It will be some time before all American adoptees who want to find their birth mothers will have the necessary tool—their mother’s name— that allowed Beth to locate Gail. Despite the progress made since the 1999 Tennessee court victory, adoptees’ original birth certificates remain sealed in thirty-four states. The obstacles to access remain the same as those faced by the Tennessee Coalition for Adoption Reform: the National Council for Adoption; insecure adoptive parents; and people who believe that birth mothers don’t want contact with their children, and that openness in adoption leads to abortion.
NCFA and its allies are much better funded than the grassroots organizations fighting for openness. But adoptees will win. And, I hope, right will also triumph over another of Georgia’s legacies: the sale of children whose mothers were robbed of them, or unduly coerced into relinquishment.
The outright theft of children is relatively uncommon now in the United States: the availability of contraceptives and the virtual erasure of the stigma of single parenting have made single pregnant young women much less vulnerable than during Georgia’s time. Most raise their children. Those who relinquish their babies often enter into open adoptions, in which they select the adoptive parents and afterward maintain some degree of contact with their children.
Today, most child stealing occurs in poor countries like Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Samoa, and China. The brokered children are both the benefactors and victims of the fact that adoptive parents are now eager to adopt children of all races. Children whose parents can’t care for them are more likely than before to get the adoptive homes they desperately need. But poor children who don’t need adoptive homes are vulnerable to baby brokers anxious to feed the growing international market for children.
Many of these current-day brokers are Georgia Tann clones. Typical is an American broker, Lauryn Galindo. Between 1997 and 2001 she made $8 million by arranging eight hundred adoptions of Cambodian children by unwitting Americans, including the actress Angelina Jolie, who adopted a son through Galindo in 2003.
Like Georgia’s birth mothers, Galindo’s were impoverished. And like Georgia, Galindo used spotters: “baby recruiters” who located vulnerable women in destitute rural areas. The recruiters passed the mothers’ names on to “baby buyers,” usually orphanage directors or taxicab drivers, who offered the mothers small amounts of rice or money for their children. The buyers often told the mothers that they could have their children back at any time, or that when the children became adults they could petition for their mothers to immigrate to the United States.
The children were then tested for hepatitis and AIDS. Children who tested positive were returned to their birth families. If the tests were negative, the child was taken to an orphanage or “stash house.” Investigating agents found conditions in these facilities “horrendous”: naked, filthy babies lay in hammocks covered with feces.
The children were then assigned to prospective American adoptive parents who paid Galindo between $10,500 and $11,500 in adoption “fees.” With the children stored and purchased, Galindo furnished them with Cambodian passports by passing them off as orphans. She erased their identities, falsifying their names and histories and giving them phony birth certificates.
Galindo differed from Georgia in being sentenced by an American court to prison, if only for eighteen months. Her justification for her crimes was, “It was always my intention to save children from desperate circumstances, and I feel like I was always acting with the highest integrity.” Georgia Tann would have said the same thing, if she’d ever felt the need to defend herself.
Other Georgia Tann imitators operate in China. “China has a growing black market in babies, often girls, who are abducted or bought from poor families or unwed mothers and sold to parents who want another child, a servant, or a future bride for their son,” a reporter for China Daily wrote in 2006.
Relatively few Chinese brokers are caught and prosecuted. But in 2004 over twenty people were arrested after twenty-eight baby girls were found at a highway toll gate in Binyang, Guangzi province, stuffed into nylon tote bags stacked on the luggage rack of a long-distance bus. The infants, aged three days to three months, had been drugged and bound. One, whose face was mottled red and blue with cold, had died.
“Most of the people arrested were middle-aged women from Binyang,” a policeman told news agency AFP. “They probably wanted to make some money.” The baby-selling ring was larger than was immediately apparent; fifty-two people were eventually convicted of this crime.
The source and the intended destination of the babies were unknown. “It’s possible the parents gave the babies away. Family planning policy is very strict and they probably had exceeded their birth limit and wanted to give the babies away to avoid fines,” a police officer said.
