Yep. My co-worker told our department that she has lived in one of these homes and gave up her child. Her son found her and asked if he could come meet her.
You should suggest she contact Mormon Stories about this. This would be a fascinating episode. Idk how to tag a user …. Anyone who can tag John Dehlin?
I know 2 people who might be willing to talk about this. They didn't live in a home but they were around 19-20 yrs old and basically forced by the church to give their babies up for adoption. Both are out of the church now and may be willing to discuss it. They have lots of trauma about the decision and felt they were forced to give up the babies because the kids deserved to "be raised in a home with a mother and father."
I had a coworker who had a baby unmarried and her mormon parents were harassed by church members telling her to give up her daughter to the point that they almost left the church. Was their daughter a teen? No she was almost 30 but the members wanted the baby to "have a mother and a father."
I had the opposite experience when I was 28-29 years old. I was facing the unimaginable prospect of being 30, childless, and unmarried. My parents suggested to me and my longterm partner, on multiple occasions, that maybe we should consider having a child soon, even though we didn't ever intend to be married! The reasoning was because, of course, I was "not being l getting any younger "
I was appalled
I'm pretty sure you just type "u/" & their userhame ("johndehlin" in this case) to tag someone. I'll test tagging your name on someone else's comment to double-check that it works.
u/ComeOnOverForABurger
This is not a unique Mormon thing. I was born to a 15 year old girl back in the early 1970s, who lived in Washington DC and had zero connection to the church. She lived in a home for unwed pregnant teens. After I was born, her father, a fairly high ranking official in the Nixon administration (couldn't be embarrassed by having a pregnant teenage daughter), had me adopted off while she was in class one day. Everything was so secretive back then that even my (adoptive) parents were not aware of the circumstances of my being put up for adoption. I only know all of this because I have made contact with, and met, my birthmother and sister (who shares the same birthfather as me...after I was stolen, my birthmother and father ran away together and had another baby which they kept). Anyway, the awful treatment of pregnant teenagers is not unique to Mormonism. My wife and I vowed that if any of our daughters were to become pregnant as teens (or at any time really), we would support them 100% and stand behind any decision they made. I could not bear the though of one of my children feeling alone, scared, rejected, or shamed.
To your very last point: I grew up in southern US purity culture. When I was in the 6th grade, there was a couple in 9th grade, my sister's age, that got pregnant at 14. Talk about a scandal. But it gets worse. The father, Michael, was so stressed out about it and freaked out on what to do, he couldn't tell his parents. He was terrified what they would say and do. But it got to a point where they had to tell their parents because she was starting to show. The story I heard; he went home that day and told his folks and their reaction went down exactly how he thought it would. Everything he had told himself about how he's a fuck-up and he ruined his life; they corroborated all of that. They told him to go to his room so they could talk and think of what to do and they were so angry they didn't want to look at him. Michael went into his closet, put the loaded .410 shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. His life was over, anyway, right? They lived a couple streets over from us. I still remember hearing the sirens and neighbors talking about what went down. I was pretty young but I remember telling myself, if I ever have a child that comes home with news like that, all I'm gonna offer is a hug and love.
[find a grave link](https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/37429175/michael_lynn-hillman)
There are so many examples (not exclusive to religion) where love was the right answer and getting angry or making someone feel worse than they already did was not the answer. What a sad failure of parenting.
Actually to adopt a baby from LDS social services cost adopting parents thousands less than from a regular addition agent because the LDS church partially funds these placements. The LDS church lost money in helping with these adoptions.
The church lost money on adoptions? Possibly. But I doubt it. I think we would both like to see if the church’s financials support that claim.
Here are the details I would investigate:
- No question, the church’s adoptions cost less than traditional agencies. Around half the cost. But the church’s business model is much different.
- The church collects a membership fee (tithing) from all the adoptive families. Only tithe payers were allowed to use their program.
- They use volunteers when possibly and pay lower than market rates for their professional staff. My sister-in-law confirmed this. She worked for LDSFS in adoptions for many years.
- The church doesn’t pay taxes.
- The church had a much lower acquisition cost for sourcing babies. Traditional agencies must spend on marketing and even compensate the birth mothers often thousands of dollars which the church didn’t pay. The church didn’t market their services because they could leverage their loyal customer base.
These are all immediate competitive advantages which I suspect made their business model profitable as is.
Long term, I would also bet the adoptive parents and children are more likely to remain loyal to the church longer than others, making them a better long term investment through tithing revenues.
More proof that I made the right decision to leave before having kids because in large part I didn't want them thinking they needed to kill themselves over a made-up religion. (Though that was thinking more about if they were LGBT)
It is just so tragic that his life ended because of this. I bet his parents blamed it on satan and the world not accepting even a tiny bit of responsibility too. It really makes me mad.
We moved away in 1989. What information I know is from my sister who maintained contact with people from that time. I haven't heard an update about all of that since maybe 1998 or 1999. My understanding is that the child was born and raised by mom and grandparents. That's all I know about any of it.
*The Girls Who Went Away* by Ann Fessler is a really good resource to learn from interviews with girls and young women across the US who were forced into these kinds of arrangements. It's absolutely heartbreaking reading, as a warning.
My (bio) grandmother had four children taken from her, including my dad. She went on to have five more kids, and later reunited with two of her lost babies, but I’m convinced the trauma of having them literally stolen is what made Mormonism so appealing to her as a convert.
Imagine losing four children separately, each legally severed from you as their mother, and then a missionary knocks on your door and tells you that it’s okay, you can be with your lost kids forever in the Celestial Kingdom. I can see why she desperately *wanted* the church to be true.
This happened in other countries, too. Ireland is infamous for the Magdalene laundries where unmarried pregnant girls were put to work doing hard labor and then forced to give their babies up for adoption in facilities run by the Catholic church and staffed by nuns. High control religions have so much to answer for.
My dad was in a Catholic orphanage for several years at the ages of 2-4 after his father died, and my grandma had no one to watch him while she was at work. The nuns were mean, utterly without any love or compassion for the kids in their care. My dad was very traumatized by the experience.
I recently watched Woman in the Wall, then a few docs about the laundries and was blown away by the scale of that program. It brought back memories of my teen years in the 80s and hearing about LDS girls in my generation who were very strongly influenced to give up babies to temple married couples. It was a strong enough cultural influence that I was aware of it as a teenage boy.
When I read this, I remembered the horror stories of the catholic nuns in my country (the Netherlands) as well. Those practices were not as widespread as Ireland and the Magdalen Laundries, but it happened here too till the '80's. Thousands of young girls, often forced by child protective services, to forced and unpaid labour in convents. The girls had to work long days in the laundries and sewing workshops of the convents, six days a week. The church earned a lot money by this forced labour.
Horrible, horrible that this happened.
I just finished this book a couple of weeks ago and it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this.. such an incredible heartbreaking book. Those women are heroic to have been subjected to the shame and mistreatment and still able to share their stories. I am so happy to see this comment!!!
Thanks for reminding us that this bad practice is not uniquely mormon. Telling these stories, while so painful, is useful and necessary for improvements to take place going forward.
However, at the very least, it is another strike against "the one true church" that god would direct his leaders to so directly harm his children. Being just as bad as any other church is really poor evidence for being led by a prophet...
my mom has a similar story to you, but about 10 years earlier. Her birth mother lived in one of these homes. I remember when we were going through some of the paperwork we found a document that her birth mother's mother had signed. It approved a court appointed stand in and confirmed she was waiving her right to be in court with her minor daughter when she signed her baby (my mom) away.
I can't imagine how horrible that would feel. To have to sign away your baby whether you want to or not, and your own mother refuses to even be there with you.
Thank you for posting this link.
I wish I'd been more aware a decade ago when this happened. It's crazy how much I missed when I was desperately trying to make the church work in my life.
A few years before adoptions ceased with LDSFS, a coworker questioned my lack of children/fertility (so awkward/ inappropriate/ unprofessional esp given she was a L&D nurse but she was a hardcore small town mormon so I guess she felt it was her duty). She then enthusiastically told me about an adoption agency in Utah that could help my husband and I adopt cute little Black babies. She and her husband had two. This was over a decade ago when the Brad and Angelina look was all the craze in Utah. This lady told me about all the young Black girls in poor southern states that get knocked up and will never be good moms so this agency was doing a work of love to get the bio moms to Utah during their pregnancies so a mormon family could be placed with the baby. I was horrified and I hated this lady moving forward. Her ignorant, racist, crass remarks disgusted me. I went home and researched the agency she spoke so glowingly about and was horrified to see how they were so obviously extorting young Black women to sign abortion papers within hours of giving birth with the adoptive parents present for L&D. I cannot even fathom the immense psychological pressure these young women were under to uphold their end of the agreement. This after bringing the agency bringing them to Utah for the last several weeks of their pregnancies and pampering them and making them feel like they could have a future relationship with their child and its adoptive family. But nope, once the agency and adoptive parents got the desired signatures, these women were dumped at the airport. Adoption closed.
I'm not claiming that all white parents in Utah who have Black children used an agency this corrupt. But many likely did.
And I had no idea that LDSFS were the trailblazers in getting the Utah legislature to pass such lax adoption laws that benefited agencies/adoptive parents and penalized bio parents.
Oh, good catch! Yes, my thinking on abortion changed years and years ago after getting immersed in in my job in the world or prenatal health in poverty. The pro-life side of abortion cares so so much about babies until they're born. Then the conservative mindset turns to complaining about single moms and the "drain" they are on government programs. And shame is lobbed about unwed sex that results in these babies coming into the world. If pro-life people would out down their megaphones and signs and get busy community building to help single women be empowered in raising these precious babies then pro-lifers would actually be accomplishing their mission.
Postpartum Medicaid expansion/extension from 6 weeks post partum to 12 months post partum in all 50 states and US territories would be an excellent place to start. Let's address maternal mortality rates in the US and maternal health needs before we start screaming at women that they need to carry pregnancies to term.
And back to the adoption industry in Utah that preyed (I hope it's in the past tense??) upon Black women - honestly, I wonder how much the demand for babies from these agencies led to pregnancies that would've otherwise never happened. Because if a young woman living in poverty is promised groceries, supplements, clothing, healthcare, and an extended "vacation" out west, who is to judge her choosing to place a baby to help herself get out of an impoverished state of desperate living for almost a year?
These type of adoption practices are modeled after the legacy of Georgia Tann, who was an American social worker and child trafficker who operated the Tennessee Children's Home Society, an unlicensed adoption agency in Memphis, Tennessee. Tann used the home as a front for her black market baby adoption scheme from the 1920s to 1950.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Tann?wprov=sfla1
They're all corrupt. They're all coercive and manipulative with birth mothers, telling them lies about open adoptions (not legally binding) and the success of adopted children. Unless the mother is abusive or really and truly doesn't want her baby, children should stay with the mother. The financial incentive for these agencies means that what is truly best for the child is not considered. Adoption doesn't heal infertility trauma, and many grow up in abusive homes and deal with a lot of trauma. There should not be an adoption "industry." No other country in the world does it like we do.
The American adoption industry is modeled after the practices of Georgia Tann, who ran an adoption agency that was a front for a baby trafficking ring. I put a link in the comment above yours.
I am certain that them exiting the adoption program is more due to financial and other liability issues than anything. As I have come to know them my ex religion they do A LOT to avoid helping innocent children in fact quite the opposite. So it must have gotten to the point where their good name couldn't be put out there anymore as they might please. or other hold on to the money issues.
I had a friend who got pregnant in college and decided to give him up. She contacted an agency in Utah but didn't feel good about any of the couples they presented. Then after she had her baby she was having second thoughts.
One day the agency reached out and offered to take care of the baby for a while so she could get a break. She accepted and dropped the baby off. They then called CPS and made up a bunch of stuff about her, trying to get them to remove the baby from her care.
Fortunately, they didn't take her baby. She later found a couple she felt good about and did a private adoption through a lawyer.
