‘People Say, You Sold Your Baby’ How Utah became the most exploitative state in private adoption.
‘People Say, You Sold Your Baby’
How Utah became the most exploitative state in private adoption.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer
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When Tia Goins gave birth to her daughter, Tiona, in July 2018, she vowed that she would provide her a different life than the one she’d had. Goins had been abandoned at birth by a mother with substance-use disorder. She entered the Michigan foster-care system and by 17 was on the street. She had Tiona at 20, and for three months had no place to live, bouncing between shelters and the homes of friends. With winter coming, she resolved to give up the baby. She typed “free adoption help” into a search engine and clicked on the first link.
Soon she was on the phone with a woman in Virginia named Flossie Green. Green is an adoption facilitator — a scout who connects pregnant women in crisis with adoption agencies across the country, but especially in states with the least oversight. Green told Goins that if she signed adoption papers at an agency in Utah, she’d receive $1,000 to get herself on her feet.
Goins asked for time to think about it, but Green didn’t give her much. “She was so persistent — she must have called me four times in one night,” Goins told me. She agreed to move forward, believing that she would be part of an open adoption, one that allowed her to keep in touch with Tiona as she grew up. “I didn’t want Tiona to have my life,” she says. “But I wanted to be in hers, and they promised me I could.”
The next day, Goins says, Green arranged for her to fly to Utah. She was picked up at the airport by Sandi Quick, the owner of an agency called Brighter Adoptions, and her longtime friend Denise Garza, who had founded an agency called Heart and Soul. Goins did not know it, but Utah had recently revoked Garza’s license and suspended her from the adoption trade because of a raft of violations. Even when the state became aware that Garza was continuing to refer pregnant women to Quick, it took no serious action.
The two women took Goins to McDonald’s, bought three pairs of pajamas for Tiona at a Wal-Mart, and dropped them at a Marriott in Layton. “I didn’t even have to check in,” Goins says. “We just walked right upstairs.”
At lunchtime the next day, Quick drove Goins to a Chili’s to meet a prospective couple from Mississippi and discuss an adoption. Goins asked them to commit to an open arrangement. “This is my first-ever child,” she recalls saying. “Please don’t take her completely from me.” Later, after bringing Tiona back to her hotel room, Goins agonized over the decision and texted Quick that she wanted to back out. Quick told her that she was with a woman in labor and couldn’t speak.
The next day, two women from Quick’s agency — her daughter, Shaylee Budora, and a notary public named Taanya Ramirez — knocked on the hotel-room door. “We’re here to talk to you about the adoption,” Goins recalls Budora saying. Goins told them that she had called things off, but the women acted as if they didn’t hear her. Budora and Ramirez gave her a document and told her where to sign. (Green and Garza dispute Goins’s account. In an emailed statement, Quick said she could not discuss the details of any particular case. “Generally, we take any indication of hesitation from the birth mother very seriously,” she said. “No one affiliated with my agency would ever take consent from a mother who did not fully understand the ramifications.”)
Goins signed. “I was afraid that if I didn’t, I was never going to get out of there,” she says. “No one even knows I’m here. I don’t know what I’m doing here.” Rodriguez notarized the document at 10:53 a.m. Minutes later, the couple from Chili’s arrived. Holding Tiona, Goins let them in, sobbing so hard her shirt was wet. “I cried. I cried. I cried and cried and cried,” Goins says. “They cried, too. But then they took my baby. And I was all there by myself.”
At noon, Quick texted her to meet in the hotel lobby for a ride to the airport. Goins recalls that inside the car, Quick handed her an envelope. “It’s $4,000, cash,” she said. “It’s to get you back on your feet.” At a stoplight, Quick turned her gaze toward her and said, “Use it wisely.”
Goins says the entire encounter, from internet search to dismissal, took three days. Soon after the trip to Utah, she posted a photo of her daughter on Facebook. The baby’s adoptive mother seemed to take offense, and their relationship turned cold. Goins has not seen to her daughter since.
Goins is now 26 and works six days a week making car bumpers. She understands now that the agreement she signed states that open adoptions are not enforceable. On the last page, her supposed expenses are itemized, including $2,600 for housing, $400 for clothing, and $600 for food. “I certify that the $4,000 I received will be used for the above expenses and were not offered to me to induce me to relinquish my parental rights,” the text reads. The amounts have no obvious basis in fact.
“People say, ‘You sold your baby,’” Goins says. “I don’t want to believe that. To this day, I still don’t want to believe it. The whole thing happened so fast. I came there with only my baby and the clothes on my back. I left without her. I didn’t hand her over for cash.”
