My mother got pregnant with me in 1968 in a small and mostly Catholic town in rural PA. I was born in April of 1969. She was not forced to give me up for adoption but in that environment getting pregnant out of wedlock was strongly looked down upon. She left the Catholic Church over the comments made publicly during mass by the priest and it is hard to believe a “Man of God” would be so cruel. Only one priest in her parish during her pregnancy treated her like a decent human being and she gave me my middle name after him.
My mother was also a child of an unwed pregnancy. She was born in 1950 in a home for unwed mothers in Pittsburgh and around the age of 4 was adopted along with 3 other orphans (all brothers). Although she has never been able to identify her birth mother (records sealed), she has learned she has a sibling born there a few years earlier.
Two of my older sisters had babies as teenagers in the 80s. My parents ending up with custody with most oldest sister’s child.
My parents did watch my other sister’s child a lot but she always retained custody. It was her senior year of high school so it scuttled her plans to go to college. She ended up having another baby 3 years later as well.
In Norway, there seems to have been a lot in the generation born in the 60s. I knew 3 people among my peers born outside of marriage. One scandalously early, one was raised by grandparents, one had a stepdad who had met and married his mother after he was born. Also a couple of people whose parents had married really young as a result of pregnancy.
During the 70s, there were sex education and contraceptives available. These days, sex ed starts at age six. In my generation, I neither knew nor heard of anyone. And when I was in the US in the 80s I was surprised to see pregnant high school students. I was surprised they would want children so young. Despite knowing several people resulting from unwanted pregnancies, by then my brain had relegated that to something that just did not happen any more.