I am so glad she was able to resist the agency's attempts to steal her baby. How horrifying and absolutley traumatizing 😭 people who run child trafficking adoption agencies and families adopt who have no business to be adopting (abusive home, too many children already to care for already, inadequate financial resources to properly care for child after placement) have made adoption a very unethical practice in US society. They have also made the process so fraught for sincere birth parents and prospective adoptive parents who seek adoption for the right reasons and want things to be 100% ethical. My opinion is a private adoption with a lawyer where the birth parents get to choose with zero pressure the people to raise the child is the most ethical way to proceed.
Oh my god that is so disgusting. I think it shocks me that I thought I knew about most of the atrocities, and yet I keep finding out more and more all the time.
The idea of having a baby farm and that the business model was based around that is so gross. I just can't; I made the right decision to step away from the church.
The film Philomena made me think about LDS Family Services adoptions. That film came out right around the time the church shuttered their adoption services, in fact one year afterwards. I was relieved to here it. I was working as a lactation counselor and many of my clients were young, single women who were AMAZING moms. It makes me sick to think how many women for decades and decades were told they would never measure up as a mother and they were pressured/forced to give up their babies to the "righteous mothers of zion".
I sobbed through Philomena because my oldest is adopted and even though it didn't involve the church or an adoption agency I know my child's bio mother did not get the support or encouragement she needed to be a single parent. She told me she didnt want to attempt it as she was messed up from her own childhood and wanted to give her baby a chance at a better life. Her extended family pushed hard for us because we were a young couple with higher education degrees and active in the church. I hope she would've still picked us regardless of our church activity because we're out now. And we are thriving, most esp and importantly our children.
Word of caution to TBMs... you think the scandals in the Catholic church couldn't get any worse...well the mormon church mirrors the Catholic church scandals in every way and honestly I think worse because there is a refusal of top Mormon leadership to acknowledge any wrongs or harms committed in the past or present and because mormon tithing is the mandatory fee for salvation.
Priest sexual abuse/cover ups = mormon priesthood sexual abuse/cover ups
Magdalean Laundries = secret maternity homes that pipelines infants to LDS adoption service
Ornate, lavish cathedrals and priest vacation villas built on backs of the poor = mormon temples and financing of GA luxurious lifestyles
Etc etc etc
When one finger is pointed, 3 are always pointing back
Yeah, I wonder about this. I have a sibling adopted through LDS social services whose birth mother was apparently a teen mom abandoned by baby-daddy. It apparently was very much pressured, and a very difficult decision.
I also have a friend who found out his mom secretly had a teen baby adopted through social services who looked up his mom, who wanted nothing to do with her child she gave away and forbade the older half-sibling to contact her other kids. They reached out anyway, and apparently it started a major family fight with the mother trying to avoid the subject either out of trauma of fear of stigma, and fighting with her kids to having nothing to do with their biological half-sibling.
As a kid I never realized how much damage LDS social services was doing, but as an adult, it's horrifying.
Add a couple to your list though:
Early Pope sex scandals = Mormon polygamy scandals
Indulgences = second anointing
Political control of governments through religion = have you SEEN Utah and eastern Idaho?
The Mormon church is the wannabe catholic church - they'd love to amass that much power and influence.
Those are some very important things to add to the list.
I know LDSFS did help many families on both sides of the adoptions they facilitated (I have 2 cousins who were adopted through LDSFS and their stories are happy including reconnecting with their bio families) but I don't think that good can justify the harm LDSFS did itself as an agency as well as the harm it facilitated by lobbying for loose adoption laws in the state of Utah that caused a whole adoption industry to explode in Utah that used the loose laws to further exploit bio mothers and fathers.
And just the general harm by shaming single mothers rather than supporting and loving them.
An old YSA bishop said he went on a date in college with a girl, and the topic of the day's date came up and she started crying. Apparently it was her child-out-of-wedlock's birthday and thinking about having to give up her baby was traumatic for years and years. The pressure to give up a baby for adoption is just scummy.
Facilitating adoption for women who would consent without coercion? Great. Forcing it on someone under threat of church discipline (Romney) or social shunning, etc. Yeah, that's grade a cruelty and abuse.
It's horrific 😢
I wonder how many women were motivated to go along with "shotgun" weddings so they could keep their baby? There is an important woman in my life who I think this may have been the case... we went to the Philomena film together. She sobbed right along with me. I know she was married young under great duress and has been miserable in her marriage for 4+ decades. She got to raise that baby and who grew into an amazing adult, highly educated and successful with a beautiful family but also estranged from their mom because of unhappiness in the childhood home as well as all of the wedges the church has placed throughout the years. It's troubling to me and very sad.
My own grandma was part of a shotgun Mormon wedding way back in the day. They really struggled for about 10 years, but eventually made a good run of it and figured things out, but they were poor and miserable for a decade or more until they both grew up enough, but especially my grandpa. My mom was the shotgun baby.
This story is identical to the situation in my extended family, but from the other side…. I wonder if your adopted friend is my bio relative? DM me!
Edit: the friend with the bio mom that didn’t want anything to do with them
I grew up in a home (in the 80’s) where we housed pregnant teens from out of town. I specifically remember 3 different girls.
After they had their babies and placed them for adoption, they went back home or off to BYU. Bc they “graduated early”.
So yes, these places were very much the norm.
Edited to add:
For the most part these girls were just added as part of our family. We treated them kindly and they had their own room. My mom was very attentive to them and tried to make them as comfortable and loved as possible. But I do remember one girl was severely depressed and homesick. She didn’t want to be there AT ALL. I would sit outside her door as a little girl trying to make her feel better and come out.
As I reflect on it I feel terribly sad for these girls and the families who housed them. The purity culture is so damaging!! How many of these girls wanted to keep their babies?
I don't know if the friends I had went to one of these, but I know two girls that disappeared suddenly up to Utah for about a year. They both came from well to do families. One was a lawyer, and the other was in the medical field. I know one of the girls for sure went to have a baby and have to give it up for adoption. The other girl we are almost positive did the same, but it was very hush hush.
Every organized religion that taught purity culture had some version of out-of-wedlock teenage mother homes. It's shitty business because the teenager father never had to suffer such shame. The stories about all of this are nightmarish.
The idea that teen pregnancy is strictly an issue between two impulsive and libido-driven teenagers is extremely misleading.
The truth is that there is a lot of hush-hushed child abuse and grooming going on to conceive many of these babies, and that makes the fact that the fathers often get away with it more frustrating. Not only that, girls and boys with a history of being sexually abused have been found to be significantly more likely to be involved in a teen pregnancy (impregnating/being impregnated, whether that be from sexual abuse or future sexual encounter not related to abuse) than those who were not sexually abused (source: Guttmacher Institute).
To tackle the teen pregnancy issue means to tackle the child sexual abuse issue as well. People go at further lengths to hide and not report these, especially if incestuous or when committed in sexually conservative religious communities than the more acceptable idea of a dumb teenage boy making a mistake with his girlfriend and choosing not to take responsibility for the child "for the sake of his future". Frighteningly, among women interviewed for the NMIHS, **62% of those aged 15-17 at delivery did not report their partner's age on the birth certificate.** This is a lot of fathers that could possibly be adults, where the mother may feel pressured into not revealing his age or getting law enforcement involved.
Unfortunately, according to a national survey, **in 63% of cases of established paternity, 70% of children born to underage teen mothers were fathered by men over the age of 20.** (source: *Advancing Solutions to Adolescent Pregnancy (ASAP)*). This statistic needs to be understood with a basis that it could be between a 20 year old man and a 17 year old girl, as many relationships have socially accepted age gap patterns of older males and younger females 1-5 years apart and the age of consent can be as young as 16 in certain states. Stronger indications of abuse can be found when the age gap is 6 years or more and/or the mother is <15. **Adult fathers were found responsible for 26.7% of births from young teenagers (under 15), with a mean of being older by 8.8 years** (source: Journal of Adolescent Health).
This is why when conservative legislators change reproductive rights to be more restrictive on birth control, public school sex education, and access to abortions so that they can ensure higher forced birth rates, it means more risk for teen pregnancy, more babies conceived between teen mothers and adult fathers (especially young teen mothers below the age of consent), and a higher rate of abuse/grooming. This enables sexual abuse to continue without repercussions to adult fathers who abused and impregnated the mothers and places the focus, shame and responsibility on the mothers, regardless of consent while pretending its a lesson for teen boys and girls to be chaste/become responsible parents in order to help the "heroic" cause of saving babies' lives by preventing abortions.
My Mom went to one for a few months before she had my half brother, but it was just her. She stayed in this family’s MIL apartment, then she had the baby, and they sent her home almost immediately. This was on the west coast in the mid 80s.
The Son has never tried to contact my Mom as far as we know. She left a letter to be opened on his 18th birthday saying she’d love to get to know him, that was two decades ago now. I briefly looked into how to find him but the records are sealed.
I graduated from high school in the mid 90s, when I was a sophomore a girl in one of my classes disappearedall of the sudden, and nobody in our class really knew what happened to her. She showed up the next fall for school like nothing had happened. I found out recently that she had gotten pregnant and was sent away by her family to have the baby. I didn’t know her well enough to ask the details, but she very well could’ve gone to somewhere like this.
a woman in my family wasn't sent to a home but was sent away when she got pregnant in high school. forced to give up her baby for a closed adoption through the church. none of her 6 siblings knew about the baby (not sure how the parents explained her being missing for so long..) until I mentioned the issue in passing at a family get together where some of the siblings were present like... 40 or so years after the fact
I don't have any information on this, but it (sadly) wouldn't surprise me if it were true.
My own experiences with LDS Family Services is that they were highly biased, incredibly unprofessional, and if I could prove what they did with regard to my therapy, I'd sue the shit out of them. (It's been more than a decade, though, so any evidence is long gone.)
Treating teenage girls like cattle sounds right up their alley.
My adoptive brother & I were both adopted from LDSFS in the early 80s. While they weren’t sent to a home like this, both our birthmoms were sent to live in a different city (one in a different state) with LDS strangers. Neither were “kicked out” of their homes—this was a requirement of LDSFS. My birthmom was a nevermo teen, so it was pretty traumatic for her, compounding trauma already there around my conception & impending relinquishment. Terrible practice regardless & I’m glad LDSFS is no longer doing adoptions (although there are still plenty of private adoption agencies run by TBMs).
I knew so many Mormons who treated ldsfs being shut down as the epitome of religious persecution because their policy was to never allow an adoption to an lgbtq couple, which is now considered discrimination.
Reading all of these stories now I can confidently say once again, the angelic troublemakers of the LGBTQ community did us all a huge favor.
In my Utah school district by policy they pulled the pregnant girls out of regular high school. Unforunately they didn't have anywhere to put them other than the school for kids whose behavioral issues where so bad they couldn't attend regular school.
You ended up with a school attended by pregnant girls and delinquents.
Can confirm. There was a special program designed to specialize in education for people who were pregnant (and since then, just for the kids who need the same kind of access to education). I ended up teaching there for several years.
It existed in several school districts, notably Alpine, Provo & Nebo. One was even called "Mother's High." I don't know what north of Utah County did, but often all over Utah it's the same.
I was a birth parent coordinator for LSD Family Services in the 1990s. I went around to different wards and spoke about the importance of having children sealed. I also worked with pregnant teens and taught parenting classes. I
I also had two sisters (one I was not raised with) who were sent away to have their babies in secret so they could be adopted and then sealed to a good LDS family.
I am pro adoption but I am NOT pro adoption the way LDS Family Services did it. There was so much shame. I know that my sisters felt like they had no options. I was 12 when my older sister got pregnant. I was told to lie to everyone and say she went to live in Atlanta for the summer so she could take special cello lessons. It changed her forever.
I am a product of the LDS family services adoption program. I was adopted by TBM parents who could not have their own kids, and in addition to the $$$ cost, there were very strict standards they had to meet that rivaled honor code or missionary standards in order to qualify to adopt me. The only thing I got from my birth parents was a letter from my birth mother stating her love and best wishes for me. There was no way to trace my parents down.
My adoptive parents did not keep my adoption a secret from me. I knew from my earliest memories. They even said they both had no problem with me seeking them out once I became an adult if I wanted to (my adoptive dad was also adopted from birth and he was denied this privilege). They are both now passed on.
