Andrew Testa for The New York Times
"What we had done was seen as so shameful. Society did not want to know you." PHILOMENA LEE
LONDON — PHILOMENA LEE is 80 now, and she has made peace with many things. Yet her voice still catches when she describes her last glimpse of her firstborn child as he was being taken away to be adopted by an American family.
Ms. Lee desperately wanted to keep the boy, Anthony, who was then 3 years old. But it was 1955. Locked in a Roman Catholic home for unwed mothers on the grounds of a country convent in Roscrea, Ireland, she had signed her rights away at the nuns' insistence.
She never even got a chance to say goodbye. Racing to an upstairs window, she got there just in time to see Anthony's face looking out the back of a departing car. "I can see him like it was yesterday," Ms. Lee said recently. "I will carry that picture in my head always."
These days, Ms. Lee, who lives on the outskirts of London, is talking candidly about those difficult years when, barely out of a convent school and completely ignorant about sex, she became pregnant at 18 and entered the ranks of the thousands of young women in Ireland who were sent to live in church institutions for unwed mothers. Though the Mother and Baby homes were supported by the state, the women were forced to work long hours and had little choice but to give up their children.
Ms. Lee's ordeal and her lifetime of searching for her son are the subject of a new movie, "Philomena," directed by Stephen Frears, which opened in America last week to glowing reviews. Judi Dench plays Ms. Lee.
Tall, dignified and with her sense of humor intact, Ms. Lee put her cane aside recently and settled into a hotel armchair to answer questions. She said she was pleased with the movie, even if she did not recognize herself on the screen. Many of the film's comic bits, like her eagerness for free Champagne, never happened.
"They really make me look like a silly billy, don't you think?" she said. But Ms. Lee says she accepts the screenwriters' efforts to inject some lightness into the film because, "otherwise, it is a very sad story."
"It is hard to believe what it was like back then," she said. "What we had done was seen as so shameful. Society did not want to know you."
The film has set off something of a firestorm in Ireland, where many Catholics are still trying to come to terms with a series of revelations about the church's past abusive practices, in which orphans, runaways and others considered delinquent were subjected to systematic and sustained physical, sexual and emotional abuse — in many cases with the government's help.
But "Philomena" focuses on yet another matter: the church's role in isolating unwed mothers like Ms. Lee and forcing them to put their babies up for adoption to families willing to make large contributions. Rights advocates charge that rather than prioritize the welfare of the mother or the children involved by finding suitable adoptees, the church was interested only in ensuring the couples were Catholic and, preferably, wealthy.
Church officials have denied that payment ever took place, and many of the documents from that period were lost in a fire. But researchers say that between 1945 and the mid-1960s, at least 2,200 infants and toddlers like Anthony, some of whom had stayed with their mothers for years, were sent to America.
Those were only a portion of the forced adoptions. Probably 50,000 babies were born in Mother and Baby homes throughout Ireland before they closed in the 1990s. Conditions in the homes were difficult for the young mothers. The church saw them as degenerates, not fit to keep their children. Among other humiliations, they were forced to recount their sexual encounters in detail to the nuns. The father of Ms. Lee's son was a young man she had met one evening at a carnival. They had planned to meet the following week, but her aunt would not allow it.
Over 50 years, Ms. Lee sent word to the convent in Roscrea every time she moved, just in case Anthony ever came looking for her, and she visited several times pressing for information about him.
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