Stolen At Birth | Ripples | 5

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It's 1943 in a hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

In a delivery room on the hospital's maternity ward, 18-year-old Mary Reed is breathing heavily.

Somewhere nearby, a newborn wails.

Mary's newborn.

She's just given birth to a healthy baby boy, and he's perfect.

She's sure of it, even though she hasn't held the boy yet.

She knows it the way only a mother can.

She feels it in her bones.

Even just moments after giving birth, Mary knows it was all worth it, the months of fear and uncertainty and plain old worry.

None of it matters now that her son is here at last.

Early on in Mary's pregnancy, she crossed paths with a woman from a local children's society.

Georgia Tann's about the age of Mary's mother and was so kind to Mary, even though she got pregnant before marriage.

Georgia seemed so happy to meet Mary and was so generous in helping her handle the pregnancy.

Georgia's helped arrange regular doctor's visits for Mary and counseled her about her options.

She can either decide to place the child for adoption or raise it herself.

The choice has been occupying Mary's thoughts for most of the last few months.

Even during labor, she was thinking everything through.

She wants to raise her child.

She knows that much, but as Georgia pointed out, being a single mother will be hard.

Not just financially.

People in the community don't always react well to an unmarried mother.

For now, though, Mary just wants to hold her son.

She'll know for sure then.

Still groggy from the anesthesia, she lifts her head from the pillow and asks a nurse to bring her the baby.

But it's not a nurse who appears by Mary's side.

Looming into view is a familiar figure.

Mary works hard to focus on the cropped hair, the sensible blouse, the spectacles.

It's Georgia Tann.

Mary's confused.

She can't remember asking Georgia to be here for the birth.

Then again, maybe it just slipped her mind.

She's having trouble holding on to her thoughts just now.

Speaking slowly, Georgia tells Mary that they're cleaning the baby and making sure he's healthy.

While they wait for that to be taken care of, Georgia says she has some papers for Mary to sign.

Again, Mary's confused.

She can't work out what Georgia would need her to sign, especially now.

But Georgia slides a pen into Mary's clammy hand and moves it towards the small stack of documents on top of the blankets.

It's just some routine paperwork, nothing for Mary to worry about.

So although she's struggling to keep her eyes open, and although she can barely feel the pen between her fingers, Mary Reed scrolls her name on the page, not realizing that she's just signed away her parental rights.

She won't see her son again for almost 50 years.

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz and this is American Criminal.

Just days before she died from cancer in 1950, the truth about Georgia Tann finally came out.

She'd spent years making money by selling babies to wealthy families around the country, many of the children stolen from loving homes around Memphis.

In the aftermath of this revelation, there was a lot of uncertainty.

Suddenly, parents who'd adopted children through the Tennessee Children's Home Society didn't know whether their adoptions were legal or whether they'd broken some kind of law when they paid Georgia's exorbitant fees.

Meanwhile, the parents whose children had been taken by Georgia were suddenly infused with fresh hope.

Many of them had been fighting to get their children back for years and had been largely ignored or dismissed by the legal system in Tennessee.

And then there were the officials whose job it was to sort through the mess that Georgia left behind.

These were the people who had to figure out which adoptions were completed legally and which ones weren't yet finalized.

They had to decide what to do with the children still in the care of the TCHS after it closed down.

They needed to sort through what remained of Georgia's records and choose what information to divulge and what to keep hidden away.

In short, it was a mess.

One that was never going to be easy to clean up.

And it wasn't the only thing Georgia Tann left in her wake, because so much of what Georgia did to help popularize adoption in the United States worked.

And the system she helped to build is still in place today.

Here to talk about Georgia Tann and the history of adoption in the United States is President, CEO and Founder of the National Center on Adoption and Permanency, and author of Adoption Nation, which has been reviewed as the most important book ever written on this subject.

Adam Pertman.

Adam, thank you for joining me on American Criminal.

I really am looking forward to this.

My pleasure.

I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Well, let's jump right in.

So, about 100 years ago, we'll call it the 1920s, adoption was not a popular way for people to expand their family.

We'll call it at least not according to the official record.

So, what do you think fostered that stigma against adoption?

Well, I think some of that stigma still exists today.

We have as human beings, a bias toward biological families.

I mean, culturally, viscerally, people think, they grow up thinking, I'm going to be a daddy, I'm going to be a mommy, and they generally have always thought that was going to be the old-fashioned way.

You know, making babies.

And that's fine, the stigma is not fine, but the context was certainly understandable, not great, but understandable.

