Stricken Babies Get Quilts From Unknown Friends : Mission: Volunteers are sending simple parting gifts to doomed infants around the world. Their goal is to do what they can to ease the suffering.

They are the forgotten ones, and they number in the thousands--babies soon to die of AIDS, fetal alcohol syndrome or complications from crack cocaine.

But for six years now, a small volunteer group has been doing what it can to ease their suffering.

From a basement room at an Episcopal mission, off a rural road in New Hampshire, the volunteers send simple parting gifts of quilts to comfort dying babies all over the world in their final days.

Ellen Ahlgren, 74, a mental health counselor, started At-Risk Babies Crib (ABC) Quilts at home when she became aware of thousands of neglected AIDS babies in U.S. hospitals.

The project later moved to the mission basement where the quilts are sorted and sent to infants in many countries.

No one takes a salary. “The reward is greater than money,” said Ahlgren. “The reward is the feeling of doing something worthwhile. It’s an opportunity to give love to people and get love back and you can’t beat that.”

About 150 coverlets in pastel colors are stacked on tables, waiting to be checked for stray pins before shipping.

ABC has sent out more than 160,000 quilts so far, including 1,700 to Romania, 400 to Bosnia and 152 to Russia in 1991. “We try to do one new country each year,” said Ahlgren. This year, quilts may go to Rwanda.

The quilts are sent to the mission from across the United States, England, Germany, Australia and Japan. As computers and phones hum in the background, Ahlgren fluffs out one of 30 quilts made by students at Hokusei Gakuen Girls’ High School in Japan. One square reads, “Love Love Peace.”

Ahlgren has seen only two of the thousands of babies who have received the gifts. When she took the first six coverlets to Boston City Hospital in 1988, she saw two babies stricken with AIDS. Ever since then, the identities of the infants who receive the quilts have been kept confidential.

But she does hear back from hospital administrators and occasionally a parent, about the solace the quilts have brought. Recently, a child named Andre died, wrapped in one of ABC’s quilts, in his mother’s arms at the New Hampshire State Hospital in Concord.

“The mother said she would cherish that quilt forever,” Ahlgren said.

ABC began as a project to help babies with AIDS, but in 1991 Ahlgren learned of babies with other afflictions and changed the name from AIDS to At-Risk Babies Crib.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, the number of babies diagnosed with AIDS in the United States has totaled 5,095 from the time CDC tracking started in 1981 to June, 1994.

Those are only babies diagnosed as having AIDS. “There are probably thousands more out there infected with HIV,” the AIDS virus, said CDC spokesman Tom Skinner.

There are no accurate figures on the number of crack cocaine babies and the CDC does not require their statistics to be reported.

ABC views itself as an AIDS education project. It hopes schoolchildren making quilts for the project will talk more openly about AIDS prevention. It has distributed 12,000 copies of a children’s quilt-making book with a section on AIDS.