Morlok quadruplets
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On May 23rd, 1946 in North Carolina, four seemingly identical quadruplets were born to a deaf and mute woman by the name of Annie Mae Fultz. Her husband wasn’t there with her; but a friend delivered the news to the ageing sharecropper that his wife had just pushed out three unexpected children. He was definitely shocked. The doctor who delivered the four baby girls was Fred R Klenner. Before he delivered these babies he was a small-town doctor with a tiny practice. Dr Klenner didn’t even have an incubator for the girls- he instead swathed them in cotton gauze and bundled them together for warmth. Klenner instantly realized that they were a definite cash cow. Why? The Fultz babies weren’t just quadruplets- they were negroes too. Their rarity was valuable. Dr Klenner named the girls himself, pairing the names of his female family members with ‘Mary’. He christened them Mary Alice, Mary Ann, Mary Louise, and Mary Catherine. In Jim Crow era North Carolina, its not like black people had the social authority to question anything white people did. A white
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Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice
Stanford University Press
December 2019
304 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9781503601123
Digital ISBN: 9781503610811
Andrea Freeman, Associate Professor of Law
William S. Richardson School of Law
University of Hawai’i, Mānoa
Born into a tenant farming family in North Carolina in 1946, Mary Louise, Mary Ann, Mary Alice, and Mary Catherine were medical miracles. Annie Mae Fultz, a Black-Cherokee woman who lost her ability to hear and speak in childhood, became the mother of America’s first surviving set of identical quadruplets. They were instant celebrities. Their White doctor named them after his own family members. He sold the rights to use the sisters for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company. The girls lived in poverty, while Pet Milk’s profits from a previously untapped market of Black families skyrocketed.
Over half a century later, baby formula is a seventy-billion-dollar industry and Black mothers have the lowest breastfeeding rates in the country. Since slavery, legal, political, and s
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The Fultz Quadtriplets is born
*The Fultz Quadruplets were born on this date in 1946. They were the first identical Black quad babies born in the United States.
The Fultz Quads: Mary Louise, Mary Ann, Mary Alice, and Mary Catherine were born at Annie Penn Hospital in Reidsville, N.C. The Quads’ parents, sharecropper Pete and deaf-mute mother Annie Mae, lived on a farm with their six other children but were too poor to care for the babies. Multiple births were rare then, and the equipment for underweight babies wasn’t as prevalent as in modern times.
The girls were delivered in what was known as “the Basement,” according to a 2002 report by journalist and educator Lorraine Ahearn. This “basement” was the Blacks-only wing of Annie Penn, and Klenner and African American nurse Margaret Ware helped Annie Mae give birth. The Fultz girls became baby celebrities, while Fred Klenner, the white doctor who delivered them into the world, exploited them for fame and money. Since the Fultz family couldn’t read or write, Dr. Klenner named the girls after his family members.
When news of th
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