Carol Briggs placed
her newborn son on the bed and removed all of his clothes. She tried to find herself in his face, searching his mouth, his nose, his eyes. "Not yet," she thought. She saw only his father. She looked him up and down, making a mental note of each of his 10 tiny toes, chubby legs, puffy belly and two little arms reaching up at her. "In my mind," Briggs says, "that was probably going to be the last time I ever saw him."
It was Dec. 1, 1972, and a big snowstorm had hit the greater Pittsburgh
area that week. Briggs had gone sledding with some of the other girls the night before, dragging a cardboard box up and down a big hill that emptied out right at the Zoar Home for Mothers, Babies and Convalescents in Allison Park, Pennsylvania. She woke up in labor around 2 a.m., and just 32 minutes later, she was a mother. She named her baby Jon Kenneth Briggs.
Her parents and older brother drove the hour from her hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, to be with her at the hospital. After
cleaning out her room at the maternity home and signing some papers, she was back in Ohio the next day, ready to resume her life as a 16-year-old high schooler and National Honor Society member.
No one outside of her immediate family and her cousin Robin knew about the baby. Only when she was preparing to sign the adoption papers did Briggs consider sharing the news with the father, a teenage fling who had gone off to college before she discovered she was pregnant. She ultimately decided
against it.
"He was a kid too," she says. "He was off at college on a scholarship. I think I may have felt that I kind of got myself in this, I'm gonna do what I need to do to work my way through it...
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