The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  She died at home in her four-poster bed at 4:20 A.M. on September 15, surrounded by her family and a few friends. Her death came just three days after she had been exposed in news articles, and some Mem phians speculated that she had killed herself from shame. Her mother, who survived her, bridled at the rumor: “Sissy [her name for Georgia] didn’t do that,” she said frequently afterward.

  Other citizens implied that Georgia’s death had been encouraged by her helpers. And its timing was convenient for people beside herself. Dead women can’t rat on their confederates.

  But it’s much more likely that she died naturally, of cancer. Services were held in Memphis the day after her death; she was buried in the local cemetery in Hickory, Mississippi, on September 17. “She had on a beautiful orchid negligee with a great big orchid pinned on her,” a resident told me.

  Georgia may finally have been at peace, but her collaborators were not. A few days after the funeral “men in suits came in a big Ford,” a Hickory woman told me. “They asked my husband and me if we knew Georgia Tann.

  “‘My wife was at the graveside,’ my husband told them.

  “‘Was it an open casket?’ they asked me. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  “‘Was it her?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “‘Really?’

  “‘Truly.’”

  Georgia was really dead.

  Of course her collaborators continued to worry, until even the most skittish realized the limited scope of Browning’s investigation. And adoptive parents across the country were terrified. Actor Dick Powell, who with wife June Allyson had adopted a baby through Georgia, vowed to fight any effort to make him return his child. “If they come to get my daughter, they will have to bring a large cannon,” he said. He and other adoptive parents were quickly mollified by the passage of the Tennessee law that legalized Georgia’s illegal adoptions.

  As for Georgia herself, she had won again, slipping away without being held accountable for her crimes. She bequeathed little but embarrassment to her family members, who, accustomed to wealth, were left in relative poverty. Of the $1 million she’d made, only $80,000 worth of stocks and property remained. By the time the lawsuit against her was settled nine years later, her estate had dwindled to $45,000, and the state attached two-thirds of that.

  She left no money for children’s causes, or for the institution that had consumed her. But she had left adoption a terrible legacy.

  The law must be consonant with life. . . . Mankind is

  possessed of no greater urge than to try to understand

  the age-old question: “Who am I$”

  —Judge Wade S. Weatherford Jr., SC, Seventh Judicial

  Circuit Court, ruling on an adoptee’s petition to

  gain access to adoption records

  Part Three

  Georgia’s Secrets

  12.

  Georgia’s Lies

  When my daughter was four and beginning to understand what having been adopted meant, she reeled: she’d lost her place on earth. “Whose tummy did I grow in?” she demanded, near panic. “Was it Lynn’s, Jean’s, Susie’s, Kathy’s, Kappy’s . . . ?” She named relatives, neighbors, friends. She seemed prepared to interrogate strangers. And by the fall of her sophomore year in college she was ready to learn the answer to her question. “I’ve spent nineteen years not knowing my birth mother. I don’t want to spend more,” she said.

  Finding her mother would have been difficult, maybe impossible, if Beth had been a typical American adoptee, since American adoptees are legally forbidden knowledge of their birth parents’ names. In all fifty states, adoptees’ birth certificates—which list the children’s birth names and the names of their birth mothers and, often, fathers—are sealed upon finalization of their adoptions. Their adoption records are also sealed.

  Adoptees are then issued false birth certificates that portray their adoptive parents as their birth parents.

  And in 1996, when my daughter was nineteen and ready to search, all states but Alaska and Kansas—which have always allowed adoptees copies of their original birth certificates once they come of age—continued to deny adoptees knowledge of their identities even after they became adults.

  Adult adoptees in the other forty-eight states could learn their birth parents’ names only through the help of private investigators, search groups, or attorneys. And there was no assurance that any of these would be successful—not even the lawyers, who had to convince judges that the adoptees had “good cause” for knowledge of their roots. “Good cause” is a vague term that many judges deemed inapplicable even to grave reasons, such as the need for biologically compatible bone marrow. A Georgia Tann adoptee living in California told me of appearing before a Tennessee judge who ruled that her leukemia was insufficient reason to justify access to her health history. The adoptee later discovered that this judge had rubber-stamped many of Georgia’s illegal transactions.

  The reasons that other judges withhold adoptees’ records are hopefully less self-serving than the Tennessee jurist’s, based solely upon their interpretation of their states’ adoption laws.

  The reason for laws denying adoptees knowledge of their birth names and identities is said, by legislators across the country, to be to protect all members of the adoption triad: adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents. Issuing false birth certificates to adoptees and sealing their true ones protects them, it’s claimed, from the traumatic realization that they had been conceived out of wedlock.

  Maintaining the anonymity of birth mothers is said to help them preserve their privacy and prevent them from being intruded upon years later by the children they relinquished.

  Adoptive parents are depicted as needing the strongest possible assurance that their children and their birth parents will never meet.