And, you know, the reality was that having a baby out of wedlock was, you know, full of shame and angst and embarrassment, and people didn't want to admit to it.

And if you had a baby out of wedlock, then the people who might raise that child, the adoptive parents, certainly were also stigmatized, because they were taking in what was literally called a bastard, right?

And so it was not a great climate, and it wasn't frankly until the 1960s, 70s that it started to change in a significant way.

What were those changes, the new realities in adoption culture?

Can you expand on that notion and what brought it about?

Absolutely.

Here's just a thimble full of history.

The 60s and 70s were just replete with revolutions, right?

Women's revolution, civil rights revolutions, the advent of real birth control, abortion, all sorts of things were going on.

And I think the biggest of them in terms of adoption were that for a lot of reasons, women started coming to their own and single parenthood started becoming increasingly acceptable.

And as that happened, it became very clear that women wanted to raise their own kids.

The embarrassment, the shame, the stigma of unwed marriagehood started to lift.

And as it did, we discovered that the people who gave birth to those children wanted to raise those children.

And so, forgive the word, the supply of infants started to diminish.

So that was the beginning of a real change.

And it wasn't alone.

The pill came into being and became pretty popular.

Abortion started being legalized, and people had abortions.

And that meant there were, again, fewer babies available for adoption.

This was also a time of real change and coming out, not just for single parents and gay people and lots of people, but also for adoption per se.

Because as the number of babies available for adoption started to diminish, other world events sort of filled the gap.

The two primary examples are that China imposed, roughly in the same period, imposed a one-child policy.

And the consequence was that there were a lot of infants available in China for adoption, and that changed the face of adoption.

Because you couldn't keep it a secret if the baby looked absolutely nothing like you, it wasn't even the same race.

And in roughly the same time, again, the Soviet Union started to crumble or did crumble.

And suddenly, we found out that there were orphanages, group homes, teaming with children.

And so as the number of white infants available for adoption started to diminish, the number of children available from abroad started to tick up.

And again, roughly in the same period under the Clinton administration, the paradigm, the model for children in foster care shifted, because it used to be that the permanency plan for children from foster care was foster care.

It was not adoption.

Again, the consequences, there were thousands of children who became available for adoption as the paradigm in American foster care shifted to, quote, best interests of the child, and that was defined as permanency.

Permanency in the family of origin when you could do it, but permanency in another family when you could not.

And so all those historical trends sort of converged at some point.

And so the type of child, the age of the child, the color of the child, the origins of the child started to shift.

And the model of pretending that you didn't really adopt and, not even telling your own kid that she was adopted, which is a really bad idea, but it used to happen all the time.

And so the whole paradigm shift, the whole landscape shifted and changed adoption.

I'm glad that you talk about the changing landscape.

Let's change it back to the early 20th century when they were running the orphan trains.

We didn't really talk about that at all.

In this series, but that seemed awful.

Can you talk about the orphan trains and what the system was like in this country at that time as compared to what it is now?

Well, hard to call it a system because it was a bunch of random things going on at the same time.

There wasn't like an adoption industry or an adoption monolith or an adoption rules, regulations and laws that were uniform and this is how things were done.

They were done sort of in the shadows usually, or often in the shadows.

So to get to orphan trains, I'll back into it a little bit by saying this.

So lots of people, when they talk about adoption, talk about the child being put up for adoption, right?

Well, when you know where that term came from, maybe people will start saying it a different way.

And I can suggest relinquish for adoption or place for adoption.

There are lots of ways to say it.

So the orphan trains in the late part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th and until later than just early, were literal trains.

It started with children who during terrible times, economic times, mainly in New York, but not only, were not being taken care of.

They were on the street.

They were in groups.

And so somebody got the bright idea that, you know, what they need is a really wholesome upbringing.

Now, we don't know whether those kids had families that could have raised them if they were, they had the resources to support them, but that's a different discussion.

So somebody decided, we'll put these children on trains, little trains, and send them to the Midwest, where good farm families, wholesome families will raise them.

Now, one of the ways, the way that that happened was the train would come into a station, and the children would be put up on a platform, and families would go, oh, I'll take that one.

Oh, that one looks healthy.

I mean, it's really cringe-worthy, but that's where the put up for adoption came from.

Orphan trains lasted for decades, and a lot of children got displaced and got moved.

Some presumably were indeed orphans, as the name implies, but lots of them weren't.

And we still have that problem in adoptions, sometimes in this country, sometimes in other countries, where we call children orphans and say they need new families, and they're not orphans.

