Kansas women turn old hospital into home for unwed mothers

? An old southern Kansas hospital that voters chose to replace two years ago has experienced a rebirth as a home for unwed mothers.

Two Kiowa women, Miranda Allen and Brenda Myers, bought the town’s old hospital for $1 and are transforming it into a place where women can live while they are pregnant, and long afterward.

Allen and Myers, both breast cancer survivors, are focused on providing for the physical and emotional needs of unwed mothers. They believe women who need them will find their way to the town of fewer than 1,000 people a few miles from the Oklahoma border.

They’re even willing to buy bus tickets for any applicants so they can move to Kiowa, The Hutchinson News reported.

“The good Lord left us here for a reason,” Myers said.

In mid-July, Project Pink House will start welcoming pregnant women who will continue to live there after their babies are born while they grow independent and more able to manage on their own.

“They can come here and choose adoption or plan to parent,” Myers said.

While there are homes where women can go to have a baby, they generally are places where they must leave as a soon as the baby is born.

“Here they can stay for two years,” Myers said.

With rooms large enough to accommodate an entire family, Pink House enables women with other young children to stay together.

Women who live there take steps to better themselves, spending 40 hours a week volunteering, attending classes or searching for jobs, Myers said. Several local businesses have agreed to hire the women.

In 1951, when the old hospital first opened, unwed women and their families often would keep their pregnancies a secret, said Ann Fessler, author of “The Girl Who Went Away.”

Typically they would be spirited away under the pretense of visiting a relative in a far-off city, when instead they were placed in homes where they would give birth, then relinquish the children for adoption.

“In the decades between World War II and Roe v. Wade, 1.5 million young women were secretly sent to homes for unwed mothers and coerced into giving their babies up for adoption,” Fessler said.