N.Y. doctor sues for right to visit stillborn's grave

Marcela Rojas, The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News | NationalDesk

It took 18 years for Dr. Laurie Grant, an obstetrician and gynecologist from Valhalla, N.Y., to discover that her stillborn baby was buried in a public cemetery commonly reserved for the poor and unknown.

Grant's daughter was born via Cesarean section on July 13, 1993, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan following a difficult pregnancy that almost cost her her own life. It was later discovered that Grant has a rare autoimmune disorder, mixed connective tissue disease, that may have resulted in her illness during pregnancy.

While she was on painkillers and filled with sorrow, Grant recalled, a nurse told her the hospital would take care of the burial and that she could visit her baby. Grant emphasized that she did not give legal consent for her baby's burial in a mass grave.

"I almost died," Grant said. "I was so sick, and also, now in grief, I wasn't thinking of the baby being buried."

After several years of trying to determine where her baby was, Grant learned in 2011 of her burial on New York City's little-known Potter's Field on Hart Island. The cemetery is maintained by the New York City Department of Correction, and burials of the city's indigent and unclaimed, including a large percentage of stillborns, continue to be performed there.

There are at least 850,000 people interred on the mile-long island in Long Island Sound, just northeast of City Island. The deceased are placed in pine coffins, and each grave reportedly contains between 150 and 162 adults or 1,000 babies.

But despite locating her baby, Grant has still not been able to visit her grave site — a right, she stressed, that any mother should have.

The DOC allows only family members of the deceased onto the island through supervised visits to a small gazebo on the site. Those visits are only approved after family members have produced a death certificate and proven their relationship to the deceased.

This week, Grant has challenged that policy by seeking through the courts an order that would give her permission to walk to her daughter's burial site.

"There are funerary rights in every religion. This is practiced all over the world," said Grant, 59. "It is a basic human dignity issue."

Lawyers for the Hart Island Project, a nonprofit organization started by Peekskill artist Melinda Hunt that advocates on behalf of families whose relatives are buried there, filed the Article 78 petition on Wednesday in state Supreme Court in Manhattan that seeks an injunction to require the DOC to give Grant permission to visit the burial plot.

Grant is now seeking relief in court after the DOC in May denied her request to visit the plot, citing safety and security concerns, according to a letter from the agency to Mark Taylor, the attorney representing Grant. The DOC denied an appeal in September.

"If we win this, it sets a precedent for other cases," Hunt said.

Officials with the DOC did not return calls for comment.

Hunt has spent more than two decades chronicling Hart Island, working to bring the 101-acre cemetery out of obscurity.

She compiled an online database that contains more than 60,000 names of those buried on Hart Island between 1980 and 2011. The database is how Grant found her name and learned where her daughter was buried.

The Hart Island Project has more recently advocated for the city to update its administrative codes concerning operations on the island and to transfer jurisdiction of it from the DOC to the city's Department of Parks and Recreation.

This is the first legal petition that challenges the DOC's visitation policy, Hunt said.

"This is a landmark case, and we hope it will change the laws in New York on whether or not families can visit graves," Hunt said. "We think she (Grant) has a particularly strong case because she is a licensed physician in obstetrics and gynecology. We think she can stand up for all women who are in these circumstances."

Grant has delivered many stillbirths throughout her career and understands both personally and professionally the devastation it can bring. Grant, who never had other children, no longer practices obstetrics and gynecology and is now completing a master's degree in public health at Columbia University.

"It never goes away. It's always part of you," Grant said of losing a child. "The whole point of trying to get onto Hart Island is that for most people, and for most women, being able to go to where the baby is is very, very important. You should be allowed that right."