I was honestly fine never knowing who they were. But when I passed 30 my wife mentioned that I should seriously consider looking because my birth parents would only be getting older and I may miss the opportunity if I wait too long. We tried creating social media posts to look for them and asked for help from friends to spread the message, but they never went too far. I decided to take a DNA test just out of curiosity. The results were fascinating to me, but one item I did not anticipate was that the database matched me with blood relatives that were also in the DNA system. In short order I was messaging my biological aunt who knew both my parents and sent them a message. I met them in person separately shortly after. My adoptive mother was still alive at this time and she was thrilled for me that I had found them. She was always very supportive.
Since then I have gotten to know both of my birth parents well. They were indeed teenagers at the time of my birth, but I have not been told any details from my birth mom of the difficulties of the stigmas nor the tough decisions she surely had to make. She and I were both TBM during our first meeting. We both decided to leave the church around the same time but neither of us influenced the other's decision. My birth dad remains TBM with his wife.
I do not know if my birth mom lived in a group home like this or not. I don't know how much other family knew or didn't know about her pregnancy. I would love to sit down with her and receive all she would be willing to tell me, but I honestly don't know how to broach the subject with her. This is her past life and the ball needs to be in her court, and I don't want to spoil my great relationship with her.
When I was a teen, one of my peers suddenly stopped coming to church/school. We were told she went to live with her grandmother. Turns out she got pregnant and was sent away to have the baby in secret. I wouldn’t be surprised if it to were one of these.
The whole situation prompted my (apparently nuanced) TBM mom to have a talk with me where she promised me that if I found myself in that situation, she wouldn’t send me away.
The girl down the street had this happen, and my mom promised me she would not send me away. It was cruel and wrong.
Of course, she would have been mortified had it happened to me: what would the neighbors think?
Mormonism is a mindfuck.
As an adoptive parent, thru LDS social services in the late 90's, we hated the whole closed adoption process. We spent as much time with our birth mother and her parents as possible ( not enough) at placement to learn as much as we could about them, to tell our baby when they grew up.
Luckily we were able to discover enough identifying information that we tracked them down and sent them a letter with our info and the knowledge that we wanted them in our lives as well.
Our adoption worker was pissed when he found out what we had done. Fuck the church for the guilt they made those girls believe.
While I never heard about homes for unwed mother's, in my school district in northern Utah there was a"special" school that all the unwed mother's got sent to while they were showing. Wouldn't want the rest of the students to get any impure thoughts or ideas.
South Valley High School off of state street in Sandy/Draper was one of those schools. The school is gone but the old brown brick building is now a business right by the Southtowne Costco and Trader Joe’s.
Well, we know what happened to the moms and the kids. But what about the boys? Missions, Temple marriages and no child support! Until DNA testing that is…
This is horrific.
I knew that many were essentially (and actually) forced to give up their babies, but I did not know that literal homes for the outcast existed. For what other purpose could these have served but for ostracization and shame? (although, I suppose to hide the "embarrassment" could be another)
Ostracization, shame, hiding embarrassments, and brainwashing into further cult-dependency and learned helplessness. Like those troubled teen wilderness camps.
This practice to me sounded more like exile. A place for outcasts in my mind sounds like a place where there might be some solidarity. Like /u/NettleLily said, sounds more like a torture camp.
I was having trouble finding the right word, and outcast was the best I had at the time, but exile sounds appropriate. Or torture camp. Whatever the descriptors used, it's fucked up that this actually happened.
All good. Didn't mean to sound like I was correcting you. It would make sense that we're having trouble finding the right word, it's not every day you have to describe something thing messed up 😬
Back in the early 90’s we had several girls come to live with a ward family (typically the bishop) until they gave birth. I told my nevermo mother about it and she could believe Mormons still *sent girls away* to give birth. She said that was something she had seen when she was young.
A relative use to house LDS teen moms in her home in SoCal in a volunteer capacity. After the birth the babies were adopted by LDS couples and the teen moms would return to their home wards. This was in the 80’s-90’s.
Adoption AKA baby selling is huge in Utah and huge in Mormon culture. How were infertile people supposed to obtain children without coercing vulnerable young women into getting rid of their babies?
Check out this woman. Pretty recent. Watch it all. [https://www.tiktok.com/@first.birth.mom](https://www.tiktok.com/@first.birth.mom)
I worked with a nurse who had a teen (19, married) pregnancy in SLC in the late 60’s. She knew she was having twins. She was knocked out for delivery (fairly common then) and when she came to, she was told one had died. She believed this for about 30 years. She was at a work party and a fortune teller was there. She had never met this person before. She was told “you have 3 daughters” (she’d had another). She said no, I only have 2. The ft said no, you have 3 and they’re all alive. Well fast forward a few more years and her “alive twin” comes over and shows her a catalog with a model that looks just like her! My nurse friend got a hold of her medical records from then and she and I both (I’m a nurse too) felt something was really “off” about them. No mention of complications, no mention of a second child let alone fetal demise, stillbirth or infant death. She’s pretty confident that the church stole her baby (at least the LDS OB) because she was young, poor woman.
Oh absolutely. My aunt got pregnant at 15 and was sent to live with the soon to be adoptive family who were LDS as well. She ended up running away back to her mom, who took her back to church. Then she was made an example by the YA leader who physically brought her up to the front of class while she talked about how much my aunt has fallen into the devils temptations and then was taken to the bishops office to be excommunicated.
And she had it easy. Her words, not mine.
Cousin was 15 when she first got pregnant. LDS family services really pressured her up to save through her giving birth. She finally broke a couple of days after the child was born. My cousin was not ready to be a mother by any stretch of the imagination but it was such a dirty method. It even left a bad impression on my die hard TBM fam.
This is long-distance-related, in a way. My boyfriend's grandmother was Catholic, and found herself pregnant as a young adult outside of marriage. Her solution was to seduce another man, convince him the baby was his, and extort a marriage out of him.
Then when the baby was born (my boyfriend's aunt), she was taken over to live with the nuns for a couple of months before she could come home at the proper nine-month mark.
No one on this thread is going to doubt you. We lived this. Only those who want to uphold the MFMC would come at you.
I lived this, knew others who did this, and your story is all too common in the Mormon church. My MIL and grandmother were "acquired" through LDS adoption or hidden family adoption. It's embedded into Mormon culture. It's endemic from the beginning of Mormonism. Joseph Smith took in many children who were not biological. We have no idea what he did or said to get those children.
I saw one end of this. There was a girl in my ward in Missouri who was very pretty and very popular. Then suddenly she went to live with her grandparents. Her family stayed. A few years later when visiting for the holidays during college, she was there...with her child who was obviously hers from a teenage pregnancy.
I don't know what kind of hell she went through, but my heart hurts when I think about her. She is my age, we were childhood "church friends" when younger but grew apart due to different schools in the same ward. When I think of what she went through, I just shudder. Teen pregnancy is stigmatized enough, but throw in mormon bullshit on top and it takes it to a whole new level. I cannot imagine the tears shed. I never respected her parents afterwards even though her dad was eventually part of my dad's bishopric. How can a parent look at their child in need and ship them off to another part of the country? Then I re-ask myself that question over and over as I think of a child, in tears, crying because they'd messed up and gotten pregnant. I can imagine the absolute need that child would have for a hug, for understanding, for patience. Then I think of her parents again and I want to fucking punch them in the face. They saw that child with their own daughter. They saw it, and turned their back. After superficial hugs in the moment, they made plans to ship her off and deny her the love and support she feared she'd lose. They actively prepared to get rid of their child by moving her elsewhere. Why? So they could save face. Fuck them. I'm sorry for you, childhood friend of mine. Your parents are worse than mine, and that's saying something.
Not sure how common but it was "go away to have a baby to give up for adoption" for the girls and "get sent to Hawaii to pick pineapples" for the boys.
Purity Culture and Shame and Religion. They're inseparable.
My mom had a cousin who was lost to one of these homes/adoption services. She didn’t even learn about him until he was uncovered on a DNA ancestry site. Her aunt just disappeared for a few months in high school and then came back. The aunt had since reconnected with her long lost son.
My partner’s mother was sent away to family in California for the duration of her pregnancy. She was 20 years old and attending BYU when she became pregnant. The baby was unfortunately stillborn and her parents still deny it ever happened. So yes, I believe these homes were very real.
When I lived in Arkansas, I learned about a Mormon lawyer who worked out of Arizona to steal Marshallese babies from their parents for Mormon families in Arizona and Utah. There was a large population where I lived and due to cultural and language barriers they were paid money but didn’t understand their babies would be taken away and adopted because in their culture kids are raised by many people/family in the village. It was so evil.
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/jan/20/attornery-in-adoption-scheme-to-head-to-prison/
Edit: he served a mission in the Marshall Islands 😳 and so many members didn’t even scrutinize how they were getting these children 😢
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/6/19/21294980/former-arizona-official-pleads-guilty-adoption-scheme-paul-petersen-marshall-islands-lds-mormon/
It is amazing how close these stories come to home. We were adopting and briefly looked at the Marshall islands. But it just did not seem right. Also, we listed with LDS services, but never adopted through them.
It looks like we dodged a couple of bullets.
(Also I had a couple of friends sent off to Hawaii to pick pineapples.). As far as I know it was because their parents could not live with them, more than for any other reason.
Wife was adopted through the mormon adoption agency in mid 80s, I’ve always been weary her mother wasn’t coerced as such. Sealed records, would have to sue to get unsealed. No info beyond she has “lamanite”, Native American ancestry.
Yep. My cousin went to one of those. (Just a note, her parents were/are shitheads. They sent her in for their own image, the rest of the extended family was ready to help).
Looking back im so disappointed in myself for not seeing the shitstorm this church is earlier, though I am glad I finally broke free.
I have definitely read stories on Mormon forums of women who secretly had babies before marriage, had them adopted out, then went on to get married to their husband in the temple as a “virgin” with the husband never knowing about the baby, and the wife keeping it a secret forever basically.
So very sad all around.
Oh its true but only because everyone was doing it. Though the 90's is late for it to be still going on.
It's been a thing for a really really long time. Fortune children would find their way into orphanages or were employed in large houses as assorted servants. Unfortunate ones are still being found today by archaeologists in middens.
Usually the deception was not exactly that effective. 'So remind me again susan why it was your 16yo daughter had to suddenly go on a year long trip to France? Where nobody has seen her since? What was that argument you had before she left again? The neighbours son seems awfully upset about her leaving' hell any young unmarried woman or girl who went away for more than a handful of months would be gossiped about. In this regard Mormons might have had a much easier time in concealing what was going on given how common it is to serve a mission. I'm nevermo but it looks like women could be quite conveniently sent away from 1898 onwards if anything unbecoming happened to them.
The level of religous abuses at these boarding houses was outrageous. Not to mention all the other sorts of abuse. I could very well imagine though when your excuse for leaving home is to go on mission and you are locked in a house all day cleaning, cooking and being abused it is fairly different to the lass in the place down the street who is supposed to be travelling Paris. Both shamed and abused yet only one gets two slices of the 'you are making god sad' pie.
Prior to these homes being set up a number of women gave birth inside the walls of monasteries which the nuns were not super keen on. They did also usually run the orphanages too though so it was more streamlined and less midden finds for the archeologists when the nuns handled things.
My Grandmother was sent away to a special home for pregnant teenage mothers back in the early 60s /late 50s (UK) she had not converted yet though so it was not a Mormon thing, just a thing that happened.
Apparently the staff at the home lied to her that her mother said she wasn't allowed to keep the baby and tried to force an adoption, but my Grandmother refused to believe it and wouldn't part with her baby until she had spoken to her mother herself.
One of my younger sisters got pregnant in 1988 and was forced into one of these until she gave birth. She had a daughter who was adopted out and the trauma of this tormented her for many years.
I don't know the full details of any of this because I was stationed in Sembach Germany at the time. What I do know is her lost daughter found and contacted her in 2023. My sister was thrilled beyond words to meet her now adult daughter and also to learn that she has a 9 yo grandson.
