missouriindependent.com – Anna Spoerre – 2025-04-28 05:55:00

by Anna Spoerre, Missouri Independent
April 28, 2025

CUBA, Mo. — Hailey cradled her cat like a baby and nuzzled his fur. It wasn’t long before he rejected the attention and leapt from her arms in the callous way cats do. She cursed him in the way hormonal teenagers do.

Ash, a gray stray Hailey took in against her great-aunt’s protesting, became the teen’s comfort through a pregnancy and postpartum that spanned 10 foster homes, hospitals and group homes across Missouri. 

Hailey entered the state foster system at 2 years old. She’s lost count of how many roofs she’s slept under. 

Last spring at 15 years old, Hailey learned she was pregnant.

When she asked the state for an abortion, Hailey was told the possibility wasn’t up for discussion. By the time her stomach started to bulge, Missourians voted to codify the right to abortion in the state Constitution, and Hailey decided she wanted to parent. 

But it wasn’t so simple. 

By then, Hailey was staying with her great-aunt, Jodi Spradley, but the state remained her legal guardian. Though Hailey took initiative to prepare for motherhood, caseworkers on several occasions during her pregnancy threatened to take the baby after she was born, rolling out examples from Hailey’s long history in the state’s care.

In late February, just a few weeks after Hailey turned 16, her daughter was born. The resemblance is unmistakable: vibrant red locks, pale skin and blue eyes. 

From the moment her baby girl entered the world, Hailey feared the state would take her. While that hasn’t happened permanently, the state did temporarily separate the young mother and child, moving them to different cities in different corners of the state. 

By eight weeks postpartum, Hailey had slept in two hospitals and four homes. 

Desperate to reunite her child with family as she was shuffled around the foster system, Hailey signed power of attorney of her daughter over to Spradley, to whom she also wanted to return.

In early April, after months of protesting the state’s push to move her into a faith-based maternity home, Hailey acquiesced. It allowed her to reunite with her daughter. 

A few weeks later, on the eve of a court hearing to discuss her permanent placement, Hailey ran away from the maternity home with her 6-week-old in her arms. Both were quickly found and returned to state custody. 

Hailey said she fled, in part, out of fear the state would officially declare she couldn’t live with Spradley. And she was terrified about where they might send her next. 

The family’s fate remains uncertain.

Missouri has long been one of the most anti-abortion states in the country, with elected officials and advocates preaching the virtue of supporting young mothers to ensure abortion isn’t their only option. 

But Hailey said this sentiment is a far cry from her experience. To her, it felt like the state first made the decision to continue the pregnancy for her, then actively worked to keep her from parenting her child. 

The Independent spent months following Hailey and reviewing communications between her, Spradley, their advocates and the state that spanned Hailey’s pregnancy and postpartum. 

The record of her struggles in the system illustrate what youth advocates and foster care experts say are repeated failures by the state to support Hailey, and later her daughter. 

“Hailey was saying she wanted to parent, so she should have been supported,” said Laura Sullivan, a licensed independent social worker in Ohio who has spent several months advocating for Hailey. “In these states where they’re forcing pregnancies, especially teen pregnancies, they have to be ready to help these moms to parent.”

A spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Social Services, which oversees the state foster care system, said she could not discuss the specifics of Hailey’s case, instead pointing to Missouri’s Child Welfare Manual.

‘Don’t get pregnant’

The Facebook message came from a stranger. 

“I have a child on my caseload who I believe is a relative to you,” an employee with a Missouri foster care agency wrote the morning of May 21, 2024. 

Within hours, the state cleared and authorized Spradley to take her niece in under a temporary arrangement. Hailey was on her doorstep by that evening.

A letter dated that same day stated that while Hailey remained in the custody of Children’s Division, she was being placed with Spradley for an “indeterminate period.” 

