Jane Blasio - Taken at Birth: Stolen Babies, Hidden Lies, and My Journey to Finding Home

I VE HEARD IT S A I D that the devil is in the details. I never thought my life was very different from anyone elses until I began searching for my birth family. What should have been a simple process to access my adoption records became a lifelong quest for truth. A quest riddled with too many details and the devil was definitely in them. My name is Jane Blasio, and I was sold as a newborn in January of 1965 by a doctor in the small North Georgia town of McCaysville.

A factory worker and his barren wife made the journey south to Georgia from their home in Ohio because they had heard they could get a healthy baby from the towns beloved physician, Thomas Jugarthy Hicks, the man who sold me. They kept the car running as Hicks passed me through the back door of his clinic.

The heartbreaking thing is that I wasnt even special. Starting in the forties and lasting over a span of almost thirty years, Doc Hicks built a lucrative business selling babies out of his clinic. In the small town, women had few options and would go to the doctor for help. Some gave their babies freely to him with his promise to find homes and a better life for their children. But others were local housewives who were simply told by Doc Hicks that their babies had died; then he sold them to willing couples with the good fortune to afford them.

The twin cities of McCaysville, Georgia, and Copperhill, Tennessee, share most of everything except zip codes. The painted state line across the blacktop of the grocery store parking lot being the only way to distinguish between the two. Walk with me and see glimpses of the townsfolk, some who, even to this day, believe that Doc Hicks was a godsenda man who healed both family and friends. Meet churchgoing people and bootleggers alike who feared the doctor and yet did business with him.

You will see the two main characters lives touch briefly as they move through time and come back together in the search for truth. The two main characters being the doctor who sold me and myself as I grew up always second best, always sitting in the laps of strangers. Ill show you the struggle to understand how flesh and circumstance could be brokered so easily. Cash for a baby and a fake birth certificate.

Let me take you on my personal search that spanned over thirty years, and I will show you, with all the care I can give, the women who lost their babies through the back door of the Hicks Clinic. Let me pull back the veil to show you the many lives touched by both darkness and light. Let me take you through time to the quiet town of McCaysville, to the small brick building of the Hicks Clinic, and introduce you to a baby seller.

The stories youre about to read are retold as I envision them, having heard the accounts by those who were personally affected. So many were hurt by their experiences at the Hicks Clinic. Ive disguised details here to protect their privacy.

I THANK G OD for tattletales. If someone hadnt gossiped like an old hen and let the truth out, no one would have ever known I was someone elses child. My father was clear that he never intended on telling my sister, Michelle, and me that we were adopted, much less that wed been bought from a clinic best known for abortions. When I first began asking questions, he lied, and when I was older, he admitted that he saw no reason to tell us the truth. My parents knew what they had gotten into when they bought two babies, and everything was, in their eyes, best buried deep somewhere. What a way to live, fearing every day that someone would show up at the house and take us from the front yard. Fear and shame are consequences of keeping secrets, especially when you have so much to lose when they cant be contained.

My father was angry at the person who told his secret. My mother kept quiet because she was afraid. My parents wanted a baby desperately, and they had heard from my mothers aunt Alice that they could get a baby for cash in North Georgia. Aunt Alices friend knew a doctor who was selling babies, and they made their way down there to get one.