Where to Watch FRONTLINE’s Documentary on the Rise of ‘Adoption Tourism’ in the U.S.

The adoption industry in the U.S. is currently a multi-billion-dollar business, with the demand for infants far outpacing the number available for adoption.

Many states now have strict laws that govern adoptions. But a new documentary from FRONTLINE and Retro Report investigates a more loosely regulated corner of the industry, where middlemen operate in what’s been 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 Gabrielle Glaser, the documentary’s correspondent. “When we looked into this practice, we found that lax laws can leave the for-profit adoption industry ripe for abuse — and that Utah is an epicenter of the problem.”

The full story unfolds in Baby Brokers, which is now available to stream. From a team that includes Glaser and director Sarah Weiser, 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.

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The resulting documentary illuminates a patchwork system, where allegations of misconduct have stacked up in states like Utah with historically more permissive laws.

“Typically, adoption would be finding families for children who need them. But what private domestic infant adoption has really become is finding children for families who want them, and because that’s been the focus, it’s become incredibly transactional,” says Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, who works for a nonprofit that tracks agencies and brokers that solicit pregnant women around the country.

The head of an adoption agency in Utah tells FRONTLINE and Retro Report that out-of-state adoptions fulfill an important need: “This population of women are oftentimes extremely vulnerable,” says Donna Pope. “If they need to get up and move, let them get up and move. If they need additional help from someone else that’s not their neighbor, get them additional help from someone else that’s not their neighbor. Empower them to get the services they need, wherever that might be.”

But others the reporting team spoke with expressed concern about cash and housing offers being used as incentives, and about how pregnant women have been drawn across state lines.

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Tara Romney Barber, program director for a child welfare organization in Utah that provides family services, including a small number of adoptions, told FRONTLINE and Retro Report about one local hospital where there were as many as three adoptions a week, almost all of them with impoverished women from out of state.

“In my opinion, that creates a higher level of vulnerability and a more higher chance of likelihood that that woman could be preyed upon in a vulnerable way or pressured to make a plan for adoption,” Romney Barber says. “And that doesn’t sit right for me, because I what I know is that there are ethical adoption agencies and ethical adoption services available in all 50 of our states, and that a woman could receive all of the services that she’s provided in Utah but in her home state, where she’s not removed from kind of her own natural support system.”

In recent months, Utah has moved to tighten some of its laws in response to mounting criticisms from birth mothers, their advocates, and adoptive parents. And at the federal level, lawmakers from a number of states are backing a bipartisan bill aimed at reining in unlicensed brokers who funnel pregnant women and families across state lines for adoptions.

“What we really want to do is eliminate that solicitation and that marketing that’s drawing those families across state lines,” says Rep. Laurel Lee (R-FL), who is a co-sponsor of the bill. “And also, the bringing them across state lines is one of the things that makes federal action important, that this is not a problem that states individually can solve alone.”

As the debate over “adoption tourism” continues, Baby Brokers is a must-watch exploration of the practice, the role of brokers, and the impact on both birth mothers and adoptive parents.

“It’s been hard to wrap my mind around what we played into,” one disillusioned adoptive parent says in the documentary. “I touted how beautiful our adoption, how easy our adoption was. Of course it was easy. Easy doesn’t mean good. So yeah, there’s, you know, there’s a level of guilt that I’ve had to work through.”

Baby Brokers premiered June 23, 2026, on PBS and online. Watch the documentary in full anytime at pbs.org/frontline, in the PBS App, on YouTube and on PBS Documentaries on Prime.