Like many adopted children, 56-year-old federal law enforcement officer, Jane Blasio, had spent decades searching for her birth parents.
But what she found was a very dark turn away from the usual dead-ends or emotional hug-filled reunions.
In 1971, when she was six years old, Blasio’s parents asked her to come into their Akron, Ohio home, and told her and her sister, 11, that they were adopted.
As Blasio told People, at that moment, she had little interest in understanding what being adopted actually meant, but the revelation planted a seed that eventually consumed her life.
What her parents, Jim and Joan, did not tell her that day was that she was one of 200 babies sold in the back alley of a McCaysville, Georgia abortion clinic, run by Dr. Thomas Hicks.
She details the whole strange story in her new memoir, "Taken at Birth: Stolen Babies, Hidden Lies, and My Journey to Finding Home."
After finding bits of information about the clinic and an illegal mention of her adoptive parents on her birth certificate, Blasio then spent much of her teen years at the local library researching to find the truth.
Before dying of cancer, her mother made her father promise to tell Jane what actually happened, and when Jane found out from her father — on top of the near three decades of research — Blasio was of course beyond shocked and angered.
She made her first trip to McCaysville in 1988 when she was 23, after her mother died. That turned into more trips to the scene of the crime.
Blasio’s research helped expose the awful story of how Dr. Hicks ran an illicit baby-selling operation that flourished during the 1950s into the 1960s.
Blasio is still trying to sort out all the obvious conflicted emotions. "My father knew [that Hicks' actions were illegal],” she says, “but my mother just wanted a baby and didn't want to know anything, so my dad was going to do whatever would make her happy.”
She concludes, “My parents bought a child in a way that gave me no option but to search and possibly find no answers. That’s not love, that’s desperation.”
The arduous work of tracking down the truth of her past must’ve led to Blasio eventually becoming a federal law enforcement officer where, among her other duties, she has worked to help dozens of the other now-grown infants — known as “Hicks babies” — track down their birth parents and relatives.
"Taken at Birth: Stolen Babies, Hidden Lies, and My Journey to Finding Home" is out on July 13. Order the book on Amazon.
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