They have one or more living parents or other extended relatives.

We have not done a great job of helping those relatives, those families stay intact or become reunited so that children can stay in their family of origin.

But anyway, that was the orphan trains, and it was part of sort of a mishmash of ways in which children were placed in homes.

And it was a time of sort of dark practices, again, lots of shame, lots of embarrassment around it.

And so people didn't want to admit it, and too much was done in the dark.

And I wrote in my book that flowers don't grow in the dark, and bad things grow in the dark, and we developed practices and attitudes that weren't so great.

I think the statistic is something like six out of ten people in this country have an experience with adoption.

Thank you.

That was the term I've tried to coin for the last 20 years.

I was wondering if you were going to notice that I got that quote from you.

And I appreciate it.

And actually, my own belief is that it's more than six out of ten.

So when we have this adoption conversation, people do wonder and sometimes say out loud, well, it's not really that many people affected.

So how much attention can it get?

And so reframing that, I think that it's a far bigger population than most people realize.

And I think that's important for a couple of reasons.

One, we treat minorities and majorities differently, and that's not the right thing to do, but it happens too often and people do, again, to this day, stigmatize adopted parents.

And part of the mission that I've been on for a long time is to lift that to whatever extent is possible.

So we think there are roughly six million, seven million, we don't know, there's no registry, adopted people in America.

It's probably a little higher, but let's just say seven million ballpark of all ages.

We talk about adopted children, but children grow up.

I had a guy at a conference once come up to me and say, hi, I'm an adopted child, and he was like 70 something.

But it's in the language and therefore in our attitudes.

If you look at demographics, each person has roughly eight to 10 close relatives, meaning up to but not including first cousin, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, grandchildren, grandparents, whatever the age of the kid.

So if you do the math, you get to roughly 100 million people with adoption in their immediate family.

And again, that doesn't go to first cousin.

That doesn't include foster parents, doesn't include the teachers who teach our adopted kids, and their attitudes and what they teach really has an impact.

They need to be involved in the game.

The children who go to school with those adopted children, and the social workers who deal with it.

I could go on and on.

But the bottom line is easily a third of our country has adoption.

They're immediate family.

And then I think that virtually everyone is touched by adoption, whether they know it or not.

We still, to this minute, live in a time when not every parent tells their kid they're adopted.

They're not going to tell the census worker.

We have not created a normalized climate to have that conversation.

You can't do research on secrets.

And so we ain't there yet.

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Let's talk about when it started to change.

Let's bring the elephant into the room and talk about Georgia Tann.

You talked about this 70-year-old man who came up to you and told you he was adopted.

He could have been at the tail end of what Georgia Tann was doing in Tennessee.

So obviously, we have well established that you are incredibly familiar with the history of adoption in this country.

So, how did her story specifically affect you as an adoptive parent going into the process?

And even though she did terrible, terrible things, we'll get into that, she did influence some lasting changes in the adoption system in this country.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Georgia Tann, I think it's important to say, one, that she was an extreme case.

But two, she was not the only one out there doing this stuff.

When a market is gray, and there was sort of a black market and a gray market, and then there was of course the out in the open adoptions.

But what Georgia Tann did was figure out that you can make money off of children.

Again, in my book, I say, anytime you put dollars in human beings in the same sentence, look out for trouble.

And that's what happened.

The good news, and just in very short, is when we do find out really bad stuff is happening, we very often try to fix it, as well we should.

And that's what Georgia Tann coming out, or the news coming out about Georgia Tann, was able to do.

People were rightly appalled.

Not everybody was rightly appalled.

Lots of people were just afraid they'd get caught.

But, you know, as a matter of public policy, they were appalled.

And some of that secrecy started to lift a little bit, not for decades longer, until it really did.

And some of the rules and regulations started changing, because they really weren't any, or were very few.

Another hallmark of secrecy and shame is that you don't have, you know, like congressional hearings about it.

You don't call experts to state legislatures to figure out what's a better law and policy than what we're doing.

Well, so just the fact of it coming out incrementally helped to start shaping new laws, new policies that did not commodify children.

And it started to change.

I mean, that's the best I can say.

It didn't change overnight by any stretch.

And she wasn't the only one doing it by any stretch.

To your question about how did I feel as an adopted parent, I think like guessing 97% to 99% of pre-adoptive and adoptive parents to this day probably don't know who Georgia Tann was.

So to your point, why don't we have more conversations about this stuff if it affects so many people?

Well, we still don't have conversations about this stuff.