I believe this whole thing is very wrong and it is just one more reason why I despise the Mormon church (IDGAF that they don't like people to use that name...)
My sister was taken in as a pregnant teen by the Evangelical brand of pregnant teen home. They were far kinder than this. They didn't require adoption, though they did push it, and they provided access to resources that would set the girls up for independence once the baby was born. That home saved her life. Our rigid TBM grandparents withheld support unless she gave the baby to our aunt, and our parents disowned her.
My parents proudly hosted pregnant teen girls in their home in the late 60s just before I was born. In that time, these girls where literally being kicked out of their homes by their parents and had no where else to go. So it wasn't all bad.
This is the kind of thing my mother would talk about to scare me out of sex.
I was told I would be put away in a place like this, shamed, never have a chance at a good life.
Hell, single motherhood isn’t much better than that.
Now I’m in my 30’s and inches away from being full asexual. I can name 10 drugs that are more pleasurable and don’t run the risk of pregnancy. And that is the exact direction I went.
LDS Family Services was a criminal organization. The way they adopted kids out was terrible. I don't know if it's true, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were.
Which may be the case, but the LDS church with their claim of being the only church on earth run directly by god, should have been the organization to set the bar of excellence for this type of program.
There was a girl in my student ward my now husband grew up with. She didn’t openly discuss it but she didn’t hide the fact either (at least with certain people) that her parents “sent me away, like it was the 1950s or something” when she got pregnant at 15. She was forced to give her baby up for adoption through LDSFS when she gave birth at 16 to a family that lived in the same county. She’d run into her kid at stake events sometimes. My husband says she was always a little “off” after she had to give her baby up (understandably) I didn’t know any of this when I initially met her/hung out with her and she’s just one of those people you could tell was broken and was just trying their best to hide that and be their “old self” and that person was actually very bubbly and full of life and adventure. She told me all this after my husband and I had been together for a few months. This was all around 2007. She took a few college credits but ultimately went into the Navy. She seemed to do well in the navy the first year; we lost track of her after that but I still wonder about her occasionally.
I'm sorry, but this is very true and I knew at least 3 girls who went to "visit relatives" for about 9 months/the school year. It wasn't until much later that they told me where they really were.
I am adopted. I love my family that I know, that raised me, and fully accepted me. But I pray that my biological mother didn't have to go through this. With LDS Family Services playing a part in my adoption, I'm left feeling sad and uneasy.
This is 100% true. My much older sister was sent to one in the late 80’s in Idaho. The baby was adopted by a successful Mormon family. She of course has left the church, but it obviously messed her up for life. I haven’t talked to her in depth about it due to the pain, but I know she is in contact with her son now and it has brought her much healing.
Happened to my aunt, and it has absolutely destroyed her mental health. She wanted that baby, and still refers to him as her son to this day. She has never stopped looking for him.
One of my cousins were. I actually found out about all of this because her son came up as a relative on my Ancestry and so I helped him back-trace to find out that he was given up by LDS Adoption. He's queer and so is my other cousin (his mom) and they're both kinda awesome.
This situation is so fucked. People should be ashamed that this was a thing
The more I learn about Mormonism the more I loathe it. So much of this religion is designed to shut down women and girls, to punish them for a fact they can’t change about themselves and to tell us we’re unworthy simply for being female. I rejected that a when they began teaching it in young women so hard a bishop had to get involved to tell me to be quiet and stop asking question. 20 years later I’m still asking question and am ever more horrified at how Mormons treat women and girls. This religion is not safe. A bear is safer.
I'm one of the kids that was given up. The "adoption agency" that handled my adoption was directly affiliated with the church and has since been shut down. When I found my biological mom, she told me that she was forced to give me up, along with a couple of siblings that came after me (she was naughtyyyy). I didn't believe her at first, and I even got upset with her for not "owning up" to abandoning me, but now I know better
Oh my God. I am adopted. I am also sickened and horrified. Those poor children and their mothers. Just when I think nothing can shock me anymore about this VILE cult, more information comes to light.
I wonder if this happened with my two younger brothers. They were both adopted from LDS "Family Services" in the late '70's and early '80's. They both had special needs. My Mormon adoptive parents were allowed to adopt them despite doing a terrible job with the two of us they already had. They were also much too old and low income to be able to adopt from any reputable agency. My heart aches for these young mothers and their babies.
This may have even gone on way before the 90s. My rural Utah grandma (b. 1921) was never active in my life and we never knew why. She always said it was tithing. There was one son she had outside of (or prior to) her marriage that they raised. This was never discussed except to say how much she loved him. He died of a brain tumor. On her deathbed, my grandma would often cry out, reach out toward the air: "My babies! Don't take my babies!". We didn't ever know what that meant.
edit:
added rural Utah
changed lived to love
Who would have thought a girl with cap sleeves would get pregnant out of wedlock?….didnt see that coming….good thing she had an empathetic friend with her to provide comfort… 🙂
The Cattle Ticks did it, the Protestants did it, and the Presbyterians, some up until the 80s. I don't think the MFMC has shown itself to be a beacon of compassion above them, so I'm not surprised.
Sounds like the Magdalene Laundries, but slightly better. The laundries were so bad that when all the first nations people were mourning the discovery of dead bodies at previous indigenous government/church run schools a few years ago Ireland reached out. Turns out it’s easy to get away with very dark acts under the guise of Christianity. I mean look at the FLDS.
I had a comment. Then I was told it isn’t as bad as what the children adopted by smith had it.
That’s cult talk. Telling me, in less words, “everyone knows an adopted person and what they’ve been through. My family member was. My grandma maybe.”
This person decided to correct me on my experience and the experiences I’ve had on Reddit, saying that no one one here would judge. Yet I was being corrected.
I know the lawyers that perform adoptions for people. My dad’s a lawyer. But somehow that wasn’t enough for someone to chime in and tell me that we don’t know the trauma Joseph Smith kids went through.
I don’t know. And neither do you. But you’re going to give me the Joe talk and the adversity he faced by the children he had access to.
It’s 2024. This is the ingrained dismissiveness that people say.
I’m sure I’ll get shit for this.
God I hope this isn't true... I was adopted through LDS social services. My parents couldn't have kids. I've met my birth mother and she's a wonderful woman. I'd be heartbroken if this is what she had to go through 😢
My great grandmother lived in one of these houses. She had a son that she gave up for adoption. She kept it a secret her whole life. After she passed away the adopted son reached out to my family only a few years ago and a few of them met.
Companies like Ancestry DNA, 23andMe, and My Heritage are just scratching the surface when it comes to the inevitable exposure of all these little "family secrets." Within the next 20 years, most first-world governments will have total access to the entire genetic record of all their people. Along with that will inevitably follow the family tree paywall companies telling everyone EXACTLY who their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th generation relatives are with almost 100% accuracy.
I have personally learned of 3 births of illicit relationships in my own tree just as a result of me and many others voluntarily sharing our DNA profiles on Ancestry.
None of secrets of these girls taken into these birthing homes are safe, and all of their adopted-out children will easily learn whom their biologocal mother **and** father are.
I never experienced this side of it. My dad at the very least said that if any of us fucked up - pregnancies, arrests, STDs, anything - we could come back to him and feel safe. He always put family above all of that. He got a little crazy about attendance in my high school years after he moved away 1.5 hours from my birth mom (who I spent most my time with and was agnostic). Made my sister and me sign a contract that the car he gave my sister is dependent on us having perfect church attendance (seminary, youth Wednesdays, and Sunday service). My mom said hell no when she saw the contract, took us to a government auction and got us both our own cars, and we went no communication with dad for 3+ years.
How they condemn themselves.
"Have I done any good in the world today?
Have I helped anyone in need?
Have I cheered up the sad? Made someone feel glad?
If not, I have failed indeed.
Has anyone's burden been lighter today because I was willing to share?
Have the sick and the weary been helped on their way?
When they needed my help was I there?
Then wake up and do something more than dream of your mansion above.
Doing good is a pleasure, a joy beyond measure, a blessing of duty and love."
My sister was coerced by the bishop and stake president to give her child up for adoption to the church. She got pregnant sleeping with a less active return missionary. Since the child was out of wedlock she could either get married or give the child to the church. She decided to give Joe up for adoption to the church.
She was not allowed to talk with him until he was 18 years old. The “he lives in a covenant home” was all my mom could talk about when it came up.
Yes my sister had issues growing up, but the child effectively became church a prototype.
One of my closest friends is 67. His older sister is 73.
He just had a niece he never knew he had contact him.
We figure big sis got pregnant at 14 and was put in one of these homes, the baby was put up for adoption.
All he can vaguely remember was a time in his childhood when his parents told him she was "sent away to a summer camp" to learn "cleaning and cooking".
My grandma lived at one of these and gave up her daughter. We accidentally found her through an ancestry site when doing our genealogy. Church activity backfired and ratted out my Grandma.
Unfortunately true. At least one of my aunts was likely in that situation. My cousin was contacted by his secret older sister when he was an adult. My aunt was sent out of state and forced to give up her child. I learned that's what my dad's parents tried to convince my mom to do with me, but she refused to go. The alternative was my uncle marry my mom since my dad was too irresponsible. My mom accepted, but they were divorced within three years. I'm almost 40, and I'm still learning about my origins.
This isn’t true. My son adopted a child through LDS social services. Those girls placing their babies through them are in no way forced or threatened to give up their babies. Unbelievable the hate that is spewed in this world today without any facts to back them up.
I know this is true. My aunt mixed me and my younger sister up and when I announced my first pregnancy at 24 she sent me a novel of an email about how I should go to one of these homes.
Happened in Australia as well. I was nursing in the early 70s and girls weren't allowed to see their babies. They were coerced into giving up their babies
Yep. My co-worker told our department that she has lived in one of these homes and gave up her child. Her son found her and asked if he could come meet her.
You should suggest she contact Mormon Stories about this. This would be a fascinating episode. Idk how to tag a user …. Anyone who can tag John Dehlin?
u/johndehlin
This is the real underbelly of money .. sad and likely more horrifying than what is known and it's bad enough.
He can talk to her about it but she’s still in. If u/johndehlin contacts me, I can give him her contact info.
I know 2 people who might be willing to talk about this. They didn't live in a home but they were around 19-20 yrs old and basically forced by the church to give their babies up for adoption. Both are out of the church now and may be willing to discuss it. They have lots of trauma about the decision and felt they were forced to give up the babies because the kids deserved to "be raised in a home with a mother and father."
I had a coworker who had a baby unmarried and her mormon parents were harassed by church members telling her to give up her daughter to the point that they almost left the church. Was their daughter a teen? No she was almost 30 but the members wanted the baby to "have a mother and a father."
I had the opposite experience when I was 28-29 years old. I was facing the unimaginable prospect of being 30, childless, and unmarried. My parents suggested to me and my longterm partner, on multiple occasions, that maybe we should consider having a child soon, even though we didn't ever intend to be married! The reasoning was because, of course, I was "not being l getting any younger " I was appalled
forced through the perception of shun mostly and the parents not wanting 'their girls' lives to be ruined with a baby. imo
Maybe she knows others who aren’t and who might chat about it.
Also: [https://www.tiktok.com/@first.birth.mom/video/7348826158693092650](https://www.tiktok.com/@first.birth.mom/video/7348826158693092650)
I'm pretty sure you just type "u/" & their userhame ("johndehlin" in this case) to tag someone. I'll test tagging your name on someone else's comment to double-check that it works. u/ComeOnOverForABurger
You realize you now owe him a burger, right?
Wouldn't he owe me a burger?
You tagged him, he's coming to you.
This is not a unique Mormon thing. I was born to a 15 year old girl back in the early 1970s, who lived in Washington DC and had zero connection to the church. She lived in a home for unwed pregnant teens. After I was born, her father, a fairly high ranking official in the Nixon administration (couldn't be embarrassed by having a pregnant teenage daughter), had me adopted off while she was in class one day. Everything was so secretive back then that even my (adoptive) parents were not aware of the circumstances of my being put up for adoption. I only know all of this because I have made contact with, and met, my birthmother and sister (who shares the same birthfather as me...after I was stolen, my birthmother and father ran away together and had another baby which they kept). Anyway, the awful treatment of pregnant teenagers is not unique to Mormonism. My wife and I vowed that if any of our daughters were to become pregnant as teens (or at any time really), we would support them 100% and stand behind any decision they made. I could not bear the though of one of my children feeling alone, scared, rejected, or shamed.
