An abusive Christian boarding home operated in the shadows. It also took teens' babies.
On a humid evening in August, Nancy Davis Womac paced anxiously on her front deck. Her hands trembled as she stared at a text message from her firstborn daughter, Melanie Spencer, saying that she was minutes away.
The two had never met.
Forty-three years ago, Womac was pregnant and living in an orphanage when she was sent to the Bethesda Home for Girls on the outskirts of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. It was run by Baptist preachers who forced girls to memorize Bible chapters and scrub carpets by hand. Staff members beat the girls with wooden boards if they broke a rule.
Womac said the home’s owners controlled every aspect of her life — from how much toilet paper she was allowed to use to what would happen to her baby once the child was born. In the 1970s and ’80s, Bethesda forced pregnant girls to give up their newborns for adoption to Christian families who paid a $250 “love gift” to the home, according to an NBC News investigation based on court records and interviews. A former judicial officer recently called the facility a “baby selling factory.”
Womac, 16 at the time, fantasized about running away and raising her baby on her own. But the home’s doors were always locked, and she didn’t have a chance.
https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/bethesda-home-girls-stolen-babies/index.html
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The Magdalen Laundries existed here too!
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