There has been a sea-change in the United States in society's attitude toward unwed mothers. First of all, they are more likely now to be called single mothers because the vast majority raise their children. Ann Fessler estimates that in 1960 40 per cent of white single women gave up their children to adoption; today that percentage has dropped to only 1.5 per cent. When they do choose to surrender their children, single women often do so in open adoptions that enable birth mothers to stay in touch with their children.

There has been a corresponding recognition that the middle-class consensus of the past half-century was damaging to young single women. As early as 1964 a Canadian conference on out of wedlock pregnancy noted in its final report that there was a general feeling that ‘these Homes for Unmarried Mothers should not be so cut off from the community and so isolated that no one knows about them.’ Dr May Taylor urged her colleagues to fact facts. ‘For generations social workers have been strongly encouraging girls who were pregnant out of wedlock to place their children for adoption and we have done this with the very best intentions [but] we are faced at this moment with the need to re-evaluate this advice…’ In 1997 the Australian Association of Social Workers Ltd issued a statement of apology for the lifelong pain they inadvertently had caused many women who had relinquished their children.