Secretive US church? But isn't this the same shit the Catholic Church pulled on Catholic women? Didn't you watch the movie Philomena (2013)?
Quote:Secretive US church coerced women into giving up babies for adoption
The claims follow a BBC investigation last year into allegations of child sexual abuse spanning decades within the church, which is believed to have up to 100,000 members worldwide and is often referred to as The Truth or the Two by Twos. The FBI has since launched an investigation.
Four women - who were all unmarried at the time - have told us they were given no option but to give up their babies. Three of them feared being cast out of the church and sent to hell if they refused.
One says she was pressured into giving her baby to a married couple in the church after she was raped in 1988, age 17.
"My fear of going to hell was so great that it forced me to make up my mind to give up the baby to this couple in the church," she told the BBC.
The adopted children - born all over the US - are referred to within the church as "Baldwin Babies" because the adoptions were overseen by Wally Baldwin, a doctor from the sect who died in 2004.
The church, founded in Ireland by a Scottish evangelist in 1897, is built around ministers - known as workers - spreading New Testament teachings through word-of-mouth.
At 18, Melanie became pregnant after falling "madly in love" with a boy from her school.
Not only were the pair unmarried, but the father was not a member of The Truth and refused to become one. This meant Melanie had committed a "terrible sin" in the eyes of local workers.
The workers and her family decided that she could only continue to attend church meetings if she gave her baby to another family in the sect.
"If I keep this baby, I'm going to go to hell. If I keep the baby, I can't go home," Melanie recalls thinking.
She gave birth in a Catholic hospital in Oklahoma, where she was discreetly put in a room on her own.
She remembers being shouted at by a doctor when she began to cry during labour.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9d5x83gg45o
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
