Mother and Baby Home

For the form of supportive housing provided to pregnant women in the United States, see Maternity home.

A Mother and Baby Home was a form of maternity home for unmarried pregnant women and girls in the UK, the Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, Belgium and the Netherlands. The earliest institution to support unwed mothers was the first Magdalen Hospital, built in London in 1772. Penitentiaries, which were established later in an attempt to reform prostitutes to pay for the "sin" of having given birth to an illegitimate child, treated the residents as inmates, and made them undertake hard physical labour; by contrast, early Dutch homes attempted to re-educate prostitutes on religious principles. During the 20th century, British Mother and Baby Homes moved towards providing unmarried women with accommodation both before and after they had given birth. In many (but not all) cases, the child was taken from the mother for adoption, and she then returned to resume her life without ever revealing to her family or the local community that she had become pregnant. Residents in Mother and Baby Homes were often given chores. The homes could be shabby, restrictive, unsupportive towards young mothers, or intrusive.

Following the foundation of the National Health Service in 1948, unmarried mothers in the UK became eligible for the same benefits as were given to married parents, benefits that could be supplemented by the newly-established National Assistance Board. Until 1964, Mother and Baby Homes there were self-regulated, and many were run by church bodies. By the late 1960s, homes were catering for 20% of extra-marital pregnancies. By this time a change in the attitude towards unmarried mothers was taking place in the UK and elsewhere. Since the 1980s, single mothers have been more generally accepted, and Mother and Baby Homes no longer exist.

Mother and Baby Homes were founded in Ireland in the 1920s as a way to secretly house unmarried mothers and their children. Some operated as workhouses, forcing the women in them to do exhausting and unpaid work. Some mothers and their children were physically and mentally abused by the nuns who ran the homes. In the Republic of Ireland, the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and certain related matters was established in 2015 by the Irish government to investigate deaths and misconduct from the 1920s to the end of the 1980s in 18 Mother and Baby Homes. The Irish government formally apologised for its part in the scandal in January 2021.

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