Though filled with gaps, the aunt and niece have a long history. Spradley used to take Hailey to the St. Louis Zoo, propping her up against the wooden railings to catch a glimpse of the animals. As Hailey got older, Spradley would take her driving around different corners of southeast Missouri to get ice cream or go to a park. 

At times they went years without seeing one another. Though another great-aunt of Hailey’s — Spradley’s sister — adopted Hailey when she was 4, Hailey spent much of her childhood shuffled between different foster homes and mental hospitals. 

Hailey doesn’t remember her mother well, but she holds on to photos of them together in the first few years of Hailey’s life, before her mother died when she was 4 years old (Anna Spoerre/Missouri Independent).

She was a flight risk almost everywhere she went until she landed at Spradley’s.

“Don’t get pregnant,” Hailey recalled Spradley telling her when she moved in. 

A few weeks later, Hailey went to the doctor to confirm what she feared. Hailey, who only a few months earlier had turned 15, was pregnant. 

She wanted an abortion in the beginning. When Hailey asked her case worker if it was possible, she was told the state wasn’t allowed to discuss it with her. Abortion at the time remained illegal in Missouri with limited exceptions for medical emergencies.

Hailey couldn’t get up the nerve to tell Spradley she was pregnant, so she made a friend break the news instead. But Spradley didn’t kick her out. She doubled down on her desire to help.

Spradley searched the internet for answers. She sent a note to JustChoice — an agency based out of Ohio that helps people create abortion, adoption or parenting plans — saying her niece had been denied an abortion and now wanted to raise her child.

There was just one problem, Spradley said: Though months from her due date, the state was already threatening to take away Hailey’s baby. 

‘We’re going to remove that baby’

Sullivan, the licensed independent social worker at JustChoice, reached out to Spradley after her organization received her message in late 2024. With Spradley’s permission, she started communicating with Hailey’s case worker to talk about a parenting plan.

Sullivan recalls the case worker in their initial calls telling her: “I don’t think Hailey’s going to be able to parent. We’re going to remove that baby. Her and her aunt, this is not a stable situation; they have a long history with the agency.’” 

Most urgent, the case worker told Sullivan, was Spradley’s lack of adequate housing. If she wanted to maintain custody of Hailey through her pregnancy, she needed somewhere else to live. 

After staying with a friend in St. Louis, Spradley and Hailey moved into the home and church of a former pastor in Wright City. Some of Spradley’s friends had pointed them to the old building off a rural highway as emergency accommodations.

The house, which abutted woods and farmland, sat untouched after the pastor died months earlier.

In the main room, religious relics crowded the wall. Behind one closed door was what Hailey dubbed the “porn room,” after they found explicit images on an abandoned computer. Hailey slept upstairs beneath old posters of semi trucks plastered to the walls. 

The lack of heat became a growing concern as winter approached.

Hailey sits on a couch across from her great-aunt, Jodi Spradley, on Jan. 2, 2025, at a house they temporarily occupied in Wright City (Anna Spoerre/Missouri Independent).

The state began talking of removing Hailey from Spradley’s care; a faith-based maternity home in the St. Louis suburbs that contracts with the state was suggested. Hailey remained adamant she didn’t want to go. When her case worker recommended she have bags packed and by the door the week of Christmas, she listened. 

But she also shut down, growing moodier as the looming threat of removal hung over the holidays.

The new year came and went. Hailey’s bags remained by the door. The state never stopped by.

Sullivan, searching for a solution, teamed up with Right By You, an “all options” nonprofit focused on helping pregnant youth, to raise money for Spradley to rent an upgraded apartment.

Within weeks, Right By You raised $5,000 — primarily through Missouri donors and abortion funds — to cover Spradley’s rent through May. Meanwhile, Sullivan worked the phones with Spradley, calling landlords in an attempt to find someone who would accept a pregnant teen, a 52-year-old on disability, two dogs and one cat.

She found a solution in Cuba, a town about 80 miles southwest of St. Louis. 