In the years since, she has pleaded with Tiona’s adoptive parents to return her so incessantly that they took out two restraining orders. The mother wrote in 2023, “I am afraid that Tia is going to find our house and lay in wait until we come out of the house so she can grab my daughter. I am afraid that she is watching us and going to try to kidnap my daughter when we are out in public. She knows everything about us. She has known every address we’ve ever lived at and where we worked. I have asked her repeatedly to leave us alone and to stop contacting us. She refuses. She has told me that no matter where we go she will always know where we are. She talks constantly about how she will see my daughter again soon and how she has a bedroom ready for her when she comes home.”
Utah’s adoption system is by consensus the most exploitative in the nation — a clearinghouse for fast-track, high-dollar placements. “The legislature made the state a hub for this kind of activity,” says William Thorne, a retired judge for the Utah Court of Appeals and a tribal court judge who presided over numerous custody cases in more than three decades on the bench.
Utah’s laws subject adoptions to fewer hurdles than almost anywhere else in the country. One of the most significant regulatory advantages is that in many cases, unmarried women who give birth there have the sole right to place a child for adoption: The state generally considers the act of having sex sufficient notice to a man that any resulting child can be given up. Utah also permits new mothers to move ahead with adoption as soon as 24 hours after birth. Once a birth mother signs the papers, the transfer is irrevocable, whereas New York gives women as many as 45 days to ask a judge for a reversal and Colorado allows 91, if it can be proved the decision was made under duress. In Utah, finalized adoptions cannot be contested even if someone involved has committed fraud.
No federal agency regulates adoption; since the 1970s, when adoptions fell sharply, the government has not even gathered authoritative statistics on the practice. One lobbying group, the National Council for Adoption, estimated in 2017 that nearly a million couples are trying to adopt at any given time. In 2020, the most recent year for which it has reliable data, NCA counted only 20,000 private adoptions. The Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade was expected to produce a wave of infant adoptions, but so far, there is no indication that has happened. In the first year after the Dobbs decision, abortions reached the highest number in more than a decade. That means that private adoption agencies continue to compete for the relatively few infants given up by their birth mothers.
The system has long been time-consuming and costly. One large agency in Texas tells adoptive parents to expect a two-year wait and a flat payment of $57,500. Others I called from Indiana to New York quoted fees ranging from $38,000 to $51,000, and several said that adoptions can take up to three years to complete. Middlemen have arisen to match prospective parents with agencies in states that offer quicker adoptions for higher prices. Utah is at the extreme. By some estimates, the fees that agencies in the state charge for a lightning-fast transaction can reach $88,000.
“Let’s call the adoption industry what it is: a marketplace,” says Gregory Luce, a Minneapolis attorney who is the director of the Adoptee Rights Law Center. “We don’t like to say we sell children in this country, but in fact we really do. It’s just made legal, wrapped up in the rules of 50-plus states and territories.”
When a couple that lives in one state adopts a baby from another, they are expected to comply with one of the only federal guidelines on the process: the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children, which holds that parents must follow the laws of both places. Outright payments to birth mothers are illegal, but parents and agencies can reimburse them for expenses. Many states limit those payments: Texas forbids prospective parents from paying for “leisure activities’’ and specifically disallows buying a birth mother a car, and Connecticut sets the maximum reimbursement for living expenses at $1,500. Birth mothers in financial crisis may consider the sums they recoup to be a lot of money, but they are not the ones profiting in the adoption industry. In the states that allow them, private middlemen and agencies that connect birth mothers with adoptive families have essentially no caps on what they can earn.
These intermediaries come in two main forms. One set, known as facilitators, use targeted internet ads to recruit pregnant women from states with strict abortion rules and few resources for newborns; then they help route them to private agencies in states with loose adoption laws, earning fees when they do so. The second kind of intermediary works with prospective parents. Called brokers or simply consultants, they sell something invaluable: speed. They can save prospective parents months or even years by directing them to agencies across the country. Pregnant women get sent by facilitators to agencies, and agencies use brokers to connect with adoptive parents. Agencies sit at the center of the dynamic, and nowhere do they leverage it more ruthlessly than Utah.
What private agencies offer pregnant women can seem like a godsend. But those in the most desperate situations often find it hard to withdraw from the process if they begin to change their minds.
