Thanks for posting. I know that the OP mostly says just, "read the article" but it's worth reading.
The prices seemed cheap. I was informed that a baby was worth $50,000 in Arizona in 1987.
I think IV drug use might affect the price.
Maybe. I do wonder if the very Christian agencies operating in Utah to get babies for people living elsewhere would find it acceptable to place a baby in a Mormon family.
My guess is that accepting thousands of dollars makes Jesus happier than the danger of a Mormon upbringing.
I heard they can't even drink coffee or whiskey.
The fraud part seems pretty unambiguously bad (and similarly, it seems like Garza shouldn't have been able to get her license back), but most of these things are genuinely tricky. How can it possibly be in the interests of the child to have an adoption undone weeks after the child has already joined a new family?
Like even in this case, the story is that the birth mom thought that she could pawn the baby for drug money and then get the baby back later, right? It's pretty hard to argue that that's a home the baby should be in.
the story is that the birth mom thought that she could pawn the baby for drug money and then get the baby back later, right? It's pretty hard to argue that that's a home the baby should be in.
The story is also that the adoption agency did not check with the birth father, lest they find out information - like that they are married - that causes the adoption to fall apart.
But there was a dad.
Yes, I am often unsympathetic to the "men's rights" arguments but, in this case, it seems like he absolutely should have had a claim to the child which was completely ignored and there wasn't any opportunity form him to make that claim.
If marriage means something, and it's really supposed to mean quite a lot for a fundamentalist Christian, ignoring the father is a huge wrong.
the story is that the birth mom thought that she could pawn the baby for drug money and then get the baby back later, right?
Probably because the adoption agency told her it would work like this, with no consequences.
9: Yes the birth mom committed fraud here, and the birth father has a real case that he's been mistreated. The question is how easy it is for the agency to detect that fraud and whether removing a child from their legal home where they're being well cared for is the right remedy for this fraud. A lot of the story here is just that US records suck (because having states sucks), which makes it easier for the birth mom to commit fraud here. If there's a good way for agencies to check whether women are married then probably they should be required to do so (though that also has its own potential downsides, and might get some women who are separated killed by their estranged husbands).
14: Could you clarify what you're referring to? It's a long article so I may have missed that, but I didn't see anything saying that in the article.
now referring to adoption agencies as spawnshops
Another thing to keep in mind here is that generally speaking it's difficult to sue your spouse, and although the father was clearly wronged here, the party that did the wrong is also pretty clearly his wife, which is just a very difficult situation.
I'm a little confused with the second kid whether she lied on the paperwork again? Or is the issue here that they got married in Mexico and there's no US records of them being married? Or is the issue just that even as a married spouse his only rights in Utah are to be notified not to object to the adoption? I'm just really unclear on the second case, where there's way less details in the article.
So Utah law seems pretty clear that:
1) The husband of the mother is the presumed father.
2) The father's permission is required, outside of certain defined exceptions none of which seem to apply.
https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title78B/Chapter6/78B-6-S120.html?v=C78B-6-S120_1800010118000101
https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title78B/Chapter15/78B-15-S204.html?v=C78B-15-S204_1800010118000101
So what happened here? Particularly in the second case? Is the mother saying that they're not actually married?
16: I don't think it said that, but I interpolated with the highly blemished record of the person and agency she was working with. The mother did describe it as "kind of like a hustle for me," but I suspect Quick helped smooth the way for that to apparently work for her.
21: Also this quote (after the fact), "Being on drugs and not really wanting to have another kid at the time--that's why I just went ahead and did it," Julia says. "But I didn't know that Utah law was like that. I thought that [Espinoza] was going to be able to say he wanted the kid and they were gonna give it to him."
I mean, she's also lying, she did it a second time knowing all of that.
Did she or he have occasion to try to take back the first kid?
Did she or he have occasion to try to take back the first kid?
He tried, repeatedly, and didn't get anywhere. It's one of the heartbreaking parts of the story.
OK, I should have read the whole thing. I do think the agencies have elevated power & therefore responsibility in this circumstances - even when a mother is trying to hustle them, they are the ones equipped to notice and forestall. Especially in cases involving addiction, it should be fairly obvious.
Especially in cases involving addiction, it should be fairly obvious.
One of the paragraphs that suggests that the case isn't just a isolated bad situation, but one that the regulators are, at least, willing to turn a blind eye towards is this -- both the note about the number of out-of-state adoptions and the comment about truthfullness.
In February 2021, Quick was deposed in Espinoza's case. The deposition, which lasted nearly two hours, gave a rare glimpse into the adoption industry in Utah. Quick estimated that of 150 adoptions the agency had completed in the last three years, just five birth moms were local. Asked if Julia ever indicated that she wasn't telling the truth, Quick replied, "Oh jeez, I don't know that any of my birth moms are truthful people, but she didn't--I mean, she was a typical birth mom." Asked what, if anything, Brighter Adoptions does to ensure that birth mothers aren't married, Quick said, "We take the birth mother's word."
