I, Tera Hattaway, declare as follows:
1. I am over 18 years of age.
2. The statements herein are of my own personal knowledge and if called
upon as a witness, I can testify competently thereto.
3. When I was involved with the Church of Scientology in Dallas Texas, I
had a boyfriend of many months prior to joining staff. This was in 1978.
Within several weeks of being on staff I was pressured by the Executive Director
At that time, Melanie Stokes, to leave my boyfriend since he wasn't a staff
member.
She basically spoke very belittling of him and made him out to be a "bad hat" for not joining staff. All this, despite the fact that he was actively taking services and contributing substantially to the church and was in good standing.
4. Within a month or so of joining staff I discovered that I was pregnant. At the time I was approximately 22 years old, upset and uncertain as to how to handle this. I was afraid and needed someone to turn to so I confided in Melanie, thinking I needed to let my ex-boyfriend know, as I truly did love him very much and we did have intentions to marry in the future.
5. Melanie's very strong advice and pressure was to abort the baby. She had gone on to say that at this point in my life it is better to do the greatest good for all. That spending my life "clearing the planet" which means basically to get the planet saved from insanity, would be the greatest good, in other words, a far more noble endeavor than leaving staff to raise a child.
6. She went on to tell me that the spirit doesn't enter the baby's body until the baby is born. She made the point that all I would be "killing" is a piece of meat essentially. We discussed this for a couple of days and she showed me definitions in the L. Ron Hubbard Technical Dictionary to persuade me to have an ABORTION.
7. I made the decision to go through with the abortion, even though I was raised in a Catholic home where abortion was never an option. I can remember the state of mind I was in at the time; I was completely shut-off emotionally. I felt numb through the entire procedure of going to the clinic and getting the abortion procedure done. I detached myself completely from the responsibility that I was about to kill a living human being so I could be on staff and do scientology. The Executive Director of the Org, my direct senior had convinced me, that this fetus was lifeless, therefore it was ok to kill it, so I could help Ron save the planet. As though it were a mole or something I was removing. I felt no remorse after the ordeal, which is very, very unlike my true nature.
8. I want to mention here that Melanie, the E.D., was also trapped in the bizarre beliefs, falsehoods, hypocrisy and lies of the Church of Scientology and that I don't see her as a bad person today. During that period I witnessed first-hand the same pressure given to others, especially when married couples on staff wanted to have children. It was looked down on as not productive for the group, or the greatest good, etc.
9. The irony that I see in this is that in many of LRH's writings he would say that one should flourish within all dynamics (scopes or areas of life). He states that children are our future and that sane relationships and rearing of children are very important to man's survival (an obvious point). Yet, I felt and knew that for some reason this did not apply to staff members of the church of scientology.
10. Here's another example of how relationships and the rearing of children was not considered valuable to the church: When I was on staff in L.A. with the middle management of the church in 1984, I observed first hand many married couples and families on staff with children being split up to live in different locations because they were "needed" in a different org or were sent out on missions across the country, sometimes indefinitely. I was the director of communications at that time relaying dispatches, mail, etc. The Inspector General at the time was and still is David Miscavaige.
11 A lot of the children were kept at the Cadet Estates Org near Sunset Blvd. behind the Celebrity Center. I was posted to work there for a couple of months in order to recruit nannies for the facility.
12 The children were kept in rooms according to age groups. One room had infants as young as a couple weeks up to several months of age. Then there was the toddler's room and so on. The building and all the furniture, desks, tables, etc. seemed very old and shoddy. There were about 2 or 3 rooms with babies in cribs stretching from wall to wall and only one nanny in the room. There was a ratio of about 8 to 10 babies per nanny. There was one nanny who was always complaining that she had too many toddlers to handle; she would have about 10 to 15 small babies to care for by herself.
13 The parents (staff members of the church) would drop the kids off early in the morning, at about 6:00 am, and would pick them up between 10:00 and midnight on a regular basis. The majority of the kids were dressed in old, worn-out, filthy, tattered clothing and most were left with us largely unkempt and disheveled. It was like the children were taken home out of obligation only and dropped off in the morning for us to care for and clean up.
