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In a statement released this morning, one lawmaker said, we just never imagined holding men accountable for reproduction. That feels so extreme. Public health officials, however, are sounding the alarm. They recommend that all male citizens over the age of 13 be issue a purity ring. For real this time. A pamphlet titled your sperm, your responsibility, and a mandatory class called abstinence only for dudes. Just say no, bro is also under consideration. The myth of the welfare queen is officially out of date, but new data shows we should have been calling it the welfare king. He has three kids in two staves, no current address, and an impressive talent for dodging child support. When asked how he survives, he responded, the Lord provides, and I borrow money from my ex. Shockingly, there's been no prime time outrage about his spending habits, his morality, or his poor life choices. In response, policy analysts are proposing a new accountability initiative called SNAP for Men. Supplemental negligence Accountability Program. Under SNAP for Men, any guy who fathers a child will receive a monthly reminder. This is hey man, those are your kids. Diapers don't pay for themselves. If he fails to chip in, he'll be automatically enrolled in a workfare program where he spends weekends doing what single moms have done for decades working, parenting, and filling out government forms while being judged at the grocery store. Economists note that this could save the country billions simply by shifting the revolutionary idea that fathers are also parents. In justice news, this radical new policy is shaking the legal system. For the first time in history, we are experimenting with questioning men about their behavior in sexual assault cases. A reporter live from the courthouse reported that prosecutors asked questions like, why did you think you were entitled to sex? How much had you been drinking? What were you wearing when you decided not to hear the word no. Why were you alone with someone who clearly did not want to have sex with you? Observers say the man appears confused. He's reportedly never had to explain his own actions before. Defense attorneys attempted to object, claiming such questions were irrelevant and unfairly prejudicial against men just doing what men do because boys will be boys. Am I right? The judge responded, sir, that's literally the point. Legal analysts are calling this a groundbreaking experiment in treating men as moral agents rather than natural disasters who just happen to women. We'll continue to follow this developing story as men across the country slowly realize that boys will be boys is not in fact a legal defense. And of course, I made all of that up. But doesn't the double standard, the control and the manipulation of the narrative towards women's sexuality and unwed mothers become glaringly obvious when I revert reverse the roles and the rhetoric. All I did was take all the things people say about women and single mothers and I made it a guy A world where unwed mothers are a crisis, but unwed fathers are just not ready. Where we interrogate women about their assault but never ask men why they committed one. Where a woman buying groceries on Snap is a national scandal, but the man who fathered the child dodging child support is just going through a phase where we tell her to keep her legs closed and somehow never finish that sentence with he should have kept it in his pants. This double standard is glaring and unfortunately it's been around for a very long time. It's been allowed for the denial of women's rights, forced lobotomies, incarceration in asylums if women like sex or don't like sex. But our focus today is the double standard that led to Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and the United States Home for Wayward Girls, AKA the Home for Wayward Mothers that are not only still in operation but have participated in abuse, coercion, forced labor, legal violations and the trafficking of children and infants. There's one open and active on Liberty University, my alma mater's campus. We'll talk about that today. There was a time not very long ago when if a girl got pregnant outside of marriage, she didn't just bring shame on the family, she would vanish. In Ireland, they called them the Magdalene Laundries, religious run institutions where fallen women quotation marks around that were locked away, stripped of their names and forced into unpaid labor in sweltering commercial laundries. In the United States, we built our own version, maternity homes and homes for unwed mothers that promised refuge. But too often delivered coercion, forced adoption and a lifetime of secrecy. Families, churches, social workers in the state all colluded in the same lie that hiding these women was some kind of help and religious institutions and the state profited from these institutions. The adult men impregnating children faced no consequences. If it was someone age appropriate, they might have gotten a firm talking to before being sent back to class while the girl was expelled. Behind those walls, girls and women were shamed for their pregnancies, pressured to give up their babies, told that their bodies and their choices were evidence of their own moral failure, while the man who helped create those pregnanc walked away untouched. Even in cases of known sexual assault, even if it was a child, the child or the woman was blamed for, quote, moral perversion. In this episode, we're going to drag these stories back into the light. How the Magdalene laundries came to exist, how homes for unwed mothers spread across the US what really happened inside them, and how the legacy of that abuse still shapes the way we talk about women, sex and respectability today on Flipping Tables. Happy New Year and welcome back to Flipping Tables. We're in week two of January, so I'm recording this on January 2nd, so I don't know how January is going yet. My name is Monty. You might know me from Instagram where I talk about leaving alt right Christian nationalism and now I teach about it and break it down with my own journey and what I've learned along the way. I love sharing my journey and learning to be critical and ask questions is how this podcast started. This is truly about Flipping tables. It's, it's based on my favorite story about Jesus in the temple flipping tables, but it's really about finding the truth. What is the what is narrative versus what's actual history? Here on the Coven of Curiosity, it's all about learning, asking questions, sitting with uncomfortable history, and hopefully becoming more compassionate and loving people in the process. Just a few announcements before I get started today. I know last week we had Tad Sturmer's episode. I didn't want to do announcements before his interview, so I'm going to do them today. If you'd like bonus content including the Bible study replays I lead that are just talking about scholarship around biblical study, helping unpack a lot of what the church has changed over the years. It's been really incredible. If you want to see those replays or you want to see my new Sunday services and now bonus live episodes of this podcast, you can sign up@patreon.com Monty Mater starting at just $4 a month to support the show and get bonus stuff and get early merch and discounts on merch. I finally found some designers that I love that are making all of that as I speak with some funny jokes from podcasts as well as things I've said online and just, you know, just some fun protest merch as well. Because we're going to be in for it this year. Um, podcast wise, we do have a change of release schedule that you might have noticed. With how my weeks were falling and the recording schedule, I'm going to be moving flipping tables to release to Mondays at 10am Central and my second podcast for you true crime and paranormal people, highway to Hell will be releasing Tuesdays at midnight. With everything going on in the world now, highway to Hell is weirdly how I'm decompressing. Um, but just with my work week, it made more sense to release the podcasts earlier in the week and record later in the week. There will also be new music coming from myself and my band this April, so if you're not on my mailing list, you can go to my contact page@monty mater.com and sign up. I do special write ups. I do calls to action, but that's where a lot of the announcements are going to be for the book release as well as the album release. And it's hard rock and heavy metal, so if that's not your style, I don't take that personally. Stay tuned to the end of today's episodes for some, a real story from one of our listeners. I've been wanting to start that for a while now, sharing people's experiences with with topics that we talk about. Thank you for supporting the very newly established Studio M Productions. Let's dive in. So this podcast was inspired by a book that I read on Christmas Eve. And when I say I read it on Christmas Eve, I read all of it on Christmas Eve. And the book is called Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. It's by an author named Grady Hendricks, who I didn't realize was a man until I read the introduction. And he mentions in this book that when he learned about what the Magdalene Laundries are and he learned about these homes for women, he wanted to write a novel really showcasing what happened to these girls and showcasing a story of the girls being able to reclaim some of their power. And just a synopsis, the book is really well written. Again, I read it in a day and it's about these pregnant girls who of course get sent away, the men who impregnate them face no consequences whatsoever. One of the girls in the home was molested and impregnated by her pastor, who is respected in her community. She can't say anything. He's been doing things to her since she was 8. And the other girls find out about it and make it their mission to try, try to save her. And that's where the witchcraft comes in. And it's, it's a really cool, really well done story that really highlights how, how the attitudes in the United States were towards women and how we still, we still treat it, we still treat it like women are solely responsible for pregnancy, that if a woman has sex, it's some kind of moral failing, but if a guy does it, you know, Alpha bro, you know, Andrew Tate, whatever, you know, insert, insert inflammatory comment here. So today it's going to be very frustrating. There's a lot of history in here. I was working while I was traveling on scripts. I was in coffee shops. I'm sure people were hearing me muttering, what the fuck? What the. Are you joking? I also wore my I am no man cropped hoodie. It comes from Lord of the Rings, where Eowyn kills the leader of the Nazgul. And just so you know, the 25th anniversary is coming out and the extended editions will be returning to theaters. And that is where I will be that entire weekend. But I wore this because it just felt fitting for the topic today. So if I get a little angry at certain points, I'm sorry. It's so frustrating. We are going to start in Europe first, so we're going to address Ireland, the laws in Great Britain that led to a lot of this thinking that led to a lot of this legislation and how that carries over into the. What the US did and what we're doing today. Because unfortunately, homes for unwed mothers, very much like what I'm going to talk about today, are not only still operational in the United States, but they are increasing in number. But let's go to Ireland first. For more than a century, the Magdalene Laundries operated as a central part of Ireland's institutional landscape. They were run by Catholic religious orders and normalized by the wider society. These institutions confined thousands of girls and women that were deemed fallen or wayward or morally suspect. Under the language of rescue and rehabilitation, the laundries became sites of unpaid labor, social erasure, and gendered punishment. Their history and the scandal that eventually forced public reckoning revealed how moral norms, state power and religious authority combined to regulate women's bodies and their lives. The Magdalene Laundries did not emerge in a vacuum. Their roots Lie in 18th and 19th century Moral reform movements across Britain and Ireland. Morality is always the excuse and power is always the result. Which sought to rescue women associated with prostitution or sexual transgressions. These movements framed female sexuality as a public moral danger that needed to be controlled and corrected through institutionalization. Sound familiar? As an example of these laws, in 1803, Great Britain passed the Ellenborough act of 1803, which, while addressing certain violent crimes like stabbings, made abortion a statutory felony for the first time and introduced the penalty for abortions after the quickening, which is when fetal movement is felt typically between 20 to 24 weeks and imposed fines, imprisonment, imprisonment, public whippings and up to 14 years of transportation, which means serving as a laborer in a penal colony like Australia. For those that happened prior to the quickening, remember that these are men making these laws about women as they are now, just like what we see every day. I still think of that picture where it's all. It's a group of men around a table and it's the Committee for Women's health and there's no women in the room. This law was then succeeded by the Lord Lansdowne act or the Offense against the persons act of 1828, which consolidated laws against interpersonal violence. Rape, if you somehow magically got convicted of it, which is really hard to do, which was rare, was now eligible for the death penalty, which I agree with, but it was very hard to prosecute. The abuse of girls under 10 was a capital felony. Also agree girls 10 to 12 was a misdemeanor because somehow 10 is the pivot and you got a slap on the wrist if that. And above 12 consent was assumed and it was a failure of the girl's morality. So we have 40 year old men sleeping with a 12 year old and it's her fault. Blame the teenager. Never the adults. Does that at all feel shockingly familiar to today's events. And it gets worse. It does get worse. And if you followed current events to their logical conclusion, this also feels familiar. A bunch of very wealthy men who had mistresses then passed the bastardy clauses of the New Poor Law act of 1834, which prevented women from collecting child support from men who impregnated them if they were not married, putting all of the financial responsibility on the mothers. One of the most commonly affected group of women were house servants who would be raped or abused by the man of the house and it protected him in his estate. When she became pregnant. He could Throw her out in the street, get a new girl to abuse, and she was legally not allowed to seek child support. The the rationalization for this law was to discourage government dependency and discourage out of wedlock births because of good Christian morals. Does that sound like 2025? Because it feels like 2025. Men were amazing, incredible God ordained leaders, but couldn't possibly be expected to control themselves or take responsibility around women and children. Only the women could take the fallout. Interesting how all the arguments about life beginning at conception don't argue that child support should also begin at conception in our recent abortion bans or even encourage stricter enforcement of paying for child support. And just a little sidebar here because I went off on several tangents while making this script because I got so angry. It's a very common myth that family court favors women with custody and child support support. And two years ago I was researching this for an article because it's what I believed. I believe that family court favored women and that custody and child support was always, you know, you know, penalizing the man, so to speak. The reality of trying to write that article is that over 72% of cases, when men ask custody for custody of the children, they get it in over 72% of cases, even in cases of documented abuse. I was so shocked by that that I sought out family lawyers who confirmed, oh yeah, when men ask for custody, they get it. They just don't ask for it because they don't want the work of the kids. And it's a great story to tell later about your ex keeping your kids away from you. In fact, lawyers often discourage women from mentioning abuse because it will be labeled as alienation between her children and her husband and possibly get her to lose the kids. I had several family attorneys say I recommend she doesn't bring up abuse. Only 43% of men who are required to pay child support pay the full amount. 