I've kinda reached my limit for internet-induced appalledness today so I haven't read the whole article, but the paragraph quoted in 27 makes it look to me like the agencies are running scams. Very probably to exist at their scale these agencies have to be running scams. The regulator probably doesn't care, and the legislators probably don't care either.
the paragraph quoted in 27 makes it look to me like the agencies are running scams
One important note. It's clear that the specific agency described in detail in the article is unethical in multiple ways. It's less clear how pervasive that is among all agencies or if they are a specific bad actor. Either way, it seems like there should be some way to identify bad actors.
28: A big theme of the article is that Utah is an outlier in facilitating this via its state laws.
Right, 25 is the key point of the article, though it's a bit unclear to me from the article what exactly happened and in what ways Utah is different. At least in the first case, the mother was saying that she was no longer married to him and the question is whether she was simply lying or whether something more complicated is happening (particularly because they got married outside the US, and because she may have thought she could divorce him by ripping up the marriage certificate). It's hard for me to square the agency saying that they complied with the law on notifying the father with what the law actually says (that they need consent from a married father, not just notification). One possibility is certainly straightforward fraud on the part of the agency, but the whole story is somewhat weird and I wonder whether there's actually more legal ambiguity here in the question as to whether they're legally married or not.
If you have no ethics and can look like a nurse, there's probably a cheaper way to get a baby.
now referring to adoption agencies as spawnshops
Yes please.
I wonder whether there's actually more legal ambiguity here in the question as to whether they're legally married or not.
I don't know where you're getting that from. It could be true . . . it is common for new stories to oversimplify ambiguous situations but, in this case, the reporter very clearly doesn't believe that. I guess the key passage is this:
Jenkins is the longtime chair of the Utah Adoption Council's standards and practice committee; Quick is also a member of the council. In court documents, Jenkins argued that Espinoza's marriage was "dubious," given that the marriage certificate had been produced that spring and it had taken him weeks to learn about the adoption. Because Espinoza had "failed to identify his alleged 'marriage' in a timely fashion," Jenkins argued, he didn't have a case.
To me that reads as a lawyer arguing for, "it's possible that not all of the appropriate steps were taken, but that could have been done in good faith" rather than an argument for, "the legally correct path was taken." But I may be reading too much into that.
Also, thinking about this from upthread -- How can it possibly be in the interests of the child to have an adoption undone weeks after the child has already joined a new family?
I am not an expert. Just going off various things I've seen my sense is that, in most of the country, adoption laws have shifted over the last several decades, and that the law used to be more inclined to the perspective of the quoted sentence but has changed in part because of testimony from adopted children who have spoken in support of their birth parents.
31: The article does make it clear that fraud on the agency's part isn't a basis for annulling an adoption under Utah law; it looks like if they can get the adoption finalized before the father finds out, he has no recourse regardless of fraud. And I don't see anything in the article supporting a good faith basis for either the mother or the agency believing that the father was wrong about believing he was legally married to the mother (once the agency became aware that there was someone holding himself out as married to the mother.)
I don't disagree with 35, it's just very weird, especially in the second case, and the article doesn't give much insight into what's going on legally.
With the premise that you can't annul an adoption for fraud, there's nothing that needs to be explained. Some combination of the mother and the agency (that is, it's a little unclear about when the agency knew the mother was lying) about there being a father with right to notification; he didn't manage to find out in time to protest before the adoption was final; he has no legal recourse. It's horrifying, but there's nothing hard to explain.
34.last: Improved rights for adopted kids to have the right to a relationship with their birth family if they want is a big change over the past 50 years and absolutely it's a good thing to have happen. But I don't think those kinds of rights are the same thing as removing a legally adopted child from the home retroactively. Perhaps in the case of fraud it's necessary, but it's a really difficult thing to do that shouldn't be done lightly.
37 make sense in the case of the first child, but not the second one!
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This is a beautiful tribute https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2025-01-22/laura-dern-last-letter-to-david-lynch-blue-velvet-wild-at-heart-inland-empire
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39: They committed fraud twice. What's to explain?
Like the article has the woman at the agency getting a call from the father before the birth of the second child and also quotes her as saying the followed the law with respect to the father. In the first case the agency either didn't know, or thought they could get away with pretending not to know, about the father. But in the second case, the father had already taken them to court, and contacted them before the birth. So either they've gone well well beyond plausible deniability, or there's something strange going on. And the text "You are silly you know you can't just rip up a marriage certificate and think that you're divorced if you do that" is what suggested to me that the main possibility is that there's some question around whether they're married. (The other possibility that came to mind is perhaps the mother had proof that someone else was the father, but it seemed to me like that couldn't have happened without some kind of court record, but perhaps I'm wrong.)
More of 41: That is, the second time, it seems clear to have been knowing fraud on the agency's part, which isn't as clear for the first time.
It's just confusing to me that the article goes into a ton of detail in the first case where it's not obvious that the agency committed fraud (they might have, they might not have) and so little detail into the second case where it would be extremely clear that they're committing fraud. Perhaps because the first case is more sympathetic to the birth mom and so makes a better human interest story?
Utah had a case a number of years ago where the birth mom wanted to place the kid for adoption, they did notify the father, but the state had gone to a four day work week and the deadline was the Friday they were closed or something like that. He spent years in court and it was pretty clear that Utah just wants babies and doesn't really care about what's fair or right.
I know people from PA who adopted from Utah specifically because the birth mother can't change her mind. While I understand what motivated their reasoning, that's a terrible law.