For-Profit Adoptions & Misconduct Allegations (full documentary) | FRONTLINE (PBS) + Retro Report

To most Americans, private domestic adoption is seen as a noble, deeply compassionate act—a sacred bridge connecting a vulnerable birth mother in crisis with a loving family eager to welcome a newborn into their home. But behind the heartwarming photos and emotional reunion videos lies a multi-billion-dollar, loosely regulated commercial industry that critics say has increasingly transformed the birth of human infants into a transactional marketplace driven by supply, demand, and profit.

Today, the stark reality of infant adoption in the U.S. is governed by severe demographic arithmetic. As international adoption channels have largely closed over the past two decades due to geopolitical shifts and systemic fraud scandals abroad, domestic demand has skyrocketed. In the U.S., prospective adoptive parents now outnumber available infants by an estimated forty to one. For desperate couples who have spent years navigating infertility treatments and emotional heartbreak, the wait for an infant through traditional, ethical channels can stretch across several years.

This overwhelming demand has birthed an aggressive, highly lucrative shadow market dominated by unlicensed intermediaries, commercial adoption consultants, and for-profit agencies—collectively referred to by critics and child welfare advocates as “baby brokers.” Operating across state lines, these entities exploit stark disparities in state adoption laws to fast-track placements, turning vulnerable pregnant women into commodities and charging hopeful adoptive parents anywhere from $40,000 to over $80,000 per infant.

The Destination State: How Utah Became an Adoption Epicenter

At the heart of this multi-state industry is what legal experts describe as “forum shopping” or “adoption tourism.” Certain states have historically enacted laws that favor quick, irreversible placements and minimal oversight, drawing agencies, brokers, pregnant women, and adoptive parents from all corners of the country.

Utah, in particular, emerged as the national epicenter of this phenomenon. Historically, Utah law allowed birth mothers to execute permanent, irrevocable consents to surrender their parental rights immediately after birth—or even prior to discharge from the hospital—with zero mandatory revocation period or waiting window. If a mother signed the paperwork, there was no turning back, even if she experienced immediate regret or realized she had been misled. Furthermore, unlike states that strictly audit or cap pregnancy-related expenses paid to birth mothers, Utah maintained virtually no caps on cash payments, provided the agency claimed the funds covered “reasonable living and medical expenses.”

To capture vulnerable pregnant women, the business routinely begins online. Tech-savvy intermediaries use geofenced search engine advertising, bidding on key phrases like “help with unwanted pregnancy,” “adoption cash,” or “free housing for pregnant mothers.”

When an impoverished pregnant woman in Michigan, South Carolina, or Texas searches Google for pregnancy assistance, the top paid results rarely belong to local, state-licensed non-profit social services. Instead, they are dominated by Utah-based agencies and unlicensed out-of-state brokers. These advertisements offer tempting lifelines: thousands of dollars in financial aid, covered rent, free food, medical care, and plane tickets to Salt Lake City.

Once a pregnant mother makes contact, unlicensed facilitators—working on commission or referral fees—quickly arrange her transportation across state lines. The moment her plane touches down in Utah, she is severed from her local support system, friends, and family, effectively placing her under the complete financial and logistical control of the agency.

“Everything Happened Too Fast”: The Human Cost on Birth Mothers

For birth mothers drawn into this network, the promises of support often curdle into overwhelming pressure, isolation, and lifelong trauma.

Consider the case of Tia Goens. In 2018, Goens was a 20-year-old mother living in Michigan. As the bitter winter cold set in, she found herself facing imminent homelessness with her three-month-old daughter. Overwhelmed by anxiety and terrified of ending up in a homeless shelter, she searched Google for local adoption help. The first result she clicked connected her to an unlicensed out-of-state intermediary named Flossy Green, who immediately offered her $1,000 in cash if she agreed to place her child for adoption.

Within twenty-four hours, Green arranged for Goens and her infant daughter to be flown directly to Salt Lake City. Upon landing, she was met by Sandy Quick, the founder and owner of Brighter Adoptions, a licensed Utah agency. Quick took Goens to a local restaurant where she was immediately introduced to an out-of-state couple who had flown in to adopt the baby.

That night, alone in a Salt Lake City hotel room, Goens experienced a profound wave of maternal panic. Feeling in her gut that she was making a grave mistake, she texted Quick, stating that she had changed her mind and wanted to return home to Michigan. Quick responded that she was currently assisting another mother in labor and would call her back later. That call never came.

