Natalie Wanzel, 34, knew she had been adopted at 3 years old from an orphanage in Russia in 1992.
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She had been told that she was born with serious health problems to a young woman who could not afford to take care of her. Her American adoptive parents brought her to suburban St. Louis, where she grew up in a caring, middle-class family.
In 2018, Wanzel did an AncestryDNA kit in the hopes of finding a genetic relative. She uploaded her DNA results into the MyHeritage DNA database, which has millions of registered users. For five years, no close relatives matched.
In January 2023, she got a match: She had a half-sister in Canada, with whom she shared a biological father. Wanzel also learned she was not Russian: She was actually from Georgia in Eastern Europe.
She joined a Facebook group for Georgian adoptees searching for biological relatives. She posted a short query with basic information about who she was trying to find. The next morning, she woke up to a stream of congratulatory messages.
One of the group's administrators had found her biological mother.
Her mother’s story unraveled everything Wanzel had believed to be true about the circumstances around her birth and adoption.
“I found out I was a child stolen and sold in Moscow, Russia,” Wanzel said.
Her adoptive parents, who declined to be interviewed, had no idea she had been taken from her birth mother under false pretenses.
Wanzel discovered that she was one of tens of thousands of children in Georgia taken from the country’s maternity hospitals and sold in a decades-long black market adoption scandal. Hospital workers lied to thousands of birth mothers about their babies, often telling them their children had died after birth, according to these mothers.
Those “dead” babies have grown into adults armed with DNA test results to expose a nation’s dark past.
“Betrayal at Birth: Georgia’s Stolen Children,” a BBC World Service documentary by filmmakers Fay Nurse and Woody Morris, released in January, shares the stories of those children -- now adults -- and their biological families torn apart by the baby trafficking scandal.
For Wanzel, the discovery allowed her to hear her birth story from her biological mother, through translators. At first, Wanzel couldn’t understand why her mother, who wants to keep her name private, kept crying.
As a young, unwed pregnant woman, her mother was sent to Moscow to deliver due to the social stigma in Georgia, she told Wanzel. When her labor began, the hospital put her under anesthesia. She woke up asking to see her baby. The staff told her the baby was too sick, and that she had been deemed unfit to care for her.
“She asked nurse after nurse; no one would say anything,” Wanzel said. Her birth mother returned to Georgia never having seen her baby.
“Looking back, it makes sense that she was so emotional to find out that I was alive,” Wanzel said.
The Facebook group “Vedzeb,” which means “I’m searching” in Georgian, now has more than 240,000 members and features posts from adopted people around the world -- including the United States -- who believe they may have been illegally adopted and are looking for biological family members.
Georgian journalist Tamuna Museridze began the group in 2021 after discovering she had been adopted. She found her birth certificate, with incorrect details, after her (adoptive) mother died.
Museridze says her research suggests the black market in adoptions took place across Georgia from the early 1950s to 2005, with stolen babies flown from Georgia to Russia to be sold and adopted by unsuspecting American parents.
Her outspoken advocacy on behalf of children and their mothers has changed the culture and stigmas around adoption in Georgia.
“Five or six years ago, it was a shame to say you were adopted,” she said. “We worked really hard to change the view of adoption.” The Georgian government opened an investigation in 2022 into historic child trafficking, but has said the cases are too old to be prosecuted as there is little evidence left.
Museridze has confronted doctors who were involved and asked them why they did this to so many people.
“They say, 'Why are you complaining? You all went to good families because only rich families could afford to buy a stolen child. Why are you complaining?'”
She rejects this explanation. After her mother died, she learned from older relatives that her parents had been told, “We have one healthy baby for sale, so you can come buy her.”
“It’s not normal that you can go buy a child,” Museridze said.