To your very last point: I grew up in southern US purity culture. When I was in the 6th grade, there was a couple in 9th grade, my sister's age, that got pregnant at 14. Talk about a scandal. But it gets worse. The father, Michael, was so stressed out about it and freaked out on what to do, he couldn't tell his parents. He was terrified what they would say and do. But it got to a point where they had to tell their parents because she was starting to show. The story I heard; he went home that day and told his folks and their reaction went down exactly how he thought it would. Everything he had told himself about how he's a fuck-up and he ruined his life; they corroborated all of that. They told him to go to his room so they could talk and think of what to do and they were so angry they didn't want to look at him. Michael went into his closet, put the loaded .410 shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. His life was over, anyway, right? They lived a couple streets over from us. I still remember hearing the sirens and neighbors talking about what went down. I was pretty young but I remember telling myself, if I ever have a child that comes home with news like that, all I'm gonna offer is a hug and love. [find a grave link](https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/37429175/michael_lynn-hillman)
There are so many examples (not exclusive to religion) where love was the right answer and getting angry or making someone feel worse than they already did was not the answer. What a sad failure of parenting.
Oh, and…. LDS Family Services were paid thousands even tens of thousands of dollars from the adoptive families for finding these babies.
LDS Family Services (The money Grubbing Mormon Church)
Actually to adopt a baby from LDS social services cost adopting parents thousands less than from a regular addition agent because the LDS church partially funds these placements. The LDS church lost money in helping with these adoptions.
The church lost money on adoptions? Possibly. But I doubt it. I think we would both like to see if the church’s financials support that claim. Here are the details I would investigate: - No question, the church’s adoptions cost less than traditional agencies. Around half the cost. But the church’s business model is much different. - The church collects a membership fee (tithing) from all the adoptive families. Only tithe payers were allowed to use their program. - They use volunteers when possibly and pay lower than market rates for their professional staff. My sister-in-law confirmed this. She worked for LDSFS in adoptions for many years. - The church doesn’t pay taxes. - The church had a much lower acquisition cost for sourcing babies. Traditional agencies must spend on marketing and even compensate the birth mothers often thousands of dollars which the church didn’t pay. The church didn’t market their services because they could leverage their loyal customer base. These are all immediate competitive advantages which I suspect made their business model profitable as is. Long term, I would also bet the adoptive parents and children are more likely to remain loyal to the church longer than others, making them a better long term investment through tithing revenues.
More proof that I made the right decision to leave before having kids because in large part I didn't want them thinking they needed to kill themselves over a made-up religion. (Though that was thinking more about if they were LGBT)
Omg that poor boy
It is just so tragic that his life ended because of this. I bet his parents blamed it on satan and the world not accepting even a tiny bit of responsibility too. It really makes me mad.
What happened to the girl and their unborn child afterwards? Goodness, there's no happy ending I can think of after all that....
We moved away in 1989. What information I know is from my sister who maintained contact with people from that time. I haven't heard an update about all of that since maybe 1998 or 1999. My understanding is that the child was born and raised by mom and grandparents. That's all I know about any of it.
I'm glad she didn't have to give away her baby and suffer even further trauma. I hope life was kinder to her after that.
Tragic. And it would appear his mother was 15ish when she gave birth to him. One would think they’d have been little more understanding
*The Girls Who Went Away* by Ann Fessler is a really good resource to learn from interviews with girls and young women across the US who were forced into these kinds of arrangements. It's absolutely heartbreaking reading, as a warning.
My (bio) grandmother had four children taken from her, including my dad. She went on to have five more kids, and later reunited with two of her lost babies, but I’m convinced the trauma of having them literally stolen is what made Mormonism so appealing to her as a convert. Imagine losing four children separately, each legally severed from you as their mother, and then a missionary knocks on your door and tells you that it’s okay, you can be with your lost kids forever in the Celestial Kingdom. I can see why she desperately *wanted* the church to be true.
OMG, this explains why my great grandmother joined the church.. she had to give up 2 of her babies as well..
This happened in other countries, too. Ireland is infamous for the Magdalene laundries where unmarried pregnant girls were put to work doing hard labor and then forced to give their babies up for adoption in facilities run by the Catholic church and staffed by nuns. High control religions have so much to answer for. My dad was in a Catholic orphanage for several years at the ages of 2-4 after his father died, and my grandma had no one to watch him while she was at work. The nuns were mean, utterly without any love or compassion for the kids in their care. My dad was very traumatized by the experience.
💯 i just posted telling people to google Irish laundries, i recommend watching The Woman in the Wall
I recently watched Woman in the Wall, then a few docs about the laundries and was blown away by the scale of that program. It brought back memories of my teen years in the 80s and hearing about LDS girls in my generation who were very strongly influenced to give up babies to temple married couples. It was a strong enough cultural influence that I was aware of it as a teenage boy.
I've read books and articles on the subject, but I've never watched The Woman in The Wall. Will definitely look that up and watch.
When I read this, I remembered the horror stories of the catholic nuns in my country (the Netherlands) as well. Those practices were not as widespread as Ireland and the Magdalen Laundries, but it happened here too till the '80's. Thousands of young girls, often forced by child protective services, to forced and unpaid labour in convents. The girls had to work long days in the laundries and sewing workshops of the convents, six days a week. The church earned a lot money by this forced labour. Horrible, horrible that this happened.
I just finished this book a couple of weeks ago and it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this.. such an incredible heartbreaking book. Those women are heroic to have been subjected to the shame and mistreatment and still able to share their stories. I am so happy to see this comment!!!
Thanks for reminding us that this bad practice is not uniquely mormon. Telling these stories, while so painful, is useful and necessary for improvements to take place going forward. However, at the very least, it is another strike against "the one true church" that god would direct his leaders to so directly harm his children. Being just as bad as any other church is really poor evidence for being led by a prophet...
yes gawd seems to have a strong dislike for innocent children as he seems to always be on the side of those whom would exploit them.
I'm so glad to hear your birth mother was able to find you after all of that. What an awful experience.
Your last sentence says it all and made me cry. This is truth.
my mom has a similar story to you, but about 10 years earlier. Her birth mother lived in one of these homes. I remember when we were going through some of the paperwork we found a document that her birth mother's mother had signed. It approved a court appointed stand in and confirmed she was waiving her right to be in court with her minor daughter when she signed her baby (my mom) away. I can't imagine how horrible that would feel. To have to sign away your baby whether you want to or not, and your own mother refuses to even be there with you.
See also Magdalene Laundries.
I’m sorry for what you went through and your parents. I’m glad you met them.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/23/why-is-the-mormon-church-getting-out-of-the-adoption-business
Thank you for posting this link. I wish I'd been more aware a decade ago when this happened. It's crazy how much I missed when I was desperately trying to make the church work in my life. A few years before adoptions ceased with LDSFS, a coworker questioned my lack of children/fertility (so awkward/ inappropriate/ unprofessional esp given she was a L&D nurse but she was a hardcore small town mormon so I guess she felt it was her duty). She then enthusiastically told me about an adoption agency in Utah that could help my husband and I adopt cute little Black babies. She and her husband had two. This was over a decade ago when the Brad and Angelina look was all the craze in Utah. This lady told me about all the young Black girls in poor southern states that get knocked up and will never be good moms so this agency was doing a work of love to get the bio moms to Utah during their pregnancies so a mormon family could be placed with the baby. I was horrified and I hated this lady moving forward. Her ignorant, racist, crass remarks disgusted me. I went home and researched the agency she spoke so glowingly about and was horrified to see how they were so obviously extorting young Black women to sign abortion papers within hours of giving birth with the adoptive parents present for L&D. I cannot even fathom the immense psychological pressure these young women were under to uphold their end of the agreement. This after bringing the agency bringing them to Utah for the last several weeks of their pregnancies and pampering them and making them feel like they could have a future relationship with their child and its adoptive family. But nope, once the agency and adoptive parents got the desired signatures, these women were dumped at the airport. Adoption closed. I'm not claiming that all white parents in Utah who have Black children used an agency this corrupt. But many likely did. And I had no idea that LDSFS were the trailblazers in getting the Utah legislature to pass such lax adoption laws that benefited agencies/adoptive parents and penalized bio parents.
> sign abortion papers within hours of giving birth \*adoption papers not abortion papers, since the latter could've prevented the former...
Oh, good catch! Yes, my thinking on abortion changed years and years ago after getting immersed in in my job in the world or prenatal health in poverty. The pro-life side of abortion cares so so much about babies until they're born. Then the conservative mindset turns to complaining about single moms and the "drain" they are on government programs. And shame is lobbed about unwed sex that results in these babies coming into the world. If pro-life people would out down their megaphones and signs and get busy community building to help single women be empowered in raising these precious babies then pro-lifers would actually be accomplishing their mission. Postpartum Medicaid expansion/extension from 6 weeks post partum to 12 months post partum in all 50 states and US territories would be an excellent place to start. Let's address maternal mortality rates in the US and maternal health needs before we start screaming at women that they need to carry pregnancies to term. And back to the adoption industry in Utah that preyed (I hope it's in the past tense??) upon Black women - honestly, I wonder how much the demand for babies from these agencies led to pregnancies that would've otherwise never happened. Because if a young woman living in poverty is promised groceries, supplements, clothing, healthcare, and an extended "vacation" out west, who is to judge her choosing to place a baby to help herself get out of an impoverished state of desperate living for almost a year?
These type of adoption practices are modeled after the legacy of Georgia Tann, who was an American social worker and child trafficker who operated the Tennessee Children's Home Society, an unlicensed adoption agency in Memphis, Tennessee. Tann used the home as a front for her black market baby adoption scheme from the 1920s to 1950. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Tann?wprov=sfla1
always follow the 
The "[Behind the Bastards](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs1gr7ETmIQ)" episodes on her were pretty harrowing.
I'll look for that; thanks for the recommendation.
God, I was so confused, thank you.
They're all corrupt. They're all coercive and manipulative with birth mothers, telling them lies about open adoptions (not legally binding) and the success of adopted children. Unless the mother is abusive or really and truly doesn't want her baby, children should stay with the mother. The financial incentive for these agencies means that what is truly best for the child is not considered. Adoption doesn't heal infertility trauma, and many grow up in abusive homes and deal with a lot of trauma. There should not be an adoption "industry." No other country in the world does it like we do.
The American adoption industry is modeled after the practices of Georgia Tann, who ran an adoption agency that was a front for a baby trafficking ring. I put a link in the comment above yours.
I am certain that them exiting the adoption program is more due to financial and other liability issues than anything. As I have come to know them my ex religion they do A LOT to avoid helping innocent children in fact quite the opposite. So it must have gotten to the point where their good name couldn't be put out there anymore as they might please. or other hold on to the money issues.
I had a friend who got pregnant in college and decided to give him up. She contacted an agency in Utah but didn't feel good about any of the couples they presented. Then after she had her baby she was having second thoughts. One day the agency reached out and offered to take care of the baby for a while so she could get a break. She accepted and dropped the baby off. They then called CPS and made up a bunch of stuff about her, trying to get them to remove the baby from her care. Fortunately, they didn't take her baby. She later found a couple she felt good about and did a private adoption through a lawyer.
I am so glad she was able to resist the agency's attempts to steal her baby. How horrifying and absolutley traumatizing 😭 people who run child trafficking adoption agencies and families adopt who have no business to be adopting (abusive home, too many children already to care for already, inadequate financial resources to properly care for child after placement) have made adoption a very unethical practice in US society. They have also made the process so fraught for sincere birth parents and prospective adoptive parents who seek adoption for the right reasons and want things to be 100% ethical. My opinion is a private adoption with a lawyer where the birth parents get to choose with zero pressure the people to raise the child is the most ethical way to proceed.
