Customer Reviews

The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Baby Thief : the Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller who Corrupted Adoption by Barbara Bisanz Raymond will hit the stands soon. And oh what a book it is!

I've known about this book and its various incarnations for a long time. In 2001 Barbara sent me an early draft. Unfortunately, I didn't follow up on it like I should have. I am happy to say, though, that Barbara did, and the result is a fascinating but sickening account of how adoption got to where it is today.

For those of you who aren't familiar to Georgia Tann, she was a baby thief who worked her evil with the full knowledge of courts, social workers, and politicians. Between 1924 and 1950 she arranged 5000 "adoptions"--many of them of children she'd kidnapped or obtained by other illegal or unethical means. Tann stole from the poor to sell to the rich. Sometimes she just gave babies away to the child-hungry denizens of Tennessee's power structure, all too happy to turn their backs on justice in order to fill their nurseries with undocumented children to call their own. As part of Boss Crump's Memphis machine Tann's political influence in Tennessee was immense and unheard of for a woman, even now.

Raymond argues that Georgia Tann invented, popularized and commercialized adoption as we know it today with its secret closed and codified system of identity erasure and falsified birth certificates.

Tann's influence did not end with her death in 1950. It is carried today by the approximate 6 million adopted persons and their birth and adoptive families in the US (and more in Canada) whose records remain sealed by the state.

The Baby Thief an important book that every adoptee rights activist, every first mother activist, and anybody who wants to clean up adoption should read and carry with them to the statehouse. Interest, however, should move beyond AdoptionLand and into the areas of women's studies, GLBT studies, child welfare, true crime, and Southern and localized history.

I urge anyone who believes in identity and adoptee rights, and about ethical adoption to read this book. You won't regret it!

The Baby Thief is both a mystery novel and a historical chronicle of 5000 wrongful adoptions. It is more than an exposé of bygone crimes committed by the notorious Georgia Tann. Throughout the book, the author weaves the stories of those who lost one another; children who remembered being wrenched from their mothers; siblings separated and meted out like puppies; mothers and fathers who searched until their deaths for the children they had lost. In order to cover her heinous crimes, Tann issued false certificates portraying adoptive parents as having given birth to the child they adopted. The practice caught on so that in almost all states today, adoptees even as adults cannot get their original birth certificates. Tann's legacy of introducing sealed birth certificates has resulted in generational harm for countless adopted adults who will never know who they are.

My wife was put up for adoption throught Georgia Tann's Children's Home. She has told me some of her experiences from being in the home in the 1940's but I just didn't believe all that I heard from her and others until I read the book. I could not read but just a few pages at a time due to the impact this book made on me. I bought my wife another book for her to read while I read this one. We both would go to bed very disturbed each night after reading the books. I would never have believed anyone could do such things to children such as Ms. Tann did and get away with it. What is amazing is all the other people in high positions in government who also got away with helping her with her twisted ideas. One of my surprises was the participation by Evangelist Pat Robertson with his misguided ideas toward adopted children. Fortunately he and his team of lawyers didn't prevail and adoption laws were changed for the good in Tennessee. It's about time that someone exposed what adopted children go through at no fault of their own. I hope this book gets great exposure all over the world because this kind of thing is still going on today in other countries. I only wish this book was written 50 years ago.

As an adoptee and 30-year resident of Memphis, I thought I knew all there was to know about adoption and about Georgia Tann. I was wrong. This book is nothing less than a shadow history of adoption in the US, and those (like me) who think it has nothing new to tell them are especially encouraged to read it. Ms. Tann made adoption acceptable in an age of eugenics. She also sexually abused children, invented sealed records, and let many babies die under her care. She will never be understood, but this book does a brave, unflinching, compassionate job of uncovering what can be known about who Georgia was, what she did, and how her actions influence adoption policy to this day.

