Inside Utah’s ‘human marketplace’ for adopted babies
Desperate women denied abortion access in much of the US are being offered a way out for the children they cannot raise themselves. It’s not always what it seems
The apartment complex nestled in the cradle of Salt Lake City’s snow-capped Rocky Mountains is teeming with expectant mothers. The women have travelled from all over America to give birth to babies they have no intention of keeping.
The apartments are run by adoption agencies that have bussed and flown pregnant women to Utah in their hundreds, if not thousands, exploiting the most relaxed laws in the country governing private adoption. In many cases they have been lured to the state on the promise of rent and cash payments, a practice so controversial Utah has been likened to a “human marketplace”.
The Times interviewed more than a dozen people as part of an investigation into the so-called baby broker business, including women who quickly came to regret the decision to give up their children only to find they had no way to legally reclaim them.
When Janie — not her real name — discovered she was pregnant she was approaching her second trimester, long past the six-week abortion limit in her home state of Mississippi.
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“I typed ‘adoption agencies near me’ into Google and I just called the one that was at the top of the results,” she says. That agency was A Guardian Angel, a Utah-based company that had paid for a sponsored link to appear in other states, many of them with strict abortion laws and few resources for mothers. “They didn’t really mention where they were until later,” she says.
The biological father was Janie’s on-off boyfriend, a man prone to violence who had kicked both her and her six-year-old daughter out of the house just before Christmas in a rage. “He hit me and told me to get rid of it,” she says. She felt she had no other option when she reached out to the agency.
A Guardian Angel’s website is filled with pictures of white couples with black adopted children: children, Janie thought to herself, who looked a lot like her own daughter.
Mitchell and Ranyard at the Layton Meadows apartment complex
KIM RAFF FOR THE TIMES
“They pressured me, offering me all these things to go to Utah. I’m coming from a place where I literally have nothing but my clothes in my car,” Janie says. She left her job working as a croupier at a local casino, took her daughter out of school and boarded a plane to Salt Lake City. “When I got there,” she says, “it turned into a very controlling situation.”
An irrevocable decision
The dozen or so agencies operating out of Utah are thriving in large part due to the fierce competition for babies in America. The National Council for Adoption estimates that nearly a million couples are trying to adopt at any given time, while only 20,000 private adoptions are taking place each year.
Adoptive parents can outnumber available infants 45 to one, and the average time between submitting an application to taking home a child is about two to three years.
Utah, the most adoption-friendly state in the country, can be lightning-fast by comparison. For fees of anywhere between $20,000 and $80,000, prospective parents can bring newborns home within weeks.
In other states, such as Colorado, a birth mother has up to 91 days to change her mind after giving her baby up for adoption. Utah, however, permits new mothers to sign away their parental rights as soon as 24 hours after birth and the decision is irrevocable, without exception.
The only federal guidelines overseeing cross-state adoption is the outdated 1960 Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children Act, which is triggered when adoptive parents live in a different state from the one the baby was born in.
Adoption rights advocates complain the law is too vague and left largely up to individual states to enforce. Utah, for example, asks birth mothers and adopters only for a current local address, no matter how temporary.
Snow-capped peaks surround Layton Meadows
KIM RAFF FOR THE TIMES
The agencies are run largely by women with links to the Mormon church, which discourages the birth of children out of wedlock. Its leaders have for decades led single mothers towards adoption, teaching the importance of forming an “eternal family” that will last beyond death.
“They really believe they are doing God’s work,” says Ashley Mitchell, co-founder of Utah Adoption Rights, a non-profit advice centre.
Business is also booming thanks to the increasing influence of the anti-abortion movement in the US, which has vilified — and in many states helped to criminalise — abortion, while promoting adoption as a panacea to unplanned pregnancies.
Since the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, which had since 1973 enshrined women’s right to seek abortion, agencies have been more aggressive about marketing their services to pregnant women. Some 16 states prohibit adoption agencies not licensed in their state from taking out ads. Mississippi is not one of them.
‘In essence, it’s child trafficking’
When Janie first made her online search for adoption agencies, she was not set on giving up her child. In another world, where she had the financial or emotional support, she would have loved to give her daughter a sibling.
By the end of her first conversation with A Guardian Angel, however, she felt persuaded to go ahead with it. She signed a contract that spelt out the penalties she would incur should she change her mind, such as the forfeiture of a paid flight home.
She was offered an apartment, medical care, a weekly allowance and a $6,000 cash-in-hand “post-placement” bonus. Outright payments to birth mothers are illegal in all 50 states, but legal experts say agencies can get around that by claiming they are reimbursing them for expenses.
Wesley Hutchins, a family lawyer in Salt Lake City who has worked on more than 1,400 adoption cases, says that some agencies tell the women: “When you come here we’ll give you an envelope full of cash.”
“They’re supposed to tie that to rent or a similar expense, but nobody ever follows up on that money,” he said. “If that’s not an inducement for someone to come and place a baby for adoption, I don’t know what is.”
Hutchins points to Utah’s Sale of a Child statute, which states a person cannot offer money or anything of value in exchange for inducing any parent to place a child for adoption, “because the buying and selling of children is in essence child trafficking”. He adds that the agencies “are very broadly interpreting the statute, acting as if it authorises them to do a lot of things that I don’t think the statute allows for. It’s all wink-wink.”
