Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

“But what about the lurkers?”

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Not all heroes wear capes.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / This Week In Blackness / St. Louis Deals With A New Scandal: Stolen Babies

St. Louis Deals With A New Scandal: Stolen Babies

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Eighteen women in the St. Louis area who were told their babies had died at birth now suspect their children were taken and used in private adoptions. All the cases happened in the 1950s and ’60s at Homer G. Phillips Hospital to young black poor mothers mostly 15 to 20 years old. Suspicions arose after Melanie Gilmore’s children set out to find her birth mother as a surprise for her 50th birthday. After this story was revealed, others have come out with very similar stories:

In each case, a nurse — not a doctor — told the mother that 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. … Watkins [their lawyer] 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. … “I never did see the baby or get a death certificate,” said [Gussie] Parker, whose daughter, Diane, works for the Associated Press in New York. “When you’re young and someone comes and tells you that your baby’s dead, in those days you accepted it.”

Here’s hoping these families are reunited. They have a lot of lost time to make up for.

Team Blackness also discussed a police torture reparations ordinance in Chicago, Satanists take on Hobby Lobby, and one hell of a weird story story with a Masonic police order in California and an attorney general staffer.

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22Comments

  4. 4.

    the Conster

    Just can’t imagine. Like the Magdalene laundries – just can’t wrap my head around how many people were/are able to rationalize such inhumanity. Although inhumanity is apparently all too human.

  5. 5.

    boatboy_srq

    Cue the RWNM screech about how two-parent households would prevent these things from happening in 5… 4… 3…

  8. 8.

    geg6

    Was this happening, by any chance, in Catholic hospitals? Because that’s exactly how they operate.

  9. 9.

    Belafon

    @geg6: I saw it in a movie involving a US diplomat, but they did have a baby to replace the original.

  10. 10.

    boatboy_srq

    @Belafon: Is it only our imagination that we can’t win arguments with wingnuts, or are they really as warped as we think?

  11. 11.

    Brachiator

    @the Conster:

    Like the Magdalene laundries – just can’t wrap my head around how many people were/are able to rationalize such inhumanity.

    Well, some people claim that they are just doing the Lord’s work.

  12. 12.

    boatboy_srq

    @Brachiator: Slaying heathens, torturing and killing heretics, and drowning witches have each fallen under that umbrella from time to time, too. Doesn’t make those things right, either.

  15. 15.

    Brachiator

    @boatboy_srq: I wrote a simple, bland sentence to downplay my rage.

    But people who do this, often claim the best of intentions. And poor and nonwhite women have often been the worst victims of this.

    I had the great pleasure of meeting the great scientist and science writer, Stephen J Gould. I had to tell him how much I appreciated how he wrote about the human dimension of the misuse of science in the name of racism and eugenics. In one of his books, he writes movingly about a white woman who had been involuntarily sterilized because the leaders of American society had approved this depravity to keep the gene pool “healthy.” Gould gives her the last word.

    Stephen Jay Gould wrote about Buck when she was aged 72 …’ But Doris Buck was never informed [about her sterilization]: ‘I broke down and cried. My husband and me wanted children desperately. We were crazy about them. I never knew what they’d done to me.’

    I have hated bullies all my life. And among those I hate the most are those who claim that they are fucking people over for their own good or for the good of society. And this group includes people of all ideological persuasions.

  16. 16.

    Emma

    If I were chosen God(dess) for a day, I would go after all of those who have “the good of society” in mind. I’m not talking about the people who see a need and try to deal with it; I’m talking about the “big picture” thinkers who have “the answers.” Almost always they’re the ones who think screwing with people’s lives is a wonderful idea.

  18. 18.

    Interrobang

    Unfortunately, I don’t really find this to be news, other than it’s finally coming out that they did this to black women, too. There’s a reason a lot of feminist writers refer to that approximate time period as “The Baby-Snatching Era.” Here in Canada, the National Post did an entire series of articles on forced adoptions between about the 1930s and 1970s, and telling women their babies had died was only one of the tactics they used.

    Perhaps it was hubris of a white-privilege sort that led me and a lot of other people to believe that they only cared enough about sourcing adoptable white babies, that they didn’t bother to, ahem, relieve black teenaged and/or single and/or poor mothers of their infants…

  19. 19.

    boatboy_srq

    @Brachiator: Understood, and shared. Among the things that never cease to amaze me is the FundiEvangelists’ willingness (eagerness, even) to throw away centuries of civil protections – protections that enabled their sect and all the precursor sects before theirs to form and grow – just because they’re convinced they’re right righteous.

  20. 20.

    Roger Moore

    @the Conster:

    just can’t wrap my head around how many people were/are able to rationalize such inhumanity.

    I can wrap my head around it just fine. They rationalize this by telling themselves that the mother wouldn’t do a good job of raising the child, while the adoptive couple will do well. They’re doing the baby a favor by giving it a better family, and that totally justifies lying to the mother and stealing her baby.

  21. 21.

    Brachiator

    @boatboy_srq:

    Understood, and shared. Among the things that never cease to amaze me is the FundiEvangelists’ willingness (eagerness, even) to throw away centuries of civil protections

    Don’t lay this just at the feet of fundamentalists. Conservatives and fundies are currently often at the head of the bus of bad intentions. But this has NEVER been the case for much of our history.

    In the 1920s, the eugenics movement was championed by liberals. Here is the background to the Buck case, from Gould.

    The campaign for forced eugenic sterilization in America reached its climax and height of respectability in 1927, when the Supreme Court, by an 8-1 vote, upheld the Virginia sterilization bill in the case of Buck v. Bell. Oliver Wendell Holmes, then in his mid-eighties and the most celebrated jurist in America, wrote the majority opinion with his customary verve and power of style.

    It included the notorious paragraph, with its chilling tag line, cited ever since as the quintessential statement of eugenic principles. Remembering with pride his own distant experiences as an infantryman in the Civil War, Holmes wrote:

    We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices. . . . It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

    Of course, Mrs Buck was normal, and had been misdiagnosed as being mentally defective. But she could not fight an 8-1 Supreme Court decision. She was a nobody.

  22. 22.

    boatboy_srq

    @Brachiator: Question, then: is it that mainstream Christianity has finally begun wising up, or is the rise of the FundiEvangelists merely the congregation of the remaining frothing bigots under one roof?

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