30% of it goes completely uncollected. Yet we don't demonize men who don't pay for child support for their children. But our society demonizes the hell out of single mothers who are the parent that stayed and took responsibility. Nice to know things never change. The girl who got pregnant, consent or not, either had to hide or get rid of the baby or face a life of poverty and sex work in Great Britain. I also have a solution to the child support problem. I don't agree with child support and stay with me. Stay with me for a second. I believe that when there's a child support case, each parent gets a Credit card that can only be used for child expenses, right? And it goes into a database. So these, if someone's alleged to have spent money, they shouldn't using that card, it immediately can get reviewed. You can get fined for misusing the card. You know, we can, we can create that later, but at the end of the month, those cards are evaluated on expenses for the kid and each parent has to pay 50%, whether that's sports, school equipment, clothes, shoes. When I tell you that abortion bans would disappear if men were suddenly legally required to not only pay 50% of all the bills for the kid, but they also had to do that starting from the time of conception. I've solved the problem anyways. That's just my solution. So things never change. Women were held responsible when men were not. And these laws in Great Britain led to what were called baby farms. Baby farming in the 19th century was the paid transfer of infants, often born to unmarried or impoverished mothers, to women who advertise to nurse, board or adopt these babies for an upfront fee, sometimes ongoing payments. This payment system would be implemented in the US home system later on. The trafficking and sale of infants in the adoption system has been going on for a long time. In a world with intense stigma around illegitimacy, weak oversight and a high background infant mortality, the arrangement could be hard to trace and easy to abuse. Some baby farmers provided genuine care. Of course, there are people who do genuinely want to do the right thing. But others neglected, starved, enslaved or disposed of infants once the fee was collected. Public scandals over infant deaths helped drive early state intervention, including the first infant life protective legislation of 1872, which historians treat as a key turning point in bringing paid infant care under regulation. It also led to one of Britain's most prolific serial killers. Amelia Dyer would pose as a respectable nurse or a doctor. She took fees and clothing for the infant and then killed them, typically by strangulation with white tape, and dumped their bodies into rivers. It is estimated that she killed two to 400 infants. She was executed in 1896 after being convicted on what was described as a sample murder charge amid wider evidence of multiple deaths. But they were able to prove one, so she was executed. Pro birth policies that put infants and young mothers in positions of social stigma, poverty, secrecy, and instead of choice and education, always get people killed. They always get people killed. It's not pro life at all. Now, before we go back to the Magdalene Laundries, now that we have kind of this legal backdrop of what creates this system, it's time for our first of two mid show sponsor breaks. If you'd like to skip these ads, become an ally starting at $4 a month patreon.com montemater to get all podcasts, ad free and bonus content. Well, the holidays have come and gone once again, but if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift, well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now, you call it an early present for next year. What do you have to lose? Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch limited time 50% off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required $45 for three months, $90 for six month or $180 for 12 month plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy, see Terms the label of the fallen woman became central sexual activity outside of marriage. Whether it was consensual or not was interpreted as moral failure of the woman, not the man. Again, boys will be boys. Men can't control themselves. Like yes, are men the God ordained leader? Absolutely. But you can't possibly expect them to lead themselves. Preposterous. In this worldview, a single sexual act or pregnancy could permanently mark a woman as disgraced forever. Magdalene asylums presented themselves as refuges where such women could repent, live lives of piety. But their internal regimes of discipline, silence and labor reflected a punitive understanding of what the word rescue means. The name Magdalene itself was symbolic. Mary Magdalene was long misrepresented in Christian tradition as a former prostitute who repented and followed Jesus. Even though let's do a little little Bible right now, the New Testament never describes her that way. That did not happen until she was labeled a prostitute in 591 AD by Pope Gregory the Great, who wanted to discredit Mary's life and ministry. She was not only a disciple of Jesus described in Luke 8, but in all of the resurrection accounts in the Gospel, which vary and contradict each other in a lot of ways, she is the only constant and she was often called the apostle to the apostles. After Christianity became an imperial religion and started imposing Roman patriarchal standards, the church strayed from early church practices of having women apostles, teachers, church planners, and deacons. Like Phoebe, mentioned in Romans 16 by Paul, Pope Gregory was able to discredit her ministry because of sex, because ew if women do it gross. And by the time it made it to the laundries, this constructed the image of a sexually sinful woman Redeemed through penitence became a template for the institution's mission. As historian Francis Finnegan has shown, the 19th century Irish Magdalene asylums were closely tied to concerns about prostitution, public order and quote unquote contagion, because women's sexuality, it's dangerous for all of us. And they were run primarily by congregation congregations such as the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. From the beginning, these institutions linked moral connection, moral correction with manual labor. This is a very common thing we see in evangelicalism throughout history is work is with his work is equated to righteousness value, repentance, suffering is equated with repentance. Laundry, sewing and other tasks were framed as both practical training and penitent exercises. Over time, the laundries developed commercial contracts with outside clients. This labor became economically significant for religious institutions as well as the state, foreshadowing the later exploitation that would be seen in 20th century Ireland. By the early 20th century, the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland had become part of a wider network of religious institutions that included industrial schools, reformatories, and mother and baby homes. These institutions collectively formed what scholar James M. Smith calls the nation's quote, architecture of containment, a system for dealing with those seen as socially problematic. Unmarried mothers, poor children, people with disabilities and others. If I can't see it, well, then there's no problem. Following Irish independence in 1922, the new state relied heavily on Catholic religious orders to provide education, health care and social welfare. Limited state capacity and deep reverence to the church meant that religious congregations were off effectively delegated authority over vulnerable and marginalized populations, really without any oversight. The Magdalene laundries in the Irish Free State and later the Republic of Ireland were run by four main orders. The Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Our lady of Charity of Refuge, the Sisters of Charity and the Good shepherd sisters. In 2013, an interdepartmental committee report chaired by Senator Mar Martin McAleese identified 10 Catholic Magdalene laundries that operated between 1922 and and 1996. Although often defended as homes for penitence, again having sex outside of wedlock, men faced no such scrutiny, no such consequence. The Irish laundries became a catch all institution for women and girls who in the eyes of their families or clergy or officials, had crossed some moral or social boundary. Many of these women were not even pregnant. Many of them were virgins. I'll get into that later. Some of them had done absolutely nothing wrong and were just sent there. Residents were sent to laundries for pregnancy outside of marriage was a cause real or alleged sexual activity. So even if someone thought you did something because you flirted with somebody, you were sent to a laundry. If they were a victim of sexual assault, they were sent. Perceived flirtatiousness. If the person was homeless, if they committed a petty offense like stealing food because they're homeless or simply because these are the. These are my favorites. Being too difficult. Right? We've heard that one. Or a very common one. Being too pretty. Well, clearly you're gonna sexually sin. Look at how pretty you are. We're gonna lock you away. Insane. Questions of voluntariness are central to the later scandal. The laundries were long described as a voluntary refuge. But the McAleese report and the human rights assessment by the Irish Human Rights Commission demonstrated multiple routes of coercion, referral by the courts and probation officers, transfers from industrial schools and mother and baby homes, and intense press, often very similar to being committed from families and clergy within. The laundry's daily life was organized around work, prayer and strict discipline. Defining feature of was laundry labor, washing, scrubbing, mangling, ironing and folding commercial loads for hospitals, hotels, religious houses and private clients. The work was heavy, repetitive, physically exhausting, and often performed in hot, humid rooms with little to no rest or water. These girls were slaves. This brutal labor was unpaid. Women and girls received no wages, no social insurance contributions, even though their work generated revenue for the religious orders. The same human rights McAleese report confirmed that the laundries operated as commercial businesses and that residents were not treated as employees in any legal or economic sense. Discipline was enforced through rules of silence, restricted movement and hierarchical control. The justice for Magaly's research, which has gathered extensive survivor testimony, describes a rule of silence and notes that women's names were sometimes replaced or rarely used, contributing to a sense of depersonalization and erasure. They literally erase these girls identities. And this is actually something that became very common in the US Homes where you were not allowed to use your real name. The focus of the laundries was to shame and dehumanize these girls, remove any sense of identity and independence, coerce and enslave them, profit off of them, and often work them to death. Education and vocational training were limited or absent. Many residents reported that they left the laundries with no recognized skills, no documents and no support for reintegration. Survivors interviewed in the documentary that would really blow this up. Sex in a Cold Climate that was released in 1998 recalls days that were almost entirely consumed by work, with little or nothing resembling any kind of therapeutic or rehabilitative care. The spiritual framing of the laundries reinforced the punitive, punitive environment. If you can make it well, this is what God wants. It's amazing what kind of cruelty you can justify. Suffering and hard work were presented as penance for sin and as a path to moral rehabilitation. Because residents were categorized as morally deficient, harsh treatment could be rationalized as necessary discipline rather than what it really was, which was abuse. This moral logic made it easier for both religious staff and the wider society to tolerate conditions that, by contemporary standards, clearly violated basic human rights. Much of the detailed knowledge of the laundry's internal regime comes from the survivor testimony and began to reach wider audiences in the 1990s. These testimonies, while personal and diverse, show strong patterns again in that documentary. Sex in a Cold Climate, was produced by Stephen Humphries and broadcast on Channel 4 in 1998. Sorry, Steve Humphries, not Stephen. This was a huge turning point. It presented the stories of four women, Brigid Young, Phyllis Valentine, Martha Cooney, and Christina McCullough, three of whom had been incarcerated in the Magdalene Laundries, with Young being raised in an adjoining orphanage as well. Valentine recalled being sent from the orphanage to the laundry at age 15 because the nuns deemed her too pretty and at risk of sexual failing. She didn't do anything. She was pretty, which. Which begs the question, why is this adult nun looking at a girl being like, you're too hot. You can't go into the real world? That's a lot of questions. She was just pretty. That's it. They had no she. They had no knowledge, no proof of any kind of sexual indiscretion. She wasn't accused of anything. She described grueling work punishment, and they cut her hair off as a means of control. Martha Cooney recounted being placed in a laundry after disclosing a sexual assault by a relative. McCall Hay described giving birth outside of marriage, having her child removed for adoption, and then being confined to the laundry while she was lactating. All three of them emphasize lasting psychological damage and difficulty building adult lives after their release. Other survivors have spoken publicly through oral the Oral History Project. For example, Mary Norris, who spent years in a laundry after being placed there as a teenager, described those years as two years of my life erased from the world. She has spoken of heavy physical labor, stigma, and the feeling that she might as well have been dead in the term in terms of social visibility. I'm sorry if at some point in this episode again, I just start yelling. It's so infuriating. Marine Sullivan, widely described as one of the youngest entrants to a laundry was sent as age 12 to the Good Shepherd Laundry in New Ross in 1964. In interviews and in her memoir, Girl in the Tunnel, she recounts years of harsh labor, physical humiliation, and the enduring impact of institutionalization on her adult life, including health problems and a difficulty trusting others. I mean, of course, it would be shocking if you could trust anybody. In JFMR's oral history, the archive preserves dozen of similar testimonies. All these girls tell the same story, Whether they were incarcerated in the 20s, 30s, 40s, or in the 70s and 80s, being returned by garde after escaped attempts, the suicide attempts within the laundries, the older women who had become so institutionalized that they knew no other life and were unable to leave. They had no way to go back into society and their lives were stolen. These personal accounts, corroborated by multiple sources, undercut later efforts to portray the laundries as a benign refuge or ordinary workplaces. It's not a workplace if your workers are enslaved. It's slavery. They were lived as carceral spaces in which women's labor, sexuality and identities were controlled in the name of moral reform. Again, when you can stamp God's name on it for your own benefit, whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish, you can justify a lot of cruelty. For most of the 20th century, the laundries drew little public criticism. They were accepted parts of the social landscape, and it wasn't until the 1990s controversy that that changed. There was the Sex in a Cold Climate that came out at the end of the 90s, but it was in 1993 the controversy erupted when the sister of Our lady of Charity sought to sell land of their former High park laundry in Dublin, leading to the exhumation of 155 sets of women's remains that had been buried in an unmarked or poorly documented graves. This brought up questions about missing records, the number of women buried, the condition of their deaths drew intense media scrutiny and raised wider questions about the laundry's history. The nuns wrote this off, wrote off this discovery and the subsequent lack of documentation as, quote, administrative error. And then again. The broadcast of Sex in a cold climate in 1998 further fractured the culture of silence. Approximately 3 million viewers watched the film in the UK and hundreds of women contacted a helpline afterward, identifying themselves as former residents or relatives of a resident. These developments occurred alongside broader revelations about abuse in other Irish institutions, including industrial schools and residential care. Obviously ongoing scandals with the Catholic Church, as was documented in the 2009 Ryan report. Together they contribute to what scholars have called an inquiry culture in Ireland, which was these past institutions that really were able to operate quietly, freely, without regulation or questions. They became subjects of public investigation and debate. Activist groups such as the justice for the Magnoles, which would later become the jfmr, played a pivotal role in transforming the outrage into structured demands. They collected