“Perhaps some of them were born to unwed mothers or migrant workers.”
It’s also possible that some of the children had been stolen. “China often balks at releasing embarrassing statistics, including the number of its young citizens abducted in front of schools, on streets and in busy markets,” Mark Magnier wrote for the Los Angeles Times in January of 2006. “But experts say the problem is growing, despite repeated efforts by the government to crack down on traffickers. China has disclosed that it rescued 3,488 children in 2004, according to the official New China News Agency. Experts say those children are only a fraction of those lost.”
One of those lost is six-year-old Chen Ying, whose parents last saw her in 2005 as she set off to school, dressed in a black and white checkered coat. Her father, Cheng Zu, had made a pencil drawing of her one night before she went to sleep. After she disappeared he and his grieving wife showed it to reporter Magnier. “You can see why someone would want to abduct her,” Cheng Zu said. “She’s so pretty.”
He and Cheng Ying’s mother were unable to get any help from her school. The police wouldn’t help either, and refused even to fill out a missing person’s report. And when a witness later reported seeing a man with someone matching the little girl’s description, the police refused to follow up the lead.
Cheng Ying’s parents earned only $200 a month, but they had done everything possible for their daughter, sacrificing to send her to a special “Hope Primary School.” After she disappeared they touched her face in her father’s drawing of her, and in snapshots, trying to connect with her.
They were numb with sorrow, her father even thinking of suicide. “I just hope, wherever she is, they’re taking care of her,” he said.
Most adoptions of foreign children are legitimate rescues of children who would otherwise be warehoused in institutions, or suffer a worse fate. But some children have been taken wrongly from their families. It’s not known how many of the children placed with unsuspecting American adoptive parents have been abducted or obtained through fraud. But international adoption can cost as much as $40,000—and even a fraction of this can seem an enormous sum to brokers in countries where the average annual income is $1,800. And Americans are adopting increasing numbers of children from very poor countries.
“Last year, nearly 23,000 children born abroad were adopted into American families,” a reporter for the New York Sun wrote in 2006. “China is currently by far the most common go-to country for adoptive parents, with nearly 8,000 orphan visas granted from that country last year. Russia comes in a distant second, followed by Guatemala, South Korea, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.
“But adoption counselors say would-be parents are increasingly turning an eye to African countries.”
With celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Madonna adopting babies from Africa, the number of Americans seeking to adopt from that continent is likely to grow.
There are often many middlemen involved in foreign adoption transactions, and abuses can creep in all along the line. “Brokers seek out pregnant women and offer them money for their babies who are then advertised on the Internet; notaries and agents take a slice to produce medical documentation which is
sometimes falsified; other officials take a cut to issue passports and other papers,” wrote a Reuters reporter in 2001.
“Adoptive parents are sometimes instructed to set out for a foreign country with large amounts of cash in their pockets for under-the-table transactions. One terrified prospective mother found herself in the dead of night handing over $8,000 to a bunch of Russian gangsters in a parking lot,” the Reuters report continued.
Such criminal operations also occur in Malaysia, where baby-selling rings are “thriving, fueled by a shortage of babies available for adoption,” reported ABC Radio Australia in 2005. “Police say the gangs have been employing mostly Indonesian women as prostitutes, denying them contraception so they can conceive, and then selling the babies. . . .”
Baby stealing is less frequent in developed countries, but it does occur. According to Interpol, brokering is being investigated in such countries as Greece, Italy, France, and Portugal, where the ringleaders are Bulgarian thugs. Criminal gangs dupe poor, pregnant Bulgarian women into moving to Greece to secure what the women believe will be lucrative jobs.
“But there was no job,” twenty-three-year-old Yanna Dobrena Yordanova told reporters for the Belfast Telegraph in July 2006. Instead of being given employment, she was expected to surrender the child she was carrying. Rescued by an Athens, Greece, organized police crime unit, Yanna escaped this fate. But babies of other young women are sometimes sold to adoptive parents before their mothers even leave the hospital.
