so what is more important here?
you have three choices
finding good homes for orphans
accepting same sex marriage
finding your real parents
Kinda hard to find your birth parents when you're being lied to. In the case of Philomena, she was lied to when looking for her son, and her son was lied to when looking for his mother. The nuns could have easily connected the two, but they wouldn't - and Philomena's son died before she found him.
Also, when you think of the importance of a mother's love, think of those loving young mothers and the children who were forcibly separated from each other, and the trauma experienced by both.
Even after the 1952 Adoption Act, which regulated adoption in Ireland and made it legal, most adoptions were facilitated by nuns in mother and baby homes. In these homes, pregnant, unwed women were hidden away in shame to have their child under the watchful eye of the Catholic Church. Sometimes located on the same site as the Magdalene laundries**, the institutions were also workplaces for pregnant women and new mothers, who often raised their children until they were toddlers. Based on records of adoption passports from 1949 on, O’Brien and Maguire Pavao list 2103 adopted Irish children, though the exact number is still not known.
While the mothers gave consent to their children’s adoptions, O’Brien describes it as a decision made out of helplessness. “For the vast majority of women, they couldn’t leave the mother and baby home until their child was a certain age. For many of the women the children were 2 or 3…[and] the nuns didn’t always tell the American adoptive parents that their mother was looking after them. They wanted to give the impression that they were orphaned or abandoned children,” says O’Brien. Not only was this painful for the young mothers, the method posed problems for both adopted people and adoptive parents. “The adoptive parents weren’t given the full picture. They were often given very traumatized children who were suffering from separation from their mother’s love and care and attention.” Even after the Adoption Act, this practice continued due to a loophole that provided for “illegitimate” children to go overseas.
http://irishamerica.com/2010/08/the-legacy-of-church-run-mother-and-baby-homes-in-ireland/
Philomena: the real-life story behind the filmPhilomena Lee was just 18 when she met a young man at the county fair in Limerick one evening in 1952. She had spent most of her young existence in a Catholic boarding school and knew nothing about the facts of life. A single night of romance left Philomena pregnant, a shameful thing in 1950s Ireland. Her family sent her away to hide her condition, and in the convent of Sean Ross Abbey at Roscrea in County Tipperary she gave birth as a ‘fallen woman’. She was forced to spend the next three and a half years there, slaving in the laundries while also caring for her young son, Anthony.
Worse was to follow. Just before Christmas 1955, Philomena was told her child was being taken from her. She was not allowed to say goodbye. Anthony was given away for adoption in America, in return for a hefty ‘donation’ to the Church from his new parents. Philomena was devastated. Sent away to England, she trained as a nurse and raised a family. But she kept the ‘guilty secret’ of her illegitimate child for 50 years, not telling her other children or her friends because the Church had told her she would be damned if she did so. Philomena spent almost five decades secretly searching for her lost son, while he — unbeknown to Philomena — was also searching for her.
The detective story I embarked on took me to Ireland and to America. I discovered that Anthony had become a successful lawyer and had risen to the heights of the American political world. Renamed Michael Hess, he had served as the White House’s chief legal counsel under Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior, but he had never stopped thinking about his mother. Like her, he had gone back several times to the convent where he was born and asked the nuns if they would put him in touch with her. The nuns knew they wanted to find each other, but refused to help.