And that means that as an adopted parent, no one instructed me, hey, you really ought to learn about this.

You should read this book, and you'll know some of the history of what you're walking into.

None of that happened.

I was a journalist in a previous life, right?

Twenty years with the Boston Globe.

When my wife and I went to our first informational meeting at the agency from which we adopted our older son, I remember someone else said this to me years later.

It saw me in a store and said, do you remember what you said at that meeting after you heard the presentation?

I said, no, I don't remember.

She said, you said, I need to write about this.

I do remember thinking that because almost everything that I was learning during that one meeting, I didn't know.

I was a journalist.

I knew about a bunch of stuff.

I thought I understood what I was walking into.

Now I say that my wife and I, we knew less than nothing because so much of what we thought we knew was skewed or just full of stereotypes or just wrong.

To Georgia Tann, that agency and nobody else said, hey, you ought to read this book about Georgia Tann, get some background.

Now when people ask me, I'm thinking of adopting, what should I do?

What should I do first?

My singular answer is always educate yourself.

Know what this institution is.

Know that adoptive parenting is different than other parenting.

Educate yourself about the various ways you can adopt, the various children you can adopt, but come in as an educator consumer, not consumer of the children, you're not buying them, but of information so that you can make educated decisions, and so that you can do a better job of raising your child.

But unfortunately, the answer to your question, my long-winded answer to your question, is that I didn't know anything, or I certainly didn't know much, and it wasn't just about Georgia Tann.

It's broader than that, and I think that my experience is not unusual.

I was going to say my best friend and his wife, they have two adopted boys, and the process that they went through of fostering and being so close to adopting the ups and downs before they finally got the go-ahead to adopt these boys.

At times, they were getting excellent amounts of information, and at other times, it felt like they were being completely shut out and had no idea what their next move was going to be.

Thankfully, they have these two great boys.

I know the oldest boy has some relationship with the family, and they kind of left it up to him, like, do you want a relationship?

Do you want to know these people?

You know, I feel like that's something that has shifted tonally.

Oh, tremendously.

You're right.

Exactly.

People are encouraging their children now to seek out your birth parents, if that's what you want to do.

Find out where you come from.

Find out who you are.

What makes you you?

It is nurture and nature.

So it's great that that's more encouraged now.

So what was interesting to me was that you talked about fostering.

So they adopted from the child welfare system.

Georgia Tann, and this is important for listeners to understand, there are three different types of adoption, broad umbrellas.

One is inter-country adoption, adoption from other countries.

That used to be a bigger phenomenon, but now it's tiny and it's almost exclusively of children with special needs.

The other is adoptions from foster care, which by far are the greatest numbers of children who are being adopted in today's world.

And then you have the Georgia Tann types of adoption, not that Georgia Tann was the norm, but the infant adoptions, domestic infant adoptions.

And that's somewhere in the middle, maybe 15 to 20,000 a year, and about 40, 50,000 from foster care, and just a few thousand from abroad.

So when we're talking about what you're talking about, which is a lot of what I write about, the advent of open adoption, openness in adoption, the opposite of the secrecy and shame, hopefully, we're moving in that direction.

That really started with infant adoptions, again, in the 60s and 70s, when it became more conspicuous, and women started raising their own kids, so a lot of different kinds of families became very visible and adoptive families were one of those types.

But it took some time, and still is taking time, for that to take hold from adoptions with foster care, because there are safety issues, because there are abuse and neglect issues and all that.

But even with that, the trend is toward what you're talking about, more relationships, more connections, because we realize it is nature and nurture, and people deserve at least the opportunity to have both in their lives, and getting over that obstacle is often difficult as well.

What do you mean you want to meet your birth mother?

Aren't I good enough?

Well, yeah, you're plenty good enough.

But that human being created you, and it's absolutely normal to want to see who you are, or fill in the blanks of who you are and where you come from.

Whether you have a relationship, that's up to individuals to decide.

A rough, really, really, really, really, really rough model is divorce.

We don't think it's a great institution, but we understand there are half siblings and step-siblings, and sometimes you're with dad, and sometimes you're with your mom, and then we marry, and you have complex families.

You do.

Adoption by definition is a complex family.

And some of the problems that we allow to continue and sometimes nurtured were rooted in our fear of the complexity of that family, that, oh my God, he's going to want to meet her, on and on.

And we continued and we shamed the human beings who created these children and drove them underground.

That's not really great.

And it has taken time to alleviate some of that and to lift some of those stigmas, but they clearly still exist.

But the good news is the example you gave.