Early last summer, in a city along the Gulf Coast, a 26-year-old woman I’ll call Jasmine learned that she was pregnant. She had recently moved in with the baby’s father, bringing with her two young children from a previous relationship, and she regretted it. Her new boyfriend, a construction worker, was jealous and controlling; he threw away her makeup and dictated what she could wear when she left the apartment. One evening, when he wasn’t looking, Jasmine opened his wallet and saw that the name on his ID wasn’t even close to the one he’d given her. “I started to wonder if I was going to be one of those girls who goes missing,” she told me recently.
Jasmine’s options were severely limited. She was unemployed and had nowhere else to live. She considered an abortion, but the state where she lived had outlawed them in 2022. She called a clinic in Florida, the nearest place that allowed abortions up to 15 weeks, and learned that there was a monthlong waiting list. That would put her past the state’s deadline.
Late one night, after her son and daughter were asleep, Jasmine searched the internet for financial help during pregnancy. Her screen lit up with websites promising generous assistance for an option she hadn’t yet considered: adoption. Jasmine filled out a form, then spoke by phone with a facilitator. She directed Jasmine to a Utah agency called Love and Light, whose website proclaimed “With us, YOU are in control. YOU decide how this journey will go forward.” The deal the agency offered was hard to resist. She would get free housing in a modern apartment complex, plus money for food, clothes, and medical treatment.
Jasmine filled out another form and soon got a call from the agency’s owner. It was Denise Garza, who had started Love and Light after her suspension expired. Jasmine did not know about the Tia Goins case or Garza’s trouble with regulators, but was wary in general. She asked Garza to give her a video tour of the apartment, and it seemed nice. The more questions Garza asked about her life and its difficulties, the better it all seemed. “I just told myself, Let’s go, because I need a roof over my babies’ heads,” Jasmine said.
Soon, she was carrying her daughter and son onto a flight to Salt Lake City. Garza was waiting for her near baggage claim. She was easy to spot: 52, purple Mohawk, fuchsia lipstick. They drove to Layton, a small suburb on the sandy plateau north of the city, where Garza gave Jasmine a double stroller and $700 to spend on maternity clothes. She also got $350 a week for food and household items. The setup was comfortable, but sometimes she replayed a conversation she’d had with her father before leaving. “You sure this isn’t a scam, girl?” he had asked. “You’re going to be so far away from home. Nobody you know is going to be able to help you.”
Jasmine is talkative and outgoing, with expressive walnut eyes and deep dimples. She got to know some of the other residents of the apartment complex — a dozen, maybe, who were also expectant mothers, some working with Garza’s agency and some with others. Like her, many struggled to find stable housing and came from states that banned abortion. Jasmine learned that Love and Light kept a separate set of apartments in a shabbier part of town for birth mothers with criminal records. She also gathered that several of the women had known Garza for years and had placed multiple babies with her. The reality of the trade-off settled in: a roof and a stipend in exchange for a child. “You know, you get this weekly allowance, and it makes you want to stay,” she told me. “You like the gifts. It’s a kind of bribery. But the housing — that was the main thing.”
After a few weeks, Garza gave Jasmine portfolios on five prospective families. Jasmine rejected several, including an Asian American couple in Hawaii who were seeking a Black baby. (Jasmine, who is Black, found their preference bizarre.) She felt most comfortable with a pair I’ll call Amanda and Matt — an outdoorsy white couple from another southern state. Jasmine got to know them, awkwardly, in texts and video calls, though she did not know their last name.
Jasmine confided in Garza that she was fearful of being cut out of her new daughter’s life and wondered whether she was making the right decision. “She’d say, ‘Baby, nothing in your life is changing,’” Jasmine recalled. Another time, Jasmine shared that her 3-year-old was asking questions about what would happen to her baby sister. She remembers Garza advising her to buy the girl a baby doll to help her forget.
Feeling isolated, Jasmine found a Facebook group where birth mothers, adoptees, and adoptive parents seemed to speak candidly about their experiences — often mentioning harrowing situations that involved Utah specifically. She started posting, and the members reminded her that she did not have to go through with the adoption if she didn’t want to. Jasmine was scared to broach the possibility with Garza. Would she owe her money if she changed her mind? “I felt so trapped,” Jasmine said. “I was just ready to run off, but I didn’t know where to go.”
A few days before Christmas, Jasmine went into labor. She left her children with another of Garza’s clients in the apartment complex and went to a nearby hospital, where she delivered a girl I’ll call Luna. Jasmine told the nurses to take the baby away. “I was too heartbroken, and I knew I’d bond if I held her,” she told me. “I just wanted some time to grieve.” Amanda arrived and wanted to meet Luna, but Jasmine had yet to sign relinquishment papers and didn’t want to see anyone.