survivor testimony, critiqued official narratives and press for independent investigation. State acknowledgment of responsibility because the state doesn't get away with this either, they allowed it to happen. And appropriate redress schemes. A central focus of the scandal became the question of state responsibility. Religious orders had run the laundries, but to what extent had the Irish state used, funded or overseen them? In 2010, the Irish Human Rights Commission issued an assessment identifying significant human rights concerns and recommending that the government establish an independent inquiry into state involvement. The state also profited, exhibited from these. And that's not to say that like obviously throughout history there have been a lot of Catholic institutions, orphanages and things like that that have done incredible work. But when these institutions are able to have solitary authority and they're able to not have any oversight, this is what happens. Because again, people can do great things in the name of God or in the name of religion, in the name of compassion, they can also take that and use it to justify cruelty. In response to these reports, the government created the Interdepartmental Committee chaired by Senator Martin McAleese. He was kind of a spearhead in these. Its report, which was published in February of 2013, found that approximately 10,000 known women and girls had entered mandoline laundries from the period of 1922 to 1996, and that various state agencies had indeed referred women there, including the criminal justice system, social services and state funded institutions such as industrial schools. The report concluded that about a quarter of admissions came directly from state entities, though critics argue that this underestimates indirect involvement through state funded structures and a soft coercion of families operating under intense social and religious pressure. I agree. There's a lot of evidence that both the church and the state would show up on families doorsteps and kind of coerce them into sending their daughters to these laundries. While the Michaelis report acknowledged harsh working conditions and the absence of pay, it has been criticized by scholars and advocates for downplaying the severity of the abuse and for relying heavily on records that were controlled by these religious orders, which are incomplete, redacted or falsified. Many of these records directly contradicted both survivor testimony and other documented records following the publication of the report. Tayshia Edna Kenney delivered a formal apology in Dalerian in February of 2013 and I am fairly sure I butchered the name of that. But I tried. I did get Taisha right because Taisha is spelled T A O I S E A C H T. I had to look that one up. He acknowledged the state's involvement, described the laundries as places where women had suffered a national shame and pledged to establish an ex gratia scheme to provide compensation and support, which is exactly what they should do. The government subsequently set up a redress scheme offering lump sum payments, pension entitlements and access to health services, all of which were removed from these young women for like being removed and ostracized from society and forced into slave labor. However, the scheme has also drawn sustained criticism. Survivors and human rights experts argue that it's too limited in scope. Some of the women were excluded due to documentation problems because the religious orders didn't keep proper documentation and that the process itself has been very bureaucratic and re traumatizing, often making it very difficult for women to access these benefits. Families whose relatives were killed in the laundries are unable to get compensation at all because records are often missing or destroyed. Destroyed. The Irishman Abudesman 2017 report, Opportunity Lost, concluded that the scheme had failed many applicants and recommended it be reformed. Another major controversy concerns the role of religious congregations in providing redress. While the orders express regret oh we're sorry, they have not universally accepted legal liability or made any kind of financial contribution on the scale many advocates expected, Given that the laundries were commercially profitable businesses and the unpaid labor extracted from the residents over decades, AIDS was directly put into the coffers of these religious institutions. I am a big fan of put your money where your mouth is. If you're sorry, pay them back. Without full access to the records, however, which the religious orders have not allowed, survivors cannot easily prove the lengths of their stay, their conditions, or even the basic facts of family separation and forced adoption. As time goes on, the Magdalene laundries have increasingly been analyzed through the human rights lens. Recent scholarship argues that Ireland's engagement with international human rights bonds bodies has been shaped by its handling of institutional abuse, including the laundries. In reports to the United nations, survivors and advocacy groups have framed the laundries as sites of arbitrary detention, forced labor and gender based discrimination. I mean, clearly from a gender history perspective, the laundries expose how sexual norms and respectability politics become encoded in Institutions, and it is always demonized against women. It is always about the subjugation of women. Women, these norms are never about morality. They are always about control. Controlling the birth rate, controlling the transfer of wealth, controlling a man's reputation, being able to allow him to negate responsibility. They contribute to systems of coercion, suppression and abuse. Because that's when you, when you establish a system like this where accountability only falls on one person, even in cases of assault. There's no other way to look at it. Morality is just what they use to justify it, to justify the silence, the coercion, the abuse, the subversion, the assaults. The women were conf. The women that were confined were not all criminals or prostitutes, right? They were often poor, young, disabled, somehow vulnerable, or whose sexuality or perceived sexuality clashed with dominant expectations. They were also often victims of sexual assault that were then punished for that assault. We still do that now. And we think about, you know, you listen to people online and anytime you talk about an assault case, people are like, well, what she was she wearing is an insane question to ask. Like, if someone, someone says, my car was stolen or my car was broken into, the first thing you ask is, oh my God, are you okay? Is everything okay? And then you ask, well, did you lose anything? And then maybe several questions down the way, you're like, well, did you? Where did you park? Right? Like, you don't blame them for their car getting broken into. Why can't women get as much respect as a broken into, vandalized car? That would be cool punishment for sex and for the risk of sex, right? If you're too pretty and you might have sex fell on women. Men who impregnated women outside of marriage rarely faced any institutional consequence, but the women and their children did. The scandal also raises wider questions about collective memory and responsibility. For decades, the laundries were visible but unchallenged. They functioned because families and communities in the church and the state all participated in the shared logic that equated, equated female virtue with sexual control and silence. The eventual exposure of that system through graves, documentaries, documentaries, documentaries, survivor testimonies and official reports has forced Ireland to confront not only the individual acts of cruelty, but the social structure that allowed it to happen in the first place. The history and scandal of the laundries revealed the system in which morality, economics and power intersected to regulate women's lives. Again, it always falls on women. It's always about regulation. Originating in the 19th century Moral reform efforts at fallen women, the Irish laundries evolved into a network of institutions that confined, imprisoned, exploited and silenced thousands of girls and women leading into the 20th century. Their existence depended on a dense web of religious authority, state involvement and societal complicity. The families had to participate. Right? That's the only way that this get that this works. The separation of church and state and the accountability of institutions is critical to keeping marginalized groups safe. Like, and this is one of the things about the commentary in the US about small government. You know, I grew up being very, very alt right Republican and it's all about, you know, government overreach and the EPA shouldn't exist. And I have a very different view of that now. I still believe in small government, but I believe that the government's job is to protect its citizens and that both means from foreign threats and internal threats. So to me, it is the government's job job to protect civil rights because that protects its citizens from discrimination from other citizens. It's the government's job to provide health care and to provide social institutions of protection to protect their citizens from things like poverty or going bankrupt. Because you went to the doctor versus that to me. And people will say, oh, but the government shouldn't have to. Those same people are totally fine with the government telling you who you can marry, which is a decision between two adults, or how you express your gender, which includes what clothes you wear, which is insane. That's not small government at all. It's interesting how that's gotten twisted where I consider a large, invasive, overly overstepping government to be a government that tells you what you can say online, who you can marry, who you can love, how you can and should dress, versus a government that says, hey, hey, you can't discriminate against citizens because we can't allow you to cause harm. Just. It's interesting how my perspective has changed. It was only when survivors spoke up publicly and when unmarked graves were uncovered and when advocates used sustained pressure on the state and the church. The system was finally named for what it was, which was a huge, decades long injustice. The McAleese report and the subsequent apologies and redress schemes represent steps towards accountability, but they have not fully resolved the question of responsibility, compensation, historical truth, or addressed the double standard of women's morality around sex that led to the problem in the first place. The laundry stand as a warning about what happens when societies treat women's sexuality as a threat to be contained rather than a human reality to be respected. They remind us that institutional abuse often hides in plain sight, justified by colorful language of care and morality and protection and redemption. And they underscore that confronting such abuse requires, requires not only exposing harmful institutions, but also challenging the beliefs that make those institutions possible. But there are still discoveries happening recently. We didn't leave this behind. In the 90s, local historian Catherine Corliss was investigating the Bon Secur's mother and baby home and found death certificates for 796 children between 1925 and 1961, but found burial records for one out of 796. Her research led to the conclusion that most of the infants had been, quote, buried, thrown in a disused septic tank on the property. In 2017, text test excavations of the mother and baby homes Commission of investigation confirmed the presence of significant quantities of human remains in the septic tank, corroborating not just Corliss's research, but also verifying the account accounts of two young boys who discovered skeletons in the 1970s. A full forensic excavation and DNA analysis began in July of 2025. So six months ago, in hopes of identifying and properly burying the infants, the investigative Commission found in 2021 that 9,000 infants died across 18 institutions like Bon Secours, which is a staggering rate of infant mortality. Like that leads to a whole other host of questions of neglect, murder, all of these things again, like when, when a pro life ideology does not include taking care of that life when it's born, it always leads to someone's death. Lots of questions about abuse and neglect. We now have some background from how Europe used religion to penalize women's sexuality, how they were victimized, and how both the law and the church shielded the men responsible. It's always about power. It's, this is not a morality issue. It is a power because if it was truly a morality issue, men would be held to the same moral standard. Moral stand doesn't change by gender. That's how you know it's about power. But now that we have that backdrop, let's see how it played out in the United States. In the United States, for much of the 20th century, becoming pregnant outside of marriage was not a private crisis. It was a public scandal. Like in Europe. The shame and social control that followed fell entirely on girls and women fathers, whether it was a boyfriend, a casual partner, a rapist or an incest perpetrator remained largely invisible. I'm beginning to believe that men really do know that the real leaders are women. And that's why they expect women to do all the leading and take all the. Because you can't have both. You can't say we're the leaders, but we absolutely can't control ourselves. And you have to lead and take responsibility for everything I do. It can't be both. So either men are good leaders and they need to be responsible for themselves and take ownership and responsibility, or if women are taking all the ownership and leadership and responsibility, we then all agree that women are the better leaders. In this climate, homes for unwed mothers and maternity homes emerged as institutional tools for managing what families, churches and social workers framed as a moral problem. Which was the pregnant girl. Right? Because she bears the physical representation of the sin. Right. He can stick it back at his pants and pretend it didn't happen. She can't do that. From the first rescue homes of the late 19th century to the highly organized maternity home network of the mid 20th century, these institutions were shaped by a double standard. Many of these homes are in operation, and in the wake of abortion bans are more of them are opening UP. An estimated 350 to 450 of these programs still exist in the United States. States, Though they're branded a little bit differently. But they were than they were in the 60s and 70s. Respectability, ah, the the big word. Demanded that female sexuality be tightly controlled. Male desire, by contrast, was excused as natural, inevitable, or simply not discussed. Boys will be boys, don't you know. They can't control it. They can't help it. And why would we give women choice over their own bodies? Why would we do that when we can regulate it and profit off of it instead punishment them for how dare you be a sexual being? When pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, the response was rarely prosecution of the perpetrator. Instead, the girl herself was hidden away, often pressured or coerced into surrendering her baby to adoption. And because so often rape and incest is a family member, families prioritize protecting the male family member than protecting the victim. The history of American homes for unwed mothers is a history of social welfare, religion, and adoption. It's also a history of gendered shame, sexual violence, and the state's failure to hold men accountable. Just like how all these abortion bans have no call for paternal responsibility. Mandatory jail time for sex offenders. And while they claim life starts at conception, for some reason child support doesn't. Paying half the medical bills doesn't. Weird, huh? In the late 19th century, evangelical reformers and philanthropists began to establish what were called rescue homes for prostitutes and fallen women in the growing American cities. And many of these homes were actually very genuine. What they would evolve into became something else. One of the most influential of these home was the Florence Night Mission opened in New York City in 1883 by a wealthy businessman named Charles Crittenton. And after the death of his young daughter Florence, he opened it in her name, which is great. In 1898, the Special act of Congress granted a national charter to the National Florence Crittenton Mission, reportedly the first national charter ever given to a private charity. By the early 20th century, the Crittenton network ran dozens of homes across the country that was now being joined by facilities operated by Catholic orders, Protestants and the Salvation Army. The early homes mixed religious rescue, moral discipline and rudimentary social services. In the very early form of these homes, their stated aim was to reform fallen women and save the souls and illegitimate infants. I have a bone to pick, though. Real