Louisiana Voice

Reams and reams of copy relate the level of the rampant ineptness and corruption of Louisiana’s political structure but none so vividly illustrates that sad observation that to accurately point out this state has more restrictive laws to govern flower arrangers and hair braiders than protective measures to prevent literal baby-selling and foster care abuse.

Documented cases of pregnant women brokering their unborn babies to multiple sets of prospective parents with the winner being determined by who was willing to pay the highest price have been hand-delivered to legislators who in 2022 still barely managed, by a razor-thin 7-6 committee vote, moved to pass a bill designed to prevent birth mothers from intentionally lying to collect living expenses and other benefits from more than one set of prospective adoptive parents. Once out of committee, it passed the full House by a 64-36 vote, raising the question of who were the 36 who voted no on such a bill?

Will, LouisianaVoice is just the place to find that information. For that full House vote, GO HERE.

The Senate was a tad more level-headed about the issue, with 32 votes in favor, but no votes in opposition. Five senators, however, did take a walk and did not vote. To see the Senate vote, GO HERE.

Yet, here we are, four years later and the Department of Children and Family Services has been hit with a thunderbolt in the form of the State of Louisiana Child Ombudsman – 2025 Annual Report of Louisiana Child Ombudsman Kathleen Stewart Richey that takes DCFS to task for shortcomings, records destruction, misinformation, sibling separations and other failures.

Richey, the first juvenile judge in East Baton Rouge Parish, is a passionate proponent of child welfare and safety. She was instrumental in establishing the Capital Area Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) Program. Over her 24-year judicial career, she received several honors and appointments, including Louisiana CASA Judge of the Year in 1997.

Her report on DCFS comes at a sensitive time with the national attention being given to sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein and the myriad prominent names associated with his activities.

And despite that 2022 legislation designed to tighten restriction on birth mothers’ adoption schemes, shady attorneys and adoption agents continue to operate virtually unchecked – unlike flower arrangers and hair braiders, who must comply with strict standards in order to be licensed in Louisiana.

Louisiana, of course, does not hold franchise rights on adoption scams.

The most notorious adoption scammer was a woman named Gloria Tann, who, as director of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, ran a lucrative child-kidnapping and adoption ring. By literally kidnapping newborns (only white children) from hospital nurseries for more than two decades, she managed to abduct more than 5,000 babies in the 1930s and 1940s, making approximately a million dollars ($11 million in today’s dollars) in the process.

She grabbed two brothers off a back porch as their mother slept inside. Perhaps as an inspiration to Korean black marketers, a favorite ploy was to have a nurse, or someone dressed as a nurse, tell a new mother that her newborn had died when it had not and Tann would adopt the baby out, making a profit on the transaction.

On one occasion, Tann, driving her large black Packard, pulled up alongside six siblings and asked if they wanted to go for a ride. The impoverished children had never seen a car before. Tann had been tipped off that the children’s mother was in the hospital, so she knew they were home alone. Those children were not adopted out immediately. They stayed at the Home Society for three months where they were exploited as free labor, changing babies’ diapers and performing other chores.  They were eventually adopted out to a family in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Tann adopted children out to each of the forty-eight states in the Continental United States to such luminaries as Pearl Buck, actors Smiley Burnette, June Allyson and Dick Powell, Joan Crawford (twins), Lana Turner and New York Governor Herbert Lehman.

Children who proved more difficult to adopt out were turned over to so-called baby farmers, generally uneducated middle-aged women. Some of the baby farmers insisted on payment up front and once it was paid, there was little incentive to care for the children. Many baby farmers killed children with some even taking out life insurance on them before killing them by scalding water or by dashing their heads against walls.

It was the ugliest side of child exploitation.

Tann died of uterine cancer on September 15, 1950, just two days after Tennessee Gov. Gordon Browning launched an investigation into the society after receiving reports that the agency was selling children for profit. The state eventually sued Tann’s estate. The case was settled for $82,000 and the Tennessee Children’s Home Society was shut down that same year.

The demise of the society, however, did not mean the end of baby brokering. Far from it. Unscrupulous lawyers, adoption agencies and scamming mothers continue to milk the system by taking advantage of eager couples willing and able to pay exorbitant fees in hopes of becoming adoptive parents–especially in Louisiana, which has some of the weakest laws governing adoptions in the nation.

The institutions of adoption, fostering and child protective services represent the unholiest of unholy trinities that prop up the unmerciful trafficking of children. As repulsive as baby-selling by unprincipled adoption agencies may be, a worse human tragedy oftentimes begins in the well-meaning but inefficient efforts of child protective agencies in states across the landscape and ends in the sordid activity of child trafficking.

Known in some states as the department of family and children services, child protective services, or some other innocuous identity, they sometimes appear to intentionally wrecking lives as they blunder their way to bureaucratic incompetence, snatching children from a willing grandmother, in one case, and sending them halfway across the country, for example, to live with a father whose occupation was an adult entertainer.

Often, it is the ineptitude of these well-meaning agencies that perpetuates the flow from foster care to trafficking. They use their personnel and financial advantages to overwhelm financially strapped parents who find themselves at the mercy of courts heavily-weighted in favor of the cold bureaucracy that is totally devoid of compassion and empathy. Occasionally, fraud itself creeps into the equation with caseworkers withholding or destroying or simply fabricating evidence. That’s because charges against parents are taken seriously while charges against caseworkers are, often as not, ignored because caseworkers and their agencies can – and do – hide behind strict confidentiality laws.

The National Foster Youth Institute in 2024 estimated that 60 percent of child sex trafficking victims had been in foster care or another part of the child welfare system at some point in their young lives. Human trafficking rings often zero in on those they consider the most vulnerable, including those previously or currently in foster care.

With nearly 400,000 children in foster care with 20,000 older youth transitioning out each year because of age. Generally, foster children “age out” at eighteen, abruptly losing their support system. These are particularly vulnerable, subject to exploitation.

In Louisiana, there were places like Arcadia in Bienville Parish and Longstreet in DeSoto Parish. Those were the locations of two homes for so-called delinquent boys (Longstreet) and girls (Arcadia). Both homes were run by an Independent Fundamental Baptist preacher names Mack Ford and both were named New Bethany.

Ford operated his homes, where survivors have related horror stories of beatings, psychological, physical and sexual abuse, for years. The state made a couple of halfhearted attempts to shut the homes down but Ford always invoked the separation of church and state doctrine and the state backed down, leaving scores of children defenseless and, as it turned out, hopeless.

Yet, the legislature and attorney general’s office failed time after time to protect those children and now Richey’s report tells us there has been little improvement in the protection of children.

And to assign the bulk of fault for this travesty, legislators need only peer deeply into their mirrors.