“What you have is too much money changing hands and too many people trying to get that money by producing babies for adoption,” said Fred Greenman, legal counsel to the American Adoption Congress. Greenman is also the attorney who helped ensure the 1999 legal victory that gave people adopted in Tennessee access to their original birth certificates. He’s well aware of Georgia Tann, and of the fact that the past is not yet past.
It lives on in another Georgia Tann legacy that leaves adopted children vulnerable: the cursoriness of preadoption home studies. While the qualifications of some prospective adoptive parents are thoroughly examined, those of others are not—a fact that had terrible consequence for a five-year-old Russian girl adopted by an American in 1998.
Even a perfunctory study of Masha’s new father, Matthew Mancuso, would have revealed that he had neither a bedroom nor bed for Masha, who was forced to sleep with him. For five years he raped her and sold pornographic pictures of her on the Internet.
In 2003 Masha, then eleven, testified against him at trial. And on May 3, 2006, she testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee regarding the need for adoption reform.
“A lot of people ask how anyone could let a pedophile adopt a little girl,” she said. Referring to the three agencies involved in her adoption, she continued, “I found out after I was adopted that none of these agencies asked Matthew many questions. They never really checked him out. They showed him pictures of me, probably on the Internet, before he had a home study to adopt me. In some of the pictures they showed him of me from the orphanage I was naked.
“He told them he was divorced and had a daughter he wasn’t close to. I found out later that the reason his daughter didn’t talk to him is that he molested her, too.
“While I lived with Matthew no one ever came to check on me even though the Russian government requires it. Since my story came out we found out that two other kids—a boy from Romania and a girl from Russia—were adopted by pedophiles, too. . . . Just so you know, fourteen other Russian kids have actually been murdered by their adoptive parents in America. I’m sure there are other kids in trouble. But no one seems to care about any of this.”
The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, a multilateral treaty that covers all adoptions between countries that ratify it, is trying to reform international adoption. Under the Convention, agencies that perform adoptions in Hague countries will be required to meet standards meant to protect all members of the adoption triad. In particular, governments of adoptees’ countries of origin must determine if adoptees are legitimately eligible for adoption because they were orphaned, or were relinquished by parents who were not robbed, deceived, or bribed. Other provisions include more stringent investigation of prospective adoptive parents; full disclosure to adoptive parents regarding agencies’ policies and fees; the preservation and disclosure of all information on adopted children; the paying of agency employees on a salary or fee-for-service, rather than contingency, basis; and prohibition of child-buying.
The Convention’s proposed requirements are admirable. But, according to Trish Maskew, president of Ethica, a Tennessee-based nonprofit organization promoting ethics in adoption, they are not enough. The Hague regulations will only cover adoptions between two Hague countries. This would involve 11 percent of all foreign adoptions, the State Department estimated in 2003.
Legislation to cover non-Convention adoptions must also be passed. A crucial need is a law making the sale of, or traffic in, children for the purpose of adoption illegal. Such a law, advocated in the 1950s by Estes Kefauver, the Tennessee senator appalled by the crimes of Georgia Tann, is needed for all adoptions, both international and domestic. And information regarding adoptees’ birth names and backgrounds has to be preserved and made available to adoptees, whether their adoptions have occurred in the United States or overseas.
If knowledge of the long-buried story of Georgia Tann teaches us anything, it is the importance of ridding adoption of lies and secrets. Until we do, she and her imitators will continue to corrupt adoption.