  Adoptees have long understood the speciousness of these arguments. Most assume they were born out of wedlock; few are shocked by that supposition, or would be devastated to learn it was true. Few single mothers are unduly embarrassed by their status, and 88.5 percent of birth mothers, according to a study published in 1989, support adult adoptees’ access to their birth parents’ names.

  Many adoptive parents not only appreciate their children’s need to know their origins but help them search.

  Beth was lucky, for although she may never see her original birth certificate she had long known what I believed was her mother’s last name. The word “Garvey” had been typed in the margin of a court paper sent to my husband Bob and me after the finalization of Beth’s adoption in 1978. Eighteen years later she procured through the Internet the phone numbers and addresses of every Western New York state resident named Garvey.

  She wouldn’t call all of them; she didn’t want to embarrass her mother by speaking with a relative who might not know she’d relinquished a child. Instead Beth would seek the help of a local support group, Adoption Network Cleveland, in determining which female Garvey, if any, was her mother, and contact her.

  I had long understood that American adoption is particularly closed and secretive. But it wasn’t until I began studying Georgia Tann’s impact on the institution that I realized that European countries like Germany, England, Scotland, Wales, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland allow adoptees access to their original birth certificates. Australia, New Zealand, provinces of Canada, Israel, Taiwan, China, Japan, and Korea give adoptees access. The United States is one of very few countries that legally forbids adopted adults knowledge of their birth names.

  American adoptees have long been furious at being denied a right enjoyed by every other American citizen. Adoptee Caprice East, who with Denny Glad headed the Tennessee Coalition for Adoption Reform, pointed out the unfairness: “Serial killers can know where they came from, but I can’t.”

  For decades Georgia Tann’s adoptees and their relatives fought individually to escape her influence and to find their birth families. Then, after finding a sister placed for adoption by Georgia T
ann, Memphian Carolyn Mitchell began helping members of other separated families find lost relatives. In 1978 Denny Glad founded Tennessee’s The Right To Know, a search group that also fights for adoptees’ access to their original birth certificates and adoption records.

  Throughout the decades, Georgia Tann’s indirect victims, who although they never met her suffered from her legacy of secrecy, have mounted similar campaigns. Their names are well known in adoption circles:

  Jean Paton, who after locating her birth mother in 1942 created an organization called Orphan Voyage. “In the soul of every adoptee is an eternal flame of hope for reunion and reconciliation with those he has lost through private or public disaster,” she wrote.

  Florence Ladden Fisher of New York, who in 1971 founded the Adoptees’ Liberty Movement Association (ALMA), which now has branches across the country, and called withholding birth information from adoptees an “affront to human dignity.”

  Betty Jean Lifton, also of New York City, whose 1998 memoir, Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter, eloquently espouses adoptees’ right to knowledge.

  And there are countless other adoptees who describe the blankness regarding their pasts as “a constant gnawing.” It creates “a hole that can’t be filled,” a “vacuum for which there is no substitute”; it is “a piece of my soul that is gone.” Not knowing who they are is like being “a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing,” “the center of a wheel missing two spokes.” “No one has the power to deny me my birthright.”

  Fairness alone would seem to dictate that adoptees should be allowed to know who bore them. But most Americans, including me, had long assumed that the falsification of adoptees’ birth certificates had at least sprung from the motives of well-meaning social workers anxious to relieve adoptees of the stigma of illegitimacy. Typical was the reasoning of the author of a popular book on adoption published in 1940 who wrote that withholding information about adoptees would help prevent “reporters nosing about for news” coming upon something really juicy and publishing it, “causing untold suffering and permanent damage. Unscrupulous birth relatives could trace a child if they wished, and use their knowledge to upset a well established adoptive relationship. . . .”

  The same rationale had been expressed several years earlier, however, by someone less well meaning. In a 1937 letter to her attorney, Abe Waldauer, Georgia Tann justified her refusal to tell the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare or the Departments of Public Welfare in other states anything about her children, including their birth names. Disclosing information, she wrote, would result in adoptive information being leaked to social workers in the counties where the adoptive parents lived, and the child’s adoption becoming “a very tempting morsel of gossip.”

  Georgia’s attorney was as dedicated as she to secrecy in adoption, not only out of disinclination for providing food for gossip, but, as Abe wrote her on April 25, 1940, to avoid placing “an effective instrument of blackmail in the hands of unscrupulous [birth] parents and open[ing] the way for them to prey upon real [adoptive] parents whose fine impulses have impelled them to accept children for adoption.”

  Needless to say, Departments of Public Welfare in states across the country, including Tennessee, resented being denied information about the children Georgia placed with local citizens, and in 1944 a Tennessee adoption law was proposed that would have made her adoptions less secretive. On October 6, 1944, Abe Waldauer wrote on Georgia’s behalf to the Chairman of the Committee on Social Legislation in Nashville:

  “The proposed statute regarding adoption is atrocious, and should not be accepted.

  “We object to the requirement of Section 1 that the [adoption] petition must be filed in the county where the [adoptive] parents reside. In order to be secure in the position of adopting children, anonymity is essential. The first place one [a birth parent] would look in seeking to find a child would be in the records of the county of residence of the adoptive parents.

