They were given this information by reputable social workers who understood the importance of family ties. As late as 1946, the supervisor of the State Charities Aid Association of New York stressed, “The identity of a child is his sacred right, and he should not be deprived of it . . . ,” a sentiment shared by the Child Welfare League of America.
Established in 1921, the League had quickly become the most renowned national organization of child welfare agencies. In the 1930s, the League formulated adoption standards protecting all members of the adoption triad, and emphasizing the rights of adopted children to know their roots.
By publicizing these standards, the League hoped to curtail the practices of the many unregulated adoption arrangers who were capitalizing upon adoption’s sudden rise in popularity. Some of these arrangers were well meaning but lacked training in arranging adoptions. The League’s executive director, Charles C. Carstens, was particularly disturbed by the lawyers, doctors, and others who profited financially from adoption.
One of these black market arrangers, of course, was Georgia Tann. But Carstens was unaware of her unethical practices until 1936, when he began the investigation that culminated in her agency’s expulsion from the League for advertising children in newspapers and failing to properly assess the qualifications of adoptive parents. And since neither he nor most other social workers outside Tennessee knew that she stole and sold children, they also didn’t know that she falsified birth certificates, in part, to cover her crimes. But her purported reason—to spare adoptees the embarrassment occasioned by the letters “O.W.” (out of wedlock), or the word “Illegitimate”—must have sounded good.
Why indeed, reputable social workers had long wondered, should adoptees be stigmatized by birth certificates highlighting their out of wedlock status? By 1920, laws forbidding the inclusion of this fact had been passed in Minnesota and New York. But these didn’t solve the problem, since adoptees’ birth certificates, which often included the names only of their mothers, not fathers, continued to imply their status. Ethical social workers in several states considered eliminating all information but babies’ names on birth certificates, but determined that birth parents’ names had to be included for historical purposes.
Georgia’s practice of issuing amended birth certificates that portrayed adoptees’ adoptive parents as their biological parents seemed the perfect solution to a long-standing problem.
But while ethical professionals supported state laws that falsified birth certificates and kept the original ones confidential, they interpreted the word “confidential” differently from Georgia. She kept original birth certificates secret even from her adoptees. Ethical social workers and vital statisticians, who wished only to keep adoptees’ origins from the prying eyes of reporters and neighbors, allowed adult adoptees copies of their original birth certificates. Workers like Maud Morlock, consultant in the Services for Unmarried Mothers for the U.S. Children’s Bureau, stressed the importance of giving adoptees information about their pasts, “for every person has a right to know who he is and who his parents were.”
Throughout most of the 1940s the Child Welfare League of America and other prominent social service organizations understood and sympathized with adoptees’ need to search. Many adoption agencies helped adult adoptees find their parents. Then everything changed.
Ethical agencies’ evolution from the sharing of information with adult adoptees to the secretiveness practiced by Georgia was gradual enough to make identifying the date of its change difficult. But by 1960 virtually all social workers denied adoptees information that would help them find their families.
Georgia’s role in corrupting virtually all of American adoption with secrecy was less direct than were her roles in popularizing the institution, commercializing it, and forcing single mothers to relinquish their babies. She couldn’t coerce social workers outside Tennessee through blackmail, as she had the Memphis workers she had provided with adopted babies, and had controlled ever after by threatening to reclaim the children. She couldn’t threaten to ruin the reputations of ethical social workers, as she’d done with the rural single mothers she’d silenced by threatening to accuse them of promiscuity to everyone in their home towns. But she could, by her existence and those of her imitators, force ethical social workers to make a terrible choice.
In 1955 and 1956 Senate subcommittee hearings were held that focused upon illegal adoption practices in an ultimately futile attempt to secure passage of a federal law against baby selling. The hearings were chaired by the U.S. senator from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver, one of the political outsiders who in 1948 had been instrumental in Crump’s statewide fall from power, which in turn led to the unmasking of Georgia Tann. Her crimes had in fact inspired Kefauver’s Washington efforts.
When I had first read the Senate hearings’ transcript, I’d concentrated on former investigator Robert Taylor’s deposition regarding the deceased Georgia Tann. But once I began seeking a reason for ethical social workers’ reversal, I recalled testimony regarding black-market adoption arrangers who were then still alive. Although they operated on a small scale and didn’t usually steal children but instead coerced parents into relinquishing them, they profited financially from adoption.
The Kefauver Committee studied the tactics of brokers who had begun operating after Georgia, and were clearly following her lead. A team very similar to that of Georgia and Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley worked in Augusta, Georgia, where a probation officer reported the names of babies born to poor parents to a juvenile court judge who terminated the rights of the birth parents. The two then sold the children to couples in California and New York. The probation officer, Elizabeth B. Hamilton, acquired some newborns by telling mothers their babies had been stillborn.
Another baby seller, operating in Wichita, Kansas, kept pregnant women on cots in her basement and allowed clients to choose the woman whose child they would buy.
