Secret maternity hospitals of the USSR: were children declared dead and given to other families?

Not all of these stories are just fantasy for the sake of hype.

In November 1983, 23-year-old Irina Popova gave birth to twin girls in Tashkent. According to doctors, both died soon after. But the mother is certain she was deceived. After all, a few days after the birth, she held one of the daughters in her arms. Alive.

They didn’t give her any documents, didn’t show her the body, they only dryly explained: “This is miscarriage material.”

And for decades now, Irina has been searching for the truth.

November 17, 1983. Irina Popova gave birth in the new building of the Tashkent Research Institute of Obstetrics and Gynecology, where doctors used the most advanced technologies of the time.

"Labor began a month early," Irina recalls. "The pregnancy was difficult. Both girls were breech. The blood loss was colossal, requiring a transfusion. But the girls were born alive!"

The next day, during rounds, Irina asked, "Where are my girls? Why is no one saying anything?" The answer was, "We don't know. Ask the pediatrician; the department is downstairs."

But getting up was out of the question: strict bed rest for several days. Furthermore, the slightest movement caused excruciating pain.

"I was waiting for someone to come and tell me how my children were. But no one came to see me the next day, or the day after that. Only the nurses were performing procedures. On the third day, one of them said, 'They called from the children's ward. They said a girl died.' And that was it. No explanation. Not a single doctor came! They wouldn't let my husband in, nor my mother. Only notes and packages sent through the post office."

That same night, on the advice of her roommate, Irina secretly went down to the children's ward. A nurse was on duty.

"I cried and begged: 'Show me the baby!' I shoved some money into her pocket. 'Don't cry like that,' the nurse reassured her. 'There's your little girl lying in the incubator. She's in stable condition.'"

Irina saw the baby: oxygen tubes, a small face – a copy of her father.

"When I asked why they weren't bringing the baby to feed, they told me, 'She's weak and can't nurse yet. We're feeding her through a tube. That's what happens with premature babies. They'll bring her when she gets stronger. I just fed her before you arrived.' The nurse opened the incubator and handed me the baby. I held my little one. She was snoring sweetly, wrapped in a swaddling blanket, a kerchief over her head. Her cheeks were puffed out, her lips curled up. I couldn't stop admiring her. Tears streamed down my face—both happiness and grief for her other daughter, the one who had died.

A few minutes later the nurse took the child away:

"Come on, I'll put it back. If the doctor on duty sees this, we'll all be in trouble."

Irina returned to the ward and slept peacefully for the first time in several days: at least one of her girls was alive!

“And in the morning they told me: the second one died.”

The next day at eight o'clock in the morning, Popova's patient was called to the head of the department. A woman of Slavic appearance, about forty years old, sat at the desk:

— Your second girl died...

Irina didn’t believe it:

- How? Show her to me!

And then she burst into tears under the watchful gaze of the headmistress.

"Now stop being hysterical! Otherwise, you'll leave here without a sick leave. Be grateful we gave you 72 days as a difficult birth! You had miscarried material—1,250 and 1,300 grams. We can't show it."

"But I had eight full months!" Irina cried. "Give my children to be buried!"

The director explained that they don't give children away for burial: "This is an institute, not a maternity hospital. We have a worker who picks up everything and takes it to the mass grave."

"Excuse me, but you already had time to remove the body at eight in the morning?" Irina asked doubtfully. "If it's 'miscarriage material,' then how can there be a burial?"

Leaving the questions unanswered, the headmistress suddenly asked what names they planned to give the children.

"I was surprised: why names for the dead? 'It's the way it's supposed to be,' the headmistress snapped. I'd chosen the names in advance—Ekaterina and Anna."

Then Irina was given a paper to sign: such and such gave birth, at such and such a time, and was informed of the date of death.

"No examination, no evidence. Nothing! But what could I prove then? In shock, an ordinary woman in labor, without rights, like most people back then."

— Why didn’t you say that you saw your daughter alive the day before?

"I was afraid to let the nurse down. Everyone was living in fear back then. But you can't fool a mother's heart. I always told my mom, sisters, and husband: something's wrong. At eight months, my belly was so huge, it couldn't even be miscarriage material! I still have the photo. It's the only evidence that it wasn't a miscarriage."

Irina admits: in the Soviet Union, people trusted doctors unconditionally. She adds:

"The maternity hospitals were like prisons. There was almost no contact with family: only an intercom in the hallway, where there was always a line. After I was told about the death of my second daughter, no one even came down to see my husband and mother, who had just arrived, or explained anything. I told them everything myself over the phone."

A few days after giving birth, Irina was transferred to the pathology department.

"They said I had kidney disease and wouldn't be discharged with those test results. But I've never had kidney pain! Not before, not after. In the end, after keeping me in the hospital until the end of December, they discharged me on New Year's Eve, with 72 days of sick leave due to a difficult birth."

A year later, on December 25, 1984, Irina gave birth to a healthy son at... the same research institute.

"At that time, they were the only ones doing an experiment on cervical suturing. I had a very short cervix, plus the aftereffects of my first birth. They stitched it up and tightened it with sutures so I could carry the baby to term. The stitches were removed before the birth. Such procedures weren't performed in regular maternity hospitals. What's more, there was no ultrasound anywhere. The first machine appeared in 1983, right at that institute."

