male summer 1963 Chicago

I have been carrying a burden for more than 40 years. As I approach my 71st birthday next week, I think it's overdue that I get some advice about it. In Chicago, in the summer of 1963, I posed as the father of a baby boy in furtherance of a black market adoption. The mother was a young woman from another state with whom I had previously had a relationship but which had ended when I moved to Chicago. When she became pregnant a few years later, by someone in her home state who then abandoned her, she reached out to me and came to Chicago. Although I was scheduled to be married later in the year, I still had feelings for her and was willing to help her throguh the situation. I found her a job and an apartment. Aside from the fact that abortion was then illegal, and that was her first impulse, she gave up that idea after a physician she had found offered a plan that would cover her medical care during prenancy and provide a measure of financial support as she reached term. The plan involved placing the child with a childless couple in a certain middle-class Chicago suburb. My participation in the plan was needed. I was to be listed as the father. The baby may have even been given my name on the hospital records. The mother gave a false "maiden name." My real name was required for reasons I no longer recall, if I ever did know in the first place. I also recall that I gave a false street address. Such things were possible in the "old days" before we began asking people for documentary proof of their identity. I was told that the doctor had somehow arranged for mother and the baby to have minimal contact in the hospital after the birth and that part of my job was to spare her the act of handing over the child. The baby, born in the summer of 1963, was a healthy boy. On the morning the mother and child were to be released, I met with the physician in his car a block from the hospital. He gave me the cash for the hospital bill plus an additional sum for the mother. It was planned that the baby would be brought to me in the lobby and I would then bring it to the waiting adoptive parents in another car near the hospital. Then I would return to the hospital and take the mother home. But at the last minute, the hospital personnel figured out what was happening. After I paid the bill and all the paper work was done, the mother and child appeared together in a wheelchair in the lobby accompanied by two of the Catholic nuns who were nurses. They were furious and indignant but since the paper work was nominally all in order and the bill paid they must have decided they had no choice to release the mother and child. But one of them did say to me that she knew what was going on and the discharge was going to go by the book - and insisted that all three of us would leave together, with the baby in the mother's arms. The nuns walked beside us until we stepped immediately outside the property line of the hospital. I had to leave the mother sitting there in the wheelchair with one of the nuns while I walked the block and one-half to the auto of the waiting "adopters." One the nuns followed me by about 50 feet and when she saw what I had done she shook her fist at me as I turned away from the car. As I walked past her back towards the hospital she called me an irreligious but understandable expletive. I felt it was accurate that day and still do. I knew I was doing something that I've come to call a "wrong thing for all the right reasons." I then walked back to the mother who was, by then in hysterics. I took her home. She and I remained in contact for about another few months. But I had been long scheduled to be married and to accept a transfer from my employer. That ended our contact. I feel compelled to say here and now that she was a kind, sweet, good person who found herself in a bad situation not of her own doing and the choice she made, as I see it even after all these years, was the right one under circumstances that are no one else's business. Today she might have had an abortion, or she could have had good counseling and professional support - but that was then and this is now. To this day I have thought about this boy, now probably a man. Now that I am 71 years old (next week) I am blessed with 5 beautiful children and 5 grandchildren of my own - but this boy has continued to haunt me. I expect that the process involved false birth records being provided to the new "parents" but I also suspect that somewhere along the way, the truth, or some of it, may come out. I think often that this man now may have found that hospital's record of his birth. At that point, he would be at a dead end that shows me, with a false address, as his father and a false name and address for his mother. When I faced a serious medical crisis about 6 years ago I sat down with my oldest child and told him this story so that he would have all the information I had in the event the boy ever showed up thinking I might be his father. As much as I wonder, I also don't know what I will do if he does show up and wants to know his mother's identity. I have some idea of where he could look. I'd probably "put him on hold" while I try to find the mother and if I do, allow her decide what to do about that. And I even wonder sometimes if I have a responsibility to find him and tell him what I know or is that just my own guilt looking for an all-too-easy but inappropriate way to shrive myself? Advice? Comment? Is that the right thing to do? Should I look for him or should I leave it alone and let happen what may or may not? As my user name states, the issue is a man's conscience.