quick sidebar with the word illegitimate. There is no single child who is illegitimate. I absolutely hate that because that child didn't do anything wrong. You can't pick who your parents are. You can't pick to be born. I hate the. Just the. I mean, it's. Granted, it's. It's a better word than they used to use the word bastard, as if the kid had anything to do with it. I hate the word illegitimate. There are no illegitimate children. There are for sure illegitimate parents. Parents, anyways. Some early Crittenton leaders believe that keeping mothers and babies together could help rehabilitate women. And Holmes sometimes offered basic medical care, child care and training for work. They believed, okay, you made this mistake or something, whatever it was, happened, we're actually going to help you live. That's what I'm talking about. But even at this stage, the framework was deeply, again, moralistic. And this is where it starts to evolve into something else that becomes really bad. Bad. Female sexuality outside of marriage was cast as a sin or a pathology, while the men involved remain nameless in the institutional records. They didn't even write the guy's name down. I love this religious idea that either women hate sex no matter what, or that they just have to do it for their husbands. Like, that's just a weird. And it's just not based in reality. There's this. I mean, I remember growing up and my dad telling me, you know, when you get married, you can't say no to your husband, but you're not gonna like it. Excuse me? Me. There were. There were so many ways people talked me out of marriage at 9. I was like, that just seems like a bad investment. I'm not gonna do that. James Dobson was the one that said, quote, the natural sex appeal of girls serves as their primary source of bargaining power in the game of life. In exchange for feminine affection and love, A man accepts a girl as his lifetime responsibility, Supplying her needs and caring for her welfare. This sexual aspect of the marital agreement can hardly be denied. Denied question, end of quote. Sex is the trade for protection. And not only do people like Dobson not believe in marital rape, he actually openly advocated against it being made against the law. But if you don't give it to your husband, he no longer has to protect you. That's the trade. Garbage. Absolute garbage. Hot ass dookie garbage. I can't imagine why women wouldn't want to sign up for that deal anymore. I can't imagine why so many women want to. Would rather be single now than do that. In the context of the demonization of female sexuality, the fathers might be mentioned as, quote, seducers. What a playful little word like you, you little rascal. You little rascal. But the practical weight of redemption. Repent for your sin. Fell on the women who carried the visible evidence of sex. In the 1920s to the 1940s, the interwar period, the language around unmarried pregnancy began to shift. Instead of being treated only as a quote, fallen, wayward, unwed mother Increasingly were labeled neurotic or psychologically unfit. As psychiatry and professional social work gained influence, Historian Ricky solinger has shown how single pregnancy became to be seen as a symptom of psychological failure, Social deviance, Making the woman herself the problem to be treated or removed. During this time, women could be committed to asylums or lobotomized at the request of their husband if they didn't like sexual sex, or if they liked sex too much, or if they were, quote, melancholy. This could also happen to women who were lesbians or suspected of being lesbians, Women who refused to get married, who were perceived as flirtatious, and during this period of eugenics exploded, Leading to the forced sterilization of thousands of women of color, but specifically 40% of the women of childbearing age. In native american communities, maternity homes gradually turned from general refuges into specialized institutions for unmarried pregnant women and girls. By the 1930s and 40s, most of these homes admitted young, young women who were still in high school or dependent on their parents in some way, Often sent there under pressure from their family, clergy, or social agencies. Abortion, meanwhile, was criminalized across the United States through state laws that were passed in the 19th century and remained illegal in most states until the late 1960s and then, of course, the passage of roe in the 70s. Contraception was very difficult to obtain. It was heavily regulated in some states Even married couples struggled to get legal birth control count counseling. Let's talk about that for a second. In the space of what we're seeing, I'm going to go over the history of abortion bans, right? And we're seeing this again because, and when Roe was overturned and I told people, because I grew up in this movement, I know what they're doing, I said, listen, this is not the end. They're going to come after ivf, they're going to start to demonize birth control. They're going to go the route of it's so bad for you, it's so dangerous, use the pull out method. And it's exactly what they're doing, demonizing it, convincing women. Because the thing is, is that if you get pregnant in this movement, you're stuck. If you're in a band state, you're stuck. And they know that the younger they can impregnate women, the younger they can make them more financially dependent on men. It's harder to leave. It also sets women up to experience elder poverty. So in this time frame, the same irrational thing is happening that we see now where these, the, the pro life, anti abortion argument is saying, well, you know, life begins at conception, you shouldn't be able to terminate a pregnancy. But they're also saying you shouldn't have open access to birth control. In Tennessee, there's been multiple bills that have been tried to be brought to the floor that make IUDs illegal. Right? So like it's you. That's how, that's another symptom, if you will, of like, this is about power. Because if it's really just about the pregnancy, not only would you be voting for social programs to make sure those kids are taken care of, that they have a chance at life, but you would also be like birth control for everyone because humans are going to have sex. That is just the way it works. That is reality. And we have to make laws grounded in reality, not grounded in some kind of religious utopia that has never existed. People have always been having sex. We'll get some more into that later of like, there's this idea that like women didn't sleep have sex before marriage in the 50s and 60s. Of course they did. Of course they did. They just, unless you got pregnant, you were just better at hiding, hiding it. And of course men have never had to hide it, ever. But let's talk about abortion bans in the US in the 1800s. When the American Medical association was founded in 1847, it was composed of all white male Physicians. Of course it was. In the mid 19th century, doctors in the AMA began to organize against abortion, even though abortions before the quickening again when that fetal movement is felt was widely practiced and not criminalized, physicians launched campaigns to change public and legal views on the practice. This is a copy and paste of what happened in those early 1800s British laws. Because when you control birth, you control the opportunities and social and wealth resources of women. You also control the inheritance of wealth. Prior to this, in the United States, abortion was considered like an unfortunate but necessary decision that women had to make. Sometimes like if you already had multiple kids, your husband passes away, away, you're pregnant. It was, it was a private matter that women and their families were allowed to decide. A central figure in this pushback to, to ban abortions was the Boston physician Horatio Robinson Storer, who spearheaded what historians called the physicians crusade against abortion. Store and his allies in the AMA argued that life began at conception. Here we go. And urged that abortion be criminalized. This was never a well held belief by anyone, Christians and culture included prior to this time. Even St. Augustine held that abortions prior to the quickening were not murder. And that's the Catholics. That's St. Augustine. That wouldn't change until the 1860s for Catholics where they would go back to conception. In 1859, the AMA adopted Store's report on criminal abortion as official policy and began lobbying state legislatures to outlaw abortion. We've been through what's happening now happened in the 1800s, okay? Abortion was legal. A bunch of white guys said no, shouldn't be legal. They started lobbying with state legislatures that eventually led to a national ban. As a result of this campaign, over 40 anti abortion statutes were enacted between 1860 and 1880, making abortion illegal in most states except under very limited exceptions. These laws help move abortion out of mainstream medical practice and into the criminal sphere. Why were they doing this? Oh, I can tell tell you. Before these laws, many abortions and reproductive health services were provided by women, especially midwives, who had long been the primary source for care of women's reproductive health. The doctors were like, we want to be making that OBGYN money so we need to remove all of you. Like these women can't practice medicine. Obviously, the EMA's campaign effectively framed abortion as dangerous, immoral, something that only credentials, I. E. Man physicians should touch. This delegitimized female practitioners and midwives, undercutting their traditional roles and pushing them out of reproductive care practice. Midwives who if you remember, had also been the primary target of European Witch trials were increasingly labeled as unscientific, untrustworthy, and outside professional medical establishment. That's one of the good things I do see happening more so in modern culture, is people are working with doulas and midwives again, which I think is smart. Not that you shouldn't go to the hospital if you need it, but there is a very practical thing of having someone who's experienced a lot of births that can be there as an advocate for you, which is really what a lot of midwives do. As medical education and licensing tightened under AMA influence, again all white male doctors, male physicians consolidated control over reproductive reproductive care and medicine as a whole, relegating many women out of the field. It's important to note that due to slavery, the best midwives were black women. Women can't have that when white men can make money off of it. And then they get the added bonus of controlling and penalizing women. These developments occurred alongside a broader effort by the emerging medical profession to professionalize and standardize their practice. A movement exemplified later by the efforts like the Flexner Report. But it was deeply intertwined with gender bias. Rejecting female dominated reproductive care not only reinforced male authority in medicine, but it also reshaped who controlled women's health. Right. Women used to be the dominant control in women's health, and men wanted to take it over. So let me summarize that. Late 1800s, the male dominated AMA actively lobbies for the criminalization of abortion as part of a broader drive to professionalize and control medical practice. They also really did not want women practicing medicine. They wanted to make money off of ob gyn and maternal care. I didn't realize that making America great that we're experiencing right now meant launching us back into the 1800s of hundreds. This campaign helped push abortion, previously considered a private choice that was unfortunate but necessary, out of women's hands into a male governed, legally restricted medical sphere. A shift that marginalized women practitioners and midwives who had previously been central to reproductive care. What scares me about these bands? Because if we look at the timeline where this happened in the 1800s and then it took so long to fix it, what scares me about the bands right now is is it going to take us another hundred years to reverse it again? Montana proposed this last year in Bill HB 609 to criminalize traveling out of state for abortion, a violation of interstate travel laws. Right? And the same people that were like, it's about states rights. Okay, well then she should be able to go to a state that's legal, right? Question mark. Oh, it's not about states rights. Local municipalities in Texas have considered travel ban ordinances that would make it illegal to use their local roads to travel out of state for an abortion. Again, violation of travel law. That's like, I don't even, I don't even know how you would enforce that. Idaho enacted a law that is facing legal challenges that prevented minors from traveling out of state for an abortion without parental consent. Now a few of you may be saying, well, I mean with Idaho, I get that and I understand why you feel that way, but I'd like to remind you that the most common sex offender in the US is biological fathers. The most common sex offender when it comes to children is biological fathers. So what is a teen girl experiencing abuse supposed to to do? Like, we have to answer these questions, we have to face these questions. Other teen girls face homelessness or abuse if their parents found out they were pregnant. Just something to think about. A lot of people unfortunately are not good or safe parents. In the wake of legal maneuvering from the male rule, male run American Medical association causing abortion to be banned in the US this meant that a young woman who became pregnant, whether through consensual sex, coercion or assault, had very few legal options. Options. Families who wanted to avoid scandal could send her away to a home where out of sight, they could pretend she didn't exist. She could carry the pregnancy to term, get rid of the baby. It never happened. She was staying, taking care of an aunt who had cancer. The men involved, by contrast, rarely faced any legal or social consequences. Maybe got a firm talking to, maybe got a side eye from mom. Even when adult men impregnated minors, families op often prioritized silence and reputation over police involvement. Studies of mid century adolescent sexuality in the Midwest found that girls pregnant from rape or incest were treated as promiscuous and sent away rather than seen as victims entitled to legal recourse. I'll say that again. So the teens that were pregnant from rape or incest were treated as promiscuous and sent away rather than seen as victims entitled to legal recourse. The same attitude we see in the bands that do not allow for the exceptions to rape and incest. The idea that like if, if you are someone who values justice, there is no way you can look at a child, child who has been raped and say, yep, you should have to carry to term. The underlying idea of people who oppose those exceptions is not the value of life. Like we've seen that in their voting records, right? They don't want to feed kids at schools. But the idea is that she some way deserved it. There's, there's a part of you that believes she isn't a victim in order for you to take that stance. Because if you saw her as a victim, you would not want her to suffer further. Victimization foundation from 1945 to 1973, the period between the end of World War II and the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision is often called the Baby scoop era. Historians estimate from 1940 to 1970, up to 4 million mothers in the United States surrendered newborns to adoption, with roughly 2 million placements in the 1960s alone. Can we just talk again? Can we just talk about the good old days? Right? People look back and like, you know, oh, every, you know, no, people were always having sex. Always. There's a reason. Like they were always doing it. And if you didn't get pregnant, you just hit it better. And now we can actually talk about it. And because we can talk about it, we can teach people how to be safe. We can be smart about it. We can learn. These were just really taboo circumstances. And when you create these taboo circumstances, you also create systems of abuse that we're going to see here in a minute. During these decades, non relative adoptions rose from about 33,800 in 1951 to a peak of roughly 89,200 in 1970. Again, these are non relative adoptions. Many of these babies were born or processed through homes for unwed mothers. The Washington Post, drawing on Ann Fessler's research, reported that an estimated 1.5 million unwed mothers were hidden in maternity homes and pressured or completely coerced into surrendering their babies. The two decades before ROW and the Witchcraft for Wayward Girls takes place in the late 60s, late 60s, early 70s. By the 1950s, the maternity home system had become a nationwide network. Florence, Crittenton homes, Salvation army facilities, Catholic and Protestant maternity homes and independent institutions operated more than 200 residential homes in 400444 states, housing roughly 25,000 young women