“Runners,” who scouted single pregnant women, operated in cities like Chicago. The runners worked for brokers who paid young women small fees for their children. One scout frequented a parking lot used by truckers from all over the country, asking, “Is there any babes you know that are in trouble that I could take over and give them a few bucks?”
Operators of a Fort Worth, Texas, maternity home fed pregnant women little but cake and water and tricked them into relinquishing their children.
If their babies had physical or intellectual problems, however, the mothers were enjoined to raise them. One young woman testifying before the committee pointed out the irony that she was considered unqualified to raise a nondisabled child, but capable of raising a disabled one who might require greater care.
The committee also heard testimony regarding less organized, ad hoc transactions, such as that of the father in Long Beach, California, who traded his unborn daughter for a poker debt.
A Chicago woman sold her baby to a milkman for $1.
An undercover social worker in New Orleans paid a midwife $30 for an infant girl and received a baby boy as bonus.
A child was sold twice during a train ride from Los Angeles to El Paso.
Fewer than one-third of the estimated 75,000 adoptions that occurred in the United States in 1949 were handled by accredited agencies. I recalled reading articles printed in the 1950s in the popular press, in which reputable social workers agonized over how to keep children from falling into the hands of baby sellers. I recalled their conclusions, and that of Ernest Mitler, special counsel to Kefauver’s subcommittee, who investigated black-market placements in New York City; Chicago; Duluth, Minnesota; Norman, Oklahoma; Texarkana, Texas; and Montreal, Canada. Ethical workers, these experts agreed, had to persuade the independent brokers’ adult victims—single mothers—and the brokers’ customers—adoptive parents—to work with reputable agencies. Doing so required understanding why so many pregnant women and adoptive parents worked with brokers.
The reasons were self-evident. Pregnant women who re
linquished their children through legitimate agencies were responsible for their pregnancy-related medical and living expenses. Unmarried women availing themselves of the services of independent operators and baby sellers received free room, board, and medical care. To Katherine B. Oet tinger, head of the Children’s Bureau, the repercussions were obvious. “The unmistakable fact is that the unwed mother needs help. . . . And until she can get it . . . the black and grey market placements of children for adoption will continue,” she wrote in 1958.
Ten years earlier, the prescient social worker Leontine Young had told her colleagues, “Because we cannot give adequate services to the unwed mother, we do not have enough children to place for adoption. Because we do not have enough children to place for adoption, the public grows impatient and ignores us. Caught between public prejudice and ignorance about the unmarried mother and public demand for adoptable children, we can protect neither the unwed mother nor the child. . . . The black market steps in without knowledge or scruples to fill the vacuum we have left.”
And the black market operators were fast: according to the Kefauver committee, they approached some pregnant young women within five minutes of their arrival in a new town.
Black-market operators also served prospective adoptive parents quickly and with little red tape—practices that were greatly appreciated. Some clients wouldn’t have met the requirements of more careful agencies. And many were comforted by the secretiveness common among black-market transactions, of which few records were kept. Threatened by the prospect of their children’s reunion with their birth parents, few adoptive parents realized they might feel secure enough to want to help their children find their roots.
Ethical social workers’ concerns weren’t entirely altruistic; some feared that brokers would force them out of business, or sully the reputations of all social workers. But their main concern was preventing children from being exploited and sold.
Ethical professionals could conceive of only one way of competing with baby sellers: by imitating them. Ernest Mitler, special counsel to Kefauver’s subcommittee, suggested that cities adopt the “Washington Plan” begun by the Washington Children’s Home Society in Seattle in 1949. Disturbed by the success of unethical owners of maternity homes whose newspaper ads seemed “like a beam from heaven” to desperate, financially strapped young women, the Home ran its own ad: “Maternity care for unmarried mothers. Including doctors, hospital and living arrangements.”
The Washington Home induced fourteen doctors to work for nominal fees, and two hospitals to make special arrangements. “[A]nd a girl can stay home, board out or live in a private home where she is paid for easy work,” Mitler wrote in an article for Look magazine. By 1953, the agency had handled 103 cases from twenty states, and the unethical maternity homes in Seattle had closed.
Social workers in many other areas continued to be hobbled by lack of funding, and by state laws that frequently required one-year residency for single pregnant women needing financial help. But the Traveler’s Aid Society managed to get more flexible treatment of nonresident mothers in Texas. And funds other than those already afforded by Aid to Dependent Children became available for the medical expenses of unmarried women in northern California and other areas.
Ethical social workers also began streamlining their services to pregnant women, allowing them to be followed by a single worker throughout their pregnancy, rather than making them work with several different people. To lure away black marketers’ customers, social workers streamlined services to prospective adoptive parents, too, easing restrictive requirements regarding age and religion. And to mollify adoptive parents fearful of “losing” their children to birth parents, social workers began refusing to give adult adoptees information about their roots.
To save children, ethical social workers denied them their pasts. To help them, they hurt them.
Ethical social workers didn’t always own up to their capitulation. They rationalized that keeping adoptees’ identities secret allowed them to “make a clean break” with their pasts. Secrecy protected adoptive parents from intrusion by birth relatives, they said, and protected the privacy of single mothers.
