On a cold, snowy January night in 1996, 18‑year‑old Valarie Mayoral was standing in the hallway of a Salt Lake City home when her water broke.
It was not her home, but that of the family who was going to adopt the baby she was about to give birth to. That night, she was babysitting the family’s two other children.
“I asked their neighbor,” she recalled, “if they would take me to the hospital.”
Mayoral’s parents were 300 miles away in rural Wyoming, where she grew up. She had moved by herself a few weeks earlier to live with the adoptive family for the final few weeks of her pregnancy.
Being raised in a conservative, religious family, Mayoral said she wasn’t asked if she wanted to keep her son — raising him out of wedlock wasn’t an option. Placing him for adoption was.
Her parents went through The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints’ Family Services branch. Back in 1996, the organization offered addiction and mental health resources to families in need. It also operated a now‑defunct adoption agency.
“They didn't really give you other options,” Mayoral said.
“It was always just like, ‘No, we’re doing adoption because you guys cannot be single moms.’ And since it was the church adoption agency, it was very much like, you know, you got to follow what the church believes.”
Mayoral’s adoption happened 30 years ago. But stories of agencies isolating young women and bringing them to Utah to give birth and place their child for adoption persist
These days, there's another ingredient at play: money.
In Utah, adoption laws are lax, so much so that the state has become known as the home of adoption tourism.
Republican Rep. Katy Hall wants to change this. Her bill, HB51, would make sweeping changes to Utah’s current code around adoption. One key subsection would regulate how agencies give money to birth mothers. Right now, they can pay out lump sums labeled as “postpartum care.”
In the view of Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, co-founder of Utah Adoption Rights, an advocacy group that lobbies for better laws for birth mothers and adoptive parents, these lump sums are nefarious because they come with strings attached.
“It’s conditional on you signing away your parental rights,” she said. “It’s conditional on you cooperating with this adoption. And it’s certainly being used as an inducement, which is in violation of state law.”
Another complicating factor is addiction. Vander Vliet Ranyard said that roughly 50% of women she sees being transported to Utah by adoption agencies have a history of substance abuse.
To her, the situation is self‑explanatory. Giving a birth mother with a history of addiction a large sum of money that can run as high as $6,000 is like “holding that carrot in front of her face.”
“I think it’s directly in conflict with what the intention of social work is supposed to be,” she said.
Tara Romney Barber is the adoption and clinical programs director at the Children’s Service Society of Utah, an adoption nonprofit in favor of the bill. She said she’s sick and tired of Utah’s loose laws playing into the hands of bad actors, and that stories of women receiving envelopes of cash at the end of their placement are common.
“I don’t see how that amount of money, which is more than some women will see in a whole year, especially if they’re not employed, isn’t coercive,” Romney Barber said.
Both Romney Barber and Vander Vliet Ranyard want social work to be a mandatory priority for all adoption agencies in Utah.
“We’re always working to see what we can put into place that will allow a person facing an unexpected pregnancy as many choices as possible, and then helping provide mental health and other support to help that woman decide which is the best pathway for them, and then helping them no matter what pathway they choose,” Romney Barber said
Another part of Hall’s bill would give birth mothers more time to change their minds. Right now, Utah is one of the only states in the U.S. that has no revocation period to reconsider adoption. Hall’s bill would extend that to 72 hours after the individual gives their consent or relinquishes their child.
Mayoral described that in 1996, she had to sign a form consenting to the placement of her son immediately after giving birth, waiving her parental rights. She was then sent home, back to high school, because life was supposed to return to normal. But it wasn’t normal.
“I drank a lot. I did a lot of drugs at that point,” she said. “Because I was trying to tune everything out that I could, and I couldn’t talk about it. There was nobody to talk to. There was nobody who could even relate.”
Within six months of giving birth, she said she hired an attorney and tried to get her son back. But it didn’t pan out.
Throughout her adult life, Mayoral battled depression. She said that she didn’t feel like she deserved to be happy. She asked herself, “How could I do that?” and “Why didn’t I just run away with him or things like that?” It wasn’t until she was almost 40 years old, she said, that she started to address her mental health problems that stemmed from the adoption.
When Hall’s adoption reforms passed through the House Judiciary committee with a unanimous vote and received a favorable recommendation, Mayoral almost cried. To her, Utah was one step closer to giving birth mothers the choice she never had.