I'm sure it's complex, I'm sure it's not always easy, but it's real, it's human, it's what people need.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it's so amazing how much it's shifted from the time when Georgia was operating.

They almost went to as great a lengths to keep knowledge away from the birth parents, away from the children who were adopted out, and she got away with it and so many did for so long.

I'm wondering, do you think that part of her specific success and why she was allowed to operate the way that she did?

We know that Joan Crawford's kids came from Georgia Tann.

So because she was selling children to celebrities, this is still something that is common today.

Celebrities get away with a lot of things.

Do you think that she was allowed to operate for as long as she did, in part because of things like that, her clientele?

So people with money and power often can often go places where you and I can't.

I mean, that's always been the reality.

It's unfortunate, but true.

And Georgia Tann had friends in high places, and she had a lot of money to spread around.

So it's not at all surprising that some of the people who came to her were people with money and power.

Joan Crawford is an example, but by no means the only one.

People who knew people and had the money to spend were able to, I'm sure, forgive me for this, but nicer cars and nicer houses.

And if they wanted a child, a baby, they knew where to get that too.

And people like Georgia Tann enabled those horrible practices.

The laws and policies at the time allowed that crap to happen.

And the feeling that children, not the feeling, the sensibility, that children were chattel and it was okay to do that, was there too.

And we need to say that out loud.

Children in law are still often treated as chattel.

So this practice that we say is in the best interest of the child, that's what we should always do, that ain't always true.

It very often is the opposite.

It's all about the adults.

And the children, even as they get older, aren't brought into the equation.

And back then, weren't even told they were adopted.

So, you know, they were surrounded, shrouded with secrets and lies.

And so again, and in that climate, in that atmosphere, people with resources can more easily get what they want.

And people want children.

That's true for lots and lots and lots of folks.

But we hope that things have progressed to a point where we don't do anything resembling what the history of adoption shows us can happen.

Yeah, I can't imagine how terrifying it must have been to be the mother of a newborn who was below the certain financial line.

And at any moment, your baby could get snatched away.

And nowadays, a woman or family who is in the position of putting a child up for adoption, in this day and age, getting into dangerous territory here maybe, but in this political climate that we are living in now, what kind of pressure are women under now when it comes to putting up a child for adoption?

And how helpful is the system to the mother?

Well, this is going to get really political.

But when abortion is outlawed, as it is in roughly half the states, I think, and is tough in other places, that means that some people are carrying children to term who did not plan to do it, who don't necessarily have the resources to take care of the child, who, for whatever reasons, were not intending to become parents.

And the consequence of that, I'm quite certain, is that we're going to see an uptick, whether it's small or large, I just don't know, but we're going to see an uptick in infant adoptions, because the parents were not ready to be parents.

And we need some education around that, we need to give resources to some of them, because some of them, and this is, by the way, historically the case nowadays with infant adoptions, most people who place children for adoptions do so for economic reasons.

They don't have the resources to take care of the child.

So you have some number of people who otherwise would have had an abortion, who now are going to wind up placing a kid for adoption, and that's really heartbreaking.

And where you notice the conversation is not, how do we help those people take care of the child?

That's not the conversation.

Right up to Amy Barrett on the Supreme Court, you know, what she said out loud was, and she's an adopted mom, she said something in the effect of, well, those children can be adopted.

Well, this should not be an industry that's about peddling children.

This should be about providing homes for children who need them, and when possible, keeping families intact.

But these laws, I'm convinced, will cause that uptick in infant adoptions for not great reasons, and a lot of people aren't ready for it or don't want it, whatever their own personal reasons, they're entitled to them.

And I will say, again, the majority of adoptions is from foster care.

And I think over a longer period of time, these laws hold, these abortion bans hold, we're going to see more children in foster care.

Because some number, I hope it's small, but some number of those people who are going to raise their babies, aren't ready for it or don't have the resources for it or aren't in good mental places for it.

And some number, hopefully small, of children as a result are going to be abused or neglected.

Some greater number, because we're going to have more parents who weren't planning for this to happen.

And over time, that means there are going to be more kids placed in foster care.

So I think that there is real impact on adoption from these decisions, but we don't have that national conversation.

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Is it something like 83% of adoptees have been abused or neglected or institutionalized at some point?

Is that the figure?

This is a complicated argument, because who knows that some number of the removals of children from their homes, for reasons of abuse, neglect, are because we weren't providing the resources to help that parent parent, or we were mandating that they go to work 40 hours a week and there's nobody to take care of the kid.

Well, that'll turn into neglect real fast.