By mid-January, Hailey and Spradley were moved into a small, unadorned two-bedroom apartment.

Spradley reached out to her network of friends, asking if they could help furnish the apartment with baby essentials as a birthday surprise for Hailey, who turned 16 in late January. 

They came by the truck-load, dropping off strollers, onesies and a swing. Spradley used some of the disability back-pay she received to splurge on a crib and a bottle sanitizer.

In the end, it still wasn’t enough. 

‘Where are you going to live?’

Spradley didn’t take Hailey in sooner for many reasons. Poverty and poor health were the most prevailing. 

“So what’s your plan for where you are going to live?” Hailey’s case worker asked in a text to Spradley months earlier, shortly after Hailey learned she was pregnant. “Do you have any money saved?”

“I had absolutely no income when Hailey was brought to me,” Spradley replied. “Not a dime. I get SSI disability which is very little.” 

But once together, Hailey didn’t want to leave. Finally, someone understood her — a sarcastic and brash teen with a tendency to raise her voice.

“Some people would see what she’s doing and would freak out, but they don’t understand what she’s grown up and what she’s went through,” Spradley said. “That’s why I don’t judge her on that. That’s the big difference between me and other people.”

Unlike a foster parent, Spradley didn’t receive consistent financial benefits from the state for taking Hailey in. Though she attempted on several occasions to get certified as a foster parent through the state, she never received the final approval. 

Spradley suspects it’s because she’s poor and sick. 

She’s often seized by anxiety, which she said has only worsened since beginning to navigate the state’s hurdles in her attempts to help Hailey. She suffers from agoraphobia, Crohn’s disease, heart conditions and often uses a walker. 

Spradley attributed some of her ailments to growing up in Times Beach, Missouri. It’s now a ghost town, beset by a chemical contamination that came to light in the 1980s. The Environmental Protection Agency deemed it “one of the worst environmental disasters in our nation’s history.”

Hailey holds up infant clothes to show her great-aunt, Jodi Spradley, on Jan. 28, 2025, at their apartment in Cuba (Anna Spoerre/Missouri Independent).

Hailey is as determined as her aunt. 

She enrolled in teen parenting classes through Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis as she started her second trimester. Between that and her prenatal appointments, she made weekly trips to St. Louis through her third trimester. 

Most weeks, she made the trip without Spradley, booking and boarding a van through MO HealthNet, the state’s Medicaid program. The vehicle usually picked up other patients along the way, stretching what was normally a 90-minute drive into multiple hours. 

The state on several occasions expressed concern with this arrangement, telling both Spradley and Sullivan that Hailey needed constant supervision. 

Instead, Spradley kept an eye on Hailey’s location from an app on her cell phone.

Every year, Missouri social services agencies seize millions of dollars in Social Security benefits from foster children. Hailey is among them. 

When Sullivan questioned how the state was using Hailey’s payments, which typically go toward funding foster care, she was told it was being used to pay for Medicaid expenses and the van rides.

She remains skeptical. That $400 a month could have gone a long way to help Spradley purchase furniture and buy groceries, both of which she said were held against her toward the end of Hailey’s pregnancy.

Birth, ‘then I was out’

Days before Hailey went into labor, the state followed through on its threat. 

Hailey was removed from Spradley’s apartment in Cuba and sent to a private foster home near St. Louis. 

The foster mother, a stranger, drove her to the hospital. Once settled into a room, Hailey said the foster parent told her she was running down to the cafeteria.

Instead, she left Hailey at the hospital and never returned.

Hailey’s daughter was born two days later, on Feb. 26. The moment of joy was brief; within minutes, Hailey lost consciousness. 

“I had a whole asthma attack, then I ended up throwing up everything in my stomach, and then shaking so bad that my jaw was hurting,” she said. “Then I was out.” 

It took two blood transfusions to stem her postpartum hemorrhage.

