Mothers wonder if their lost babies are still alive
Adoption may answer question
ST. LOUIS — Eighteen black women who were told decades ago that their babies had died soon after birth at a St. Louis hospital now wonder if the infants were taken away by hospital officials to be raised by other families.
The suspicions arose from the story of Zella Jackson Price, who was 26 in 1965 when she gave birth at Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis. Hours later, she was told that her daughter had died, but she never saw a body or a death certificate.
No one is sure who was responsible, but Price’s daughter ended up in foster care, only to resurface almost 50 years later.
Melanie Gilmore, now lives in Eugene, who Ore., has said that her foster parents always told her she was given up by her birth mother.
Price’s attorney, Albert Watkins, is asking city and state officials to investigate. In a letter to Gov. Jay Nixon and St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, Watkins said he suspects the hospital coordinated a scheme “to steal newborns of color for marketing in private adoption transactions.”
The women’s story spread in recent weeks after Gilmore’s children tracked down her birth mother as part of a plan to mark their mother’s 50th birthday. The search led them to Price, now 76, who lives in suburban St. Louis.
In March, an online video caused a sensation when it showed the moment Gilmore, who is deaf, learned through lip reading and sign language that her birth mother had been found.
The two women reunited in April. DNA confirmed that they daughter.
“She looked like me,” said Price, a gospel singer who has five other children. “She was so excited and full of joy. It was just beautiful. I’ll never forget that,” she said of the reunion.
After the reunion, Watkins started getting calls from other women who wondered if their babies, whom they were told had
are
mother
and died, might have instead been taken from them.
Their stories, he said, are strikingly similar: Most of the births were in the mid-1950s to mid-1960s at Homer G. Phillips.
All of the mothers were black and poor, mostly ages 15 to 20.
In each case, a nurse — not a doctor — told the mother her child had died, a breach of normal protocol. No death certificates were issued, and none of the mothers were allowed to see their deceased infants.
“These are moms,” Watkins said. “They are mothers at the end of their lives seeking answers to a lifelong hole in their heart.”
He plans to file a lawsuit seeking birth and death records. Watkins has no idea who, or how many people, may have been responsible if babies were being taken, though he believes they were stolen and put up for adoption in an era when there were few adoption agencies catering to black couples.
Price gave birth to a baby girl born two months’ premature on Nov. 25,1965. The baby weighed just over 2 pounds, but Price was able to hold the crying child after birth.
A nurse took the baby away and came back an hour later. The little girl might not make it, Price was told.
Shortly thereafter, the nurse came back. The baby, she said, was dead.
Price recovered in the hospital for two more days, in a ward surrounded by happy mothers.
“It was depressing to see when they rolled the babies in and they were taking them to their mothers, but I didn’t have my baby,” she recalled.
Retired physician Mary Tillman was an intern and did a residency at Homer G. Phillips in the 1960s. Calls to her home were unanswered, but she told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the hospital had protocols and record-keeping to track mothers and daughters. She never had any suspicions of wrongdoing, but said it should have been doctors, not nurses, who broke the news of death to mothers.
Price, who has five other children, said she’s saddened by the lost years that she could have spent with her daughter.