Baby Brokers

The adoption industry in the U.S. is currently a multi-billion-dollar business, with prospective parents far exceeding the number of infants placed for adoption each year. Many states have strict laws that govern adoptions. (Feels like we need a “But” introducing this thought, perhaps?) In Baby Brokers, director Sarah Weiser and correspondent Gabrielle Glaser investigate a corner of the adoption industry in the U.S. that is more loosely regulated, where middlemen operate in a practice that critics have described as “adoption tourism.”

“Pregnant women are being lured far from their home states by unlicensed, so-called ‘baby brokers’ offering quick money to them, and quick adoptions to hopeful parents,” says journalist and author Glaser. Baby Brokers draws on dozens of interviews with birth mothers, adoptive parents, adoptees, agency owners, and government and law enforcement officials, as well as thousands of pages of adoption-related documents.

The resulting documentary illuminates a patchwork system where allegations of misconduct have accumulated in states like Utah, whose adoption laws have historically been less restrictive than those in other states.