Gregory Luce, director of the Adoptee Rights Law Center, says private adoption in Utah has essentially become a “human marketplace”.
A Utah judge ruled in 2018 that one agency, Heart and Soul, had veered on the wrong side of the law.
“To the birth mother population, [the agency] described the promise of $4,000 cash in hand as likely a substantial amount of money that very well may incentivise their decision to relinquish,” Judge Sonia Sweeney wrote in the case. The “overwhelming majority” of birth mothers, she said, came from “very low-income” backgrounds, and were “homeless or transient”.
Denise Garza, the director of Heart and Soul, told The Salt Lake Tribune that she took “full responsibility for the situation”, but said she did not believe her licence should have been revoked.
A number of the Utah agencies have faced civil lawsuits over the years, but they were either quietly settled or dismissed before reaching trial. The Heart and Soul case made headlines because it was an anomaly.
Janie was put up in an apartment in one of the sprawling complexes located in Layton, a remote area 30 minutes north of the capital city.
KIM RAFF FOR THE TIMES
“The agencies market it like a vacation, sending them pictures of townhouses with views of the Utah mountains,” says Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, who works alongside Mitchell, looking up at the breathtaking range. “If you’re from a dumpy part of Louisiana, or wherever, that can be pretty appealing.”
‘I 100 per cent have an irreversible trauma’
The Times went out with Mitchell and Ranyard one morning in March as they distributed leaflets around Layton Meadows. The bright pink pamphlets included advice on a birth mother’s legal rights, such as “you have the right to change your mind about adoption and NOT pay anything back to the agency”.
The two women had themselves put babies up for adoption before later going on to start families of their own. Both were left traumatised by the circumstances of the placement, and hoped to arm women with the information they felt they had been deprived.
KIM RAFF FOR THE TIMES
“They talk about it like it’s this wonderful thing, that you could be this hero,” says Ranyard, whose son was adopted nearly a decade ago. She now lives in California with her husband and their four-year-old daughter. “No one really tells you the reality, like you’re probably going to need grief counselling because this is really going to affect you for the rest of your life.
“I 100 per cent have an irreversible trauma that I have to live with.”
Janie started to have doubts within days of arriving at Layton Meadows. She was told not to leave the house or speak to anyone else in the complex. She had to rely on the agency’s “caseworkers” to deliver her shopping twice a week and take her to the prenatal check-ups they had booked.
KIM RAFF FOR THE TIMES
KIM RAFF FOR THE TIMES
Janie was given files describing five couples and told to pick the one she wanted to raise her baby. Within a few days the agency imposed a 24-hour deadline to choose; a deep and uneasy feeling grew in the pit of her stomach.
“I told them ‘I don’t think you guys realise how big of a decision this is and how emotional this is for me’,” she says. “The families had written about how much they were going to love and care for my baby and I just cried. It’s like, if my circumstances were different I would have been able to take care of my baby and love them like that.”
KIM RAFF FOR THE TIMES
Then she told them she had changed her mind.
“They just went crazy on me. They were livid. I said, ‘I feel like all you care about is just the baby’, and they just replied ‘well, this is an adoption agency, of course it’s not about you’. Those were her exact words to me,” she says. “Through the whole process I just felt like a handmaid, like I was just a nuisance in the way of them getting a baby.”
She was ordered to leave the apartment first thing the next day. She never received any money.
Agencies label upset mothers ‘angry’ and cut all contact
When she returned home to Mississippi in late February, Janie was nearly eight months pregnant, homeless and jobless, off her state medical plan and with a daughter out of school. The agency was sending invoices for her medical appointments back in Utah, saying she owed $19,000.
“At this point, my world is pretty much upside down. I’m in a terrible situation,” Janie says.
Ranyard says this situation is common. “These women rarely go back to anything better,” she says. “Any tiny bit of stability — a job, a house they may have had is gone the moment they leave their state.”
Jesslaynn Henry, who set up a website about adoption in Utah, describes an “underground railroad” of former birth mothers helping support women in need. She says as many as 100 a year seek her advice after going ahead with an adoption only to regret their decision when they emerge from the postpartum hormonal haze.
In some cases, the mothers were told the adoption would be “open”, meaning they were free to contact the adoptive parents, but the agency refuses to connect them. States such as Utah do not have laws in place to enforce “post-placement” contact.
“Often it’s only after a woman has placed [the baby], she realises what is happening. She gets upset and frustrated and then the agencies label her as angry and cut all contact,” Henry says. “It is just absolutely disgusting that no one is stopping this.”
Hutchins and others are pushing for legislative change in Utah, hoping to pass laws that include allowing a much greater time for mothers, and fathers, to change their mind after signing away rights to their children. A Guardian Angel and Heart and Soul were contacted for comment.
Back in Mississippi, Janie still plans to give her baby up for adoption, just not with A Guardian Angel. “I’m just so very mentally messed up now,” says Janie, who is living out of her car and relying on food handouts. “It may not seem like it, but I love this baby. I have had people ask: “how could you love your baby and do this at the same time?’ It’s complicated, you know? It’s complicated.”