Hailey ultimately stayed in the hospital for 12 days. Not because of her health, she said, but because the state didn’t know where else to send her.

This isn’t uncommon. In 2024, there were 314 Missouri foster children residing in hospitals. Others were held in hotels, offices and out-of-state residential treatment facilities. 

Hailey carries her daughter into her great-aunt Jodi Spradley’s apartment on April 1 in Cuba during a day-long visit while Hailey was staying at a group home in southeast Missouri (Anna Spoerre/Missouri Independent).

While at the hospital, Hailey learned how to breastfeed. She believes her daughter shares her own lactose intolerance since she doesn’t take well to most formulas.

In many ways the two girls resemble Hailey’s mother, who was found dead in 2011, two years after Hailey had been removed from her custody. She was in the third trimester of pregnancy with a second daughter, who didn’t survive. The autopsy concluded a drug overdose. Spradley still believes it was something more nefarious.

A few months before Hailey gave birth, she asked Spradley if she could see the place where her mom died. They drove 60 miles to the apartment and asked the current tenant if they could look around. Hailey asked lots of questions. Spradley hoped it was healing.

She tries to tell Hailey stories of her mother often. Like the time Hailey’s mother, while pregnant with her, found a free mini fridge at a scrap sale and walked miles home with it. She later did the same with a kiddie pool.

Hailey doesn’t know her father. She hopes her daughter won’t, either.

The line for “father” on the birth certificate is blank, as Hailey intended. 

She says little about the 20-year-old other than that they first met at a foster home years earlier, that he beat her and that he was, for a time, homeless. 

Multiple warrants are out for his arrest, including for failure to appear in court on trespassing and theft charges.

Throughout Hailey’s pregnancy, one of Spradley’s closest friends, Brandie Coleman, was among her fiercest defenders. When Hailey gave birth, Coleman was by her side, Facetiming with Spradley, who feared the state might punish her for being there. 

As Hailey recovered from her hemorrhage, Coleman says a hospital social worker confided in her that a state case worker had been trying to convince her to report Hailey to child protective services so they could remove her baby. But Coleman says the hospital employee refused, not seeing any evidence of abuse or neglect. 

Stephanie Kraft Sheley, founder of Right By You, the Missouri-based reproductive rights group that helped fundraise for Hailey and Spradley, said the family’s self-advocacy was admirable. 

And in a way, she believes, they were punished for it.

She called Hailey’s case “such a blatant example of a pregnancy literally forced by the state, and then a very clear bias against this person and this notion that her child would be better off with a different family, and she was told that explicitly. And I just honestly was a little bit surprised how unveiled that was. There wasn’t really any pretense about it.” 

Stephanie Kraft Sheley, founder of Right By You, called Hailey a “forceful self advocate,” adding: “It’s really admirable for someone so young, who’s in such a disempowered situation” (Anna Spoerre/Missouri Independent).

Kraft Sheley, who is also an attorney, said the fact that Hailey had a family member who wanted to take her in — who understood her — was huge. That Hailey was deprived of that support in the days leading up to and after her labor was “such inhumanity.”

“For any person to lose their home and be ripped away from their loved one within three days, four days of giving birth, one of the most formative, transformational experiences of a person’s life, she was treated with such a lack of care,” Kraft Sheley said. “… As a teen in such a vulnerable situation, she deserved to be held and surrounded by care, and instead, she was placed in this really precarious, uncertain situation.”

Postpartum ‘disrupted’

When Hailey was finally discharged from the hospital, she and her baby were driven 200 miles southwest to Springfield. 

There, they were placed in a private foster home with other teen moms.

Less than a week later, Hailey called Spradley. She was being taken to a mental health hospital to be screened for postpartum depression. Hailey said she was told it was because the foster parent heard her yelling; Hailey said she was yelling at a friend on the phone, not at her baby.

“I never heard this kid cry like she did,” Spradley said of Hailey during the phone call. 

