ST. LOUIS (AP) — Eighteen black women told decades ago that their babies had died soon after birth at the old Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis are now questioning if their children weren’t instead taken from them while alive.
A video that went viral last month shows Melanie Gilmore reuniting with her birth mother, Zella Jackson Price. DNA confirmed with near 100-percent certainty that the two are mother and daughter.
Price was 26 in 1965 when she gave birth, only to be told hours later that her daughter had died.
Media attention about the reunion led to other women reaching out to Price’s attorney, Albert Watkins. He says city officials are trying to help investigate, but that no one can locate birth records from the hospital that closed in 1979.