So a large number of children, again, most adoptions are from foster care.

So by definition, and let's change the word, by definition, those kids were traumatized early in their lives, and they're dealing with trauma.

By the way, the whole another adoption conversation, we don't do a very good job of providing services for those kids, and they didn't do anything wrong except be born.

I was going to ask you what happens to those specific kids.

Disproportionately, they wind up having children who are, who wind up in foster care, they drop out of school at higher rates, they have unintended pregnancies at a disproportionate rate, they wind up incarcerated at a disproportionate rate.

You know, the state says we will take care of those kids, and that's the whole idea.

You remove them to place them in safer and better circumstances, but we do a pretty lousy job of insuring, not insuring even, but giving them a real shot at some level of success in their lives.

So it's a, you know, we say children are our future, we say, you know, they are the greatest resource we have in America.

We don't do a great job of demonstrating that that's true.

Well, you've been writing about it for so long, and you've been talking about it for so long, this need to reform the adoption system.

I would say, lay out your plan, but if it's possible for you to cherry pick one major thing that you would go, where would you start?

If they came to you today and said, Adam, you're in charge, fix it.

What's the first thing you would do?

Well, I can answer the question, but it's not a little thing.

So I started the National Center on Adoption and Permanency a decade ago for a singular purpose, and I'm going to stay on mission in the answer to your question.

The mantra in the field has always been and is today, that every child deserves a safe, permanent, loving family.

And I don't think anybody can argue with that.

Families of origin when possible, new families when necessary.

I think that we can all get on board that.

But because we do not provide those resources to the parents, the education to the parents, we talked about that, right?

Services for kids who need them and parents who need them.

Because we don't have a system in which those are integrated into adoption per se, and foster care, but into adoption.

Those things are called post-adoption services or pre-adoption services.

They're not adoption.

Adoption is about placing children and families.

And I think that that's the fundamental thing that I would change.

The NCAP, National Center for Adoption and Permanency, our mission is to move that paradigm to what I call a family placement model.

That's what it's all about.

Let's get kids into those families.

To a new model that is focused rather on family success.

And people say, what does that mean?

And great, we're finally asking the right question.

How do we help children and families succeed?

Every child deserves to be a safe, permanent, loving and successful family.

To whatever extent that's possible under their individual circumstances.

So the answer directly to your question is, I believe that we need to reshape budgets and priorities so that every family who's struggling, as many as we can, I know there are limitations, but that there are services available so that children can be taken care of and families can stay in tact whenever possible.

And when they need to go into foster care, woefully underfunded, woefully undereducated, woefully under supported, that when they go into foster care, they get support, they get services.

You would never put a kid in a wheelchair into a home without ramps and other things that they need.

But we put kids who need mental wheelchairs who have been traumatized, we do it all the time without providing the services and everything in the things that they need.

So and then into the new family, we think, oh, the kids in adopted families, and generally speaking, we walk away as a culture, we walk away, now they can raise their kid.

Well, their kid is part of a sibling group that was abused and traumatized till they were 8, 10, 12 years old.

And we walk away and say, everything's going to be fine, they're in a home.

They're in a loving home, they're in a safe home, they're in a permanent home, and life is hell on reels every day because we haven't done it.

And so, the answer to your question is, it all has to be about providing support services in an ongoing way for the children and families who need them.

That's a big paradigm shift, I get it.

But it's my only answer to your question.

Well, I hope this doesn't give you a big head, but I'm going to quote you to you again.

No pessimist ever changed anything for the better, and you are certainly working to make things better.

And as someone who is very close to a family, who was very involved in the adoption process, I appreciate what you've done.

I know that there are so many families out there who appreciate what you've done.

And I appreciate you sitting down with us today on American Criminal, Adam Pertman.

Thank you so much.

My absolute pleasure.

Thank you for letting me spout off.

That was my conversation with Adam Pertman, author of Adoption Nation and president, CEO and founder of the National Center on Adoption and Permanency.

From Airship, this is the final episode in our series on Georgia Tann.

On the next series, a pair of killers team up for a cross-country killing spree like the world has never seen, or so they say.

We use many different sources while preparing this episode.

One we can particularly recommend is Adoption Nation by Adam Pertman.

This episode may contain reenactments or dramatized details, and while in some cases we can't know exactly what happened, all our dramatizations are based on historical research.

American Criminal is hosted, edited and executive produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio Editing by Mohamed Shazid.

Sound Design by Matthew Fillett.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan.

Managing Producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson and Lindsey Graham for Airship.

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