But Beulah, the mother of one of the earliest Hicks Babies Stephen Dilbeck- was told that her twin boys were stillborn.
The mother had also left home to work at a factory when she was 13 years old so it seems unlikely that she had family support. The birth mother in this case was 18 years old and married, but her husband had a history of disappearing for months at a time, so the marriage wasn't stable. It is unclear how far along she was, but Hicks convinced her to carry the pregnancy until he induced her. One of the few birth mothers who has been located confirmed that she initially went to Hicks for an abortion.
#DR. HICKS BLACK MARKET BABIES FULL#
It is unusual for full term pregnancy to produce a singleton this small which suggests Hicks may have been inducing women early. In the first episode of the TLC documentary, grown up Hicks Baby Jane Blasio notes that many of the Hicks babies were dangerously small at birth- 4-5 lbs. Hicks are providing an important service in an economical depressed area. Hicks was a known abortionist and the illegal adoptions came to an end in 1964, when Hicks was caught performing illegal abortions. A very small number were reconnected with their birth parents. The researchers made several matches, and the Babies met many long-lost cousins and siblings. In 2014, and ABC News to conduct DNA tests on the Hicks Babies and members of the nearby community. The doctor kept no known records of the birth mothers, who discreetly vanished. Hicks made sure the birth certificates listed the people adopting as birth parents. All of them paid up to $1,000 for a baby no one could trace back to its mother. All the sales were arranged by a West Akron Goodrich employee who bought four babies for herself. All the fathers who bought them worked in the Akron tire companies, except for a Cuyahoga Falls doctor who bought two babies. The Fannin County Courthouse records list 49 babies, for example, who went to Summit County in Ohio. Many of the babies were adopted by families in Akron, OH: But they still know relatively little about their histories. The black market adoptions were discovered in 1997 and a community of Hicks babies has been in contact since that time.
#DR. HICKS BLACK MARKET BABIES SERIES#
TLC recently aired a very long 3 part documentary series on the Hicks Babies who were adopted out. If it was run by word of mouth like that, I tend to think those babies had as good a shot at a good home as the others.In the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. A couple who took illegal measures to get their baby isn't going to share the secret with the neighbor who drinks and smacks his wife around on the third Thursday of every month, however would likely share it with the couple who have been waiting ages to adopt. They would have to be trustworthy enough to keep the secret and also genuinely seem like good people. They probably just looked for married couples with stable income and no criminal record, which isn't much considering how underreported domestic abuse was and the general outlook on it.Īnyway, I figure to get a baby from Hick, a person had to know about the operation, which was probably kept very, very quiet. It was during the Baby Scoop era practically anyone was considered better than an unwed birth mother. I'm sure the standards were much lower than they are today. Searches have gotten nowhere and the backgrounds of many of the Hicks Babies remain a mystery.
Another issue is that Hicks, who died in 1972, either destroyed his records of the adoptions or never kept any at all. DNA is a help, but is limited by the fact that because word of Hicks' services had spread widely at the time, pregnant women and especially adoptive parents often came from considerable distances. Today many of the now-50something "Hicks Babies" are trying to discover their birth families. They would give birth at the clinic, and circumventing all legal formalities Hicks would hand over the babies to adoptive parents along with forged birth certificates which listed the adoptive parents as the biological parents. Word spread that his clinic would take care of desperate pregnant women. More to the point, he also facilitated over 200 illegal adoptions. He performed abortions, which were strictly illegal at the time and led to the loss of his medical license. Thomas Hicks ran a medical clinic in the hardscrabble north Georgia town of McCaysville from 1955 until 1964.