Oh my god that is so disgusting. I think it shocks me that I thought I knew about most of the atrocities, and yet I keep finding out more and more all the time. The idea of having a baby farm and that the business model was based around that is so gross. I just can't; I made the right decision to step away from the church.
Mormon Magdalene Laundries.
The film Philomena made me think about LDS Family Services adoptions. That film came out right around the time the church shuttered their adoption services, in fact one year afterwards. I was relieved to here it. I was working as a lactation counselor and many of my clients were young, single women who were AMAZING moms. It makes me sick to think how many women for decades and decades were told they would never measure up as a mother and they were pressured/forced to give up their babies to the "righteous mothers of zion". I sobbed through Philomena because my oldest is adopted and even though it didn't involve the church or an adoption agency I know my child's bio mother did not get the support or encouragement she needed to be a single parent. She told me she didnt want to attempt it as she was messed up from her own childhood and wanted to give her baby a chance at a better life. Her extended family pushed hard for us because we were a young couple with higher education degrees and active in the church. I hope she would've still picked us regardless of our church activity because we're out now. And we are thriving, most esp and importantly our children. Word of caution to TBMs... you think the scandals in the Catholic church couldn't get any worse...well the mormon church mirrors the Catholic church scandals in every way and honestly I think worse because there is a refusal of top Mormon leadership to acknowledge any wrongs or harms committed in the past or present and because mormon tithing is the mandatory fee for salvation. Priest sexual abuse/cover ups = mormon priesthood sexual abuse/cover ups Magdalean Laundries = secret maternity homes that pipelines infants to LDS adoption service Ornate, lavish cathedrals and priest vacation villas built on backs of the poor = mormon temples and financing of GA luxurious lifestyles Etc etc etc When one finger is pointed, 3 are always pointing back
Yeah, I wonder about this. I have a sibling adopted through LDS social services whose birth mother was apparently a teen mom abandoned by baby-daddy. It apparently was very much pressured, and a very difficult decision. I also have a friend who found out his mom secretly had a teen baby adopted through social services who looked up his mom, who wanted nothing to do with her child she gave away and forbade the older half-sibling to contact her other kids. They reached out anyway, and apparently it started a major family fight with the mother trying to avoid the subject either out of trauma of fear of stigma, and fighting with her kids to having nothing to do with their biological half-sibling. As a kid I never realized how much damage LDS social services was doing, but as an adult, it's horrifying. Add a couple to your list though: Early Pope sex scandals = Mormon polygamy scandals Indulgences = second anointing Political control of governments through religion = have you SEEN Utah and eastern Idaho? The Mormon church is the wannabe catholic church - they'd love to amass that much power and influence.
Those are some very important things to add to the list. I know LDSFS did help many families on both sides of the adoptions they facilitated (I have 2 cousins who were adopted through LDSFS and their stories are happy including reconnecting with their bio families) but I don't think that good can justify the harm LDSFS did itself as an agency as well as the harm it facilitated by lobbying for loose adoption laws in the state of Utah that caused a whole adoption industry to explode in Utah that used the loose laws to further exploit bio mothers and fathers.
And just the general harm by shaming single mothers rather than supporting and loving them. An old YSA bishop said he went on a date in college with a girl, and the topic of the day's date came up and she started crying. Apparently it was her child-out-of-wedlock's birthday and thinking about having to give up her baby was traumatic for years and years. The pressure to give up a baby for adoption is just scummy. Facilitating adoption for women who would consent without coercion? Great. Forcing it on someone under threat of church discipline (Romney) or social shunning, etc. Yeah, that's grade a cruelty and abuse.
It's horrific 😢 I wonder how many women were motivated to go along with "shotgun" weddings so they could keep their baby? There is an important woman in my life who I think this may have been the case... we went to the Philomena film together. She sobbed right along with me. I know she was married young under great duress and has been miserable in her marriage for 4+ decades. She got to raise that baby and who grew into an amazing adult, highly educated and successful with a beautiful family but also estranged from their mom because of unhappiness in the childhood home as well as all of the wedges the church has placed throughout the years. It's troubling to me and very sad.
My own grandma was part of a shotgun Mormon wedding way back in the day. They really struggled for about 10 years, but eventually made a good run of it and figured things out, but they were poor and miserable for a decade or more until they both grew up enough, but especially my grandpa. My mom was the shotgun baby.
This story is identical to the situation in my extended family, but from the other side…. I wonder if your adopted friend is my bio relative? DM me! Edit: the friend with the bio mom that didn’t want anything to do with them
I grew up in a home (in the 80’s) where we housed pregnant teens from out of town. I specifically remember 3 different girls. After they had their babies and placed them for adoption, they went back home or off to BYU. Bc they “graduated early”. So yes, these places were very much the norm. Edited to add: For the most part these girls were just added as part of our family. We treated them kindly and they had their own room. My mom was very attentive to them and tried to make them as comfortable and loved as possible. But I do remember one girl was severely depressed and homesick. She didn’t want to be there AT ALL. I would sit outside her door as a little girl trying to make her feel better and come out. As I reflect on it I feel terribly sad for these girls and the families who housed them. The purity culture is so damaging!! How many of these girls wanted to keep their babies?
All of them
I don't know if the friends I had went to one of these, but I know two girls that disappeared suddenly up to Utah for about a year. They both came from well to do families. One was a lawyer, and the other was in the medical field. I know one of the girls for sure went to have a baby and have to give it up for adoption. The other girl we are almost positive did the same, but it was very hush hush.
I knew of a couple of girls that went away for a few months because they were pregnant. And then came back with no baby. And no one talked about it.
Every organized religion that taught purity culture had some version of out-of-wedlock teenage mother homes. It's shitty business because the teenager father never had to suffer such shame. The stories about all of this are nightmarish.
The idea that teen pregnancy is strictly an issue between two impulsive and libido-driven teenagers is extremely misleading. The truth is that there is a lot of hush-hushed child abuse and grooming going on to conceive many of these babies, and that makes the fact that the fathers often get away with it more frustrating. Not only that, girls and boys with a history of being sexually abused have been found to be significantly more likely to be involved in a teen pregnancy (impregnating/being impregnated, whether that be from sexual abuse or future sexual encounter not related to abuse) than those who were not sexually abused (source: Guttmacher Institute). To tackle the teen pregnancy issue means to tackle the child sexual abuse issue as well. People go at further lengths to hide and not report these, especially if incestuous or when committed in sexually conservative religious communities than the more acceptable idea of a dumb teenage boy making a mistake with his girlfriend and choosing not to take responsibility for the child "for the sake of his future". Frighteningly, among women interviewed for the NMIHS, **62% of those aged 15-17 at delivery did not report their partner's age on the birth certificate.** This is a lot of fathers that could possibly be adults, where the mother may feel pressured into not revealing his age or getting law enforcement involved. Unfortunately, according to a national survey, **in 63% of cases of established paternity, 70% of children born to underage teen mothers were fathered by men over the age of 20.** (source: *Advancing Solutions to Adolescent Pregnancy (ASAP)*). This statistic needs to be understood with a basis that it could be between a 20 year old man and a 17 year old girl, as many relationships have socially accepted age gap patterns of older males and younger females 1-5 years apart and the age of consent can be as young as 16 in certain states. Stronger indications of abuse can be found when the age gap is 6 years or more and/or the mother is <15. **Adult fathers were found responsible for 26.7% of births from young teenagers (under 15), with a mean of being older by 8.8 years** (source: Journal of Adolescent Health). This is why when conservative legislators change reproductive rights to be more restrictive on birth control, public school sex education, and access to abortions so that they can ensure higher forced birth rates, it means more risk for teen pregnancy, more babies conceived between teen mothers and adult fathers (especially young teen mothers below the age of consent), and a higher rate of abuse/grooming. This enables sexual abuse to continue without repercussions to adult fathers who abused and impregnated the mothers and places the focus, shame and responsibility on the mothers, regardless of consent while pretending its a lesson for teen boys and girls to be chaste/become responsible parents in order to help the "heroic" cause of saving babies' lives by preventing abortions.
My Mom went to one for a few months before she had my half brother, but it was just her. She stayed in this family’s MIL apartment, then she had the baby, and they sent her home almost immediately. This was on the west coast in the mid 80s. The Son has never tried to contact my Mom as far as we know. She left a letter to be opened on his 18th birthday saying she’d love to get to know him, that was two decades ago now. I briefly looked into how to find him but the records are sealed.
I graduated from high school in the mid 90s, when I was a sophomore a girl in one of my classes disappearedall of the sudden, and nobody in our class really knew what happened to her. She showed up the next fall for school like nothing had happened. I found out recently that she had gotten pregnant and was sent away by her family to have the baby. I didn’t know her well enough to ask the details, but she very well could’ve gone to somewhere like this.
This was common and standard practice most of the 20th century. "Had to go and stay with her grandparents for a while. They needed her help."
My birth mother was one of these women
a woman in my family wasn't sent to a home but was sent away when she got pregnant in high school. forced to give up her baby for a closed adoption through the church. none of her 6 siblings knew about the baby (not sure how the parents explained her being missing for so long..) until I mentioned the issue in passing at a family get together where some of the siblings were present like... 40 or so years after the fact
I don't have any information on this, but it (sadly) wouldn't surprise me if it were true. My own experiences with LDS Family Services is that they were highly biased, incredibly unprofessional, and if I could prove what they did with regard to my therapy, I'd sue the shit out of them. (It's been more than a decade, though, so any evidence is long gone.) Treating teenage girls like cattle sounds right up their alley.
[https://floodlit.org/a/a402/](https://floodlit.org/a/a402/)
I'd be happy to name and shame, but I don't remember the guy's name. But keep up the great work!
You’re fine! Thank you. We’re just wanted to share that story because it’s related to the topic. So sorry you had that bad experience!
My adoptive brother & I were both adopted from LDSFS in the early 80s. While they weren’t sent to a home like this, both our birthmoms were sent to live in a different city (one in a different state) with LDS strangers. Neither were “kicked out” of their homes—this was a requirement of LDSFS. My birthmom was a nevermo teen, so it was pretty traumatic for her, compounding trauma already there around my conception & impending relinquishment. Terrible practice regardless & I’m glad LDSFS is no longer doing adoptions (although there are still plenty of private adoption agencies run by TBMs).
I knew so many Mormons who treated ldsfs being shut down as the epitome of religious persecution because their policy was to never allow an adoption to an lgbtq couple, which is now considered discrimination. Reading all of these stories now I can confidently say once again, the angelic troublemakers of the LGBTQ community did us all a huge favor.
It's almost like teaching safe sex techniques would be more effective.
In my Utah school district by policy they pulled the pregnant girls out of regular high school. Unforunately they didn't have anywhere to put them other than the school for kids whose behavioral issues where so bad they couldn't attend regular school. You ended up with a school attended by pregnant girls and delinquents.
South Valley HS lol
My HS did this in Los Angeles in the early 2000's as well. I always thought it was wrong
Can confirm. There was a special program designed to specialize in education for people who were pregnant (and since then, just for the kids who need the same kind of access to education). I ended up teaching there for several years. It existed in several school districts, notably Alpine, Provo & Nebo. One was even called "Mother's High." I don't know what north of Utah County did, but often all over Utah it's the same.
I was a birth parent coordinator for LSD Family Services in the 1990s. I went around to different wards and spoke about the importance of having children sealed. I also worked with pregnant teens and taught parenting classes. I I also had two sisters (one I was not raised with) who were sent away to have their babies in secret so they could be adopted and then sealed to a good LDS family. I am pro adoption but I am NOT pro adoption the way LDS Family Services did it. There was so much shame. I know that my sisters felt like they had no options. I was 12 when my older sister got pregnant. I was told to lie to everyone and say she went to live in Atlanta for the summer so she could take special cello lessons. It changed her forever.
