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

For almost three decades, renowned baby-seller Georgia Tann ran a children's home in Memphis, Tennessee, selling her charges--often neglected, abused, and stolen from their birth parents--to wealthy clients nationwide, Joan Crawford among them. Drawing on extensive interviews and correspondences with many of Tann's surviving victims, Barbara Bisantz Raymond shows how Tann not only popularized adoption--which until then had been feared and discouraged--but also commercialized and corrupted it. She tells how Tann abducted babies or coerced women to leave their children in her care and then sold them. To cover her kidnapping crimes, she falsified birth certificates, a practice that was approved by legislators who believed it would spare adoptees the taint of illegitimacy--and one that still holds in many states today in the form of amended birth certificates and closed adoption records. Uncovering many life-shattering stories along the way, Raymond recounts how Tann openly sold more than 5,000 children and killed so many through neglect that Memphis's infant mortality rate soared to the highest in the country. She explores how Tann's operation was able to thrive in a Tennesee governed by Ed Boss Crump and the political network that allowed her to operate with impunity. She also portrays the paucity of options available to women, affecting not only the birth mothers she robbed, but Tann herself, who turned to social work after having been barred from a masculine profession--the law. Part social history, part detective story, part expose, The Baby Thief is a riveting investigative narrative that explores themes that continue to reverberate in the modern era.

"An episode in American adoption history little remembered by the public at large, the crimes of nationally-lauded Memphis orphanage director Georgia Tann are skillfully and passionately recounted by freelance writer Raymond, herself an adoptive mom. The portrait of Tann that emerges is a domineering, indefatigable figure with an insane commitment to ends-justify-the-means logic, who oversaw three decades of baby-stealing, baby-selling and unprecedented neglect. Meanwhile, she did more to popularize, commercialize and influence adoption in America than anyone before her. Tann operated carte blanche under corrupt Mayor Edward Hull Crump from the 1920s to the '50s, employing a nefarious network of judges, attorneys, social workers and politicos, whom she sometimes bribed with 'free' babies; her clients included the rich, the famous and the entirely unfit (who more than occasionally returned their disappointing children for a refund). 'Spotters' located babies and young children ripe for abduction-from women too uneducated or exhausted to fight back-and Tann made standard practice of altering birth certificates and secreting away adoption records to attract buyers and cover her tracks-self-serving moves that have become standard practice in modern adoption. A riveting array of interviews with Tann's former charges reveals adults still struggling with their adoption ordeal, childhood memories stacked with sexual abuse, torture and confusion. Raymond's dogged investigation makes a strong case for 'ridding adoptions of lies and secrets,' warning that 'until we do, Tann and her imitators will continue to corrupt adoption.' A rigorous, fascinating, page-turning tale, this important book is not for the timorous." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)