Three pregnant women, ages 15 and 16, have escaped from the New Hope Maternity home in Utah. They had been sent there by there parents, and had been brainwashed into considering adoption and changing their behavior. As an act of desperation, they hit the director, Jane Moody, over the head with a frying pan, tied her and another woman up, and took their Dodge van and fled the state.
According to the Daily Herald of Utah,
(Gina) Castro suspects that her daughter didn’t want to give her baby up for adoption, when friends and family members were telling her to. It may be one of the reasons why the girls decided to run.
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Castro said she knew her 16-year-old daughter didn’t like being at New Hope. Far away from her friends and boyfriend, the girl didn’t like not being able call or e-mail them. That’s what her mother wanted, originally.
These women have been on the run, and are currently not traceable. Their names have not been released to the press, and they have not used the credit card or cell phone since filling up the van with gas at a local gas station in Utah.
As prisoners of the Maternity Home, they were unable to contact family or friends. The only reason they had been imprisoned in the Maternity Home, was because they had gotten pregnant as young women, and their families disapproved.
According to FauxClaud of Musingsofthelame:
Being held against your will at a maternity home is not much fun. Separated from friends and family at a vulnerable time in ones life, being forced to go there by such friends and family with the knowledge that the future only holds the forced separation from one’s baby can be like a death sentence. No one will help you. No one cares about what you want.
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A much bigger story is here. The American people have been able to grasp the enormity of social abuses, cruelty of past adoption practices and the treatment of young women in maternity homes with the release of Ann Fessler’s “The Girls That Went Awayâ€. The problem is that many people seem to think that “those days†are over. Even in the educated adoption community, people are shocked to hear that maternity homes such as New Hope still are in operation. With the current administration pledging more federal funding to go to maternity homes, the 95-10 Initiative promoting adoption as a solution to prevent abortion rates, and Infant Adoption Awareness Trainings, funded by the million by Congress, and going right to the profit making agencies to further market their business, we need someone who can tell the truth of the treatments and mental coercion that goes on at these homes.
This should be a warning to families, to provide support for their pregnant teenage girls. Hiding them away can only harm them further, and pushes them away, forcing them to take extreme measures in order to protect themselves and their children. These teenage girls are now mothers, are now women, who are looking out for themselves and their children. They need support, not condemnation.
Heather Kuhn is an author who writes for Todays News and BNN
2 users commented in " Women Escape From Maternity Home "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackCan these 15/16 year old teens be called WOMAN just because they got pregnant? Stigma attached to these pregnancies is enormous in small communities. maternity home acting like prison is the root cause of this problem.
I attended Abundant Life Academy, a behavior modification program that replaced the New Beginnings Maternity Home in 2007 after claims of mental and physical abuse there proved true. The school that replaced it was no better, if not more abusive. I can personally testify that two girls (both 15) were coerced in to sex with a staff member (age 30) who was not fired until months after the scandal was realized. The school is still open and taking on more teens every day.
I ran away from the school at 17, after being forced on to medication for depression which I never had until I attended the program.
Ironically enough I was refused other medication, such as anti-biotics or penicillin, for weeks when I came down with strep throat. I was shut up in a quarentine room and left with two other sick girls for about two weeks before anyone took us to the hospital. It was hell.
Schools like this are terrible. No one, adult, child, or however you see them should be subjected to this treatment. EVER.
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