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 Away”. 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

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