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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Germy Shoemangler
Key & Peele. Negrotown:
youtube.com/watch?v=Rg58d8opQKA
shell
Dear God!
MomSense
This is heartbreaking.
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.
boatboy_srq
Cue the RWNM screech about how two-parent households would prevent these things from happening in 5… 4… 3…
WereBear
It’s much like the Hollywood Baby Snatcher.
Belafon
@boatboy_srq: Actually, I’m pretty sure it will be more like “What racism? Blacks were taking babies as well.”
geg6
Was this happening, by any chance, in Catholic hospitals? Because that’s exactly how they operate.
Belafon
@geg6: I saw it in a movie involving a US diplomat, but they did have a baby to replace the original.
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?
Brachiator
@the Conster:
Well, some people claim that they are just doing the Lord’s work.
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.
WereBear
@Brachiator: And they dehumanize the victims.
chopper
jesus, I just can’t.
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.
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.
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.
rikyrah
if true, this is pure, raw EVIL
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…
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
rightrighteous.Roger Moore
@the Conster:
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.
Brachiator
@boatboy_srq:
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.
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.
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?