My guess, they were hungry. I don't give a damn how much you pay in taxes for welfare, how much you give to child welfare organizations, if you turn children over to the care of people like this the results will be the same.
In the 19th Century, Massachusetts open an asylum for unwed mothers. No men were allowed in the facility. They made deliveries, but women unloaded the wagons. The girls had to sew or clean or prepare meals to earn their keep, and were trained as seamstresses. The inmates were committed there by courts, and the place had some aspects of a prison, but the matrons were reputed to be kind to the unfortunate girls.
Far better and more civilized than this.
And the facility was used to keep young girls who had been incestuously raped from being able to accuse predators.
There never were any halcyon days.
Yes, the unwed mothers were locked away in asylums and the men who made them unwed mothers remained free to continue to stock the place with more unwed mothers.
Cue James Brown’s ‘it’s a man’s world’.