Shameless

The Fight for Adoption Disclosure and the Search for My Son

By: Marilyn Churley

Narrated by: Ellen Davis

In the late 1960s, at the age of eighteen and living far from home amidst the thriving counterculture of Ottawa, Marilyn Churley got pregnant. Like thousands of other women of the time she kept the event a secret. Faced with few options, she gave the baby up for adoption.

Over twenty years later, as the Ontario NDP government’s minister responsible for all birth, death, and adoption records, including those of her own child, Churley found herself in a surprising and powerful position–fully engaged in the long and difficult battle to reform adoption disclosure laws and find her son.

Both a personal and political story, Shameless is a powerful memoir about a mother’s struggle with loss, love, secrets, and lies–and an adoption system shrouded in shame.

©2015 Marilyn Churley (P)2022 Between the Lines

Critic reviews

“Part memoir, part activist’s handbook, part feminist analysis of 1960s societal mores, Churley’s book is wholly wonderful.”—Catherine Porter, columnist, Toronto Star

“I wept. I didn’t expect to, but I wept. I wept for Marilyn’s humiliations, her loss, her joy of reuniting with her son, her determination, her dogged determination to change the system, her passion and compassion. I wept because with honesty and candor Marilyn took me with her: ‘unwed’ mom, birth mother, alone again, married woman, mom again, elected politician. She took me with her to places I had never been. Perhaps you have been there yourself and it will be familiar. If not, you will experience the complexities, the surprising brutality, the love, the hope of young moms longing for their own. As a politician Marilyn gets it right! The marriage of compassion and justice, real social justice influencing policy. Read this book and believe it is possible.”—Gerry Rogers, filmmaker and former Member of the Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly MHA