My latest article is up at RH RealityCheck: Sent Away: A New Look At Maternity Group Homes. It’s about the new generation of homes for unwed mothers.
The world of maternity group homes is not very well-studied. One of the lesser-known benefits of Roe was the disappearance of the huge institutional maternity homes where pregnant women would go to gestate and secretly hand off their babies for adoption.
Today’s homes run the gamut from secular publicly-funded social services for homeless teenagers, to expensive "tough love" boarding schools, to the back ends of the same crisis pregnancy centers that mislead women about birth control and abortion.
The private religious homes and the boarding schools can be shockingly restrictive and seemingly quite punitive towards their clients. For example, I found that many facilities cut off their clients’ access to visitors and even phone calls for weeks or months at a time. Many will not allow the birth father to be present at the delivery, even if the mother wants him there.
If anyone has had any personal experiences with maternity homes, please leave comments or send email. I’d love to know more.
My article is part of a special RH RC symposium on the Politics of Childbirth.
Also contributing: Amie Newman, Jill Sheffield, Tracy Cooper, Lisa Chin, and Susan Hodges.