per year and turning away thousands more. Also need to note that the houses served white girls for the most part, often middle class girls, upper class girls and young women whose pregnancies their families saw as a threat to their social status. Historian Solinger and others have shown that black women's pregnancies were treated very differently. Maternity homes were largely segregated and unmarried black mothers were often presumed, quote, naturally promiscuous. Right. Gotta throw some racism in there. Not our, not our perfect white daughter she couldn't have hormones and sexuality. The filthy black women were also assumed to be more naturally maternal, expected to keep their children versus white women were expected, required and coerced to not keep their children, and that black women were going to rely on extended family rather than adoption. Race, class and respectability politics thus intersected strongly with gendered shame. For many girls, the first experience of institutionalization began at a home. Parents frequently reacted to a daughter's pregnancy with shock, anger, humiliation, abuse. In oral histories collected by Fesler, women described being treated as if they had committed a crime or worse brought dishonor on the entire family. And I've shared this before, but pregnancy, sex, all of that was so demonized in my growing up years that I remember. And every single girl I know that I grew up with or other girls I met that grew up similar, that deconstructed. We have all said I would rather tell my parents I murdered someone than got pregnant. That is how harsh the stigma was. And for all the sermons, the purity culture, you know, demonizing like fallen women, teen moms, all of this stuff. A woman who dared to have sex, which again, remember night of your wedding, you're supposed to flip a switch and now you love it and you can't say no. I never, I never heard anyone ever talk about men having sex before marriage, ever. There's just never a conversation. Meanwhile, I'm sitting, I would have pregnancy nightmares. I was so terrified that I would get assaulted and get pregnant and it would be my fault that I would, I would have a nightmare starting when I was 12 about it. I would rather tell my dad I killed someone. That is how serious this was and is in a lot of families. Still, unfortunately, one woman in particular remembered her mother wordlessly packing her suitcase and sending her alone on a plane to an out of state maternity home. While friends were told she was visiting an aunt for the school year. Another recalled being posed in a cap and gown to fake graduation photos so neighbors would never suspect that she had spent those months pregnant. Pregnant in a home. Fathers of the babies, however, continued school military service. They went to work completely uninterrupt, uninterrupted. It did not change their lives at all. No change to their lives. Karen Wilson Butterball. I think it's Butterball. It might be Beerbaugh, but I'm going to say Butterball because that just makes me happy. She's a baby. Scoop era mother and historian cites a mid century social work manual that bluntly acknowledged that society's instinctive response to an unwed Pregnant girl was to ostracize her, expelling her from school and family and social life. While such swift action was not meted out to unmarried schoolboy, father or adult man, in many cases, when pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, the pattern was very similar. Families chose secrecy over prosecution, fearing court testimony and publicity more than they feared continued access by the perpetrator. In the absence of mandatory reporting, laws that had any teeth to them, and in a culture that doubted or blamed victims like we still do, sexual assault remained massively underreported. Even in the 1990s, less than 1 third of rapes were reported to the police. Police. And historically the reporting rates are believed to have been even lower prior to the 90s. And I want to break down really quick what that actually means, especially for those of us now. Law enforcement statistics still estimate that around 30% of assaults are reported. With that low of reporting 30%, one in five women in the United States experience rape or attempted rape. And this is just rape. If you add in domestic violence and stalking, it's 1 in 3 women every 98 seconds. In the US a woman is sexually assaulted. In 2023, 127,216 rapes were reported to law enforcement. This does not include statutory rape. So that means the real number is at least 424,053 rapes. Again, not including statutory. And if 70% of rapes are not being reported, that means that that 1 in 5 number is closer to 3 in 55 of women, maybe even 4 in 5. And again, that doesn't include women who are victimized multiple times. And then I can, I can hear it now. Well, why don't they go to the police? Doesn't the history of what we've read tell you that's something I had to learn because I used to say shit like that when I was ultra conserved. Why am I before I experienced it for myself and realized how cops treat you when you try to report it? How have we spent hundreds of years implanting sexual shame? Shame even when the result, the result is from sexual violence. And then we expect women not to suffer shame from sexual violence. Women's decisions to not report sexual assault is often misunderstood as silence, fear or complicity. Well, she didn't report it because it was consensual. She couldn't prove it. In reality, non reporting is most often a rational response to systems that have repeatedly failed to protect survivors and in many cases have actively harmed survivors. You can find police interviews on YouTube. YouTube where the cop is sitting in Front of a sobbing woman who's reporting rape, telling her why it's her fault, that he can prove it's her fault, and he's lying to her. It's insane. And we've. And we've seen what, you know, the son of a judge gets away with or the son of the sheriff. We've seen that we have to shift the question away from individual behavior and toward the social, legal, and cultural conditions that surround reports reporting most sexual assaults are not committed by strangers in dark alleys. And this was something I had to learn this year. I would find myself, and obviously the social media algorithm is a nightmare, but I would find myself with men I knew and men I considered to be good people that had this belief that rape is rare. And I was like, why? Why do they think that? And so I started to ask men, what is rape? How does rape occur? I started asking the questions, and what I realized was there is a large group of men where their definition of rape is that a stranger jumps out of the bushes and attacks you. And that is the only definition of rape they have. Sexual assaults by strangers are extremely rare. Extremely rare. Rape and assault are almost always committed by people the victim knows. An intimate partner, a family member, a co worker, employer, religious leader, teacher or girlfriend, someone you trust, someone you might let into your home, someone you might have drinks with because you have no issue not trusting them, but right, like they, oh, this is my. This is my best friend's brother or whatever. Like you, it's someone you know. Reporting an assault in these circumstances, when it's someone you trust, someone you might permit yourself to be alone with, is a problem, isn't it? Because how do I prove in a room with no camera that I didn't agree to this? Reporting an assault in these circumstances does not merely mean contacting law enforcement. It can mean I'm destabilizing my entire life. Women can face the loss of housing, employment, financial support, child care, family or community belonging. If the perpetrator is embedded in a shared family or a workplace or a faith community, the woman can be isolated, retaliated against, or completely pushed out. And not just for the survivor, but sometimes for her children as well. I think we see this. There's two examples of this. There's Pastor Andy Savage. If you rem. He admits on the stage, on the pulpit to his congregation to having a sexual relationship with a teenager. She was a senior in high school. And he apologizes for it. He calls it adultery. Instead of acknowledging, like, power dynamics and abuse and statutory rape, his Congregation gave him a standing ovation for, you know, his honesty and repentance and asking for forgiveness. That girl can never go to that church again. It's her fault, right? And then we have Pastor John Lowe. The second he comes out and he says, you know, he. He also phrases it as committed adultery. And thankfully, the woman that this happened to is in the audience. She grabs the mic and good for her. She says, you are not the victim here. You started grooming me when I was 14. You took my virginity on your office floor when I was 16 years old, and you abused me for years after that. And her husband also confirmed what she had said. He said, yes. She told me about this when we started dating. John Lowe also got a standing ovation, and his congregation formed a prayer circle around him. May I remind you that the victim of the assault was standing right there and did not get a prayer circle. Fear of disbelief is one of the most consistently cited reasons women do not report. Despite widespread public belief to the contrary, false reports of sexual assault are very rare. We see this online all the time. Women like, it's going to ruin a man's life. We have an adjudicated rapist. As president, I don't want to hear it. But also, false reports are extremely rare because it takes so much for a woman to have the courage to report in the first place. Like survivors are routinely treated with skepticism, required to prove their credibility, or interrogated. Interrogated in a way that implies they're to blame. Questions about what were you wearing? Alcohol use. Delayed reporting. I experienced a delayed reporting1. Prior relationships. Emotional responses are often framed as assessments of truth rather than reflections of trauma. Many women know either personality or through others, that reporting can feel like being placed on trial themselves. And that is exactly what happens. The only time this didn't happen to me in an incident with a police officer was one time where a guy broke into my apartment on Christmas Eve, punched me in the face. I was able to get to my phone. I called the cops and because the cops saw me bleeding and they had text messages proving I had told him not to come to my house and they had CCTV footage, he encouraged me to press charges. That is the only police officer that has ever been like, I believe you. And. And I think in part because it wasn't sexual, because I had blood all over my face. The reporting process is also frequently re. Traumatizing. Survivors may be required to recount the assault repeatedly in great to police officers, which of course is. Is traumatizing and humiliating. Medical professionals, prosecutors, attorneys, often without meaningful control over the narrative, investigations can be extremely invasive. They're very slow, they're very public. Court proceedings can take years during which survivors may be cross examined about intimate details of their lives. Well, she dated this guy and that's such a common thing of like, well she had, she's had sex before, so who's to say she didn't have sex with this guy? As if having a boyfriend in the past means you want to sleep with everyone anyways. The accused in these situation often remains free and socially protected. For many women, particularly those already coping with trauma, the emotional cost of reporting outweighs the likelihood of a just outcome. Because in the United States it is very rare to get a conviction for sexual assault. Very rare. I, I think it's one out of every. It's either 900 or a thousand actually go to jail in reported cases like that is such a small number. And we saw this. If you're not familiar with the Jesse Mack Butler case that recently is still playing out. Thankfully the parents of the girls that were assaulted, taking him to civil court. He assaulted two girls, strangled, raped, sodomized these two teenage girls. He strangled one so hard that the doctor, she had to have emergency neck surgery to save her life. And the doctor told her that she was 30 seconds away from dying. And, and Jesse's mother heard him assaulting these girls and didn't stop him. He was facing 78 years in prison. There is plenty of proof because he videoed it himself and it's on his cell phone. And the judge who's connected to OSU and his dad is connected to OSU decided to reclassify him as a youthful offender. He's getting no jail time. That's why women don't report, not because it doesn't help happen, because we know how this system plays out. Retaliation is another critical factor. Abusers often issue explicit or implicit threats. Violence, financial ruin, job loss, deportation. I'm going to post your nudes harming children or pets. These threats are not hypothetical. Especially for women that are leaving domestic violence, the most dangerous time is right after they've left. And if there's a court case going on, it makes it more dangerous. In Tennessee they just passed what's called Savannah's law, which sounds really good, but there's some problems with it. And it's a law because of the murder of a deputy sheriff. I think she was a deputy sheriff, a law enforcement official who was murdered by her ex boyfriend who had a history of domestic violence that she wasn't aware about. They passed this law that there will now be for repeat domestic violence offenders, there's going to be a registry. Sounds great. Love that. I think there should be a registry. However, the law requires that the victim agree to them being put on the registrar registry, which places the onus on the victim. It puts the victim in more danger because she's going to be worried if I put him on the registry and when he gets out of prison he's going to confine me and kill me. Or, well, maybe I'll be safer if I don't agree to put him on the registry. But if she doesn't agree to put him on the registry, then it's like, oh, was she telling the truth? Yikes. Not good. And retaliation is so real. Research shows that reporting can increase the risk of further harm, especially when protective systems fail to act swiftly, safely or effectively, which they rarely do for women in marginalized community, women of color, disabled women, LGBTQ + women, undocumented women, or women with prior involvement in or with criminal child welfare systems. Any of that. The risks are magnified. Interaction with law enforcement or courts may carry additional dangers unrelated to the salt itself. Also, cultural conditioning plays a powerful role. We're talking about all this, this history that has implanted sexual shame in women. Even if women aren't to blame, blame. Many women are raised to prioritize harmony, right? Keep the peace, don't rock the boat, protect your family reputation, avoid conflict, don't speak up, sit still, be quiet, be pretty. And also to doubt their own perception. Women are gaslit all the time about, well, this is the role of a women, or this is what marriage looks like, or this is. Women are often taught not to trust their own intuition. They are taught explicitly or implicitly that reporting sexual harm will bring shame to them them, not to the perpetrator. In religious or conservative environments, women may be instructed to forgive and remain silent and endure the suffering for the sake of unity. Especially if the abuser is a religious leader. I mean, he's just doing so much good work with his life. Can't you just forgive? In professional environments, they may be warned, formally or informally, that reporting will mark them as difficult, unreliable or unhirable, leading to the loss of their job. Importantly, many women do see seek help, but not through formal reporting. They disclose to friends, therapists, clergy, support organizations. They make decisions aimed at preserving their physical safety, stability and mental health. And for some, healing requires distance from the systems that demand proof, confrontation and public exposure, the systems that are imposing shame. Choosing not to report does not mean the assault did not happen. It often means the survivor evaluated the risk and concluded that reporting would cause further harm. There are of course again these accusations of, well, women lie. They're going to ruin a man's life. I mean, we have an entire administration of men who have had very credible accusations against them. One of them is a convicted adjudicated rapist. We have Matt Gates who there is evidence that he trafficked a 17 year old. He's not in jail. Like ruins women's lives a lot more often than it ruins A lot more women have had their lives ruined by telling the truth than men have had their lives ruined by accusations being brought up against them. Research shows that 2 to 10% of allegations are false, with most research sitting between 4 to 5% percent. Full offense intended. If you are