— Weren’t you afraid to go there again?

"It's scary. But I was in a hopeless situation. True, the specialists at the research institute almost ruined that baby too: they waited until the last minute, didn't perform a C-section, and the baby was already not breathing. I gave birth to my second son in a regular maternity hospital."

In 2017, Irina moved to Russia. She lives in Krasnodar. She has two sons and three grandchildren. But the pain persists:

"Every year I think: my girls would be this old now..." And again she emphasizes: "I held a living baby in my arms! A healthy one, weighing about two kilograms! And the birth certificate said 1250 grams. I wasn't stupid; I was 23, after all, and I could tell weight by its heaviness."

"Data from the archives has disappeared."

Irina made her story public in 2013.

I saw a similar story on television once. Then a second, a third. Then I decided to post it on social media. And the responses started pouring in. Women described similar situations. It was all the same: the children were declared dead, the bodies weren't shown, the paperwork was blank. Regarding Uzbekistan, they mentioned the Tashkent Research Institute of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Maternity Hospital No. 6, considered the best in the city.

— Have you tried to investigate the case?

— One of my former compatriots living abroad noted: there were a suspiciously large number of such cases in 1983. And all roads lead to that ill-fated research institute.

In 2013, my mother's friend's daughter, a well-known and well-connected lawyer in Tashkent, filed a complaint with the prosecutor's office. But they refused to open a case: the statute of limitations had passed. I had no intention of opening a case; I wanted to find my children. The lawyer began searching for information about my birth at the institute. The archives were empty! Everything had vanished. A few years later, my sister contacted a friend of the woman who managed the research institute's archives. She also tried to find something, but then said that many documents had been destroyed between 1982 and 1986.

— Do you remember the names of those doctors?

"No. They might not even be alive anymore. Many were already elderly then. The head nurse who discharged me was Russian. I think her patronymic was Pavlovna... And I never saw the pediatrician everyone kept citing. I understand that those involved in that story will never be found."

— Did you manage to find out anything at all?

— Nothing. Of course, there were all sorts of rumors. For example, that premature babies were declared dead and sent to Moscow to be given to other families. A lawyer friend of mine even found someone who, according to some sources, was involved in these cases. He lived abroad. People who knew him refused to testify. So there's nothing to go on.

— Not a single clue at all?

One day, a subscriber responded to my letter. She knew two twin sisters from Tashkent, born in 1983. Both were fair-haired, but they lived with an Uzbek family. Then they moved to Sweden. I started corresponding with one of them. It turned out the girls' parents from Tashkent had adopted them while they were in graduate school in Moscow. Their mother told them, when they were already adults, that they had been abandoned at the maternity hospital. They didn't have time to learn the details; their parents died of COVID-19. But the story struck me as odd.

The staff at one TV show offered to pay for the test, but the sisters refused. A couple of years later, they found their biological mother through an international DNA database. They sent a photo of the woman—the same face as them. Although I hoped until the very end that they were my girls…

— Can adoptive parents of such children know the truth?

"The lawyer didn't think that was a given. Children could have been taken to another country at any time. It was a constant occurrence in those years."

“It’s strange that none of the former employees of the research institute have responded yet.”

"It's unlikely that anyone would admit to it, even if they were still alive. Who wants to dredge up such a past? And so many years have passed."

— Has your husband supported you all these years?

He was silent, still processing everything. He couldn't believe we'd been deceived, that something like this was possible in the USSR. And I couldn't get what had happened out of my head. You can't fool a mother's heart. I have no doubt that the girls are alive. I've tried and will continue to try to find out something. But for now, alas...

"The bodies were handed over in a box."

Irina Popova's story is not unique. You can find recollections online of other women who gave birth in Tashkent in the early 1980s. The stories are similar: the babies were declared dead, the bodies were not shown, the archives were empty…

A new story from Kazakhstan recently surfaced on social media. An Almaty resident recounted that in July 1987, she gave birth to two eight-month-old girls at the Kapchagay Maternity Hospital. She heard them crying, but the children were immediately taken away and later reported dead. On the sixth day, her husband was given the bodies in a sealed box without any paperwork. He buried the box unopened near a railroad track, as he had no official burial papers.

Two years later, the woman gave birth to a healthy daughter in the same maternity hospital. The author of the post is convinced that her daughters may be alive. The story was prompted by other high-profile stories—for example, about a girl from the US who, after a DNA test, found her parents in Uralsk, although she was presumed dead at birth.

Now the woman is asking for help in finding archival documents and is ready to undergo a DNA test, hoping that her daughters are also looking for their mother.

From the stories of victims, it's clear that Soviet maternity hospitals were subject to a strict system of secrecy. In cases of stillbirth, neither medical reports nor death certificates were often issued. They were said to be miscarried. Bodies were not shown or given for burial. Doctors argued that anything weighing less than 1,200 grams was considered incapable of life. Documentation was formal: a single piece of paper—a statement of acknowledgement of the date of death.

According to women's testimonies, cases of newborn disappearances were recorded not only in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, but also in some regions of Russia and Ukraine in the 1980s. The scheme went like this: parents received a death notice, and the child was handed over to other families. No official investigations were conducted.

But the stories of women from different countries show that the truth can emerge even after decades. And miracles do happen. If you don't remain silent.