Baby-Selling Business Thrived Unmonitored
The photographs showed smiling, happy toddlers. The advertisements offered “charming babies for adoption . . . free of social disease.”
From the late 1920s to the late 1940s, as many as 80 infants filled the cribs of the Ideal Maternity Home. Prospective parents flocked from all over Canada and the United States to a remote seaside village in Nova Scotia to pick one.
In an age when contraception and abortion were illegal in Canada and the stigma of having a child out of wedlock was enormous, the home sold secrecy to unmarried mothers.
For couples wanting a child, the home offered quick, easy adoptions with few questions. Owners Lila and William Young built a niche market among Jewish families in New York and New Jersey, in particular. Some couples said they paid thousands of dollars to the home’s lawyers. Others made substantial donations to the home, although officials who spent years trying to shut it down had difficulty tracing exact figures. Adoptive parents were reluctant to admit paying for a baby.
Each birth mother was charged a $25 delivery fee, plus several dollars a day for room and board. For another $300 she was told she could leave the newborn for adoption if it was white and, according to the contract, not “birthmarked, crippled or deformed.”
Up to 1,500 children are believed to have been adopted from the home over two decades. There are no numbers for those who died, but suspected neglect was long an issue with Canadian health and welfare officials.
“My chief concern at the moment is this wretched Ideal Maternity Home,” Nora Lea, acting executive director of the Canadian Welfare Council, wrote in 1945. “I wish a tidal wave would come in from the Atlantic and engulf it.”
The problem was not that the home was operating outside the law, but that there were no laws to control it.
Eventually legislation overhauled the adoption and welfare system by requiring stricter licensing of maternity homes, tougher monitoring of adoptive parents and tighter control of immigration.
The Ideal Maternity Home closed in 1948.
