, 1953, 6.

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Prison Adoptee @prisonadoptee.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

🥚Grueling process retrieving records from the Mercer Reformatory. Sometimes descendants reach out after finding a relative in a census—with a baby! Yet access requests are denied under the YCJA. What!?! Ontario maintained the age of delinquency under 16 in the JDA until the YOA.

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