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There’s a dark side to Utah’s faster and easier adoptions

There have been some efforts to change Utah adoption law over the years, but “they have been greeted by staunch industry pushback,” said reporter Julia Lurie. “So it's more been sort of tinkering around the edges than really reforming the heart of the industry.
Jim Hill, KUER
/
Utah Department of Health and Human Services
There have been some efforts to change Utah adoption law over the years, but “they have been greeted by staunch industry pushback,” said reporter Julia Lurie. “So it's more been sort of tinkering around the edges than really reforming the heart of the industry.

Utah is famously family-oriented. It’s also one of the most adoption-friendly states in the country.

That’s turned it into a hotspot for agencies that connect pregnant women with prospective parents. But there’s a dark side to having laws that make adoption proceedings easier.

Mother Jones senior reporter Julia Lurie calls Utah adoption a “cottage industry.” Her new investigation, “Cradle and All,” found that in Utah, like many other states, adoption agencies can’t legally pay birth mothers for their babies. But in Utah, there’s no cap for how much money and benefits they can give a birth mother, as long as those expenses are “reasonable.”

“I think that it’s understandable and easy to say, we should support pregnant women, of course,” Lurie said, “But also the flip side of that is that that money can be used in a way that some would say is quite manipulative and even coercive.”

One Las Vegas woman, Julia, gave up two children for adoption in Utah through the Brighter Adoptions agency. She was addicted to heroin and wasn’t actually planning to go through with the adoptions.

“She was planning on hustling for the money,” Lurie said. “But she proceeded to go to Utah and stay in one of the apartment complexes that Brighter uses to put up pregnant women. And she's receiving cash stipends, and she talks to adoptive parents, and she started thinking that she felt pretty stuck, and also maybe adoption wasn't the worst idea after all.”

So Brighter Adoptions facilitated the adoption when she had the baby in 2019. Julia told Lurie that after signing the adoption papers, the agency gave her $7,000 in cash, on top of hundreds of dollars weekly. The agency knew she was actively using heroin. Then the same scenario played out again in 2022.

There’s “very little oversight” Lurie found into how money given to birth mothers is used.

Once the papers were signed, Julia could not have changed her mind about the adoption. Many states allow birth mothers to go back on their decision days or weeks after consenting, but that’s not the case in Utah. It’s irreversible.

Utah’s laws make “adoptions faster and easier to facilitate,” Lurie said. And that results in adoption agencies flying in pregnant women from across the country, “who are almost always poor and often in very vulnerable positions and are enticed, understandably, by free lodging and cash stipends.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ciara Hulet: What makes Utah unique when it comes to adoptions?

Julia Lurie: I do think that part of it has to do with a culture of adoption within the LDS church, and the way in which, within the Mormon faith, adoption is a way of growing your eternal family. But also, I think that there has been a lot of concern over the years, especially in the 90s, about an epidemic of children born out of wedlock. And as a result, the state passed legislation in the 90s that really codified a lot of these laws that we've been talking about.

CH: What does Brighter Adoptions say about their operations?

JL: Brighter Adoptions says that it prioritizes first and foremost birth mothers, and wants to support these women who they acknowledge are often in vulnerable positions. And they're there to support them and do whatever it is that the birth mothers want to do. And that adoption can be a beautiful thing, and if birth mothers want to go through with an adoption, they are happy to help facilitate that.

CH: Julia falsely claimed she wasn't married and the father wasn't notified about the first adoption. He found out and wanted to keep the child. Why wasn't their marriage certificate enough to reverse the adoption?

JL: Utah has a law that explicitly says that finalized adoptions cannot be dismissed, even if the adoption was fraudulent. So even if someone in the adoption arrangement, whether it's a birth parent or the adoption agency or adoptive parent, even if they lied or misrepresented something, that by itself is not grounds to dismiss the adoption.

And I think the original intent behind that was to protect adoptive parents who, understandably, once they have a child, don't want to have the threat of potentially having that adoption be dismissed. But the effect of it has been to basically say fraud and misrepresentation in Utah when it comes to adoption is OK.

CH: Have there been efforts to change Utah adoption laws?

JL: Just a few years ago, Sen. Luz Escamilla introduced legislation to crack down on advertising by facilitators, which are basically organizations that try to find pregnant women who are interested, potentially, in adoption, and they can be quite predatory. And Sen. Escamilla told me that even this very small regulatory step proved to be one of the most difficult bills for her to pass. And she ended up basically being accused of being against adoption, which she is not at all. She was just trying to make sure that no one was profiting off of children.

Facilitators are still very much used by agencies in Utah, so it does not seem to have a lot of enforcement, but the bill did pass.

CH: What about laws regarding the father? 

JL: Another law that Utah has on the books that makes it very conducive to adoptions is the fact that agencies and birth mothers do not need to notify birth fathers of the adoption of their child if the birth father is not married to the birth mother. Utah law says that the act of having sex is notification enough to the potential birth father that the woman might become pregnant.

So there have been a number of cases over the years of fathers who don't realize that their child has been put up for adoption, and come forward wanting their child back, and it's often too late. There have been efforts to change that legislation, and to my knowledge, that has not gotten anywhere.

Ciara is a native of Utah and KUER's Morning Edition host
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