A child being stolen at birth sounds like something you see in a bad movie. The terrifying truth is that it's far more common than you might want to believe.
In fact, it's precisely what happened to Sara Rosenblatt, a 43-year-old from North Carolina. Upon learning the truth, she decided to seek out her true family and discovered the sister she always wanted.
Sara's family had always made her aware of the fact that she had relatives in her native Chile, including a biological sister. However, Sara had always grown up with the belief that her biological parents had placed her up for adoption voluntarily. Unfortunately, it took her more than 40 years to discover that this simply wasn't the case. That in fact, she'd been taken.
"I understood while growing up that there was going to be some extra understanding when it came to my identity," she explained. Sara also told the interviewer how she understood from a very early age that she looked different from the other members of her family and that unraveling her identity in that sense would be comparatively complicated.
The article contained stories of Chilean babies who had been stolen from their mothers. Soon after reading, Cara reached out to a Chilean non-profit that enabled her to take a MyHeritage DNA test. Soon after, Sara was able to locate not only her biological sister but her birth mother as well. And earlier this year, after having spent a lifetime apart — the three of them were finally able to reunite.
Sadly, her story isn't altogether unique. It turns out that Sara was just one of potentially tens of thousands of Chilean babies that had been taken from their often poor mothers. The majority of them are sold off to rich families in North America, Europe, Asia, and beyond through an illegal adoption circuit.
"It's been really validating to go through this process, though," she said. "It's a process that I have to go through, but I'm not alone in it."