The next few hours were fraught. In the baby unit down the hall, Luna was inconsolable. Amanda kept asking to meet them both; Jasmine, tired and hungry, relented after Amanda brought her some fried chicken from a fast-food restaurant. A nurse brought Luna to her arms, and Jasmine stared into the baby’s eyes. Amanda tried to make conversation, asking Jasmine what name she wanted Luna to call her by when she was older. She also made remarks about the baby’s looks; they might have been innocuous, but Jasmine, postpartum, found them off-putting.
Amanda stepped out. Jasmine called Garza, who was traveling out of the state, and told her that the adoption was off. Garza told her she’d have to vacate her apartment immediately. (Garza declined to answer questions about Jasmine’s case but said the account did not “match the tone or practices of how we treat the expectant moms we work with.”)
From her hospital bed, Jasmine posted to the Facebook group that she needed a place to stay. One of the group members, Jessalynn Henry, who had once placed a baby for adoption in Utah and now lives in California, contacted Garza directly. Unlike Jasmine, Henry knew all about Garza’s track record. “I called her and was very firm,” Henry told me. “I said, ‘You leave Jasmine alone. Do not speak to her. We’re getting her out of there.’” She arranged for Jasmine to stay at her mother’s house nearby.
Another member of the group picked up Jasmine and Luna from the hospital and drove them back to the apartment complex to gather their things. While she was there, Garza’s daughter Nickale arrived and pounded on the front door while Jasmine and her children hid in a back room. She called the police, and Nickale left. A few hours later, Jasmine emerged from the apartment with her belongings, her two toddlers, and the newborn. The stroller Garza had given her was gone.
Soon after returning to her home state, she texted me, “I can’t believe I almost gave her away. I want to shut this down COMPLETELY.”’
Garza, who grew up in suburban Salt Lake City, says she has overseen more than 800 adoptions since starting her first agency, Heart and Soul, in 2006. She ran into problems early on. In 2008, an adoption she’d handled made national news when it was overturned. Her agency had not followed the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, a 1978 law that gives preference to tribal members when one of their group’s children is put up for adoption.
In 2013, a Texas man regained custody of the 2-year-old son his former girlfriend had attempted to place for adoption through Garza during a separation. The man told reporters at the time that Garza had informed him he had no rights in the state because he hadn’t established paternity, but that was false; his name was on the boy’s birth certificate. The next year, Garza was in federal court, defending against a suit claiming she’d deceived and defrauded a couple during three failed placements, including one in which they alleged that she’d withheld information about a birth mother’s drug use. The case was dismissed in 2015.
In 2018, Utah revoked Garza’s license after state regulators found 22 violations, including failing to provide medical information to adoptive parents, falsifying forms, and charging parents $4,000 for medical expenses paid for by Medicaid. Garza was barred from the adoption trade for five years. But she did not comply. When the state became aware she was sending pregnant women to her friend Quick, it put Quick’s license on conditional status for five months and instructed Garza to take down the website.
Garza has also worked as a mortgage originator, and she founded a $49-a-month motivational coaching service called Powerful Kind Women, telling prospective clients in a video that the “world needs more kindness, but we’ve got to start with us.” In 2022, she started a candy business on behalf of her 5-year-old son, telling a reporter that he was so destructive around the house, he needed a way to start paying for what he’d broken. She created a TikTok channel to promote the venture and peddled his lollipops at local markets. In 2022, Garza filed for bankruptcy and sold her 9,500-square-foot home soon after a bank started a foreclosure.
In 2023, when her suspension was up, Utah issued her a license to run a new adoption agency: Love and Light. In an article about the state’s decision, Garza told the Salt Lake Tribune that she felt called back into adoption work because of the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling. The newspaper quoted former clients who were critical of the state’s action, and Garza took to TikTok to ask her followers, “Have you ever had somebody post an article, say something about you, and they’re trying to hurt you and bring you down? And in return, that article … ends up blowing up to the most positive thing ever? People reach out to you, people call you, and the people who are looking for you find you?”
Garza declined my requests for an interview. “Although there are unreported nuances about the state licensing issue, I take full responsibility and I am very sorry for the mistakes I’ve made in the past,” she wrote in an email, adding, “I am committed to running my agency at the highest ethical and administrative standards.”