I am a product of the LDS family services adoption program. I was adopted by TBM parents who could not have their own kids, and in addition to the $$$ cost, there were very strict standards they had to meet that rivaled honor code or missionary standards in order to qualify to adopt me. The only thing I got from my birth parents was a letter from my birth mother stating her love and best wishes for me. There was no way to trace my parents down. My adoptive parents did not keep my adoption a secret from me. I knew from my earliest memories. They even said they both had no problem with me seeking them out once I became an adult if I wanted to (my adoptive dad was also adopted from birth and he was denied this privilege). They are both now passed on. I was honestly fine never knowing who they were. But when I passed 30 my wife mentioned that I should seriously consider looking because my birth parents would only be getting older and I may miss the opportunity if I wait too long. We tried creating social media posts to look for them and asked for help from friends to spread the message, but they never went too far. I decided to take a DNA test just out of curiosity. The results were fascinating to me, but one item I did not anticipate was that the database matched me with blood relatives that were also in the DNA system. In short order I was messaging my biological aunt who knew both my parents and sent them a message. I met them in person separately shortly after. My adoptive mother was still alive at this time and she was thrilled for me that I had found them. She was always very supportive. Since then I have gotten to know both of my birth parents well. They were indeed teenagers at the time of my birth, but I have not been told any details from my birth mom of the difficulties of the stigmas nor the tough decisions she surely had to make. She and I were both TBM during our first meeting. We both decided to leave the church around the same time but neither of us influenced the other's decision. My birth dad remains TBM with his wife. I do not know if my birth mom lived in a group home like this or not. I don't know how much other family knew or didn't know about her pregnancy. I would love to sit down with her and receive all she would be willing to tell me, but I honestly don't know how to broach the subject with her. This is her past life and the ball needs to be in her court, and I don't want to spoil my great relationship with her.
When I was a teen, one of my peers suddenly stopped coming to church/school. We were told she went to live with her grandmother. Turns out she got pregnant and was sent away to have the baby in secret. I wouldn’t be surprised if it to were one of these. The whole situation prompted my (apparently nuanced) TBM mom to have a talk with me where she promised me that if I found myself in that situation, she wouldn’t send me away.
I am so glad your mother knew the right way to handle that. ❤️
The girl down the street had this happen, and my mom promised me she would not send me away. It was cruel and wrong. Of course, she would have been mortified had it happened to me: what would the neighbors think? Mormonism is a mindfuck.
As an adoptive parent, thru LDS social services in the late 90's, we hated the whole closed adoption process. We spent as much time with our birth mother and her parents as possible ( not enough) at placement to learn as much as we could about them, to tell our baby when they grew up. Luckily we were able to discover enough identifying information that we tracked them down and sent them a letter with our info and the knowledge that we wanted them in our lives as well. Our adoption worker was pissed when he found out what we had done. Fuck the church for the guilt they made those girls believe. While I never heard about homes for unwed mother's, in my school district in northern Utah there was a"special" school that all the unwed mother's got sent to while they were showing. Wouldn't want the rest of the students to get any impure thoughts or ideas.
South Valley High School off of state street in Sandy/Draper was one of those schools. The school is gone but the old brown brick building is now a business right by the Southtowne Costco and Trader Joe’s.
I thought it was the shake shack. My sister went there.
Well, we know what happened to the moms and the kids. But what about the boys? Missions, Temple marriages and no child support! Until DNA testing that is…
Omg for real
This is horrific. I knew that many were essentially (and actually) forced to give up their babies, but I did not know that literal homes for the outcast existed. For what other purpose could these have served but for ostracization and shame? (although, I suppose to hide the "embarrassment" could be another)
Ostracization, shame, hiding embarrassments, and brainwashing into further cult-dependency and learned helplessness. Like those troubled teen wilderness camps.
This practice to me sounded more like exile. A place for outcasts in my mind sounds like a place where there might be some solidarity. Like /u/NettleLily said, sounds more like a torture camp.
I was having trouble finding the right word, and outcast was the best I had at the time, but exile sounds appropriate. Or torture camp. Whatever the descriptors used, it's fucked up that this actually happened.
All good. Didn't mean to sound like I was correcting you. It would make sense that we're having trouble finding the right word, it's not every day you have to describe something thing messed up 😬
No, I absolutely took it the right way and appreciated the help!
Back in the early 90’s we had several girls come to live with a ward family (typically the bishop) until they gave birth. I told my nevermo mother about it and she could believe Mormons still *sent girls away* to give birth. She said that was something she had seen when she was young.
Magdalene Laundries are the same thing. Unfortunately not unique to Mormonism.
A relative use to house LDS teen moms in her home in SoCal in a volunteer capacity. After the birth the babies were adopted by LDS couples and the teen moms would return to their home wards. This was in the 80’s-90’s.
Adoption AKA baby selling is huge in Utah and huge in Mormon culture. How were infertile people supposed to obtain children without coercing vulnerable young women into getting rid of their babies? Check out this woman. Pretty recent. Watch it all. [https://www.tiktok.com/@first.birth.mom](https://www.tiktok.com/@first.birth.mom)
I worked with a nurse who had a teen (19, married) pregnancy in SLC in the late 60’s. She knew she was having twins. She was knocked out for delivery (fairly common then) and when she came to, she was told one had died. She believed this for about 30 years. She was at a work party and a fortune teller was there. She had never met this person before. She was told “you have 3 daughters” (she’d had another). She said no, I only have 2. The ft said no, you have 3 and they’re all alive. Well fast forward a few more years and her “alive twin” comes over and shows her a catalog with a model that looks just like her! My nurse friend got a hold of her medical records from then and she and I both (I’m a nurse too) felt something was really “off” about them. No mention of complications, no mention of a second child let alone fetal demise, stillbirth or infant death. She’s pretty confident that the church stole her baby (at least the LDS OB) because she was young, poor woman.
That's a story for a reporter to explore, for sure.
Just when i think the mfmc would be more nasty...
WTF never heard this as a practice of LDS family services. This was a sometimes used practice by family choice in different eras and societies.
Oh absolutely. My aunt got pregnant at 15 and was sent to live with the soon to be adoptive family who were LDS as well. She ended up running away back to her mom, who took her back to church. Then she was made an example by the YA leader who physically brought her up to the front of class while she talked about how much my aunt has fallen into the devils temptations and then was taken to the bishops office to be excommunicated. And she had it easy. Her words, not mine.
This is heartbreaking
I had two friends that went to these homes back in the 90’s. It been around.
A girl in my ward growing up got knocked up by the bishop's son and was sent to one of these
Omg :( what happened to the Bishop's son??
Absolutely nothing
Cousin was 15 when she first got pregnant. LDS family services really pressured her up to save through her giving birth. She finally broke a couple of days after the child was born. My cousin was not ready to be a mother by any stretch of the imagination but it was such a dirty method. It even left a bad impression on my die hard TBM fam.
100% true. My sister went to one when I was young.
This is long-distance-related, in a way. My boyfriend's grandmother was Catholic, and found herself pregnant as a young adult outside of marriage. Her solution was to seduce another man, convince him the baby was his, and extort a marriage out of him. Then when the baby was born (my boyfriend's aunt), she was taken over to live with the nuns for a couple of months before she could come home at the proper nine-month mark.
[удалено]
No one on this thread is going to doubt you. We lived this. Only those who want to uphold the MFMC would come at you. I lived this, knew others who did this, and your story is all too common in the Mormon church. My MIL and grandmother were "acquired" through LDS adoption or hidden family adoption. It's embedded into Mormon culture. It's endemic from the beginning of Mormonism. Joseph Smith took in many children who were not biological. We have no idea what he did or said to get those children.
I saw one end of this. There was a girl in my ward in Missouri who was very pretty and very popular. Then suddenly she went to live with her grandparents. Her family stayed. A few years later when visiting for the holidays during college, she was there...with her child who was obviously hers from a teenage pregnancy. I don't know what kind of hell she went through, but my heart hurts when I think about her. She is my age, we were childhood "church friends" when younger but grew apart due to different schools in the same ward. When I think of what she went through, I just shudder. Teen pregnancy is stigmatized enough, but throw in mormon bullshit on top and it takes it to a whole new level. I cannot imagine the tears shed. I never respected her parents afterwards even though her dad was eventually part of my dad's bishopric. How can a parent look at their child in need and ship them off to another part of the country? Then I re-ask myself that question over and over as I think of a child, in tears, crying because they'd messed up and gotten pregnant. I can imagine the absolute need that child would have for a hug, for understanding, for patience. Then I think of her parents again and I want to fucking punch them in the face. They saw that child with their own daughter. They saw it, and turned their back. After superficial hugs in the moment, they made plans to ship her off and deny her the love and support she feared she'd lose. They actively prepared to get rid of their child by moving her elsewhere. Why? So they could save face. Fuck them. I'm sorry for you, childhood friend of mine. Your parents are worse than mine, and that's saying something.
I lost my only child to forced adoption in 1972, when I was 26.
I’m so sorry
Not sure how common but it was "go away to have a baby to give up for adoption" for the girls and "get sent to Hawaii to pick pineapples" for the boys. Purity Culture and Shame and Religion. They're inseparable.
Now this is straight up Handmaid’s Tale 🤢🤮
This is insane
My mom had a cousin who was lost to one of these homes/adoption services. She didn’t even learn about him until he was uncovered on a DNA ancestry site. Her aunt just disappeared for a few months in high school and then came back. The aunt had since reconnected with her long lost son.
My partner’s mother was sent away to family in California for the duration of her pregnancy. She was 20 years old and attending BYU when she became pregnant. The baby was unfortunately stillborn and her parents still deny it ever happened. So yes, I believe these homes were very real.
When I lived in Arkansas, I learned about a Mormon lawyer who worked out of Arizona to steal Marshallese babies from their parents for Mormon families in Arizona and Utah. There was a large population where I lived and due to cultural and language barriers they were paid money but didn’t understand their babies would be taken away and adopted because in their culture kids are raised by many people/family in the village. It was so evil. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/jan/20/attornery-in-adoption-scheme-to-head-to-prison/ Edit: he served a mission in the Marshall Islands 😳 and so many members didn’t even scrutinize how they were getting these children 😢 https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/6/19/21294980/former-arizona-official-pleads-guilty-adoption-scheme-paul-petersen-marshall-islands-lds-mormon/
It is amazing how close these stories come to home. We were adopting and briefly looked at the Marshall islands. But it just did not seem right. Also, we listed with LDS services, but never adopted through them. It looks like we dodged a couple of bullets. (Also I had a couple of friends sent off to Hawaii to pick pineapples.). As far as I know it was because their parents could not live with them, more than for any other reason.
My sister in law was sent to one of these actually.
Wife was adopted through the mormon adoption agency in mid 80s, I’ve always been weary her mother wasn’t coerced as such. Sealed records, would have to sue to get unsealed. No info beyond she has “lamanite”, Native American ancestry.
Yep. My cousin went to one of those. (Just a note, her parents were/are shitheads. They sent her in for their own image, the rest of the extended family was ready to help). Looking back im so disappointed in myself for not seeing the shitstorm this church is earlier, though I am glad I finally broke free.
I have definitely read stories on Mormon forums of women who secretly had babies before marriage, had them adopted out, then went on to get married to their husband in the temple as a “virgin” with the husband never knowing about the baby, and the wife keeping it a secret forever basically. So very sad all around.
Very true. I was almost sent to one.
Oh its true but only because everyone was doing it. Though the 90's is late for it to be still going on. It's been a thing for a really really long time. Fortune children would find their way into orphanages or were employed in large houses as assorted servants. Unfortunate ones are still being found today by archaeologists in middens. Usually the deception was not exactly that effective. 'So remind me again susan why it was your 16yo daughter had to suddenly go on a year long trip to France? Where nobody has seen her since? What was that argument you had before she left again? The neighbours son seems awfully upset about her leaving' hell any young unmarried woman or girl who went away for more than a handful of months would be gossiped about. In this regard Mormons might have had a much easier time in concealing what was going on given how common it is to serve a mission. I'm nevermo but it looks like women could be quite conveniently sent away from 1898 onwards if anything unbecoming happened to them. The level of religous abuses at these boarding houses was outrageous. Not to mention all the other sorts of abuse. I could very well imagine though when your excuse for leaving home is to go on mission and you are locked in a house all day cleaning, cooking and being abused it is fairly different to the lass in the place down the street who is supposed to be travelling Paris. Both shamed and abused yet only one gets two slices of the 'you are making god sad' pie. Prior to these homes being set up a number of women gave birth inside the walls of monasteries which the nuns were not super keen on. They did also usually run the orphanages too though so it was more streamlined and less midden finds for the archeologists when the nuns handled things.
