A pair of twin girls, taken from their mother right after birth and sold to different families, have been reunited dramatically thanks to TikTok.
Years after they were stolen at birth, Amy and Ano from Georgia have met again after watching a TikTok video, BBC reported.
As the two delved into their past, they realised they were among thousands of babies in Georgia stolen from hospitals and sold, some as recently as 2005.
The twins discovered each other when they were 12 years of age. This was when Amy was watching her favorite TV show Georgia’s Got Talent where Ano was performing as a young artist. She even got calls from acquaintances asking if she was the one performing with another name but the family brushed it off, thinking everyone has a doppelganger.
Seven years later Ano was sent a TikTok video by a friend of Amy’s in a fresh haircut and eye-brows piercing. She thought the resemblance “cool” and the two got connected on Facebook.
Amy instantly knew Ano was the girl she had seen all those years ago on Georgia’s Got Talent.
“I have been looking for you for so long!” she messaged. “Me too,” replied Ano.
Over time, they discovered several commonalities between them but not all of it made sense. The biggest of all was that they had the same genetic disease, a bone disorder called dysplasia. Both were born in the same hospital but according to their birth certificates, they were born a few weeks apart.
It felt like they were unraveling a mystery together. “Every time I learned something new about Ano, things got stranger,” Amy relates.
They decided to meet and when they did it was like “looking in a mirror”.
They confronted their families and found out they were adopted in 2002.
Unable to have children, Amy’s mother says a friend told her there was an unwanted baby at the local hospital. She would need to pay the doctors but she could take her home and raise her as her own.
Ano’s mother was told the same story.
Neither of the adoptive families knew the girls were twins and despite paying a lot of money to adopt their daughters, they say they hadn’t realised it was illegal. Georgia was going through a period of turmoil and as hospital staff were involved, they thought it was legitimate.
The two went online and posted their story in a Facebook group called Vedzeb, which means “I’m searching” in Georgian.
A girl from Germany replied to them stating her mother had given birth to twin girls in Kirtskhi Maternity Hospital in 2002 and that despite being told they had died, she now had some doubts.
DNA tests revealed that the girl from the Facebook group was their sister, and was living with their birth mother, Aza, in Germany. Sceptical, they met their birth mother in Leipzig, Germany. She explained to them how she went into a coma after giving birth and upon waking she was told that her children had died.
The group was made by journalist Tamuna Museridze in 2021 after she discovered she was adopted. She has helped to reunite hundreds of families, but has not yet tracked down her own.
Tamuna discovered a black market in adoption that stretched across Georgia and went on from the early 1950s to 2005. “The scale is unimaginable, up to 100,000 babies were stolen. It was systemic,” she says.
In 2022, the Georgian government launched an investigation into historic child trafficking, telling BBC that it has spoken to more than 40 people but the cases were “very old and historic data has been lost”. Journalist Tamuna Museridze says she has shared information but the government hasn’t said when it will release its report.