The following morning, agency representatives arrived at Goens’ hotel room with stack of legal documents. Overwhelmed and exhausted, Goens listened as a representative read off the documents and pointed to signature lines. Goens signed. Under Utah law at the time, that single pen stroke permanently severed her parental rights.

The entire process—from a desperate Google search in Michigan to handing over her child in Utah—took just three days. Before Goens was sent back to the airport alone, Quick handed her an envelope containing $4,000 in cash with instructions to “use it wisely.” Goens would spend the next several years consumed by grief, fruitlessly attempting to maintain contact with the adoptive family until a court issued a restraining order against her.

Goens’ experience is far from unique. Ashley Mitchell, a prominent birth mother advocate, has spent years documenting the conditions faced by women brought to Utah by for-profit agencies. Mitchell uncovered instances where agencies rented dilapidated, rundown apartment units to house out-of-state pregnant mothers.

These apartments came with a sinister, unspoken ultimatum: if a woman changed her mind during her pregnancy and decided to parent her child, she was immediately evicted, stripped of financial support, and left stranded thousands of miles from home without a place to sleep or a way to return.

“If a woman wanted to parent, they would be evicted immediately,” Mitchell explains. “Because if they were brought here for the sole purpose of adoption, the agency isn’t going to pay their bills anymore. Imagine carrying your baby out of the hospital while being forced to pack up your apartment with nowhere to go.”

Another mother, recruited from a state where abortion was banned, recalled being housed by an agency owner who promised a luxury apartment with a playground and pool. But as her delivery date approached, the mother felt trapped and terrified to voice her hesitation. “I felt pressured all the way around—trapped, isolated, and ready to run,” she recalled. “It felt like I had been hit by a train several times.”

The “Baby Mill” Schemes: Exploitation of Vulnerable Populations

The commercialization of adoption reached its most shocking extreme in cases involving targeted exploitation of indigenous and foreign populations, most notably women from the Marshall Islands.

Under the Compact of Free Association between the U.S. and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Marshallese citizens can travel and work in the U.S. without visas. However, international compacts explicitly ban Marshallese citizens from traveling to the U.S. for the primary purpose of adoption. Despite this legal prohibition, unethical operatives spent years exploiting cultural differences and economic desperation.

The most notorious operative was Paul Peterson, an adoption attorney and elected official in Maricopa County, Arizona. Peterson ran a massive, multi-million-dollar baby broker network spanning Arizona, Utah, and Arkansas. Using unlicensed middlemen in the Marshall Islands, Peterson recruited impoverished pregnant Marshallese women with promises of thousands of dollars, medical care, and a better life in America.

Once in the U.S., these women were crammed into overcrowded duplexes and rental houses—sometimes sleeping on mattresses on the floor—awaiting delivery. Adoptive parents who hired Peterson were charged tens of thousands of dollars, often receiving urgent emails demanding immediate wire transfers of $24,000 or more within hours of being matched.

Dan and Rachel Christensen, a Utah couple who hired Peterson in 2018, recalled the eerie, unsettling nature of the operation. After being matched in less than three weeks, they met the birth mother, Telma, who was wearing a thin mumu and flip-flops in the middle of a snowy Utah February. During Telma’s very first prenatal visit—arranged only after the Christensens intervened—doctors discovered severe medical neglect and had to induce labor immediately to save the child’s life.

When the Christensens later visited the house where Telma was staying to drop off supplies, they were horrified by what they saw. “I remember walking in, and there were all these pregnant women like sleeping on the floor,” Rachel Christensen recounted. “It felt like a baby mill. You have puppy mills—that’s what it felt like. We walked out thinking, ‘What have we done?'”

Investigative authorities eventually discovered that Peterson was taking advantage of a profound cultural divide. In traditional Marshallese culture, informal adoption within extended families is common, and mothers routinely maintain ongoing relationships with their children. Peterson’s recruiters misled these mothers into believing they were sending their babies to America for education while retaining parental rights and contact.

When law enforcement interviewed mothers in the Marshall Islands, many broke down in tears, revealing that the promised money never fully materialized and that their phone calls to American adoptive families were permanently blocked.

In October 2019, law enforcement raided Peterson’s home and office. He was indicted on 62 felony charges across multiple jurisdictions, eventually pleading guilty to human smuggling, wire fraud, and falsifying public records. He was sentenced to more than ten years in federal prison.

Financial Ruin and Heartbreak for Adoptive Parents

While birth mothers bear the physical and psychological scars of coercion, hopeful adoptive families are routinely victimized financially and emotionally by the unregulated nature of for-profit adoption entities.

