ST. LOUIS — Eighteen black women who were told decades ago that their babies had died after birth at a St. Louis hospital wonder whether the infants were taken by hospital officials to be raised by other families.
The suspicions arose from the story of Zella Jackson Price, who said she 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. Melanie Gilmore, who now lives in Eugene, Ore., has said that her foster parents 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 the hospital might have stolen “newborns of color for marketing in private adoption transactions.”
Gilmore’s children worked to track down her birth mother. The search recently led them to Price, 75, who lives in suburban St. Louis.
After the mother-daughter reunion, Watkins got calls from other women who wondered whether their babies, whom they were told had died, might have been taken from them.
Their stories, he said, are 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.
“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.
