My Life as a Thalidomide Survivor

IN 1962 C. JEAN GROVER WAS BORN WITH MALFORMED LIMBS AFTER A DOCTOR GAVE HER MOTHER AN OUTLAWED MEDICATION FOR MORNING SICKNESS. NOW SHE IS SPEAKING OUT-AND SEEKING JUSTICE

- K.C. BAKER and WENDY GROSSMAN KANTOR

It was November 1961, and Ann Morris (her name has been changed to protect her privacy) had been feeling nauseous in the mornings. Suspecting she was pregnant, her ob-gyn gave her an unmarked sample of a new drug he said would ease her morning sickness. “My mother was always under the impression they were vitamins,” says Ann’s daughter C. Jean Grover, who was born nine months later with severely shortened arms and legs, a rare condition known as phocomelia. She was also diagnosed with bilateral PFFD, which causes deformities in the hip, leaving one leg shorter than the other. Both conditions are specifically associated with thalidomide.

However, as Ann lay sedated in her room at Cincinnati’s Jewish Hospital after giving birth, doctors failed to make that connection. They advised her husband that their daughter would be better off in foster care, and hospital officials quietly made the arrangements. "It was like out of sight, out of mind," says Grover, now 60, who would later learn that she was the fifth baby born at Jewish Hospital that same year with phocomelia. "They didn't want my parents to get attached to a child that was going to die."