Before Roe v. Wade, when a young, unmarried girl got pregnant, she was often sent away – to a place called a maternity home. There, she would give birth in secret, surrender her baby, and return to her life as if nothing had happened. That shadowed history is the setting of Grady Hendrix's latest horror novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. Today on The Sunday Story from Up First, Ayesha Rascoe talks with Hendrix about the truth that inspired his timely fiction — and what happens when people with little choice, discover a new kind of power.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. You're probably familiar with the baby boom. After World War II, there was a huge spike in fertility rates. But not all of those babies were wanted. At the time, abortion was mostly illegal in the U.S.
And so that baby boom, it also led to something that people have called the baby scoop era. Yes, that's actually what they called it. Before Roe v. Wade, there was a period from 1943 to 1973 when many unmarried women and girls were forced to give birth and put their babies up for adoption.
The exact numbers are hard to know because these births often happened in secret in places called maternity homes. Grady Hendrix is an acclaimed horror writer, and he made this tragic history the setting of his latest novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. It's a book that in some ways reverberates with the present. Today, things are obviously different from the years before Roe v. Wade.
Abortion is still a protected right in 21 states and the District of Columbia, and there are abortion pills now that can cross state lines. But with the fall of Roe and the resulting abortion restrictions, some of this history, it echoes. Hendrix's novel is a spellbinding work that explores what happens when people who have been stripped of power suddenly gain it.
My conversation with Grady Hendrix when we come back. Stay with us. Grady, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Okay, so set this up for us. The story starts in the early 1970s with a pregnant 15-year-old girl, her very angry father at the wheel. They're speeding from Alabama to Florida.
And there is so much judgment at this time for unwed mothers in general, but especially for teenage unwed mothers. Tell us who the girl is and where her father is taking her.
Her name is Neva. She's 15 and she's pregnant. And she's being taken to a maternity home in Florida. And there were about 190 of these across America. You know, they were around for a long time, but their peak was really from about 1940, 45 to 1973 when Roe versus Wade passed. And this is where if your daughter got pregnant and didn't have a ring on her finger... you would send her.
She'd spend the last trimester, usually, of her pregnancy in hiding, have her baby. Her baby would be taken from her and put up for adoption. And she'd return home with some kind of cover story you tell the family or the neighbors. Oh, she, you know, visited her aunt this summer or she went to work on her French in Chicago.
And she would be expected to never talk about or think about her baby again.
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