Women told their babies had died; they didn't (1 Viewer)

[Optimus Prime]

From the Washington Post. Very sad and makes me angry.

Is there any sort of legal recourse for something like this?
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One woman and her long-lost daughter may have brought a dark chapter from St. Louis history to light.

As a 26-year-old woman in 1965, Zella Jackson Price was told that her daughter had died shortly after birth. Nearly 50 years later, though, Jackson Price learned that her daughter has been alive all along.

Melanie Diane Gilmore, also known as “Baby Diane,” is now 49 and living in Oregon. After mother and daughter reunited last month, thanks to some Facebook sleuthing by Gilmore’s children, dozens of other women have come forward with eerily similar and potentially tragic stories.

They had all given birth to children at the Homer G. Phillips Hospital, which was at one point the only hospital dedicated to serving African Americans in racially segregated St. Louis.................


They were told their babies had died. Now, these black women wonder: Was it a lie? - The Washington Post

 

[Optimus Prime]

The story began 49 years ago in a St. Louis hospital, when Zella Jackson Price was told by a nurse that her prematurely born baby daughter had died shortly after birth.

The truth, however bizarre, was that her daughter was alive.

For reasons that remain unclear, the infant ended up being raised in foster care and adopted by another family when she was 16.

For the next half-century, Jackson Price, now an accomplished 76-year-old gospel singer living in suburban St. Louis, and her daughter, Melanie Diane Gilmore, living in Oregon, would lead separate lives, each unaware of the other, but with a gaping hole in their lives.

In August, Gilmore’s own children began looking for their grandmother using Facebook. One of the children found Jackson Price and, after trading messages, began to strongly suspect they might be related. A DNA test was administered to both mother and daughter, and then the family waited for the results.

“The results had stated that Zella Jackson Price was the mother of Melanie Diane Gilmore (Jackson) and it was a 99.9997% match,” Gilmore’s daughter, Melika Jackson, wrote on a GoFundMe page that was set up to finance a family reunion.....................

49 years after she was told her daughter was dead, a mother reunites with her child - The Washington Post

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

was reading that this morning - wish i had the energy to be surprised anymore
this was around the same time that NC was sterilizing 'similar' women w/out their consent

 

[BHM]

I don't get why they were raised in foster care?

 

[Madmarsha]

Yeah, I don't get any of this. That's just cruel.

 

[Optimus Prime]

For Sara Melgarejo, the wait at Santiago airport was agonising. The 65-year-old had travelled about 30km north from San Bernardo, a working-class suburb of the Chilean capital, for the reunion.

She walked the length of the building trying to calm her nerves, holding her breath for the arrival of the two children she had spent the last 40 years believing were dead. “My heart was racing and my body was trembling,” she says, “but I felt pure joy.”

Siblings Sean Ours, 40, and Emily Reid, 39, walked into arrivals together, having arrived on a flight from the US. Even though they had never met Sara in person, there was no question that she was their biological mother – they share the same eyes, the same infectious smile.

“When I saw her there waiting for us, all pretty in pink, I started crying. I just gave her the biggest hug because it was the first time that we were able to feel her, to tell her that we loved her,” Emily says.

“To be able to just hold her, and for all of us to hold each other together, was so surreal. It was a long time coming,” Sean says.

Their story is just one of tens of thousands relating to Chilean families torn apart by illegal adoption. Parents were typically told that their babies were lost or dead.

In reality, they had been stolen and sold, facilitated by a network of social workers, faith officials and health and legal professionals across the country.

Thousands of dollars were paid by American and European families for newborns they believed had been given up willingly.

Mothers in Chile have recounted how hospital staff claimed their babies had died at birth and refused requests to see their bodies.

Others were denied access to their babies, who were being looked after in children’s homes or public institutions, while some were coerced into giving them up for adoption.

Not long after sunrise on a hot day in Santiago, four of these broken families were meeting in person for the first time.

Brought together by Connecting Roots, an NGO dedicated to redressing the damage caused by decades of forced and illegal adoption, the group included daughters, sons, siblings and parents nervously waiting to set eyes on each other.

They would then travel to their Chilean home towns to get to know relatives and share stories and photographs from the lives they had led apart.

This dark chapter in Chilean history affected an estimated 20,000 children, who went on to grow up in families across the US and Europe.

The practice reached its peak during Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship between 1973 and 1990, when the regime actively encouraged adoption as part of a strategy to eliminate poverty.

Poor, young and Indigenous communities were targeted, and a climate of fear made it impossible for families to question or dispute the loss of their child……..

She was told her babies were dead. Instead they were sold abroad. What happened when she met them 40 years on?

Four families torn apart by Chile’s illegal adoption scandal finally found each other decades later. They describe the emotional moment they met – and how they pieced together the lives they had spent apart

www.theguardian.com

 

[Nisey55]

Yeah, I don't get any of this. That's just cruel.

Selling babies for big bucks, without consent, while eliminating the poor and "undesirable" from the community has been big business for forever.
Pigs.