People who go to Utah to adopt a baby sometimes do so without fully understanding the market they are a part of. They are often financially and emotionally depleted by years of infertility treatments, and when they first encounter the complexity of the American adoption system, with its array of large and small agencies, public and private options, brokers and lawyers, it is easy to be overwhelmed. I spoke to six women who adopted in Utah, all of whom have mixed feelings about it. They love their children; they feel lingering unease about how they came to join their family.
One of them, Carrie, is a teacher who now lives in Brooklyn. In early 2017, she and her husband, Alex, an Army officer who did four tours in the Middle East, were stationed in Hawaii and hoping for a baby. But Carrie had been in a bad car accident years earlier, and doctors told her that pregnancy would be too dangerous. A friend had recently used a broker in Georgia called Faithful Adoption Consultants to get a baby in less than a year, and Carrie got in touch with the organization that May.
The owner of Faithful Adoption Consultants, Courtney Lott, is a frequent intermediary for adoptive parents who end up in Utah. She told Carrie and Alex that she only works with practicing Christians. The couple didn’t belong to a church, but they got a letter from Alex’s military chaplain stating that he was an active officer and had attended services. “Apparently that was religious enough,” Carrie told me. They sent Lott $3,000 to help them find an agency; they expected to pay total fees in the neighborhood of $45,000 to $55,000.
Less than three months later, Lott connected them with Garza. She was working with an Arizona woman who had come to Utah and was giving birth the very next day. Carrie and Alex flew to Salt Lake to meet the woman and their soon-to-be son. At Jordan Valley Hospital, just outside the city, they met two other couples who were also waiting to leave with their newly adopted babies. Carrie thought that was remarkable; she remembers noticing that the hospital staff, on the other hand, didn’t think it was out of the ordinary.
Carrie and Alex signed a contract with Garza, who told them that the birth mother, whom I’ll call Tracy, wanted only a semi-open adoption with all communication going through her agency. Garza said that Tracy wanted to share only her first name and her medical history. As Carrie was leaving the hospital, however, she spotted a form sitting on a countertop with Tracy’s full name, and she took note.
Not long after Carrie and Alex returned to Hawaii with their son, Faithful Adoption Consultants contacted them. They were informing clients that Garza’s license was about to be suspended. Carrie recalls finding the notice “weird and confusing,” but she had a newborn to focus on; the Army was also about to relocate them. She was too exhausted to question the process. “Initially, you feel so grateful that you have this beautiful baby,” she says. “You don’t want this to be an industry where everybody’s being taken advantage of.”
For the next few years, as agreed, Carrie sent annotated photo albums to Garza to share with Tracy. She asked repeatedly if Garza could put her in direct contact, but each time Garza brushed her off. Then, on the boy’s 4th birthday, Garza forwarded a text from Tracy expressing interest in having closer contact. When the two women finally exchanged DMs, Tracy told Carrie that she’d hoped to connect for years. They discovered Garza had lied about their preferences, claiming each wanted limited communication. (Garza’s decision to forward the text message baffled them; perhaps she’d sent it in error.)
Carrie felt angry about the lost time, which deprived her son and Tracy of a closer relationship. Carrie’s theory is that Garza blocked the contact because she stood to lose money if Tracy had another unwanted pregnancy and arranged with Carrie directly to place the baby with its sibling. “That’s their biggest fear, that you’re going to go rogue and handle it without them,” she says. “They want to be in control of everything.”
Carrie and Alex later adopted a second baby through Faithful Adoption Consultants, this one from Florida. Now she has misgivings about the system she’s taken part in. One evening this June, she learned that her second son’s biological mother had just had her tenth baby — none of whom live with her and a number of whom have been adopted by other families. When we spoke, Carrie was still processing the news.
“As adoptive parents, we’re the least vulnerable party, and I can’t stand the stories where people are somehow made to feel sorry for us,” she said. “I hate it when people say, ‘Oh God bless you, you adopted a child,’ like there’s just this house full of babies waiting to be adopted and out of my goodwill I went over and adopted one. It’s just not true. I’m lucky that I was able to adopt a baby, but a lot of the narrative we have about adoption doesn’t capture the state of the industry at all.”
She paused. “It makes me feel sort of dirty,” she said.
Ashley Mitchell is a fifth-generation Utahan who lives outside Salt Lake with her husband and two children. She still feels conflicted over her decision to give her first child up for adoption at 26, on the advice of her family and social workers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “I fucking believed the lie the industry tells birth mothers when it puts them on a pedestal and says, ‘Giving up your baby to someone who hasn’t made your terrible choices is your only redemption,” Mitchell says. “I believed the church when it told me, ‘This is your only way to grace.’”