The author, an adoptive mother, shares the fact that it was difficult for her to come to grips with what she found, and I respect her all the more for that. Adoption owes all it is today (good and bad) to Ms. Tann, and it's time for our society to somehow come to grips with that.

and you thought that people who did these kinds of things in the 20th Century were prosecuted by the law. Wrong!
From 1924 through 1950 babies and children were kidnapped, taken by coercion and lies, and sold on to farms and in to homes across America. They weren't the children of slaves - though they were treated like they were, nor were they low life trash - though they were treated like they were... they were born to single mothers, poor parents, and into families that were promised a better life for the child. Some of them did have better lives, new parents that loved them and took care of them. Some were killed, some died, and some wished that they would die. For those that survived - loving parents or not - they found that they had been robbed.
Though this book is about only one person's complete disregard and disdain for those they viewed as lesser creatures - akin to stray dogs, beasts of burden, or producing livestock. What this person did and the way they viewed "adoption" influenced adoption practices all the way into the present day.
"The Baby Thief" is a hard read, but it is worth the effort. To read this book and not know without a doubt that the adoption laws need to be changed and that adoption practices need to be regulated with attention to ethics and compassion is to have a heart and soul as dead and black as Georgia Tann's.

Although I thought I knew a great deal about Georgia Tann and her stealing of children, I found the author's book to go well beyond the usual scope of adoption story telling.
At times I had to put the book down because the depth and horror of her stealing combined with lack of empathy and care for children was beyond my ability to comprehend. Many of us interested in adoption history know this story, but I did not realize the impact her "marketing and advertising" had on future aspects of modern day adoption practices. Georgia was at the right place at the right time, so to speak, since Tennessee was run by a ruthless political boss who protected her. When you add in other corrupt judges and officials who believed poor families and poor single mothers had no right to raise children, you end up with a story which rivals any possible fictional account involving adoption. There are many lessons to be learned from Georgia's exploitation of children. This should be a "must read" for all agency social workers and those involved in any kind of child placement - domestically or abroad.


Ellen Roseman
Cooperative Adoptions
San Anselmo, Ca 94960

"The Baby Thief" gives a detailed and well-documented narration of the life and the activities of a most revolting and pernicious sociopath. The fact that Georgia Tann stole babies and sold them, abused children in her care, and through neglect and with no basic sense of human decency was responsible for the deaths of an unknown number of children under her control, is testimony to evils of closed adoptions. With the willing assistance of malevolent Memphis politicians, judges, social workers and a spineless state legislature she was able to engineer 5,000 adoptions. She literally invented the idea of sealed records to cover her criminal misdeeds. During her reign as the Queen of Adoption, most state legislatures followed her lead and placed legal barriers in the way of all members of the adoption triangle: birth parents, children and adopted parents. This wall is secrecy is still in effect in most states. Even though she died in 1950, the evil she did lives after her. The final chapter in "The Baby Thief" tells of the fight in Tennessee to undo the sealed records laws. As the law was altered who should step in but Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice: a right wing organization that seeks to keep records sealed. Why? Because of their affiliation with the National Council for Adoption, a Washington based lobbying organization that receives funding largely from adoption agencies who promise adoptive parents secrecy. They managed to tie up the courts with bogus reasoning for years. Their reasoning and their arguments were spoken by Georgia Tann decades earlier, and in the end they lost. Georgia Tann is not the only social worker who has profited from secrecy, and acted immorally. How can an adoptee know that he or she wasn't kidnapped if records are sealed? Assuming the adoptee isn't in the witness protection program, what right does a state have to keep his or her records sealed? Are we supposed to take the word of social workers that they act in an ethical and legal manor? I don't think so.

Barbara Bisantz Raymond has done the world a outstanding service with this book. Like dinosaurs, closed adoption should become extinct.

This is certainly one of the best books on adoption in recent times. I am not surprised that the publishers decided to publish it here in Australia as well as the US. Though much of the Georgia Tann story is uniquely American, it also reflects universal attitudes. The book shows the profound systemic effects of personal evil.

If you are wondering whether or not to buy this book, here is a review I did for Online Opinion, Australia's e-journal of political and social debate.

From 1924-1950, Georgia Tann sold more than 5000 children and was responsible for the death of so many others in her charge that, for a time, the infant mortality rate of Memphis, Tennessee, soared to the highest in the USA. Tann had set herself up as a saviour of children, finding good middle class foster homes for children suffering from neglect and poverty. When her home for orphaned children could not provide such a child, she sent out `baby scouts' to find them. Poor families and families with sick children were particularly vulnerable. Children were handed over to her care, with the expectation that they would be looked after and returned. Most of them never were. With the collusion of corrupt political boss, Edward Hull Crump, who legitimised her status as a welfare worker, and cooperative judges, who ruled that the children would do better by being removed from their families, the children were placed for adoption. How could such a monster gain so much power?