Her daughter was napping when they took Hailey away.

At the hospital, Hailey said she didn’t screen positive for postpartum depression but was diagnosed with adjustment disorder, meaning she has stronger emotional or behavioral responses to stress and trauma. 

Hailey said when she learned she was being admitted to the hospital without her daughter, she had to be sedated after she started “throwing hands” at staff. She remained there for six days. 

Spradley had little contact with Hailey in the hospital once her phone was taken away. When Hailey was released, she signed power of attorney for her daughter over to Spradley. 

As Spradley drove to pick up Hailey’s child, Hailey was taken to yet another location — this time a group home in southeast Missouri.

Hailey believes the separation from her daughter was intentional. Within the first month of her child’s life, the two had been apart nearly as much as they’d been together. 

She tried to continue pumping breast milk. At the start of her third trimester, Hailey had already started collecting small bottles of colostrum. But it didn’t take long after being separated from her daughter for her milk supply to diminish. 

Hailey feeds her daughter while visiting her great-aunt Jodi Spradley on April 1 in Cuba (Anna Spoerre/Missouri Independent).

“For a teen mom, especially one with attachment issues like Hailey has, to be able to breastfeed successfully, that is beautiful and amazing, and could have been really healing,” Sullivan said. “But it was disrupted. So that caused both Hailey harm and (her daughter) harm.” 

Sullivan, who has also worked as a social worker in two states, said it’s easy to use a teen’s years-long history in the system against them unfairly. She doesn’t believe Missouri ever gave Hailey a fair chance. 

“Instead of being like, ‘This is a kid who we know has a lot of trauma and a lot of stuff, we should probably try to figure out how we’re going to help her parent and heal so she can be a good parent,’” Sullivan said. “‘It was just, ‘We’re on a mission to make her not be able to parent.’”

‘I’m not giving up on you’

On a sunny day in early April, Hailey returned to her aunt’s home in Cuba.

For the second time in a week, she held her daughter, who was one day shy of 5 weeks old.  

Hailey’s milk supply had mostly dried up. She considered attempting to breastfeed, but then opted to make a bottle instead. 

“Has she given you all the stink face yet?” Hailey asked as Spradley confirmed with a chuckle. 

“Good. That’s my child,” Hailey replied, smiling down at her daughter as she fed her.

She sat in her old room again, across from stickers adhered to the wall welcoming her baby home. She urged the dogs to be careful as they investigated her baby’s scent. She cuddled her cat.

It was all temporary.

Hailey reunites with her daughter, then 5 weeks old, as her family’s dog, Belle, sniffs curiously, on April 1 at Hailey’s great-aunt Jodi Spradley’s apartment in Cuba (Anna Spoerre/Missouri Independent).

Hailey was back for just part of the day on an authorized off-site visit. A few hours later, Spradley would drive her 90 minutes back to the group home where Hailey would again kiss her baby goodbye.

Until then, she changed diapers, went through paperwork and sorted baby clothes, a sense of normalcy in a life that had been anything but.

As Hailey lounged on the couch with her daughter and Spradley rocked her small dog, named Baby, in the corner, Spradley’s cell phone rang. At the sight of the caller ID, an old friend of Spradley’s, Hailey perked up and grabbed for the phone to say hello.  

“You know what? I love the sound of your voice right now. You sound so happy,” Spradley’s friend said to Hailey before pausing. “Honestly, are you doing OK?” 

“Not for good, sadly,” Hailey said. “Jodi kidnapped me for the day though.” 

She outlined her plan to return permanently to her daughter. The first step was the maternity home she initially resisted. It was her only option she saw to parent.

Less than a week later she checked into the St. Louis area facility. Spradley met her in the lobby with the baby. 

The past several months have been hard on Spradley. Anxiety attacks bare themselves in the middle of the night. She worries over Hailey and her daughter. She worries over herself. When she first took in Hailey, there were days she wondered if the stress was too much and if she should send Hailey away. But now, the house feels devastatingly empty without her. 