Notes
Prologue
x: “. . . over five thousand adoptions”: In 1946, Georgia Tann reported having arranged five thousand adoptions—Press-Scimitar, December 6, 1946, “Years Ago She Found a Career: Now Miss Tann Completes 5000th Adoption Case.” She continued to arrange adoptions for almost four more years, until her death on September 15, 1950. She arranged 223 adoptions in 1949: Press-Scimitar, March 10, 1950, “Marked Increase in the Number of Children Offered for Adoption.” She placed “more than 100” children for adoption between January 1, 1950, and September 1, 1950. Figures for 1947 and 1948 are unavailable, but she is reputed to have placed over 250 children per year during that time: Neill, October 1978, p. 38. The true number of adoptions arranged by Georgia Tann is probably closer to six thousand than five thousand.
x: “She had molested . . . in her care”: Interviews with Barbara Davidson, 1992 and 1993; interviews with June Jardin, 1992.
x: “by the 1930s . . . highest in the country”: Oppenheimer, p. 1.
x: “And the actual . . . former Memphian told me”: Interview with Robert Taylor, 1992.
xi: “She had been . . . to Tennessee”: Interview with Vallie Miller, 1992; interview with Regina Hines, 1993; interview with Hickory, Mississippi resident, 1993.
xi: “and agencies like . . . adoptions a year”: A Report of the Children’s Aid Association of Boston, “Our 1937 Children,” May 1938.
xi: “In 1928 . . . arranged 206”: Press-Scimitar, March 11, 1929, “Clearing House of City’s Orphans Always Busy.”
xii: “Since the passage . . . twelve other states”: See notes to pp. 240-241. Michigan granted limited access before Tennessee granted full access.
1. Georgia’s Home
2: “Georgia’s orphanage at . . . the wide front porch”: The Commercial Appeal, November 28, 1942, photograph of Home; Press-Scimitar, April 13, 1943, “Babies Smile Thru Dark War Clouds: Spacious New Home for Tots on Poplar”; interviews with May Hindman, 1992.
2: “three nurseries were . . . sleeping babies”: Press-Scimitar, April 13, 1943, “Babies Smile Thru Dark War Clouds.”
2: “But . . . the women weren’t nurses”: Interview with Mrs. Leon Sims, 1994.
2: “the head caretaker . . . while drunk”: Taylor, p. 10.
2: “And the outfits . . . hardest to sell”: Interview with Vallie Miller, 1992.
2: “Two of Georgia’s . . . of the main building”: Miller, V., p. 48.<
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3: “ ‘I picked you out’ . . . told them”: Interview with Jimmye Pidgeon, 1992.
3: “When she was . . . stern telegrams”: The Commercial Appeal, January 28, 1948; The Commercial Appeal, September 14, 1950, “Tennessee Action on Report of Black Market Babies Climaxes Bitter Controversy.”
3: “futile habeas corpus suits . . . local press”: Press-Scimitar, November 20, 1937, “Dad Who ‘Gave Away’ Children Wants Them Back — Court Says No”; Press-Scimitar, April 29, 1940, “Claims Society Misled Her and Took Child”; Press-Scimitar, 1947, “Unwed Mother Asks Return of Baby”; The Commercial Appeal, August 30, 1947, “Unwed Mother Plans New Fight for Child”; Press-Scimitar, March 24, 1951, “Child Placement Illegal, Welfare Chief Asserts”; Press-Scimitar, March 25, 1951, “Placing Children Described as Illegal”; Press-Scimitar, March 26, 1951, “Seeking Custody of Three Children”; Nashville Tennessean, April 3, 1951, “Couple Opens Fight to Regain Three Children”; Nashville Tennessean, April 4, 1951, “Court Delays Adoption Fight”; Associated Press, March 19, 1952, “Tann Victim Seeks Children’s Return.”
3: “expulsion from the Child Welfare League of America”: Miller, V., p. 85; Taylor, p. 7.
2. Georgia’s Disappearance
5: “It wasn’t until . . . her crimes”: Nashville Tennessean, September 12, 1950, “Black Market in Babies Probed at Shelby Home.”
5: “And this reference . . . seller in print”: Interview with Robert Taylor, 1992.
6: “At a press . . . ‘Society,’ Browning said”: Nashville Tennessean, September 12, 1950, “Black Market in Babies Probed at Shelby Home.”
6: “it was a token . . . or her helpers”: Interview with Robert Taylor, 1992.
The Baby Thief Page 23