A series of yellow fever plagues in the late nineteenth century had turned the once prosperous commercial city of Memphis into a demoralised and struggling community of survivors and new arrivals. The plagues did not affect young as much as the old, and residents developed an unquestioning admiration for those who looked after the children in their midst. By the early twentieth century, the city had a burgeoning population of needy people, depleted of its traditional leadership. There was rising crime and gangsters. It was an environment easily exploited by opportunists such as Crump, a crude strongman, who gained political control in 1907 and monopolised it for decades.

Though she appeared to be a do-gooder, Tann was a woman driven by thwarted ambition. She had wanted to be a lawyer, but instead sought power and prestige through the emerging profession of social work. Outwardly cool, professional and efficient, she was privately cold and abusive. She treated her young charges so harshly, and neglected their health needs so cruelly, that many of them died. She also physically and sexually abused them, particularly little girls.

Tann had successfully created a network of powerful and influential supporters, not only in Tennessee but across America. As well as corrupt officials, others became enmeshed because Tann had provided them with the most precious of gifts--a child. Tann had succeeded in making adoption a success story. Until the 1920s, society had become so enthralled to the eugenics movement that the idea of adopting a baby--someone else's blood--was considered risky. Tann succeeded in finding babies for infertile middle-class and upper-class families, often using direct newspaper ads offering individual children for adoption. As Raymond points out, adoptive parents were `unscreened for anything but wealth'. Many of those who responded were Hollywood stars and leading political figures. She cultivated these influential connections. Celebrities such as Joan Crawford, June Allyson and Dick Powell, and their adopted children, were featured in magazines. Of course, Tann charged them outrageously for the privilege. Directly pocketing the proceeds, she became a wealthy woman, further adding to her aura of success.

Barbara Raymond argues that Tann's activities not only contributed to commercialising adoption and making it socially acceptable in the USA, she also helped create the closed-system of adoption. Secrecy was important to protect both herself and her clients. Some of the children ended up in loving families, but others were treated as domestics and farmhands, starved, beaten and abused physically and sexually.

As she listened to the voices of Tann's many victims--the families she tore apart and the children she abused--Raymond confronted her own experience as an adoptive mother. She openly and honestly traces the echoes of the past in adoption today, including intercountry adoption. Though current practices are light-years ahead of those in Tann's era, there remain ethical concerns about market forces in adoption and the transfer of children from the poor to the relatively well-off. Today, there is more recognition of the rights of birth parents and more direct assistance to help them to parent rather than to relinquish a child.

For adoptees in the USA, though, the picture is different. In the majority of states they still have no access to their original birth certificates, effectively denying them a right to the first chapter of their life histories. Raymond observes, `If knowledge of the long-buried story of Georgia Tann teaches us anything, it is the importance of ridding adoption of lies and secrets.'

The story of Georgia Tann is in itself startling and thought-provoking, and would be ideal for those book clubs that include non-fiction in their lists. The issues it raises are also relevant to Australia, because we too have inherited the effects of a closed system of adoption; though here, in most cases, individuals are able to access there original records. Just about everyone has either been affected by adoption or knows someone who has.

Barbara Raymond offers more than a wide-eyed, jaw-dropping account of a monster dressed up as a saint; she gives us a clearly-focussed, level-headed, compassionate portrayal of the multiple injustices wrought by a combination of common greed, political corruption, tainted science, systemic neglect and just plain snobbishness. Raymond traces Georgia Tann's victims--those who had their children stolen from them and those who were emotionally and physically abused by her--and gives them a voice. As they tell the truth about what happened, we recover an inkling that there might be a moral centre to the universe after all, despite the monstrous efforts of those, like Georgia Tann, who lay waste to all that is good in order to gratify their own lusts for money and power. The Baby Thief unmasks personal and social evils and is unafraid to raise the question of our complicity in them. In its obvious commitment to ensure that we hear the voices of the victims of a great injustice, it taps into wellsprings of kindness, openness and compassion that give us hope for the future.


Dr Trevor Jordan is Senior Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the Queensland University of Technology and President of Jigsaw Queensland, Inc., a post-adoption resource centre in Brisbane, Australia.