To raise the exorbitant fees charged by private agencies—which often exceed $75,000—families drain their savings, launch crowdfunding campaigns, take out heavy bank loans, or sell family assets. One couple from Tennessee took out a home equity line of credit and sold three and a half acres of family land—giving up one dream to pursue another—to send a $45,000 lump-sum payment to Sandy Quick’s agency, Brighter Adoptions.

Under state regulations, agencies are legally required to provide itemized expense reports to courts detailing exactly how adoptive parents’ money is spent on birth mother care. However, state audits later revealed that Quick failed to submit timely financial disclosures for roughly 75 percent of her adoptions between 2024 and 2025.

In early 2026, after collecting tens of thousands of dollars from eager families, Quick abruptly sent an email to her clients announcing that she was closing her agency immediately, citing a “changed legal landscape.”

Families who were actively matched, waiting for newborns, or awaiting reimbursement were left stunned. Text messages, emails, and phone calls went unanswered. Decades of life savings vanished overnight without itemized receipts, refunds, or accountability, leaving couples emotionally devastated, financially bankrupt, and without a child.

“You feel taken advantage of, embarrassed, and ashamed,” one adoptive father shared. “You never think something like this is going to happen to you. It was completely out of our control.”

Whistleblowers, Legislative Battles, and the Fight for Federal Reform

The sheer scale of misconduct eventually triggered an internal uprising from hospital healthcare workers, ethical adoption providers, and child welfare advocates.

In Utah, hospital social workers became so alarmed by the influx of distressed out-of-state mothers that they began submitting formal whistleblower reports to the Utah Attorney General’s Office. Social workers reported seeing mothers suffering severe mental health crises, weeping in labor units, and stating they felt forced to sign paperwork because they couldn’t afford to pay back the agency’s housing and medical expenses. In one horrific instance documented in state filings, an agency permitted twins to be separated and placed with two different adoptive families against the mother’s wishes.

Tara Romney Barber, program director for a non-profit child welfare organization in Utah, became an outspoken critic of predatory out-of-state recruitment. Barber pointed out that ethical non-profit agencies charge around $20,000 to cover legitimate administrative and legal costs—a fraction of the $80,000+ demanded by commercial brokers.

“When you remove a woman from her safety nets—her friends, family, local job, and community social supports—and fly her across the country, you create an immense level of vulnerability,” Barber noted. “It creates a much higher likelihood that she will be preyed upon or pressured into an adoption plan. Ethical, high-quality adoption services exist in all 50 states; there is zero legitimate reason to fly an impoverished woman across state lines just to deliver a baby.”

In response to public outcry, hospital reports, and investigative journalism, state legislatures began taking decisive action. Between late 2025 and March 2026, the Utah State Legislature convened high-profile committee hearings on “adoption tourism.” Overriding fierce pushback from for-profit agency owners, lawmakers passed landmark reform legislation.

The new legal framework established:

A Mandatory 72-Hour Revocation Period: Granting birth mothers three full days after signing consent to change their minds without penalty.

Non-Profit Requirements: Mandating that child-placing agencies operate as registered non-profit entities.

Guaranteed Mental Health Services: Ensuring independent counseling for all birth mothers prior to and following placement.

Mandatory Expense Disclosures: Requiring detailed, audited accounting of all financial transfers to eliminate cash-for-baby inducements.

However, advocates and federal prosecutors emphasize that state-level reforms alone cannot eradicate the problem. As long as adoption laws remain a patchwork of 50 different state statutes, predatory brokers will simply pack up, shift operations, and target whichever state maintains the weakest oversight.

To close these interstate loopholes permanently, a bipartisan coalition of federal lawmakers—led by figures such as U.S. Representative Laurel Lee—is currently pushing comprehensive federal legislation aimed at curbing “baby brokering” and adoption trafficking nationwide.

The proposed federal bill targets the root mechanism of the shadow market: it seeks to outlaw unlicensed out-of-state intermediary solicitation, ban paid commercial brokers, and establish uniform, federally enforceable ethical standards across every U.S. jurisdiction.

“Anytime we see inconsistent state laws operating to the detriment of vulnerable families and children, it is a clear signal for federal intervention,” Representative Lee stated. “This is not a problem that states individually can solve alone. By creating uniform national standards and clearly defining this conduct as unlawful, we ensure that no family or mother can be moved from state to state simply to be exploited.”

For families whose lives have been touched by the shadow adoption market, these reform efforts are long overdue. As adoption shifts back toward its core mission—protecting the best interests of children and supporting mothers in crisis—the hope is that the dark era of commercialized baby brokering will finally give way to transparency, ethics, and human dignity.