Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

by Grady Hendrix

“The average unwed mother is a young moron who as a child had inadequate home training, due to the ignorance, poverty, and alcoholism of her parents.” —Mental Hygiene Magazine, 1927 “You can’t call your soul your own once you’ve had a baby without a marriage certificate.” —Ladies’ Home Journal, 1947 “When she renounces her child for its own good, the unwed mother has learned a lot. She has learned an important human value. She has learned to pay the price of her misdemeanor.” —The Telegram, 1956 “Behind the national statistics testifying to the proliferating number of adolescents giving birth, a perplexing question remains unanswered: Why do teenagers permit themselves to become pregnant?” —Ebony, 1980 “You shouldn’t have a baby when you’re not married. You just have to stop it.” —President Bill Clinton, 1994 “Needy girls who imagine that having a baby will fill the void in their lives are usually in for a rude shock.” —Time, 2005

we’d been taught that the devil was the worst thing in the world, but we were too young to understand that there were worse things than the devil. We were too young to understand that their job was to convince us that the most natural thing in the world was evil, and the most evil thing in the world was natural.

It isn’t too smart for a girl to be smart, her mom had always said. So she just made herself very, very small.

Your experience will not be painless. Genesis, chapter three, verse sixteen, ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’ The pain of childbirth is Eve’s curse. A reminder that you are here because you broke two of the Ten Commandments—committing adultery and dishonoring your mother and father—and this suffering is your penance.”

“You’ll look like this one day,” she said. “They hate us enough. Don’t hate yourselves, too.”

Fern’s little boy ripened and grew in her stomach. Now when he kicked she stroked and soothed him. She started calling him Charlie Brown because he had a big bald head and nobody wanted him.

She had picked herself over her child, and she knew she would spend the rest of her life punishing herself for that.

she realized that, like Miss Wellwood, he wasn’t evil. He wasn’t cruel. He was just frightened. He was frightened of what she could do.

As in life, it is the failures that prove to be most valuable because it is in failure that you learn anything useful, about the world or about yourself.

Less than three years after we left Florida, Roe was decided and the Homes disappeared in the wave of a magic wand. If we had only gotten pregnant two years later everything would have been different.

Maternity homes existed in America since the nineteenth century, but they became widespread between 1945 and 1973, from the end of World War II until Roe v. Wade. While their secrecy makes numbers hard to come by, it’s estimated that at least two million babies were surrendered for adoption in the United States during that period, and many of them were born at one of the 190 homes for unwed mothers that existed in forty-six states, run variously by the Florence Crittenton Mission, the Salvation Army, the Catholic Church, and a variety of independent operators. Whether girls had been raped or sexually abused, believed a promise that wasn’t kept, didn’t have access to contraception, or simply didn’t know it existed, they were told that getting pregnant was all their fault. Doctors and social workers labeled unwed mothers “neurotic,” newspaper columnists suggested they be housed in Alcatraz, and politicians blamed them for everything from high taxes to crime to the collapse of Western civilization.