When Hailey was 11 weeks pregnant, she snuck Ash, the cat, into the house against Spradley’s wishes. At the time it infuriated Spradley, who was already having a difficult time feeding two humans and two dogs, making frequent trips to the food pantry. Then she saw how much comfort the cat brought Hailey as she faced an unknown future.

When Hailey was taken away, Spradley started letting the cat sleep beside her at night. 

Over the years, Hailey ran from multiple family members and foster homes.

But she never ran from Spradley. It’s something Hailey’s social worker pointed out to Spradley in messages throughout Hailey’s pregnancy, and something Spradley continues to emphasize in her fight to bring Hailey and her daughter back under her roof. 

Jodi Spradley holds Hailey’s cat, Ash, on April 1 at her apartment in Cuba (Anna Spoerre/Missouri Independent).

It’s why Spradley wasn’t shocked when she learned at Hailey’s most recent placement hearing in mid-April that she had run away from the maternity home just hours earlier. 

“I don’t believe what the system is doing to her… She is a child that’s been in that system for so long that they broke her,” Spradley said the next day, after police located Hailey and her daughter about 130 miles east, in south-central Illinois.

“Sometimes she makes me so mad,” Spradley continued, “but I just can’t blame her for what they did to her. I blame them. I blame the system.”

After Hailey and her daughter were located by the state, they were moved to another foster home, just outside St. Louis. 

A few days later, Hailey said her case worker showed up with police, insisting her daughter was underweight and needed to be evaluated at the hospital. Spradley rushed to St. Louis Children’s Hospital to meet them. There, she said doctors gave the baby a clean bill of health and noted she gained weight since the week prior.

Then on Friday, hours after the Missouri Department of Social Services responded to a request for comment on Hailey’s case from The Independent, her case worker called Spradley. The state would soon allow Hailey and her daughter to return to Spradley’s care, at least until a court made a more permanent placement decision, Spradley said.

Despite the sudden good news, nothing about the family’s situation is set in stone.

“I’m scared about what tomorrow’s going to bring,” Spradley said Sunday.

She often reflects on words she spoke to Hailey’s mother not long before she died. Hailey was in a private foster home at the time. 

“I promise you I’m going to bring Hailey home,” she said more than a decade ago.

It’s why Spradley didn’t hesitate when Hailey reached out for help. Though when asked about that decision, Hailey, who doesn’t tend toward sentimentality, said, “I knew she’d take my dumb ass.”

She flipped Spradley the bird. Spradley mirrored the motion. 

“Me and Hailey, our relationship, even when she has hardships, I’m like, ‘I’m not letting you go,’” Spradley said. “I’m not giving up on you.”

It’s why Hailey chose Spradley to help raise her daughter. 

She’s adamant her daughter won’t end up in the state’s care the way she did. 

“What they’re doing is f**ked,” Hailey said of her lifetime spent in the foster system. 

Spradley is ready to fight right there alongside her niece. 

“We want her to experience an actual caring family and have support rather than toss you aside whenever they can’t handle you,” Spradley said. “If they can’t handle you at your worst, then they don’t deserve you at your best, right?”

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The post A Missouri teen spent her life in foster care. Now she’s fighting the state to keep her baby appeared first on missouriindependent.com

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Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning

The content portrays a clear critique of Missouri’s foster care system, with a focus on the state’s handling of teenage pregnancy and its anti-abortion stance. The narrative emphasizes the struggles of a young, pregnant teen, Hailey, in the foster care system, highlighting her lack of support and the state’s coercion regarding parenting. Additionally, the piece features a strong advocacy for Hailey’s right to parent her child, aligning with reproductive rights and a critical stance toward government intervention in personal decisions. The involvement of advocacy groups like “Right By You” further indicates a left-leaning perspective, focused on social justice and supporting vulnerable populations.