Are these places still around? I ask because a co-worker of mine went to an unwed mother’s home in 1983 when she was 16. Does a public school still try to hide the pregnant teenagers by sending them away? She said she lived there from when she was 3 months pregnant until the birth and it was like 100 miles away from home. She said they also let the girls smoke. :eek: There were birth classes, baby classes, cooking, and sewing. This sounds like 1960 to me. I would think now a girl would still be allowed in school or she could do homeschool.
There are a couple (or at least they were, I saw a documentary about it about 10 years ago) in Puerto Rico. It’s not that pregnant girls are not allowed in public school (they are, teen pregnancy is not uncommon here), but rather that these girls had already either dropped out of high school, were in bad habits (drugs, alcohol), lacked parental/familiar support, etc. IIRC, they were run by religious orders (nuns). And the idea was to make them self sufficient, get their GED, plan ahead, etc., away from the environment they were before.
I did some searching and the best general article about them that I could find quickly is this:
Note that the name that they’re usually called these days is “maternity group homes.” There aren’t nearly as many as there were back before abortion was completely legalized in 1973, but there are apparently still a fair numbr of them.
The Salvation Army used to run places like this under the name “Booth Memorial Hospital.” They would teach young girls how to care for their babies and assist with adoption if needed. In Chicago “Booth Memorial Hospital” was located around Foster and Pulaski. There were other “Booth Memorial Hospitals” in Cleveland, NYC, St Louis and Boston, and many other cities too.
Cyn used to work in one IIRC.
Paging cyn to GQ