The New Yorker:

For Rebecca Kiessling, helping mothers who’ve conceived children through sexual assault is part of a strategy for curtailing reproductive rights.

As a young girl in suburban Michigan, in the nineteen-seventies, Rebecca Kiessling was teased for looking nothing like her adoptive parents. Larry and Gail Wasser were Jews who took the family to temple on the High Holidays, and Kiessling, a fair-haired, blue-eyed child, recalls people asking, “Who’s the little shiksa?” Her only sibling, an adopted older brother, acted out in grade school and later got into trouble with the law. In Kiessling’s memory, Larry would joke that “socially deviant behavior is genetic,” a reference to the 1956 thriller “The Bad Seed,” in which a psychopathic child turns out to be the descendant of a serial killer. Gail sewed matching mother-daughter outfits, but that did little to quell Kiessling’s feeling that she didn’t belong. She likes to recount a story about seeing the musical “Annie” and being transfixed by the song “Maybe,” in which the orphan protagonist dreams of her mother and father. When Kiessling and I first met, last spring, she recited some of the lyrics for me. “Betcha they’re good / Why shouldn’t they be?” Annie sings. “Their one mistake / Was giving up me.”

In a spiral-bound notebook, Kiessling counted down “the years, months, and days” until she would be old enough to legally access information about her biological parents. On her eighteenth birthday, in 1987, she contacted a local probate court. Soon she received a two-page letter from an adoption caseworker, which listed details about her birth mother down to her “reddish highlights” and “average” high-school grades but stated, “No information is available concerning your biological father, other than he was caucasian and of large build.” Kiessling recalled, “It sounded like a police description. I thought, Something’s wrong.” She reached out to the caseworker, who reluctantly confirmed what Kiessling already suspected: she was the product of a rape. She eventually spoke by phone with her birth mother—who asked that I use only her first name, Joann—and learned that Joann had been walking to a grocery store near her home in Livonia, Michigan, one night in October, 1968, when a stranger attacked her at knifepoint. Kiessling told me, “I remember thinking, Do I have this ugliness lurking inside of me? Because, after all, socially deviant behavior is genetic, right?”

Go to link