more bothered by 5% of allegations than the 95% of the time it's true, then you are part of the problem. If women have to be perfect before men can be accountable, you are part of the problem. Again, almost all the research sits between 4 and 5%. That means that when a woman brings up domestic violence, sexual violence, 9.5 times out of 10 she's telling the truth. There's the persistence of the question again, why didn't she report? It reflects deeper cultural failure. It places responsibility on survivors rather than institutions to earn their trust. A more honest and productive question is why was reporting unsafe, ineffective or damaging? When we ask that question, patterns emerge. We get low, low conviction rates, inadequate victim support, institutional self protection. Right again, especially if that person is in a position of power or law enforcement or religious leadership. And the cultural narratives that reward silence and punish disclosure. Again, women have lost a lot more by reporting by telling the truth than men have lost by the truth being told. Understanding why women do not report assaults does not require speculation or moral judgment. It requires listening to survivors and acknowledging the structural realities in which they navigate. I think we see this most clearly with the Epstein victims. Silence in this con in this context is not consent, weakness or dispute deception. It's often a strategic response to a power imbalance. Look at all these victims. Jeffrey Epstein trafficked over a thousand girls. Over 1,000. He's dead and we still can't get the truth because of who the lie protects. If reporting is to increase, systems have to change, not the survivors. Belief must replace suspicion. Safety must replace exposure. And accountability must replace the expectation that women sacrifice their well being being in the pursuit of justice that too often never comes to them anyway. Historically in the US homes for wayward girls, if you will Girls impregnated again by relatives, teachers, employers. Older men were classified not as victims, but as wayward, promiscuous, psychologically unstable. Their own families wouldn't advocate for them. Why would those daughters who've been trained by their families that this is your fault believe they had any legal recourse? Recourse or teach their daughters. You have legal recourse if you've never been taught to believe that. If you think that saying anything is just going to bring shame and ruin your life. I'm so proud of seeing women stand up to this. The shame becomes generational. Instead of holding adult men accountable for assault on teens, the girls were dispatched to homes for unwed mothers, where the fact of sexual violence was buried under the narrative of personal traffic shame. The rape victim carried the shame, and we need to reverse that. We're starting to see that. So there's German journalist Anna Letke, who was part of the Freedom Flotilla that was stopped trying to get supplies into Palestine, into. Into Gaza. And she was raped while incarcerated by Israelis. She was raped by Israeli soldiers. She's been very public about it. She gives a very moving speech talking about her assaults where. And she's crying and her voice is cracking. And her. She's like, this isn't about me. And she's like, the shame is not my. Mine. I will not be ashamed because something was done to me. She's like, I'm here telling this story because I want people to know what is happening behind closed doors. For those of us who are trying to bring aid to Gaza, we see this with Chazelle Pellico in France. Incredible. And if you're not familiar with her case, she's. I think she's in her 60s. I believe she might be a little older. For 10 years, her husband was drugging her at night in her dinner and inviting strange men to come into the home and ran rape her. Like he had. He had sought out men to come assault her. There were hundreds of men involved. Hundreds more had been approached with this and didn't. Didn't report it. She finds out. And in France, the sexual assault cases automatically hide the identity of the victim in an effort to protect their privacy, which is, I think, a good rule. But Giselle says, absolutely not. Show my face, say my name. The shame is not mine, it's his. He should be a shame. Ashamed. He should be ashamed, not me. And it has been transformative. And it. It is changing the laws in France right now, like, they are completely changing laws around femicide, around sexual assault, around what consent means. Like they are protecting women in large part because of the stand that Giselle took. And it's so funny because the men that have been convicted are talking about, oh it's just so hard to be deemed a rapist. I want an appeal. And I'm like well you shouldn't have done done it then. Oh, too bad. So sad. All right, now let's go inside the US homes now that we've really kind of talked about historical context reporting sexual assault, the culture behind these things, the daily life in mid century maternity homes combined austere religious discipline. Again, we can justify cruelty if we use morality, strict rules and what survivors would later describe as psychological manipulation. The Washington Post 2018 investigative feature documents the experience experience of Karen Wilson. Again, Buterbaugh, but I think it's Beauterbaugh actually I'm going to correct that. Karen Wilson Buterbaugh, who sent at 16 to Florence Crittenton Home in Washington D.C. in 1965. She remembered it as a shame filled prison where mail was censored, visitors were forbidden and staff used mind control techniques to push girls toward adoption. Karen is a former adoption professional who later became an adoption reform advocate because of her experience. Her testimony describes system systemic coercion used against pregnant women in crisis, particularly young, poor, religious or so socially isolated women and girls and showcased how these practices were normalized, not framed as abuse but justified as quote best for the baby. These were especially common in private and religious adoption agencies which is why private and religious organizations need government oversight. They should not be able to wiggle out of it because they are a religious institution. These homes use the following tools to coerce and manipulate the girls. The first was isolation, independence, dependency. Pregnant women were required to sever contact with their family, their partners, friends or anyone who might support them keeping and parenting their child. Housing, food, medical care and emotional support were completely controlled by the agency creating dependence. They use coercive control where the girls needs required to survive were tied to their compliance with the program. The girls were also denied legal or even guardian representation. Number two, they used authority pressure and moral framing. Within these institutions, social workers, counselors, pastors and agency staff presented themselves as the moral and professional authority. Again, quote this is what's best in God's eyes. And quote trust me, I've been doing this a long time. Adoption was framed as the loving choice, God's will, the only responsible option. Choosing to parent was framed as selfish, immoral and harmful to the child. Keep in mind that these institutions were making tons of money via the sale, I mean adoption of these infants. So again we get into this, you don't want the pregnancy, but now she also can't keep it like it's. Again, it's about removing choice. Number three. They use gaslighting and emotional manipulation. Population girls who expressed doubt about adoption were told that they were confused, emotional, psychotic or not thinking clearly. Again, the gaslighting fear and grief were written off as temporary feelings that would disappear as soon as they surrendered the baby. Maternal bonding was reframed as dangerous attachment that needed to be suppressed. Number four, they used information control and deception. Girls were often neither not informed or misinformed intentionally about their legal right to revoke connection, consent, financial assistance available to them if they chose to parent and long term grief outcomes that were associated with relinquishment. Adoption paperwork was often presented late in the pregnancy or immediately following labor and sedation when the girls would be heavily medicated or exhausted. Number five, they use time pressure and crisis exploitation. False deadlines of you have to decide now and well the adopted parents are already attached so it's too late. Labor delivery, postpartum periods were treated as administrative windows, not recovery periods. Additionally, hospitals and staff were known to be very rough with the unwed girls and deny them pain management. Hesitation about adoption was framed as cruelty to the adopted parents. If a girl stood her ground about refusing to surrender, the homes would present her with what they called the bill for her stay because she was unwilling to give up. The bill would often be so large she would have no way to pay it and no other option but to agree to surrender. Number six, shame and fear conditioning. Girls were told that they would fail as mothers, their youth or finances made them unfit and that their child would rather present them. Past trauma or assault was weaponized as proof that they couldn't be a good parent. Again, using assault to tell a girl she can't be a good mom. Girls and young women, the the the age range, most of them were mid to upper teens, sometimes early twenties and then occasionally on the outlier a little bit further in the 20s and also very very young. There's some cases of these girls being 10, 11, 12. Number seven, erasure of maternal identity. The girls were called birth mother instead of mother and phrases like making an adoption plan replaced giving up a child psychologically reducing the resistance to surrender. And number eight was post surrender abandonment. As soon as they had that baby they immediately stopped helping. Surrender care was immediately stopped, support vanished and women were expected to move on by themselves. Long term grief, depression, PTSD and regret were minimized or completely denied. Let me give you an example from my life of this type of home situation. But before I do, it's time for our second of two mid show sponsor breaks. And again, if you don't want to hear these ads, you can sign up to be an ally starting at $4 a month on patreon.com montemater all right, as many of you know, I went to Liberty University and the Liberty Godparent Home is one of these maternal homes that is still in operation and has a lot of very questionable practices and scandal surrounding it. The Liberty Godparent Home was founded in 1982 at the height of the Moral Majority of and the Christian Right Mobilization against Abortion. Here we go. And remember, Jerry Falwell didn't preach his first anti abortion sermon until 1978 when they realized that segregation was no longer popular to make white people vote. They now decided abortion was the issue when the both the Southern Baptist Convention and the Dallas Theological Seminary supported the the passage of Roe, believing that women did have autonomy over their own bodies. When that became politically inconvenient, convenient, they changed their mind. So Falwell, who had helped build the movement that promoted a strict sexual ethic one man for one woman for one lifetime. Yes, his son is the one with the pool boy scandal and no sex outside of marriage and it framed maternity homes. He presented the Godparent home as a compassionate pro life alternative to abortion for unwed mothers. From the beginning, the Liberty Home was part of a broader ecosystem that still exists. Thomas Roy Baptist Church and Liberty University provided the religious and institutional background backdrop. Family Life Services and other faith based adoptions agencies worked closely with the home to place infants with white evangelical middle and upper class couples. The home housed girls and young women from roughly the ages of 12 to 21, often sent there by their parents, pastors or Christian schools. A stay included housing, Bible studies, life skills class and crucially eligibility for a scholarship to Liberty University if they completed the program and placed their babies up for adoption. Step 1 Financial exploitation and coercion. On paper, the program claimed to have to support each individual in making either a parenting or adoption plan. In practice, survivors say the institution treated adoption not as one of one option among many, but as the expected proof of repentance for their sin of sex outside of marriage. Former residents interviewed for the onery podcast Liberty Lost, which I highly recommend, as well as interviews for Ms. Magazine, the independent St. Louis Public Radio and the Religion Disco Dispatches describe a remarkably consistent environment, isolation and surveillance. Residents recount being far from home, with limited access to phones, the Internet or outside information. Staff would monitor their calls, controlled visits and restricted their relationships. Even with boyfriends who were fathers of the baby who wanted to parent with the girls. There was mandatory religious programming. Girls were required to attend church services, Bible studies and group devotions where their pregnancies were framed as evidence of moral fear failure. This sounds exactly like the laundries. It's exactly the same. A former staff member told Ms. Magazine that the guilt and shame were tools of the trade, explaining that residents were taught they had violated purity pledges and now needed redemption. There was a lot of disappearing girls and hidden grief. Survivor Tony Pog Popham. Sorry, Tony Popham. There we go. Sent to the home from St. Louis after becoming pregnant at 12 and arriving there at 13 in just 1991, recalled that you don't form a whole lot of relationships because the girls just disappear once they have their. Their babies. She remembered not being allowed to see what happened after birth, only that friends were suddenly gone. She also recalled staff prayer over her while she was in active labor, urging her towards adoption as she's laboring because she had explicitly chosen a month prior to keep her child with the support of her family. Residents over the last few years reported being told that God wanted their babies to go to quote more deserving Christian couples framing adoption not just as an option, but a moral or spiritual obligation. Here's how. How you can prove to us that you've repented. Some women who wanted to parent were allegedly subjugated to emotional and psychological pressure by staff and were denied legal representation. They use systemic pressure toward adoption. The journalist TJ Raphael, after interviewing multiple residents and staff, describes a pattern that when the girls expressed any desire to parent, they were walked through parenting plans structured to convince them that they were unfit and that the only loving choice was adoption by a married couple. Christian couple. One former resident, Abby Johnson, entered the home in 2008 at age 16. Raised in evangelical purity culture, just like me, she was given jewelry, a ring, just like me. And she told and told that she had promised her virginity to her father, which is so gross. Well, she became pregnant and was sent to Liberty's home rather than being supported to parent. Once inside, she says she was isolated, shamed and told that God's plan for her was to give her baby to an affluent married Christian copy couple while she received a full scholarship to Liber Liberty. That is so gross, so foul, so disingenuine, so not, oh, stressful. For Abby and others, the message was clear. Pregnancy was Proof of female failure. Adoption was the path to redemption. Education and a future were contingent on surrendering their children. And I take personal offense to this. Not just because like when I used to go do my training runs, I was running marathons at the time. I used to run by the God parent home, not realizing what was going on in there, but also because one of the girls that is part of the Wondery podcast, she's one of the people mentioned there is my best friends from college little sister. So like this happened to people like I'm close to like. Nowhere in these accounts do we see comparable scrutiny or spiritual discipline aimed at the men involved. Again it's, it's just like we have not changed since 1800s. Before Britain, many of the men were older and held more power, often to the point of abuse. The scarlet letter was attached firmly to the girls bodies, not to the men's actions. The central dispute around the Liberty godparent home is not whether it provided food or shelter or classes. Survivors acknowledge these basics. The conflict is over what those supports were for and what was demanded in exchange. This was not a gift, this was not a service, it was not a charity. It was a trade. It was an ex and it was an expectation. We are going to buy, buy your submission, we're