Some reputable social workers, however, understood the hollowness of these excuses. Annette Baran and Reuben Pannor began their careers in social work in California in the late 1940s. They were then unaware of Georgia’s influence upon adoption, which may have been particularly strong near Los Angeles, the site of her sole branch office and of an organization called the Adopted Children’s Association.
Composed of one thousand parents who had adopted through Georgia, the Adopted Children’s Association was headed by Mrs. Ernest Debs, the wife of a prominent state legislator. During the 1940s Georgia persuaded Mrs. Debs to chair a committee that rewrote California adoption law. Georgia also addressed the California legislature herself.
Passed in 1949, the new law required California courts to recognize the decisions of Tennessee courts regarding adoptions, and made the relinquishments of birth mothers immediately binding. Formerly, California mothers had had a period of time before their children’s adoption during which they could reclaim them. The new law reduced the rights of birth parents in California to the level of those in Tennessee—virtually none at all.
Georgia Tann died one year after the passage of the California law. But Annette Baran and Reuben Pannor, and thousands of other social workers, began their careers in environments heavy with her legacy. “I bought into the whole system,” Annette Baran told me. “I believed closed adoption worked.
“I accepted that a social worker’s effectiveness was measured by how many unmarried mothers she could persuade to surrender their children. That the goal was to persuade all of them to give their children up.
“I also believed mothers could go on with their lives as if nothing had happened, and that ‘normal, healthy’ adoptees would have no curiosity about their roots.”
Through the years, however, these supposed truisms rang more and more hollow. In 1971 a twenty-one-year-old man who had been adopted through Annette’s agency said, “I don’t expect you to give me any information. But could you call my birth father and ask if he’s willing to meet me?”
“No one had ever asked me that,” said Baran. But the young man was reasonable and intelligent, nothing like the then-supposed sick and obsessed searcher. “His request made sense,” she said. Shortly afterward she hosted a seminar titled “Is Anonymity in Adoption Necessary?” and began research which led to the publication in 1978 of a book by her, Reuben Pannor, and Arthur Sorosky, The Adoption Triangle. It was a groundbreaking event that sparked the adoption rights movement.
But by the 1970s the secretiveness Georgia had insinuated into adoption was well entrenched. Virtually no adoptees were allowed knowledge of their origins. “Doesn’t this remind anybody of how we treated slaves?” asked an adoptee in a letter to the New York Times.
13.
The Fallout
The endurance of Georgia’s legacy of secrecy has allowed her to harm many more than the thousands she directly touched. She has hurt every American adopted since the beginning of the falsification of adoptees’ birth certificates. She’s hurt their birth parents. And she continues to hurt most of the 6 million adoptees and approximately 12 million birth parents alive today.
She hurts them by keeping them apart, causing pain difficult for most of us to imagine. Elderly women speak of having thought of their relinquished children every single day. They cry when they talk of their missing children.
Adoptees suffer too, and spend enormous energy imagining the parents who bore them.
“I remember looking at faces in the crowds, wondering if I might be looking at my mother without knowing it,” recalled an adoptee interviewed, as were the next five adoptees quoted, by Annette Baran and Reuben Pannor for The Adoption Triangle:
“I was forever running into people who would start conversations with, ‘Do you have relatives in Rochester, or Duluth,
or Denver? You look just like someone I know there.’ I’d answer as calmly as possible, ‘Not that I know of, but who is it?’”
“I wonder if my natural mother thinks about me. I occasionally look at people driving by. If anyone looks like me I wonder if it might be a brother or sister. I once thought that my mother’s best friend was my birth mother because of a resemblance to her. . . .”
“I used to cry and look in the mirror and wonder if my mother looked like me. When I tried to visualize her, I did not picture her as a princess, nor did I picture her as a streetwalker. I did not care who she was. All I knew was that I had to find her. . . .”
“I used to fantasize about my birth mother being a whore or an alcoholic and telling me to get lost. [T]hen I’d think about her being rich and prominent and explaining it all to me, taking me in her arms and holding me. I suppose it was natural that I would look at it from all angles.”
“I pictured my birth mother as an earthy, sensuous, laughing, affectionate person, in contrast to my adoptive mother, who was confident, practical, matter-of-fact, but not very warm. In actuality, I believe, I wanted to be like my birth mother fantasy.”
Briefly enamored of the soap opera General Hospital, my daughter once asked if her favorite actor might be her birth father.
When she said this, I thought of one of our former neighbors, thirteen year old Martha, who lived directly across the street from us in Grand Island, New York. Martha, too, had been adopted, and, like Beth, then an infant, had pale skin, light eyes, and dark hair. Martha remarked upon their resemblance and, during her second visit, ventured that she and Beth might be biological sisters. I knew that Beth’s mother was too young to have borne Martha, but I couldn’t bring myself to say so. Martha wanted to believe it, wanted what we who haven’t been adopted take for granted.
The Baby Thief Page 20