The Baby Thief

For almost three decades, Georgina Tann was nationally applauded for her work at her children's home. In reality she was selling many of her charges, often neglected, abused and stolen from their birth parents, to wealthy clients nationwide. Drawing on extensive interviews and correspondence with many of Tann's surviving victims, Barbara Raymond shows how Tann not only popularised adoption but also commercialised and corrupted it. She tells how Tann abducted babies or even coerced women to leave their children in her care and then sold them. She 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. Written by an adoptive mother, The Baby Thief is part social history, part detective story, and part expose.

Barbara Bisantz Raymond has written extensively for a variety of magazines. She has been nominated for a National Magazine Award in Reporting and received two awards for feature writing from Women in Communications. She lives in New York City.