going to buy your complacency and we're going to buy your child. Investigative pieces and survivor testimony highlight several coercive dynamics. Again, these scholarships are tied to adoption. Yeah, you can get a full ride scholarship but you have to give up your baby. When college may be the only route out of economic poverty for some of these girls that incentive effectively turns the baby into the price of a future. Obviously there's financial strings attached. Abby's mother later explained that the family's insurance would not cover delivery cost. But the godparent home promised to cover expenses on the condition that Abby completed the program. Leaving early could mean reimbursing the home for thousands of dollars, creating enormous pressure on both the parents and the daughters to stay and comply. So they're manipulating the families often too. Then of course there's the religious manipulation. I mean this is liberty. Survivors describe being told that God wanted them to re. God wanted them to redeem their sin by giving the baby to a more deserving family. And that good Christian mothers were married, financially stable and living in a two parent household. Doesn't that sound familiar? Their own desire to parent was framed as selfish and sinful. There was a lack of genuine alternatives given to the girls. Former residents say staff did not offer meaningful help accessing housing programs, food stamps or Medicaid that might have made parenting possible. In some cases, they say, their phones and Internet access were tightly controlled, making it difficult to research options independently. They were also explicitly lying lied to about financial options. Reproductive justice scholars note that this is coercion, even if no one is physically forced to sign a signature. When a teenager is hundreds of miles from home, dependent on an institution for food, medical care and schooling, and told that both God and her parents expect adoption, the choice to surrender a baby is heavily scripted. Liberty and the godparent home of course, reject these characterizations. That's not real. Pool boy scandal in response to Liberty Lost and the related coverage, the organization issued statements insisting it had since 1982 empowered and informed parenting and voluntary adoption with compassion and care, and denounced the investigations as irresponsible journalism. It should be noted that the home let its state foster care license expire in 2022, allowing it to continue operating as a private religious program without standard child welfare oversight. We can't have the state poking in to make sure we doing what we say we're doing. Adoption services connected to the home are still subject to licensing, but state officials have been non committal on investigating past allegations because Liberty University owns Lynchburg and they're too powerful. There's no problem if we don't look into it. It's not real, guys. See, I'm just closing my eyes. I can't see anything. The documentary record Record now shows detailed on the record testimonies from multiple former residents spanning the 1990s through the 2000s. Till now. A former staffer who described guilt and shame as standard tools corroborating reporting from multiple sources that this is a consistent problem in the Liberty godparent home. The godparent home unfortunately does not exist in isolation from Liberty university's broader culture. Culture which is so toxic. But in the last decade, the university it's like. And what I mean by that is that in the last decade alone, like how Liberty as a culture addresses sex and sexuality and women, the university has faced multiple investigations. Multiple investigations and lawsuits alleging it mishandled sexual assault, discouraged victims from reporting and weaponized its strict liberty way code, which is the code of conduct against women who came forward. And they absolutely have. When I was in college, college there, there was a girl who was gang raped by a bunch of starters from one of the teams and she was basically expelled when she tried to report it because those athletes were too valuable. Some key points from recent cases include a federal lawsuit by 12 women alleging Liberty's policies made sexual assault more likely and that the honor code banning extramarital sex, alcohol, or even being alone with a guy was used to threaten or punish survivors who reported assaults. Liberty settled that lawsuit in 2022 and announced policy and security changes because you see how like the code of conduct is you. You can't be alone with a man if something happens and you get assaulted. Well, why were you alone with the man? I don't know of any instance. And there was multiple sexual assaults on Liberty's campus. There still are. I don't know of a single instance where a man was held accountable. Not one. 2021 ProPublica investigation documenting how women who reported rape were warned they could be disciplined for honor code violations like drinking or being in a man's dorm. Again, the rape's not the problem. Her being in the room, room is. Or having a drink. Oh, that's way more serious than rape. A 2024, 2025 Department of Education investigation found that Liberty failed to comply with the Clery Act's campus crime reporting requirements and that officials discourage reporting sexual assaults, resulting in a $14 million fine and federal monitoring. Taken together, this evidence sketches a consistent pattern. Sexual behavior and pregnancy are treated as primarily a female moral failing, while institutional systems routinely minimize, conceal or mishandle male violence and misconduct conduct. The Liberty Godparent Home fits into that pattern precisely. It's designed to deal with the visible consequence of sex right pregnancy by disciplining, hiding and ultimately separating her from her child. While the men involved, whether it's a careless boyfriend, an accident, or a criminal abuser, are almost completely absent from the story. These dynamics are not a closed chapter. They have intensified in the wake of the Supreme Court 2022 Dobbs decision. Ms. Magazine, drawing on the New York Times data, reports that the number of maternity homes in the US has has grown by 40% in three years. This is happening again and it's happening right now. KFF Health News and data in the Virginia independent estimate over 500 maternity homes nationwide and nearly 23% increase in their numbers since DOBs, with about 80% of these being faith based. Again, morality justifies abuse. Many states are now directing public funds, your tax dollars, tens of millions of dollars towards abortion alternatives like crisis pregnancy centers and maternity homes. Homes that are abusing women, coercing them and trafficking their children. Your tax dollars, my tax dollars are going to. That tax dollars should not be going to religious institutions. Full stop. End of sentence. Period. Liberty God Parent Home is still operating and positioned as a Flagship within this network of new homes, its former director has served as the leadership council of the National Maternity Housing Coalition, a program of Heartbeat International, one of the world's largest anti abortion organizations. Because of course, in this environment, the old double standards that we have talked about for an hour and 42 minutes, because this is one of my longer episodes, are still here. Women's sexuality is policed. Men's responsibility is minimized. Pregnant teens are removed from their communities, lectured about purity, pressured into adoption. While there is no structural attention to the fathers, including men who may be significantly older or who assaulted these women and girls, support is conditional to compliance. Housing, medical care and scholarships are offered, but tied to adoption decisions so they can sell your baby to a white family. Adherence to honor codes and silence is about what happens inside these homes. And again, a lot of these homes now are also going back to the same thing, where for the most part it's only going to be white girls in there. The language of mercy masks structural cruelty. Leaders speak of saving babies and empowering women. Yet the system routinely withholds the very support. Child care, housing vouchers, cash assistance, legal representation that would allow you to young mother to not only make a knowledgeable decision, but also to keep her child. Separation is framed as godly sacrifice. Keeping the baby is cast as selfish. Survivors like Abby Johnson and Tony Popham are now publicly challenging these narratives. Again, the shame is not mine. They describe the long term trauma of coerced adoption, the shame that haunted them for decades, and their growing realization that they were punished not for being bad parents or bad people, but for violating a narrow script of white heterosexual, married purity. Their stories expose the core contradiction of institutions like the Liberty Godparent Home. They claim to defend life and family, but routinely separate mothers and babies. They preach accountability, but overwhelmingly enforce it on the girls and women, not the men or the institutions that harm them in the first place. In the US homes both decades, in past decades and today, young women were typically admitted in their seventh month of pregnancy. They required to use assumed names. They even with one another, they couldn't use their real name to preserve secrecy. Phone calls and visits were heavily restricted, if out at all. Leaving the grounds often meant wearing a fake wedding ring provided by the staff to signal that they were respectably pregnant wives. Almost there. I'm almost done. Some homes included compulsory labor. Laundry work, for instance. Sound familiar? Cleaning or assisting in nurseries framed as character building and repayment for charity. Others focused on regimented schedules of chores, religious services and mandatory counseling. Counseling sessions. Sociologist Prudence Rains and other scholars describe these institutions as total environments organized to reshape the girl's sense of self, emphasizing her alleged unfitness for motherhood, her sin, and her duty to relinquish the child. A survivor quoted by Fessler recalled, our days were spent talking about pregnancy. Nobody gave us classes. They did not want us to bond with the baby. The child was always called the baby. Calling the infant the baby instead of my baby was a deliberate, deliberate tactic to prevent attachment. Another woman, Janet Mason Ellerby, remembered that there was never an adult who told me I had the right to keep my child. Instead, caseworkers repeatedly insisted that keeping the baby would ruin both of their lives, rendering the child a, quote, bastard and the girl unemployable and unmarriageable. Formally, adoptions were supposed to be voluntary, with mother signing consent forms. In practice, it was systemic coercion. Historian Ricky Solinger's Wake Up Little Susie explores how demand for healthy white infants, combined with post war pronatalist ICE ideology and limited welfare support for single mothers, turned maternity homes into pipelines for adoption agencies. I highly recommend the reading, by the way. Fesler's the Girls who Went Away, which is. It is a brutal read, but it's really good, similarly chronicles how families, clergy, doctors, and social workers pressured, bullied, and coerced young women to relinquish their children, often withholding information about financial support or legal rights. A 2018 Washington Post article drawing on Fesler's work noted that by the mid-1960s, more than 80% of women who entered maternity homes surrendered their babies for adoption, often after being systemically denied options to keep them. The homes routinely withheld information about public assistance or family support that might have allowed them to parent. They separated mothers from infants immediately after birth, often preventing any contact and telling the mothers it was for the best. They misrepresented the law suggested that once papers were signed, there was no possibility of revocation when the mother does have that right. They pathologized resistance, framing any desire to keep the baby as proof of immaturity, neurosis, and selfishness. In some cases, survivors alleged that staff resorted to more extreme measures, such as heavy sedation during labor, signing consents while medicated, or telling women falsely that their babies had died. Although precise numbers are impossible to establish because these homes intentionally hit a lot of those records, inquiries in other countries have documented such abuses in similar maternity home systems. These are bad. Okay, this. This system is not great for the women, the emotional consequences were profound. Anne Fessler writes that many felt they had surrendered control of the most decision they might ever make to authorities who did not have their interests at heart, and that their lifelong shame shifted from being pregnant to having giving away or not fought hard enough for my child. The question of how these homes handled pregnancies resulting from rape and incest exposes the system's deepest injustice. Oral histories and case studies show that girls impregnated by fathers, stepbrothers, stepfathers, brothers, uncles, or older men in positions of power were treated essentially as the same as girls pregnant by boyfriends. A dissertation on adolescent sexuality in the Midwest, we talked about this earlier, between 1946 and 1963, notes that even when pregnancy resulted from rape and incest, the girls were labeled as promiscuous and sent away while the male perpetrator remained in the home or the community without facing prosecution. Scholars of child sexual abuse point out that intrafamilial abuse, especially incest, has historically been the least reported and most hidden form of violence, shielded by family silence and social taboo. Historical data are patchier, but the strong consensus is that mid 20th century reporting and conviction rates were even lower than they are today, especially for assaults involving acquaintances or family members. Like when we see now and we look around it, it feels like there's just so much like rampant pedophilia, and we can't believe people are protecting it, and we can't. We've been doing it as a culture a long time. This has been going on forever. And people have always protected them. The reason that there's so much pushback now is because. Because people want us to keep going along, to get along. Just, just don't talk about it. She'll be fine. She'll be fine. Just don't talk about it. And I'm glad that women and young girls are choosing to refuse that. Within that system, sending a pregnant girl to a maternity home became a way to solve the problem without confronting male violence. The girl's body bore the evidence and the blame. The man's actions disappeared into family secrecy. And we all know those families, and maybe our family is one of them that still lets that one uncle come to Thanksgiving. Some survivors interviewed by Fesler and others describe being coerced into denying that assault occurred or being told explicitly the disclosing rape would not change the expectation that they carry the pregnancy and surrender the baby, which is just unspeakable cruelty. In this sense, paternity homes functioned as instruments of what we might now call victim silencing. The institution managed the visible consequence of the assault, while Reinforcing the cultural culture of impunity for the the insailant. When I tell you that Roe was not just about abortion, it was about autonomy, legal protections. Without Roe, we get no legal protections from being fired because of getting married or getting pregnant. It was because of Roe that those laws passed. We get no second wave feminism allowing us the same financial access like bank accounts and credit cards as men. That's what Roe gave us. It wasn't just about abortion. If you have no governance over your own body, you have no recourse to whatsoever. Several forces converged in the late 1960s and early 70s to undermine the maternity home model. The introduction and wider availability of birth control and contraceptives. Right? Like if we want to prevent unwanted pregnancy, contraception. Gradual liberalization of some state abortion laws in the late 1960s and of course Roe in 1973. Changing attitudes towards female sexuality, marriage, single motherhood. Influenced by the women's movement and broader cultural shifts. Growing recognition of the psychological harm experienced by mothers separated from their their influence infants through coercive adoption, non relative influence, non relative infant adoptions declined sharply after 1970. Many homes for unwed mothers closed, merged or reinvented themselves as broader social service agencies serving pregnant and parenting teens, foster youth or survivors of abuse, rather than operating explicitly as adult adoption pipelines. Pipelines. The National Florence Critten House Mission, for example, restructured over time. And today's Critten affiliated agencies present themselves as advocates