Natalie Wanzel, 34, of Valley Park, knew she had been adopted at 3 years old from an orphanage in Russia in 1992. Her American adoptive parents brought her to Manchester, Missouri, where she grew up in a caring, middle-class family in suburban St. Louis.
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. Wanzel searched for information about her birth parents for 15 years without any luck. She reached out to the Cradle of Hope Adoption Center, now headquartered in Maryland, to no avail.
In 2018, she did an AncestryDNA kit in the hopes of finding a genetic relative. For five years, no close relatives matched. She uploaded her DNA results into the MyHeritageDNA database, which has millions of registered users.
In January 2023, she got a match.
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She had a half sister in Canada, with whom she shared a biological father. They connected instantly. Wanzel also learned she was not Russian. She was from Georgia in Eastern Europe. Neither of them had any information about their biological father, but Wanzel thought if she could track down her biological mother, she might uncover his identity, as well.
She joined a Facebook group for Georgian adoptees searching for biological relatives. Wanzel posted a short query with basic information, including her surname and who she was trying to find. The next morning, she woke up to a stream of congratulatory messages.
One of the site administrators had found her biological mother overnight.
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 Nurse Fay and Woody Morris released in January, shares the stories of those children, now adults, and their biological families torn apart by a baby trafficking scandal that may have operated from the 1950s to early 2000s.
For Wanzel, the discovery allowed her to hear her birth story from her biological mother. They communicated through translators. At first, Wanzel couldn’t understand why her mother, who wants to keep her name private, kept crying. She was a young, unwed pregnant woman who was sent to Moscow to deliver due to the social stigma in Georgia.
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 she was deemed unfit to care for her.
“She asked nurse after nurse; no one would say anything,” Wanzel said.
Her mother told her the hospital staff only said, “She now belongs to the state.” Wanzel’s birth mother returned to Georgia never having seen her baby.
When Wanzel heard the traumatic story, the problems in her adoption paperwork began to make sense. Her birth mother’s signature wasn’t on the relinquishment statement. There were inconsistencies in the name on her birth certificate. Her birth father’s name had been falsified.
“Looking back, it makes sense that she was so emotional to find out that I was alive,” Wanzel said.
Maia Tskvitaia, a Georgian painter living in Germany, is one of the Facebook group administrators who helped locate Wanzel’s birth mother. She joined the group “Vedzeb,” which means "I'm searching" in Georgian, three years ago.
It now has more than 240,000 members and features posts from adopted people from around the world, including the United States, who believe they may have been illegally adopted and are looking for biological family members. Georgian mothers post their stories about hospital staff telling them their babies had died, only to later discover these deaths were never recorded. The cemeteries that hospital workers claimed the babies were buried in never existed.
Tskvitaia says she joined the effort to reunite families because her mother had worked as a nurse in the Georgian maternity hospital for 39 years.
“I fear if my mother made some mistake, I should help these people,” she said. She also hopes that some of those who learn they have Georgian ancestry will become attached to the country slightly smaller than South Carolina that sits in Southwestern Asia between Turkey and Russia.
So far, the group has helped reconnect around 900 people with biological relatives. It is trying to get more of the Georgian population tested using DNA kits and seeking justice from the government for what has been done to them.
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 mother died.
Museridze says her research suggests the black market in adoptions took place across Georgia from the early 1950s to 2005, with a number of stolen babies flown from Georgia to Russia to be sold and adopted by unsuspecting American parents.
She believes the scandal involved people from various sectors — from criminals to doctors and nurses to high level government officials. While an exact number is impossible to verify, she says as many as 100,000 babies may have been stolen.
Her outspoken advocacy on behalf of children and their mothers has changed the culture and social stigmas around adoption in her country.
“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, with little evidence left, to be prosecuted.
She 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 elder 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.
The public reporting on the scandal and subsequent family revelations have rocked the country for the past several years. The BBC documentary, watched by millions, has been another watershed moment for raising public awareness about the issue. Nurse says the BBC has received a phenomenal reaction to the film. It's been translated into 26 languages.
"The stories from Georgia are tragic but they are even more shocking because they are also relatively recent," Nurse said. "The country itself is reeling from the allegations, and there are more victims coming out of the woodwork, including people from Canada and the U.S."
She hopes the documentary helps expose the truth and the families get the reconciliation and justice they want so much.
The film shares the remarkable journey of identical twins, each sold to different families at birth. They just so happened to find each other after one appeared on a televised episode of "Georgia’s Got Talent" and the other shared a TikTok video seven years later. DNA testing confirmed their genetic relationship — in addition to being a mirror image of each other.
On top of the shock of discovering of an unknown identical twin, they later found their birth mother in Germany, who had been told they had died after being born. The emotional and life-altering discoveries and searches featured in the documentary bring to life the devastating impact of the long-running criminal enterprise.
The BBC filmmakers approached the Georgian Interior Ministry for further information on individual cases but were reportedly told that specific details would not be released due to data protection. Media spokesmen for the Georgian Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to emails seeking comment on an update on any remaining investigations.
In 2006, Georgia strengthened its anti-trafficking laws. The following year, it passed additional laws making illegal adoptions more difficult.
Museridze is working with a human rights lawyer to take the cases of victims to the Georgian courts seeking the right to access their own birth documents.
Meanwhile, Wanzel has developed a relationship with her biological half-sister. They Facetime each other regularly. They have discovered so many unexpected similarities. They use the same perfume, are drawn to the same color nail polishes and even own some of the exact same accessories and wallets. They have not yet found their father.
Last spring, her sister drove from Canada to St. Louis, so they could meet in person. Wanzel’s adoptive family hosted a big party to welcome her.
The relationship has enriched her life.
From her biological mom, she learned that she has other half siblings; one of whom bears a striking resemblance to her.
Stories like Wanzel’s motivate Museridze to keep going despite pressure from some government officials to stop digging and bringing up bad history.
Even though her Facebook group has attracted hundreds of thousands of people, she still hasn’t found her own biological parents or answers to her questions.
She keeps searching.