Butterbox Babies is a 1992 book by Bette L. Cahill describing life in the 1930s at the Ideal Maternity Home in East Chester, Nova Scotia, Canada.
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The Ideal Maternity Home, a home for unwed pregnant mothers, was operated by William Peach Young, an unordained Seventh-day Adventist minister and chiropractor, and his wife Lila Gladys Young, a midwife. They opened "The Life and Health Sanitarium", later called the Ideal Maternity Home in February 1928.
From 1928 to 1945 the home took in many unwed pregnant mothers and arranged adoptions for the infants. However, it faced serious allegations of profiteering from the fees charged to female residents and adoptive parents, and for the home's high rates of infant mortality which were later proven to be caused by starvation. Any baby deemed not perfect (moles etc) were starved to death and buried in butter boxes. [1]
The book's title is a reference to the "butter boxes": these were small mitered pine boxes, used as coffins for the babies they murdered who were buried in the yard of the home.
The book was made into a 1995 film starring Susan Clark, Peter MacNeill, Catherine Fitch, and Michael Riley, and directed by Don McBrearty.