and support providers for girls and young women while acknowledging the troubled legacy of their past, which is important. They can do a lot of good, but they have to acknowledge where they went wrong. And yet, even as maternity home system shrank, new stigmas arose. From the 1970s onward, political rhetoric about quote welfare queens and quote broken families targeted unmarried mothers, but especially black mothers as symbols of irresponsibility and social decay. Again, we can just not tolerate putting any of the responsibility on the men when a man in theory could impregnate a woman every day of the year. A woman can only carry one pregnancy a year, but we can't anyways. The focus remains squarely on the morality and the behavior of the mothers, not the conduct or the responsibility of the fathers. In recent decades, survivors of homes for unwed mothers have organized, written memoirs and created an oral history to document their experiences. Works like Ann Fessler's the Girls who Went Away, which is amazing job, Joss Shireyer's Death by Adoption and Karen Buer's research in the Baby Scoop era have reframed these women not as shameful figures who gave up their children, but as victims of coordinated social coercion. Internationally, governments like Australia, Ireland, Scotland and parts of Canada have issued formal apologies for forced adoption and confinement of unmarried mothers in maternity homes and related institutions. In the United States, there's been no single national apology, but there have been apologies and acknowledgement from some churches and agencies and professional associations. Negotiations, as well as ongoing calls for broader truth telling and redress, which I agree with. This has seen a sharp decrease, however, since the Dobbs decision, because now we're building those homes right back up. For many women, the trauma is lifelong. One mother quoted by Fessler described feeling like an unwilling accomplice to the kidnapping of my own child, forced to live with both the loss and the sense that she had somehow failed to prevent it. Others speak of decades of silence, depression, complicated relationships and unresolved resolved grief. Adoptees, too have challenged the secrecy of sealed records and the idea that their adoptions were a pure win win outcome. Advocates argue that sealed birth records and a refusal to confront coercive practices perpetuate the same shame and control that underpinned the homes themselves. The history of homes for unwed mothers in the United States reveals a system built on gender double standards and institutionalized shame. From the first rescue homes of the baby scoop era to the maternity homes, these institutions function less as neutral charities and more as mechanisms for enforcing moral order. A very particular, narrow, evangelical, white focused moral order. Female sexuality was police because you can see a pregnancy. Male behavior was shielded even if it's a rapist. Rape and incest victims were treated as problems to be hidden, guilty of their own assault. And adoption was framed as moral rescue, even when achieved through deception, intimidation and the withholding of rights. Understanding this history is not just about an expose of past abuse abuses, but context for the current debate on reproductive rights we have right now. All of this is happening right now. Crisis pregnancy centers, adoption ethics, the ongoing under prosecution of sexual violence, the lack of choice for women. Now the same underlying questions remain. Whose sexuality is controlled? Whose choices are honored? Whose violence is excused? And whose bodies bear the consequences? Because the reality is that with the abortion bans, these maternity homes are opening back up in ban states. This is happening again. And one of the reasons is because adoption agencies are largely controlled by religious institutions who stand to profit by forcing young girls, well, restricting choices for young girls to either get an abortion or to have access to contraception so that they can funnel these girls into these systems so that they can profit off of trafficking their babies. It's A major problem that religious institutions are profiting off abuse and human trafficking via adoption and are often using our tax dollars to do it. Religious based adoption institutions in the US sit at the intersection of genuine care and documented harm. For more than a century, churches and faith aligned nonprofits have operated maternity homes, adoption agencies and foster care contracting organizations with the stated purpose of quote, saving children and supporting families at their worst. And history shows multiple eras where worst is not rare. Religious authority, social shame and money created conditions where women were controlled, children retreated like commodities and adoption slid into coercion, fraud and and trafficking. Wherever you have residential institutions with strict rules, weak oversight and vulnerable residents like girls, pregnant teens, poor women, children, abuse becomes more likely, especially when the staff are treated as unquestionable moral authorities. Again, if you can stamp God on it, you can justify a lot of abuse. Historical maternity homes and child placement institutions. Again, so much documentation of humiliation, psychological abuse, isolation, surveillance, coercive discipline, neglect of medical and mental illness, health needs and retaliation when girls refuse the adoption plan. The US has a documented history of child placement schemes that look like trafficking children taken through fraud, coercion. The most notorious example of this is Georgia Tan in the Tennessee Children's Home Society right here in Tennessee. It was an adoption placement empire that according to state investigations and documentation involved kidnapping and illegal child procurement. Procurement, while presenting itself as a charitable work, they were literally, literally body snatching. Tennessee's own state archive hosts investigative scrapbooks connected to the 1950s babies for sale scandal. Right. If you're going to make money off selling babies, what a better way than to create a system where when young girls get pregnant, they get sent to your home. Modern trafficking dynamics can look different. It's not always a single mastermind, but a market where demand specifically for white infants meets vulnerable supply like women and crisis. And with money changing hands when women don't have options and having a, a, a pregnancy or a baby that you can't feed, you can't care for, that prevents you from education, prevents you from the workforce and someone offers to buy them from you. We're, we're now in a coercive state. Private Adoptions can top $65,000 times. Investigation into America's private adoption industry details allegations of profit driven practices, coercive pressure on mothers and financial structures that can incentivize, incentivize, quote closing the adoptions like they're closing a sale. Another trafficking adjacent scandal is rehoming. See informal transfer of adopted children to new caretakers outside of the child welfare system. Reuters investigated documented Online marketplaces where children were effectively advertised and handed to strangers with little oversight. A dynamic child safety experts can warn, can expose kids to exploitation and abuse. Of course, this matters in religious context because some of these informal transfer networks have leveraged, quote, Christian community trust language, Christianese, a good family, a member of the church, a godly home as a substitute for having legal safeguards to make sure those children are being handed to someone safe. The core issue is the same though. Children become a movable asset in an adult driven system where profit is happening. Most religious adoption agencies and maternity homes operate as nonprofits officially. But non profit does not mean no money incentive. It means that profits aren't distributed to shareholders. Yet revenue can still drive behavior through stock salaries, bonuses, expansion, fundraising and institutional prestige, as well as donations from those rich white parents. In private domestic infant adoption, money can be large. Again, multiple mainstream adoption costs describe typical private adoption expenses in the tens of thousands of dollars. And this is where commodification creeps in. The system operating budget depends on completed placements. You have to get the kid to them. It creates structural pressure to secure relinquishment and to match babies with paying for clients. Scholars have explicitly described how adoption can take on market characteristics, demand scarcity, transaction cost and financial transfers, raising predictable ethical risks. This is a human life. This isn't a, you know, refrigerator. This doesn't mean that adoptive parents are buying the baby in like a strict simplistic sense sense, or that most agencies are intentionally coerced. It just means that high demand, high cost systems with no oversight generate bad intentions incentives, especially around low regulation and when they're religious institutions. Because when this is combined with moral messaging, low regulation, because they can, they can then claim if you try to regulate it or you try to supervise, they're going to say well you're infringing on my religious liberty. And then it becomes a civil rights issue. Religious adoption and foster care agencies have also been flashpoints for discrimination, sometimes explicitly permitted by state policy. Clear example of this is the ongoing litigation and reporting around faith based agencies refusing services to federal families who do not share their religion. In Tennessee, an appellate court revived a lawsuit by a Jewish couple who alleged they were denied services by a state funded Christian agency because the state refused to allow them to adopt because they're Jewish. The Supreme Court's decision in Fulton versus the city of Philadelphia in 2021 sided with Catholic Catholic social services after Philadelphia stopped contracting with the agency for refusing to certify same sex sex couples, illustrating the legal tensions between non discrimination rules and religious exemptions. Race enters this on multiple levels. One, who gets targeted for relinquishment, often tied to poverty and structural race. Racism, like poor girls, are getting much more coercion. They're much more at risk in this system. Two, who gets approved as adoptive parents, mostly white. And three, where children of color are placed. And four, this is also where we see that, like, if you are a person of color, you're much more likely to have your children taken away from you for a minor offense versus a white parent who has a documented history of abuse. The Multi Ethnic Placement act, the MEPA, was created amid concern about racial discrimination and delays in placement. And the debate continues about how racism affects both children and prospective parents across the system. Religious agencies can intensify this when they define across eras and denominations, the same risk factors occur. So we have these again, religious closed institutions with moral authority, weak external oversight. There's the economic incentives, the vulnerability of the children and mothers, the moral narrative. Again, if I can stamp God on it, I can get away with a lot. And the discretion to discriminate against what they consider undesirable parents, whether they're undesirable because of religion, race, sexuality, or their marital status. We see that in, in Tennessee where a woman was denied care. She's been with her partner for 15 years, but they're not legally married and she was denied prenatal care because she's not not married. When these align and she's an adult woman, like this is not a teenager. So it's, it's all coming back full circle. And it's very scary when these aligned scandals become predictable. Coerced surrender, falsified consent, baby selling behavior, abusive residential conditions, slave labor, discriminatory gatekeeping, and child safety failures. And one of the things that I wanted to read was a story that was submitted by one of our listeners around how this kind of morality shift shaping leads to the abuse of women that can cost them either their entire lives or a large portion of their lives. When we don't hold men accountable, when we put so much weight on girls, even the conversation we have right now around purity, culture, trad wives, all of this, it was a really great story. I asked her permission to share it and I'm very excited. She says, probably the best place to start. I left my hyper conservative, controlling Pastor, husband of 27 years in the spring of 2020, 21. I was raised by broken people and at 20, I was, quote, saved into a conservative evangelical Baptist faith. I was groomed by the single pastor who was 17 years my senior I married after only a four month courtship and I had five beautiful, amazing, brilliant and kind children. I was home with them. I was a good trad wife. I was fully invested in this life and it was my passion, my genuine truth and identity. I was alienated from my family and only real Christian influences were allowed that included books, music, etc. I was fully immersed and with the certainty I had in this movement was euphoric. I studied in seminary, taught Bible study, was engaged in ministry while being a dedicated wife and devoted mother. Serving under my husband, I baked all our bread, made homemade yogurt. I was on several volunteer boards. I was fully convinced in the truth before me and I cannot tell you how much I treasured it. So true that certainty is feels so safe. Life. This life made me safe. It made me important. Somehow turned into the means by which I could, with my exhaustion and pain, merit, value. Then it moved also to being a system by which everyone is measured and I can evaluate myself. This went on for years as my husband would not work and began to spiral into addiction and extreme ideologies. I started to recognize the issues and this was the beginning of the end. After my separation, I maintained my conservative views, not pursuing divorce and no chance of of remarriage. My husband, after leaving his pulpit in 2007 had still refused to find work. 20 years later. I went out and found minimum wage jobs. Three of them I went back to finish my degree. I graduated from my undergrad at 40, started my career, worked my way up to management. My husband could no longer hide his alcohol and drug addiction and I. I am so ashamed. I should have known better. Opened my first bank account at 4:44. Anyway, fast forward to the separation. My faith began to disintegrate. It was terrifying. Deconstruction was possibly the hardest thing I endured. When my marriage ended, I started this message with thank you because I see your reels and I know I'm not wrong, that I am doing what is good. And if a creator is out there watching how I relate to my everything and everyone, she would be proud. I want you to know that I'm thriving. My career is fulfilling. My home is warm, surrounded by beauty. My kids are loving and kind. We are so close and they are close and supportive of each other. I have found freedom, peace and the most pure passionate love I've ever known. I work in community with people with dementia. I have more grace, compassion and humility than ever before. And I am grateful for the few things that I did well and I'M more grateful for the myriad of circumstances that led me to my joy. I am happy. Oh, I just. I'm not going to give her name here. I just want to say, Ms. Ma', Am, I'm so proud of you for. For what you did. It's so hard to leave a system of security and certainty, even if it's. Even if it does cost you your exhaustion and your worth and your value when you're like, oh, but I know that this is true. And because it's safe, this works for me. What a brave decision. I'm so proud of you. I'm so happy for your children to have a mother like you. I am so glad you have your own bank account. I love that. And listen, y', all, I know that this episode was long. That's it for today. What a journey. Until we truly have equal accountability, abuse will continue. And without bodily autonomy, there is no freedom. Thank you to Seeger and Phoenix Studios, Lara Battles and Amanda at Palette and to everyone who supports me on Patreon for making the show show possible again. If you'd like ad free episodes or to support my work, you can subscribe@patreon.com montemater and I will see you next week on Flipping Tables. This time of year, everyone talks about going dry. But at Athletic Brewing Co. We're skipping that because we prefer going athletic, which isn't dry at all. From crisp goldens to hoppy IPAs and limited releases is in between, you'll find something that fits your style. Every single nonalcoholic brew is packed with flavor and the same craft experience you love. So yeah, you could call it dry, but there's really nothing dry about it. Find your new favorite near beer at athleticbrewing. Com Athletic Brewing Co. Fit for all times.