The Ideal Maternity Home was a maternity home operated from 1928 until 1947 by William Peach Young, a chiropractor and unordained minister of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and his wife Lila Gladys Young, a midwife, although she advertised herself as an obstetrician. The business was eventually shut down by the government.
Opened as "The Life and Health Sanitarium" [1] in the late 1920s and later renamed to Ideal Maternity Home (IMH), the unlicensed maternity home promised both maternity care for married couples in NS and NB and provided private birthing and placement of children of unwed mothers. The average wage at the time was $8 a week, and mothers were charged $500 for maternity services. The business also sold babies in the black market for up to $10,000 per baby. With 80-125 babies housed, it was Eastern Canada's largest maternity home. Between 800 and 1500 babies were born there from 1928 to 1946.
Starting in 1934, The Nova Scotia Department of Public Welfare gathered evidence against the Youngs, unaided by the Youngs' many admirers, including local businessmen, prominent Nova Scotia families, and politicians. [2] However, the province's child welfare system lacked mechanisms to shut down the IMH. This was part of a wider failure of the province to provide modern social policy in areas such as poor relief and adoption law. In 1935, The Youngs were convicted of fraud for charging child care expenses for a dead child. They were charged with manslaughter in 1936 in relation to the death of a baby and mother at the IMH, but acquitted. In 1942 they were involved in an inquest related to a recent adoption from the IMH. In 1946 the government failed to prosecute them for having overreached their questionable medical qualifications but they were convicted on seven violations of the Maternity Boarding Houses Act. [2] The Youngs renamed the IMH the "Battle Creek of Nova Scotia Rest Haven Park", but the business continued to operate as before, amid continuing court cases.
In 1946 the Montreal Standard newspaper published the article "Traders in Fear: Baby Farm Rackets Still Lure Girls Who are Afraid of Social Agencies". In the article, staff writer Mavis Gallant wrote that young girls were exploited by the Youngs and bullied into putting children up for adoption, that medical care was questionable, and that the Youngs were international traffickers in babies. The Youngs unsuccessfully sued for defamation and during the trial it was revealed that dead infants were buried in grocery boxes, or "butter boxes". [2]
Survivors of the Ideal Maternity Home, now scattered throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe continue to meet, provide support, and assist one another with birth family searches. [3]
The Home has been subject of several books, plays, and two movies. The title of Bette Cahill's book, Butterbox Babies is a reference to the "butter boxes," wooden grocery crates from a local dairy used as coffins for the babies killed at the Ideal Maternity Home. [4]
The 1995 film Butterbox Babies was adapted from the book. [5] Another film based on the story, The Child Remains, was released in 2017.
Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting of another, usually a child, from that person's biological or legal parent or parents. Legal adoptions permanently transfer all rights and responsibilities, along with filiation, from the biological parent or parents.
Child abandonment is the practice of relinquishing interests and claims over one's offspring in an illegal way with the intent of never resuming or reasserting guardianship. The phrase is typically used to describe the physical abandonment of a child, but it can also include severe cases of neglect and emotional abandonment, such as when parents fail to provide financial and emotional support for children over an extended period of time. An abandoned child is referred to as a foundling. Baby dumping refers to parents leaving a child younger than 12 months in a public or private place with the intent of terminating their care for the child. It is also known as rehoming when adoptive parents use illegal means, such as the internet, to find new homes for their children.
Lebensborn e.V. was an SS-initiated, state-supported, registered association in Nazi Germany with the goal of raising the birth rate of Aryan children of persons classified as 'racially pure' and 'healthy' based on Nazi racial hygiene and health ideology. Lebensborn provided welfare to its mostly unmarried mothers, encouraged anonymous births by unmarried women at their maternity homes, and mediated adoption of these children by likewise 'racially pure' and 'healthy' parents, particularly SS members and their families. The Cross of Honour of the German Mother was given to the women who bore the most Aryan children. Abortion was legalised by the Nazis for disabled and non-Germanic children, but strictly punished otherwise.
The international adoption of South Korean children started as a result of a large number of orphaned mixed children from the Korean War after 1953. Religious organizations in the United States, Australia, and many Western European nations slowly developed into the apparatus that sustained international adoption as a socially integrated system. This system, however, is essentially gone as of 2020. The number of children given for adoption is lower than in comparable OECD countries of a similar size, the majority of adoptees are adopted by South Korean families, and the number of international adoptees is at a historical low.
Parental leave, or family leave, is an employee benefit available in almost all countries. The term "parental leave" may include maternity, paternity, and adoption leave; or may be used distinctively from "maternity leave" and "paternity leave" to describe separate family leave available to either parent to care for small children. In some countries and jurisdictions, "family leave" also includes leave provided to care for ill family members. Often, the minimum benefits and eligibility requirements are stipulated by law.
Edna Browning Kahly Gladney was an early campaigner for children's rights and better living conditions for disadvantaged children.
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The said bureau shall investigate and report to [the Department of Commerce and Labor] upon all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child life among all classes of our people, and shall especially investigate the questions of infant mortality, the birth-rate, orphanage, juvenile courts, desertion, dangerous occupations, accidents and diseases of children, employment, legislation affecting children in the several states and territories.
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Butterbox Babies is a film by Sullivan Entertainment and adapted from the book Butterbox Babies by Bette L. Cahill. The film and book are based on the true story of the Ideal Maternity Home, a home for unwed pregnant mothers, during the Great Depression and Second World War. The home made millions from the illegal adoption of illegitimate babies during the 1930s and 1940s.
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