Posted on 11/12/2021 6:29:47 AM PST by Morgana
DALTON, Ga. — 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.
“I cried every day,” she recalled. “But I would cry while we would pray, and that way they thought that, ‘She's really getting in touch with God because she's praying.’ But it wasn't that.”
She gave birth in June 1979. She was never allowed to hold her baby.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Our family used to live near Hattiesburg. Hmm...never heard of that place...
The word allegedly should have modified Christian.
Thank the good Lord that today’s girls aren’t branded as “BAD” and their life ruined because they became pregnant. In my early life divorced women were shunned as well. I wasn’t allowed to play with the children of a divorced mother.
I sometimes think that I should stay away from Southern Baptist and their ppreachers. Locked up prison environments and beatings for pregnant girls. Just not what I would expect from people who call themselves Christians. That being said, the article is from Dalton, Ga. about what happened in southern Mississippi. Let’s don’t blame Dalton for the sins of Mississippi.
Abusive Christianity is fake Christianity...unless it is abusing merchants trying to turn the courtyard of the Holy Temple into a den of thieves...or maybe those abusing the name of Christ to sanctify other evil behavior like mistreating children.
I’m glad these young unwed mothers lived to tell their stories.
In the 1950s my friend had a child out of wedlock. The father was an older, married man who visited their home frequently on business.
Less than a year later, my friend took her baby and ran away with a trucker to another state. Her parents soon received a call to come and claim her body and the baby.
The trucker and his mother claimed that the 17 year old had committed suicide, leaving her infant in the hands of strangers.
Some young girls are impulsive and vulnerable and they are not equipped to be single parents.
I was born in such a place, but it was run by Catholic Charities. My father wanted me kept in the family, but my mother’s family and the home nixed that, being that his family was Baptist. So I was given to strangers who main qualification was that they were Catholic and married.
gracie1,Did you ever meet your birth parents ((((Hugs))))
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