For years, the Tennessee Children’s Home Society had a sparkling reputation — a private adoption organization that went largely unregulated with the backing of wealthy and grateful adoptive parents, as well as Georgia Tann’s relationships with high-ranking members of Memphis’ political and societal landscape. But over time, people grew suspicious and began to pull back the curtains masking the Society’s inner workings.
The Society, once thought to be an upright adoption non-profit, was revealed to be a child trafficking organization. Tann took children — often through outright kidnapping or coercion of the parents — and charged adoptive parents high prices, effectively selling the children that were under her care. Thousands of families were broken apart; thousands of children were placed into new situations without adequate investigations into their new families; and hundreds of children died while in Tann’s neglectful custody.
After the truth of the Society was uncovered, laws were passed to further regulate adoptions in Tennessee. And today, many of those children — now grown, with their own generations of descendants — are reconnecting with their birth families.
As always, we have a segment preceding the episode. Zoey covers a cryptid: the Smiling Man.
Sources:
“Orphan Victims Of A Black-Market Baby Business Share Their Stories” by Meghna Chakrabarti and Anna Bauman, WBUR.org, Oct. 22, 2019. (This article features an excerpt from the book Before and After by Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate, published by Ballantine Books in 2019. It features interviews with the survivors. If you’re interested in learning more about this subject, this is truly the book to read!)
Austin, Linda T. “Babies for Sale: Tennessee Children’s Adoption Scandal.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 49, no. 2 (1990): 91–102. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42626860.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/161593514/tennessee-children%27s-society
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/tongue-tie/symptoms-causes/syc-20378452
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