Mitchell runs Knee to Knee, a nationwide support group for “post-placement” women, and is a founding member of Utah Adoption Rights, which pushes for reforms including restrictions on facilitators and brokers. One day in early March, she drove to Layton to visit the rented apartments where Garza, Quick, and others house their pregnant clients. Mitchell and another UAR founder, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, who also directs public policy at the California-based nonprofit Ethical Family Building, had prepared flyers alerting pregnant women of their rights. Mitchell planned to slip them under doors.
The first complex was eerily quiet, except for a heavily tattooed man in his 30s who stopped as Mitchell walked through a courtyard. “Who are you?” he said. “What are you doing here?” A moment later, an older bearded man on a golf cart drove up. “What are you looking for?” he asked.
“My sisters,” Mitchell said as she strode toward one of the apartments, directing her gaze straight ahead.
“Plenty to see here,” the second man said, driving off. “Plenty to see here.”
Except there wasn’t. The vertical blinds of most units were drawn shut, even though it was broad daylight. Next, Mitchell went to the parking lot of Holy Cross, the hospital where Jasmine gave birth. It’s small and low slung with a lonely windsock on the roof. As she arrived, she received word about a Florida woman who had decided to keep her 1-day-old baby and said that Garza was threatening her with fraud.
“How is this predation not illegal?” she shouted at me. “How does this escape the notice of regulators?” Waving her hand toward the hospital entrance, she said, “How different is this from sexual grooming? These agencies and facilitators check all the same boxes. They target the victim. They gain their trust. They meet their needs. They isolate and exploit them. And then they call all the shots.”
The current Congress is considering two adoption-reform bills. One, the Adoption Counts Act, introduced by a Republican from Colorado, would require states to report private adoptions to the federal government. A second, the ADOPT Act, brought by a Democrat from New Hampshire, aims to impose a nationwide ban on unlicensed, for-profit brokers. It is based in part on the work of Ranyard, who advocated for a bill banning unlicensed facilitators that recently became law in California. Neither piece of legislation has advanced.
When Jasmine got back to her home state, she didn’t just face the same irresolvable problems that had led her to adoption in the first place. She also worried that Garza would pursue her for the thousands of dollars in expenses she had incurred in Utah. She moved in with a cousin temporarily, and everyone was on edge. Jasmine had no income and no child care; it felt like the only thing fueling her was panic. She dropped so much weight that her cheeks hollowed out.
At the end of January, she called a local adoption agency, hoping to place Luna nearby. The owner told her that unlike in Utah, their state required the birth father’s consent, and Jasmine hadn’t been in contact with him since she left his apartment. “They told me I could avoid all that drama if I went back to Denise,” she said.
Feeling wretched, and certain that it would weigh on her for the rest of her life, Jasmine texted Garza. She responded immediately; all was forgiven. Garza told her that if she signed over custody, she’d receive more financial support. In the last days of January, Garza flew to Jasmine’s state, where they met with a local lawyer. As the law required, he asked Jasmine to identify the birth father. She said that she knew where he lived but not his real name. She mentioned his threatening behavior, which seemed to satisfy the lawyer.
Then he asked Jasmine pointedly if she understood what she was agreeing to. Jasmine told the attorney of her hopes for an open adoption with texts, calls, and ongoing contact. The lawyer told her that even if both parties agreed to such an arrangement, it wouldn’t be binding. “I felt my face get so red,” Jasmine said. The baby “was all dressed up, sitting in her car seat looking at me like she knew. In her eyes, she knew.”
Jasmine asked to meet new sets of parents, and one couple drove from another southern state to meet her. She styled her hair and dressed up in one of her favorite outfits, eager to make her best impression, but was nauseated when the prospective father started flirting with her in front of his wife.
Garza suggested that Jasmine reconsider Amanda and Matt. Mostly, Jasmine had liked them. Seeing no other options, she agreed. Garza handed Jasmine the first installment of what would turn out to be more than $5,500 and turned to take Luna. Garza was taking temporary custody of the baby before transferring it to Amanda and Matt.
In the months since, Jasmine has felt grief, regret, shame, and guilt. Not all of her family members know she gave a baby up for adoption. She worries that talking publicly will lead Amanda and Matt to cut off communication and stop sending her occasional photos of Luna. Her daughter often asks where the baby has gone. For a time, Jasmine considered telling her Luna was dead, which seemed easier than explaining the truth.
With reporting from Sarah Weiser.