  “Section 3, requiring natural parents to be made defendants [i.e. informed that their child was being adopted] is contrary to all advanced thinking of correct social service. This places in the hands of the real [birth] parents of the child an effective instrument of blackmail. Only backward states require service of process on the real parents of the child.”

  The proposed reform law, he continued, “is just an attempt to make adoptions difficult, and to surround the entire procedure with the sort of intrusive inquisitiveness of social workers that will have the effect of reducing adoptions in Tennessee. We are unalterably opposed to the State Department of Public Welfare becoming an investigative agency of this character. This would inject the State Department into adoptions, and would mean that information respecting adoptions would be available as choice morsels of gossip for inquisitive women in a political set-up. . . .”

  A desire to cater to adoptive parents anxious to prevent their children’s birth parents from finding their children wasn’t the only reason Georgia kept her adoptions secret, but it was a large one. “We never tell the natural [birth] mother or reveal to others where the child is and where it is being placed for adoption,” Georgia told a reporter for the Commercial Appeal in 1948. “Adoptive parents want to take the children and love them as their own, and they do not wish to be subject later to interference and confusion.”

  But while Georgia refused to let birth mothers know who had adopted their children, she frequently let adoptive parents know whose children they’d adopted, by giving them adoption decrees that listed the name of the child’s birth mother. She may have done this to satisfy adoptive parents’ curiosity. And she apparently wasn’t worried that her clients would share this information with their adopted children, leading to an adoptee and birth mother reunion that might lead to exposure of her child stealing.

  She was correct in her assumption. Most adoptive parents of the time were as loathe to have their children find their birth parents as they were to have the birth parents find their child. In an attempt to prevent the child’s searching, many adoptive parents didn’t even tell adopted children that they’d been adopted. I know of only four Georgia Tann clients who gave their children information about their backgrounds. Three did it out of kindness. The other was Joy Barner’s adoptive father. After telling her, “I paid $500 for you, and I could have gotten a good hunting dog for a lot less,” he threw her adoption papers at her feet, shouting, “You come from the lowest scum on earth.”

  Contemporary adoptive parents, like Bob and me, are also often given the names of their adopted child’s birth parents. There have been no studies of how frequently this happens, or of why it occurs. But the fact that adoptive parents are sometimes given birth parents’ names, and that, except in cases of open adoption, birth parents are never given the names of adoptive parents indicates which party courts and some adoption agencies consider important. This continues to be the party Georgia favored, the adoptive parents. Today’s adoptive parents, however, are more likely to give their adopted children their birth parents’ names.

  Of course Georgia and her lawyer had reasons for secrecy other than to placate and coddle adoptive parents. To a great extent, Georgia operated in plain sight. But absolute openness regarding her adoption practices, which would have been tantamount to an admission of kidnapping, would have taxed even Boss Crump’s tolerance. Georgia and her attorney’s need for concealment was so specific that their argument that openness would provide “an effective instrument of blackmail . . .” might never have been used again. But over five decades later, in 1996, a lawyer defending secrecy in adoption paraphrased Abe Waldauer’s words: “[Openness] could be easily used as blackmail or the threat of blackmail.”

  The use of wording so similar to Georgia’s was no coincidence, but rather evidence of the endurance of her legacy of secrecy in adoption.

  Considering her general proclivity for deception, her need to cover her tracks, and her energy, it was perhaps inevitable that she would be the person to begin the practice o
f falsifying adoptees’ birth certificates. What is remarkable is that until I began my research neither I nor anyone else knew that she had originated this identity theft. One reason for this, of course, is her escape from historical notice. Another is that the first state to pass a law “amending” adoptees’ birth certificates, in 1931, was Alabama, not Tennessee.

  Adoptees and their advocates, however, have long suspected a link between falsified birth certificates and baby selling. “Secrecy in adoption does cover a multitude of crimes,” Hal Aigner wrote in Adoption in America Coming of Age, published in 1992.

  The instincts of adoptees and their advocates are correct. In 1928, three years before the passage of the Alabama law calling for the “amendment” of adoptees’ birth certificates, Georgia Tann had, extra legally, begun having the Tennessee Department of Vital Statistics issue phony birth certificates for her adoptees. Nine years later, in 1937, she used her political connections to have a law passed legalizing the practice in Tennessee.

  Within twenty years all forty-eight states were issuing adoptees falsified birth certificates, and upon admission of Alaska and Hawaii as states, the number rose to fifty. And in the vast majority of states, legislators and social workers deny adoptees knowledge of their identities forever—for far longer than they did when states first began falsifying birth certificates. Georgia’s inducement of legislators and social workers across the country into becoming almost as secretive as she was is one of her most terrible, and extraordinary, accomplishments—one that required her, once again, to stand previous adoption practice on its head.

  Until her influence upon adoption hardened in the late 1950s, the prevailing theme regarding it was one of openness. Despite the falsification of adoptees’ birth certificates, almost all adult adoptees but Georgia’s were given information that would help them find their parents.