Dirty secret no longer
>> Elizabeth House offers comfort, counselling and education to young mothers

by NOEMI LOPINTO

Once, it was called “going to an aunt’s.” Young girls disappeared from their communities and walked through the doors of an institution, carrying a small suitcase and a secret. They or their families paid between $5 and $8 a day to be put on a regimen of cooking and cleaning classes, prayer and letter-writing until the physical evidence of their “confinement” was gone. When the babies were born their mothers had already signed a contract relinquishing all rights to them.

Shame created institutions whose sole purpose was to hide unwanted pregnancy, and created a framework which reinforced it. The hospice Les Soeurs de la Misericorde, located on Bélanger on the Plateau, was administrated by the Grey Nuns. Between 1949 and 1956, approximately 2,700 so-called illegitimate children were born there. Two-thirds of mothers gave their children up for adoption. Les Soeurs was a place where girls knew each other by pseudonyms—”humiliane” or “fructueuse”—and where everybody wore the same drab grey uniform. Young pregnant girls were submitted to intelligence and personality tests, and at the height of the Duplessis era, 80 per cent of them were found to have “sub-intelligence” levels. Les Soeurs moved in 1976 to another address on Bélanger and became the Centre Rosalie Jetté, which still caters to pregnant girls.

The anglo equivalent

At its inception in 1848, Elizabeth House was not unlike Les Soeurs de la Misericorde. It too was a place to hide from the social and moral stigma of unwanted pregnancy. Ghislaine Prata, the former executive director from 1992–1997, says the archives at Elizabeth House show girls arriving all the way from Scotland and England to surreptitiously give birth. “The whole concept was to hide, have your baby and leave it to be adopted,” says Prata. “There are comments in the records that reflect the mentality back then: ‘Living a life of sin, weak before vice, unrepentant.’ There was no reference to rehabilitation or assistance, or keeping the baby.”

Elizabeth House is a still a centre for pregnant teens, located in a quiet two-storey brownstone now on Marlowe in NDG. It has a staff of 25 people: social workers, educators, psychologists, daycare workers and maintenance staff. It is a private rehabilitation centre, with a $1-million per annum budget, funded by the Quebec Ministry of Health and Social Services. Elizabeth House is mandated to serve the anglophone community throughout the province of Quebec. It is the only English-language centre of its kind in the province.
Clients—mothers and their children—are followed in residence and externally. The program encourages a maximum of nine teenage mothers to finish their education, with an in-house daycare centre and high school curriculum so that mothers can breastfeed and pass algebra at the same time.

According to Prata, finances were of supreme importance when she took the helm in 1992. “Funding was atrocious,” says Prata. “The building was in a terrible state of disrepair. The roof was leaking, the aluminium showers were so small the girls had difficulty having a shower, the floor smelled because they hadn’t been done—it was just horrible. In 1994 there was a government assessment set up by the Ministry of Health and Social Services and they were horrified by the lack of money, the physical situation, the overwhelming need, the lack of staff. They recommended an immediate increase in the budget of a few hundred thousand dollars. By the time I left in 1997 a lot had been done, but the funding was nowhere near meeting what the needs were.”

Better times

The current executive director, Linda Schachtler, says funding is still an issue. “We’ve had a very hard time,” says Schachtler, “but we’ve established ourselves in the community. We’re a specialized service. We run a really tight program and we have good staff. We’ve done the work to make sure Elizabeth House provides the services the clients need and we made sure to make a really clear case to the government, tying it all together.”
For Schachtler, it is important that clients know they can stay as long as they need, and that there will be a follow-up after they leave. “We support them and we lead them to resources,” says Schachtler. “We let them make their own decisions. We refer them to professionals for counselling, give them all of the information they need and help them explore all the possible options. When they make their decision, if it’s putting the child in foster care, if it’s putting a baby up for adoption, or if it’s keeping the baby—we give them support. We do not blame. It can never be what it used to be.”

Prata also worked to establish guidelines, policies and treatment methods that were in accordance with the orientations of the Ministry. In the 1990s the Health and Social Services network in Montreal underwent major transformations. The Montreal Regional Board of Health and Social Services undertook a wide consultation on the reorganization of the Health and Social Services system on the island of Montreal. When the social services were amalgamated in 1992, 13 different organizations were put under the same umbrella organization, the Centre de jeunesse de Montréal.

No more revolving doors

Diane Paré is a front-line worker at Elizabeth House. She first began working there 19 years ago. She says many things have changed. “It was a lot more like a maternity home in the old days,” says Paré, “and it was very much like they stayed here to have their babies, and then they left. Now everybody here is really focused on rehabilitation and advocating for the girls, giving them a better chance of parenting than they had of being parented. I know for a number of staff there’s been a shift, and it is a very warm caring place. Everybody here, even the administrative and accounting staff, is working for the benefit of the clients.”
Many of Elizabeth House’s clientele have a history in the juvenile system. Elizabeth House is a last stop for these women, usually by order of a judge. Workers must untangle a variety of social ills in these individuals: poverty, violence, substance abuse and incest.
“Katie” is 17. She came to Elizabeth House six months ago so she could be with her then one-year-old son. He had been placed in foster care. He was given back to her on the condition that she complete the program at Elizabeth House.

She says she was labelled as a “troublemaker” in her small hometown. “I had my share of problems,” she says. “It was either come here, or lose my son forever. At first I hated it. I felt like I was under a microscope. I thought they were just waiting for me to screw up. It wasn’t true, I just saw it that way. Here I can ask for a break and go cry if I want to, or do what I need to do. Before, I didn’t know what to do when my son cried too much, or when he misbehaved. Now I feel ready to be a single mother.” :