Madonna adopting a new baby makes headline news; Angelina Jolie has turned adoption into a new career. But, celebrity adoption though currently headline news, is not new. Joan Crawford (Mommy Dearest), Art Linkletter, and many other celebrities of the past discovered adoption years ago. And, in the past, if a celebrity chose to adopt, they called Georgia Tann, the Memphis, Tennessee woman who single-handedly recreated adoption to her own specifications.

Anyone who has been listening to the news knows that America is in love with the idea of adoption; everyone, that is, except the parties most intimately involved in the loss side of adoption, the mothers and the children taken for adoption. The warm, fuzzy, happy-ending side of adoption is welcome news in people's homes on their nightly news, as another underprivileged infant is brought home to fulfill a desperate adopter's ambition to become a parent. We hear little or nothing from the women or families that have suffered the losses. Current methods used to obtain surrenders in America have been based on corrupted practice from early on, according to Barbara Bizantz Raymond, author of the recently released book, The Baby Thief, the Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption , published by Carroll and Graff.

Raymond interviewed and corresponded with many of Tann's surviving victims, and tells how Georgia Tann commercialized adoption, removing it from the arena of the well-meaning charity women and created an industry that today accounts for almost $2 billion a year, largely unregulated. Due to Tann's desire to hide her own and her cohorts criminal practices, today we have sealed records and falsified birth certificates in the majority of the country. Despite natural mothers' insistence that they were not interested in hiding from the children they lost, nor the children themselves, upon adulthood, seeking to find information that could be life-saving, the records remain sealed today.

Raymond does a great job of researching the history of the area, setting up the framework from which Georgie Tann could operate. Despite her portrayal of Tann as a child, who though being a spoiled darling of her father, is never seen as a sympathetic character. Tann's deeds are too heinous for sympathy toward her to creep in. You can sense the evolution of the evil woman she becomes almost from the instant she is presented. There is nothing appealing about Georgia Tann.

The book outlines how Tann lied, stole, abducted children and coerced them from their mothers, not due to any altruistic motive on her part.. She had paying customers waiting for the children and she could deliver to specification. Along with political "Boss" Ed Crump and his network of political cohorts in her control, she was able to make herself a millionaire, and created an industry along the way. The practices she established have since become law and are still acceptable practices today.

The stories in the book, right from the beginning, are tragic, heart-breaking and difficult to read. The first page of the prologue begins with the story of Alma Sipple, who thought Georgia Tann was taking her baby for medical treatment for a cold. When Tann left with her 10-month-old daughter she never saw her again. You keep waiting for the happy ending, for the light to shine at the end of the tunnel for some glimmer of hope for the people in her grasp. That glimmer never comes. You can only imagine how bleak the outlook must have been for the mothers and children separated from each other by Tann.

It is hard for rational human beings who pride themselves on being kind and compassionate to get their minds around the concept presented by Raymond in her book. If it were fiction, it would be far-fetched. Unfortunately, for anyone who is familiar with current adoption practices it is all too believable. A must read book for students of Social Justice, Adoption reform, Women's Studies, Social Work, American History, or life. This truth telling contribution is a huge contribution to studies in all the above areas as well as anyone who is interested in knowing the facts. Thank you to Barbara Bisantz Raymond for what must have been a difficult, but oh, so very important offering.

The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption







There are not enough words in the English language to describe this book and do it justice. Barbara Bisantz Raymond has done a thoroughly wonderful job in her reporting of Georgia Tanns' influence on Adoption Law today.

I just received "The Baby Thief" this morning and have just finished the last page. I am awe stuck in the similarities of the way Adoptions records and the "secrets" withheld by most States even to this day.

As in Tennessee, and Georgia Tann, there are many states who allow 1 person or entity complete control over who knows what or whom in adoptions. Their lame arguments for secrecy and delay for change become even more suspicious when the "not so benevolent" motives, of those in control, are crystal clear.

Money and fear of allowing Adoptees their records may shed too much light on the "Georgia Tann" like methods they have and still use to acquire their commodities, infants available for adoption, continue to this day.

These "no Sayers" are in danger of losing not only the bundles of money childless couples pay them to adopt these "little treasures" if news of their methods come to light. Who knows what crimes would be exposed. Similar to the ones Georgia Tann & her co-conspirators got away with in Tennessee.

This book is a must read for any and all State Senators and Representatives who are at this time considering allowing Adoptee access to their records. Buy one for yourself and your State Representative TODAY.