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But some of these women say they never surrendered their child at all: They say they were told their child was stillborn or died shortly after birth, when in reality they allege their baby was adopted or essentially handed to a married couple.

“In those days, it was just said the child was dead because that way the mother wouldn’t look for it,” said Lise Pageau, a regional director at Mouvement Retrouvailles supporting adoptees and natural parents, adding that she has personally spoken with at least a half-dozen mothers who allege this happened to them. “[Nurses and doctors] would show the mother a very, very, very sick baby and say the child would not pull through the night. Sometimes the child was already promised to a couple.”

The Edmonton mother’s daughter, who cannot be identified because of a publication ban, is suing the woman who raised her and the hospital where she was born, alleging that her adoptive mother and a doctor wrongfully arranged for her adoption some 40 years ago.

The daughter found her natural mother in 2004, but her mother thought she was “crazy,” court documents say. A DNA test later confirmed they were kin.

It is difficult to know for certain how often Canadian women were lied to about their baby dying. Unless a woman was contacted by her child later in life, she would not know that her allegedly dead child was actually alive.

Still, the accounts of mothers, such as the one who swore the affidavit, suggest the possibility that at least some babies born to single women were immediately or eventually transferred to married couples. In her 2011 book, The Traffic in Babies: Cross Border Adoption and Baby-Selling Between the United States and Canada, 1930-1972, McMaster University professor Karen Balcom wrote that in Nova Scotia there were “numerous examples of birth mothers who were falsely told that their children were dead so they would not interfere in adoption placements.”