Gladys Lila Young, born in 1899, and her husband William Peach Young opened the Ideal Maternity Home at East Chester, Nova Scotia, in 1928. She was a midwife; he had a mail-order diploma in chiropractic. The home took in unmarried women, delivered their children in secret for a fee, and placed the babies for adoption for a further fee, largely with families in New Jersey and New York.
The business worked because of what surrounded it. An unmarried mother in Nova Scotia in those years had almost nowhere else to go, adoption was barely regulated, and the province required no records that would have made the traffic visible.
Infants who were not marketable, being sick, disabled, or of mixed race, were fed a mixture of water and molasses and left to die. The bodies were buried on the property, at sea, or burned, packed in the wooden boxes the dairy delivered butter in. In Nova Scotia the case is known by that detail, the Butterbox Babies.
The number of deaths has never been established. Estimates in the Nova Scotia literature run from four hundred to six hundred over nineteen years; this roster's range of two to one hundred and more reflects how little of it was ever tested. No exhumation programme was carried out and no register of the dead exists.
They were never convicted of a killing. In March 1936 Lila Young was charged with two counts of manslaughter over the January deaths of Eva Nieforth and her newborn, and was acquitted at a three-day trial that May. In the 1940s the couple were convicted repeatedly under the province's maternity boarding house legislation and fined small sums, which they paid and continued trading. The home was closed in 1945 and the business wound up by 1947. She died in 1967.
The entry is marked as one in which nobody was convicted of a death. What the Youngs were punished for was operating without a licence.