14 The playground was all dirt and no lawn. I don't even remember the kids having any type of jungle gym, slide or swings to play on. The rooms had disgusting, huge roaches everywhere and the older kids would be put to work cleaning the place up. It was a humiliating and vile place for anyone to live in, much less young children.
15 The kids were all placed on statistics even the infants. The amount of movement that the babies made was their stat. If they lifted their heads or could turn their heads while in the crib by themselves, their stats were considered up. Records were kept on this.
16 The parents were supposed to be taking a bus to this facility which was about 10 miles or so from the main buildings that they worked at, for one hour per day to visit their babies. Some parents showed up, lots didn't.
17 The children were instructed to write-up their parents if they didn't come to visit that day.
18 From what I saw, these kids were being raised as "little soldiers" and being prepared to become future workers for the church of scientology. There were at that time, young teenagers who were already working at the main base filing, running errands, cleaning the buildings, doing garden and grounds work. They were even working in the kitchen helping cook as well as doing dishes for the hundreds of staff who would eat in the galley. I observed this on a daily basis.
19 When I was with the cadet org I had to listen to LRH on at least 4 reel to reel tapes on the subject of children. LRH mentions, in so many ways, that children are best raised in a 3rd dynamic (group) and not in a 2nd dynamic (family). That the 2nd is too restimulating and aberrated.
20 These tapes also mentioned that every child is a "big being" who is just going through the growth period from a small body to a large one once again, as had been done hundreds or thousands of lifetimes. He spoke of how in-between lives we all receive "implants" (unconscious messages, memories, etc,) and have a continuous case of amnesia from one lifetime to the next. He was bringing this up to make a point on how confused and disoriented the "being" will feel for the first couple of years of life.
21 In one of his tapes, he mentions just letting a baby or kid "cry it out" when upset. Unfortunately, I saw a lot of this "crying it out" when the kids were dropped off at the facility or when they just needed someone to give them a hug. There was no sympathy given, as LRH described sympathy as "low toned". There just were never enough grown-ups to go around to give these kids love, affection and the true nurturing that a child deserves and has a right to have.
22 As a matter of fact, it was considered "down stat" (very bad behavior) for the children to cry or be upset for what I knew and felt to be a reasonable emotion, given the circumstances, such as no parents to be there for their first words, or their first steps, or no hug or kiss for the little boo boos they get. No parent to show off to or to share a normal life with. They didn't even know what a normal life was.
23 These kids were taught that the outside world is the enemy. That the outside world is very insane and people outside of Scientology were not to be trusted. The people of the outside world are referred to as WOG's (a derogatory word used by Hubbard to describe an average human being).
24 The children studied and learned all of LRH's technology. Basically, going to regular public school, high school and college was discouraged. The children were taught that if you became a trained scientologist you wouldn't need any other education.
25 These children are raised to believe that there sole duty in life is to serve the Church for the greatest good in order to save the planet; they were indoctrinated to be willing to do or experience whatever it takes to get the job done. Whether one of their parents lives in a different state or continent, or whether they didn't get to see their parents for several months, these messages of being tough to "help save the planet" were continuously being put forward in the form of policies and directives to "handle" them.
26 Not only was this brainwashing done to the children but to me as well. A sense of urgency was always being generated by the executives and all seniors of the Church as though "things have to get done NOW before it's too late".
27 On a final note, I entered the church of scientology shortly after leaving high school. It was my first time away from home. I was young and impressionable, to say the least. I feel that this was taken full advantage of by the church of scientology management that I worked for. It was like they wanted to keep me ignorant. For instance, my seniors one-for-one discouraged me from having any connection with the outside world; I was discouraged from watching TV, reading the newspaper or even a novel! We were all, the children and me, disconnected from the world outside of scientology. I frankly could not have told you who the president was at that time of my life!
Total pages: _____
Executed in Douglasville, Georgia this 12th of April 2001.
________________________________________
Tera Y. Hattaway
BEFORE ME, the undersigned authority, personally appeared TERA Y. HATTAWAY,
Who presented ______________________________ as identification and who did take
an oath and said the foregoing statements are true and correct.
_________________________________________ SEAL
Notary Public
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