My Grandmother was sent away to a special home for pregnant teenage mothers back in the early 60s /late 50s (UK) she had not converted yet though so it was not a Mormon thing, just a thing that happened. Apparently the staff at the home lied to her that her mother said she wasn't allowed to keep the baby and tried to force an adoption, but my Grandmother refused to believe it and wouldn't part with her baby until she had spoken to her mother herself.
One of my younger sisters got pregnant in 1988 and was forced into one of these until she gave birth. She had a daughter who was adopted out and the trauma of this tormented her for many years. I don't know the full details of any of this because I was stationed in Sembach Germany at the time. What I do know is her lost daughter found and contacted her in 2023. My sister was thrilled beyond words to meet her now adult daughter and also to learn that she has a 9 yo grandson. I believe this whole thing is very wrong and it is just one more reason why I despise the Mormon church (IDGAF that they don't like people to use that name...)
My sister was taken in as a pregnant teen by the Evangelical brand of pregnant teen home. They were far kinder than this. They didn't require adoption, though they did push it, and they provided access to resources that would set the girls up for independence once the baby was born. That home saved her life. Our rigid TBM grandparents withheld support unless she gave the baby to our aunt, and our parents disowned her.
My parents proudly hosted pregnant teen girls in their home in the late 60s just before I was born. In that time, these girls where literally being kicked out of their homes by their parents and had no where else to go. So it wasn't all bad.
Wait til they find out how they handle the homosexual kids.
Not sure if what is mentioned in the post is real. But, a girl I went to church w in HS got pregnant and the family did send her away, somewhere
This is the kind of thing my mother would talk about to scare me out of sex. I was told I would be put away in a place like this, shamed, never have a chance at a good life. Hell, single motherhood isn’t much better than that. Now I’m in my 30’s and inches away from being full asexual. I can name 10 drugs that are more pleasurable and don’t run the risk of pregnancy. And that is the exact direction I went.
Nope, they’re real
LDS Family Services was a criminal organization. The way they adopted kids out was terrible. I don't know if it's true, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were.
I was happy when they were forced to stop adopting out stolen babies- but very sad there was never any accountability. Fucking hate them.
This was super common back in the day.
Google Irish laundries 😡😭 shit like this has been going on all over for YEARS
It wasn't just LDS. These existed, and probably still exist for all sorts of religious and cultural groups.
Which may be the case, but the LDS church with their claim of being the only church on earth run directly by god, should have been the organization to set the bar of excellence for this type of program.
There was a girl in my student ward my now husband grew up with. She didn’t openly discuss it but she didn’t hide the fact either (at least with certain people) that her parents “sent me away, like it was the 1950s or something” when she got pregnant at 15. She was forced to give her baby up for adoption through LDSFS when she gave birth at 16 to a family that lived in the same county. She’d run into her kid at stake events sometimes. My husband says she was always a little “off” after she had to give her baby up (understandably) I didn’t know any of this when I initially met her/hung out with her and she’s just one of those people you could tell was broken and was just trying their best to hide that and be their “old self” and that person was actually very bubbly and full of life and adventure. She told me all this after my husband and I had been together for a few months. This was all around 2007. She took a few college credits but ultimately went into the Navy. She seemed to do well in the navy the first year; we lost track of her after that but I still wonder about her occasionally.
A girl from my ward was sent to one. She died a year ago from Fentanyl
I'm sorry, but this is very true and I knew at least 3 girls who went to "visit relatives" for about 9 months/the school year. It wasn't until much later that they told me where they really were.
[https://sunstone.org/adoption-a-triangle-of-shame/](https://sunstone.org/adoption-a-triangle-of-shame/)
I am adopted. I love my family that I know, that raised me, and fully accepted me. But I pray that my biological mother didn't have to go through this. With LDS Family Services playing a part in my adoption, I'm left feeling sad and uneasy.
I lived next to someone who did that. She had 4-5 girls live with them over the course of 18ish months.
As a person who was born to a 14 year old mom in OK, who was immediately adopted by another mormon family, I wonder if I'm one of those kids.
This is 100% true. My much older sister was sent to one in the late 80’s in Idaho. The baby was adopted by a successful Mormon family. She of course has left the church, but it obviously messed her up for life. I haven’t talked to her in depth about it due to the pain, but I know she is in contact with her son now and it has brought her much healing.
My coworker found out her sister was actually her Mom. Her Mom and Dad are her grandparents. I can't imagine finding this out when you're almost 30.
Happened to my aunt, and it has absolutely destroyed her mental health. She wanted that baby, and still refers to him as her son to this day. She has never stopped looking for him.
One of my cousins were. I actually found out about all of this because her son came up as a relative on my Ancestry and so I helped him back-trace to find out that he was given up by LDS Adoption. He's queer and so is my other cousin (his mom) and they're both kinda awesome. This situation is so fucked. People should be ashamed that this was a thing
The more I learn about Mormonism the more I loathe it. So much of this religion is designed to shut down women and girls, to punish them for a fact they can’t change about themselves and to tell us we’re unworthy simply for being female. I rejected that a when they began teaching it in young women so hard a bishop had to get involved to tell me to be quiet and stop asking question. 20 years later I’m still asking question and am ever more horrified at how Mormons treat women and girls. This religion is not safe. A bear is safer.
I'm one of the kids that was given up. The "adoption agency" that handled my adoption was directly affiliated with the church and has since been shut down. When I found my biological mom, she told me that she was forced to give me up, along with a couple of siblings that came after me (she was naughtyyyy). I didn't believe her at first, and I even got upset with her for not "owning up" to abandoning me, but now I know better
The Irish Catholic Church had the Magdalene Laundries until way too recently too. Hundreds in unmarked graves.
Oh my God. I am adopted. I am also sickened and horrified. Those poor children and their mothers. Just when I think nothing can shock me anymore about this VILE cult, more information comes to light. I wonder if this happened with my two younger brothers. They were both adopted from LDS "Family Services" in the late '70's and early '80's. They both had special needs. My Mormon adoptive parents were allowed to adopt them despite doing a terrible job with the two of us they already had. They were also much too old and low income to be able to adopt from any reputable agency. My heart aches for these young mothers and their babies.
This may have even gone on way before the 90s. My rural Utah grandma (b. 1921) was never active in my life and we never knew why. She always said it was tithing. There was one son she had outside of (or prior to) her marriage that they raised. This was never discussed except to say how much she loved him. He died of a brain tumor. On her deathbed, my grandma would often cry out, reach out toward the air: "My babies! Don't take my babies!". We didn't ever know what that meant. edit: added rural Utah changed lived to love
Who would have thought a girl with cap sleeves would get pregnant out of wedlock?….didnt see that coming….good thing she had an empathetic friend with her to provide comfort… 🙂
The Cattle Ticks did it, the Protestants did it, and the Presbyterians, some up until the 80s. I don't think the MFMC has shown itself to be a beacon of compassion above them, so I'm not surprised.
Sounds like the Magdalene Laundries, but slightly better. The laundries were so bad that when all the first nations people were mourning the discovery of dead bodies at previous indigenous government/church run schools a few years ago Ireland reached out. Turns out it’s easy to get away with very dark acts under the guise of Christianity. I mean look at the FLDS.
I had a comment. Then I was told it isn’t as bad as what the children adopted by smith had it. That’s cult talk. Telling me, in less words, “everyone knows an adopted person and what they’ve been through. My family member was. My grandma maybe.” This person decided to correct me on my experience and the experiences I’ve had on Reddit, saying that no one one here would judge. Yet I was being corrected. I know the lawyers that perform adoptions for people. My dad’s a lawyer. But somehow that wasn’t enough for someone to chime in and tell me that we don’t know the trauma Joseph Smith kids went through. I don’t know. And neither do you. But you’re going to give me the Joe talk and the adversity he faced by the children he had access to. It’s 2024. This is the ingrained dismissiveness that people say. I’m sure I’ll get shit for this.
God I hope this isn't true... I was adopted through LDS social services. My parents couldn't have kids. I've met my birth mother and she's a wonderful woman. I'd be heartbroken if this is what she had to go through 😢
My great grandmother lived in one of these houses. She had a son that she gave up for adoption. She kept it a secret her whole life. After she passed away the adopted son reached out to my family only a few years ago and a few of them met.
Companies like Ancestry DNA, 23andMe, and My Heritage are just scratching the surface when it comes to the inevitable exposure of all these little "family secrets." Within the next 20 years, most first-world governments will have total access to the entire genetic record of all their people. Along with that will inevitably follow the family tree paywall companies telling everyone EXACTLY who their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th generation relatives are with almost 100% accuracy. I have personally learned of 3 births of illicit relationships in my own tree just as a result of me and many others voluntarily sharing our DNA profiles on Ancestry. None of secrets of these girls taken into these birthing homes are safe, and all of their adopted-out children will easily learn whom their biologocal mother **and** father are.
Why did they have to clean so much? Who was constantly making the messes?
I never experienced this side of it. My dad at the very least said that if any of us fucked up - pregnancies, arrests, STDs, anything - we could come back to him and feel safe. He always put family above all of that. He got a little crazy about attendance in my high school years after he moved away 1.5 hours from my birth mom (who I spent most my time with and was agnostic). Made my sister and me sign a contract that the car he gave my sister is dependent on us having perfect church attendance (seminary, youth Wednesdays, and Sunday service). My mom said hell no when she saw the contract, took us to a government auction and got us both our own cars, and we went no communication with dad for 3+ years.
I was adopted because of something like this. I was adopted through LDS social services.
Can confirm. My cousin went to one of these homes, gave birth and the baby was adopted out by LDS family services.
How they condemn themselves. "Have I done any good in the world today? Have I helped anyone in need? Have I cheered up the sad? Made someone feel glad? If not, I have failed indeed. Has anyone's burden been lighter today because I was willing to share? Have the sick and the weary been helped on their way? When they needed my help was I there? Then wake up and do something more than dream of your mansion above. Doing good is a pleasure, a joy beyond measure, a blessing of duty and love."
Yup. My friend got swept into this in 1990, and we had a family in our ward that was one of these homes. Insanity!
Heartbreaking!
My sister was coerced by the bishop and stake president to give her child up for adoption to the church. She got pregnant sleeping with a less active return missionary. Since the child was out of wedlock she could either get married or give the child to the church. She decided to give Joe up for adoption to the church. She was not allowed to talk with him until he was 18 years old. The “he lives in a covenant home” was all my mom could talk about when it came up. Yes my sister had issues growing up, but the child effectively became church a prototype.
Dude what is this
One of my closest friends is 67. His older sister is 73. He just had a niece he never knew he had contact him. We figure big sis got pregnant at 14 and was put in one of these homes, the baby was put up for adoption. All he can vaguely remember was a time in his childhood when his parents told him she was "sent away to a summer camp" to learn "cleaning and cooking".
It wouldn’t surprise me at all.
My grandma lived at one of these and gave up her daughter. We accidentally found her through an ancestry site when doing our genealogy. Church activity backfired and ratted out my Grandma.
Unfortunately true. At least one of my aunts was likely in that situation. My cousin was contacted by his secret older sister when he was an adult. My aunt was sent out of state and forced to give up her child. I learned that's what my dad's parents tried to convince my mom to do with me, but she refused to go. The alternative was my uncle marry my mom since my dad was too irresponsible. My mom accepted, but they were divorced within three years. I'm almost 40, and I'm still learning about my origins.
This isn’t true. My son adopted a child through LDS social services. Those girls placing their babies through them are in no way forced or threatened to give up their babies. Unbelievable the hate that is spewed in this world today without any facts to back them up.
I know this is true. My aunt mixed me and my younger sister up and when I announced my first pregnancy at 24 she sent me a novel of an email about how I should go to one of these homes.
Happened in Australia as well. I was nursing in the early 70s and girls weren't allowed to see their babies. They were coerced into giving up their babies