Adoption shapes the lives of many Utah families. In fact, a higher percentage of children in Utah are adopted than the national average.
For so many families, adoption is full of love, sacrifice, generosity and hope. It can also be deeply complex. Good family policy requires honoring both the beauty and complexity of adoption. Fortunately, Utah just passed such a policy: HB51.
From our perspective, HB51 addresses many challenges that people connected to adoption face.
Expectant parents often come to placement decisions from challenging or impossible circumstances. Despite these circumstances, placement itself is often full of loss and complicated emotions for birth parents.
Similarly, prospective adoptive parents often come to adoption in a vulnerable state. Though many adoptive parents are not seeking adoption solely in reaction to infertility experiences, infertility is the most frequently cited reason to seek adoption. Prospective adoptive parents are often drained — financially and emotionally — from years of navigating infertility and wanting to welcome into their home children, who always seem just out of reach.
Adoptees remain the most vulnerable of all. They generally get no voice in these decisions but bear the consequences — both beneficial and difficult — for their entire lives.
Amid all this vulnerability and heightened emotions, each group faces the risk of exploitation. This is why adoption policy is crucial. The United States has very little federal-level adoption policy or law. Instead, adoption is most often defined and supervised by the states.
Historically, Utah adoption policy has been more hands-off than most other states. This can reduce barriers to much-needed placements and decrease the time children may spend in institutional settings like foster care. However, a hands-off approach doesn’t protect vulnerable children and adults from exploitation, coercion and other challenges.
For example, a substantial number of birth mothers report experiencing coercion prior to or during placement. Coercion can happen because birth mothers may be experiencing financial crises or perhaps feel indebted to adoptive parents or professionals who may have paid for transportation, medical bills or other expenses. These types of financial concerns are the most common reasons given for feeling coerced during placement decisions.
While this type of coercion and exploitation is concerning on its own, it has several additional consequences. Feeling free from coercion is a strong predictor — sometimes cited as the strongest predictor — of adoption satisfaction, which decades of research has found is significantly related to birth family, adoptee and adoptive family well-being, both short term and long term. All in all, if birth families feel able to make this choice free from coercion, everyone is better off.
HB51 addresses this and other concerns directly, not by preventing adoptions but by creating protections to strengthen the process for everyone involved. Among other provisions, this bill does the following:
- Clarifies what types of financial assistance are permissible in adoption and sets clearer boundaries around expenses such as travel and other costs. Clarifying these boundaries reduces misunderstandings, strengthens transparency and helps ensure that financial assistance functions as support — not leverage.
- Ensures a 72-hour period after the birth during which birth parents may revoke relinquishment. Such policy is common across other states — about half of U.S. states provide at least 72 hours, with some providing longer periods of time. This can lessen the immense pressure birth parents feel, especially during and after birth. This allows everyone to feel more confident and supported in the decisions ultimately made.
- Clarifies the resources birth parents have access to — like ensuring they have access to legal counsel and making sure they are informed of this right before placement. The bill also ensures that mental health counseling is explicitly listed as an adoption service in Utah. Though still not required, having mental health counseling listed and encoded in law sets an expectation that mental health counseling is an important service for expectant parents considering adoption and birth parents who have placed children for adoption.
In our view, HB51 helps adoption in Utah be more ethical and durable by supporting everyone involved. While this bill is a great start, we identify four areas of concern for future policy discussions.
- Many states encourage Post-Adoption Contact Agreements, or PACAs, which are agreements between expectant families and adoptive families about what ongoing contact may look like after placement. These agreements can create clear expectations for open adoption, an increasingly common practice. Utah would be wise to require PACAs as part of adoption agreements.
- Further, mental health counseling, especially long term, is vital for birth mother healing. In the past, LDS Family Services, a Utah-based agency, provided lifelong counseling to birth mothers. We have heard from birth mothers directly about how life changing such resources can be. Birth mothers frequently do not feel ready to talk about their adoption experience until several years after placement. Long-term care is one way to honor the difficult decisions and lasting consequences adoption poses for birth parents. Utah could require adoption agencies to provide access to ongoing counseling services: before, during and after child placement.
- HB51 seeks to prevent financial coercion by only allowing nonprofit organizations to be licensed as agencies starting in January 2027. While this provision acknowledges a problem — agencies making a lot of money from adoptions — it is not a complete protection. Many nonprofits conduct adoption services well, and nonprofits can still participate in financial coercion and exploitation. Further deliberation and refinement is needed.
- Utah has a reputation for being an adoption tourism destination, which means many people travel to Utah in order to adopt or place, even if neither the placing nor adoptive parents live in Utah or plan to after the placement occurs. Adoption policy in Utah could do more to reduce incentives for travel from other states for adoption while continuing to serve important adoption needs in our state.
Adoption is complex, and everyone involved may be vulnerable. Adoptive families, birth families and adoptees deserve resources and protection to help them navigate it well. HB51 helps begin this important work. We are proud of this new state policy and are encouraged by the momentum it creates for future conversations about adoption in Utah.