Kathleen Hoy Foley was 16, alone and pregnant from a rape in 1964 when she decided to put the baby up for adoption, intending to forever close that chapter of her life.

“The day I walked out of that hospital, it was the day it ended for me,” Foley, now 65, told the Daily News. “I was emancipated. I truly believed I was free.”

She wasn’t.

More than 30 years later, the child defied the odds and found her, shattering the life Foley had created and forcing her to reveal a dark piece of her past that she had wanted to keep hidden from her grown daughters and husband.

Penn, now age 48, became interested in meeting her birth parents after having her own child in 1996. First she found out that her biological father was dead and then she was rejected by Foley. She admitted to the New York Daily News that her mom’s reaction was like “a knife to my heart.”

“It’s really sad,” Penn added. “It is very hard for somebody in this time to put their brain back in 1964 in that society. I’ve never experienced it. But I would hope that whatever happens in that situation that at this point, I would get myself help and I wouldn’t take it out on the person I gave birth to.”

Foley was contacted by the unwanted child she put up for adoption 15 years ago. How Elaine Penn found her birth mom is questionable. Foley claims Penn hired a private investigator and that Catholic Charities unlawfully passed over important information. With a closed adoption the birth certificate is supposed to remain sealed and the birth mom’s name never revealed.

Elaine denies hiring an investigator and says she found leads in public documents. She first made contact with Foley’s lawyer who ended up being her biological mom’s son-in-law.

Even though Penn has reached out to her mom several times over the past 15 years, the two haven’t met in person. Foley, now age 65, doesn’t want to ever meet her daughter and she has become an advocate for women who have given up a child and prefer to remain anonymous.

Today, these aging women, including frail elderly women, are enduring egregious abuse from State governments that are opening court sealed adoption records and intimidating these women into forfeiting private medical and personal histories to stranger-adoptees.

Adoption agencies are placing aging and elder women at extreme physical and emotional risk by releasing deeply intimate and identifying details to strangers claiming rights as adoptees. (Betrayal by Catholic Charities permanently ended my life--and the lives of my family--as I knew it.)

Adoptees seeking to satisfy their own curiosity, some looking for revenge, are hunting down and ambushing elder women and their families, dismissing as unimportant the damage and destruction they create. (Among many cruelties, the stranger-adoptee in my situation posted my 80 year old mother's name on the internet, along with accusatory sexual insinuations.)

Despite whatever irreversible consequences may occur, society, via the media, insists on romanticizing this trend of pursuing women and forcing public exposure of past traumas.

Socially and politically this sanctioned abuse and punishment of aging and elderly women is disguised as a human rights issue for those who were placed into adoption.

Left without social support and legal options, it is, sadly, up to the woman in hiding to protect herself the best way she can.

“It’s really sad,” Penn added. “It is very hard for somebody in this time to put their brain back in 1964 in that society. I’ve never experienced it. But I would hope that whatever happens in that situation that at this point, I would get myself help and I wouldn’t take it out on the person I gave birth to.”

I never knew I had a choice. Never knew that I did not have to accept being violated by that despicable stigma affixed to me as a teenager. Birth mother—a slur that branded me a slut; a whore. The label that blamed me for getting pregnant from rape. The label that ignored the rapes; turned my torment into a hot and heavy teenage romance with me unable to keep my legs closed.

Getting pregnant was what I deserved for wanton sexual escapades. Just punishment for my sexual lust. I was to confess my sin—I did. Do my penance—I did extra just to make sure. And my sins and my secret shame would be washed away by a confidential adoption. That is what they promised—Catholic Charities; my mother. Do my penance and I would be free. I believed them.

Over thirty years later my confidential records were breached and a stranger—the adoptee—was wreaking havoc in our lives. Which is why Phil was on the phone with our attorney and I was listening to him say what I had never in my entire life heard before. There in our kitchen, that tiny moment in time, me fifty years old, I slowly began to see that I was not required to stigmatize myself any longer; that I did not have to join society and continue to condemn myself with the label Birth Mother; a label so vile, it made me retch.

I looked up at Phil when he sat down at the table across from me.

“Rape is not making love,” I finally managed, giving voice to what I had never been able to speak aloud. “Being forced to breed did not make me a mother. They don’t call girls who had abortions, mothers.”