The Baby Brokers : In the Emotional World of Private Adoptions, the Lawyers Make the Deals Between Childless Couples and Women Who Give Up Their Babies

With the exception of Cathie and John Kanuit, the names of biological mothers and adoptive parents have been changed.

PEOPLE COME to this Beverly Hills lawyer’s office looking for the advantage in tragedy.

Laura Taylor is 20 years old and seven months pregnant, a wistful, wide-eyed blonde with a honeyed Tennessee drawl. She had never been on an airplane in her life until two days ago, when she flew to Los Angeles to meet D. Durand Cook, the adoption lawyer whose toll-free telephone number was listed in her local newspaper’s classified ads. Cathie and John Kanuit, both 39, waited to have children until their careers were on track, only to find that they are unable to conceive. They adopted a baby girl, but, still yearning for the perfect family, they want a second child.

Taylor and the Kanuits have never met or spoken to each other. Cook, who has been arranging adoptions for the past 17 years, is the intermediary who set up today’s introduction. Along with a handful of other Los Angeles-area lawyers, he specializes in private adoptions, in which the birth mother chooses the family she wants to adopt her unborn child, and the adoptive parents usually assume the mother’s medical, legal and living expenses. (Not all biological fathers are aware of the pregnancy, and those who are rarely intervene when an unwed mother is prepared to give up a child.) Such arrangements, also known as independent adoptions, occur outside the county’s adoption-agency process.

Cook, who has collected pages of personal information from everyone involved, has determined that this might be a good match--that Taylor might be willing to walk out of the hospital without her baby and allow the Kanuits to take the infant home. Taylor, who is so overwhelmed by Los Angeles that she is afraid to venture out of her Beverly Plaza hotel room on foot, has taken a cab the half-mile to Cook’s office. The Kanuits are on their way from Palos Verdes Estates.

If their meeting leads to a successful adoption, Taylor will say goodby to her child in the hospital and go back to college classes in merchandising and an interrupted dream of someday becoming a clothing designer. The Kanuits will pick up the baby and pay $2,500 in legal fees to Durand Cook. About six months and lots of paper work later, the adoption will be finalized in court, and Cook will receive an additional $1,000.

In purely legal terms, the process is a simple one. Emotionally, the transfer of a baby from one parent to another is a profound and fragile undertaking, whose consequences long outlast the technicalities involved. As the popularity of these adoptions grows--the state Department of Social Services approved more than 700 Los Angeles County requests for private placement in the past fiscal year, contrasted to fewer than 500 in fiscal 1980--so does the intensity of the debate over them. Proponents of private adoption regard it as a valuable legal service. Critics cringe at what they consider an entrepreneurial empire built on a foundation of human frailty.

It is a business without codified standards, a specialty not yet recognized by the State Bar. Despite California law, which prohibits anyone but a biological mother or licensed agency from placing a child, independent adoption involves active matchmaking on the part of the attorney, whose primary goal is to provide a baby for his clients. Such adoptions often reflect economic inequality, with a well-off couple subsidizing a pregnant woman on the economic edge. As adoption lawyer Karen Lane candidly admits, this amounts to “buying babies,” even though the money spent is technically for the birth mother’s expenses, and not in exchange for the child. The most powerful person in the private-adoption relationship is the lawyer, who is in the heady position of being able to beat nature: He can bestow a family on infertile adults and rescue a young woman from an unplanned pregnancy. The Los Angeles adoption lawyers who have been around longest and who devote themselves to it full time--Cook, Lane, David K. Leavitt and David J. Radis--have each developed a distinctive style.

Cook is a shirt-sleeve proselytizer who enthusiastically promotes private adoption and is given to emotional displays of affection in his work, while Leavitt, who has placed about 7,000 infants in his 28-year career, sits at the other end of the scale, a self-contained, imposing man who exudes efficiency. Lane calls herself a “leaper personality,” whose eagerness to get the job done appeals to certain clients; Radis’ cozy office and vague references to predestination--babies and parents who were “meant” for each other--attract a different sort of clientele.

Whatever the approach, the lawyer’s office is a safe harbor for what one social worker calls the “walking wounded”: couples who need a happy ending to years of frustration and women who need a strong helping hand. In their vulnerability, they turn to an adoption lawyer--and, depending on what happens, they come to consider him either a saint or a baby salesman.

Private adoption is like the nursery rhyme about the little girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When it is good, it is very, very good. Cathie Kanuit weeps with joy when she speaks of her 18-month-old adopted daughter. “It’s absolute elation,” she says. “You go through all the trauma of having to think about trying to get pregnant every single day for five years, and there’s a tremendous relief in not having to think about it anymore and knowing it ended up in the best, best, best possible way. And there is euphoria, too, because you just can’t believe that you’re finally so lucky.”

But when it is bad--when a placement falls through, or when it works but leaves emotional scars--it is horrid.

THERE HAS never before been a group of adoptive parents quite like the ones who now languish for as long as three months on a lawyer’s waiting list for an initial appointment--people who, for the most part, are used to getting what they want and are prepared to spend the $6,000 to $14,000 it usually costs to adopt an infant privately.

As Radis describes them, “Adoptive parents are typically 35 to 45, have been through over five years of fertility treatments, middle- and upper-class, primarily white.” Most of them are looking for Caucasian infants in the midst of a baby drought brought on by birth control, legalized abortion and an increasing tendency among young pregnant women to keep their babies. Demand far exceeds supply: Radis estimates that there are 40 eager couples for every available healthy Caucasian baby.

Private adoption can be an unstable, sometimes explosive combination: desperately impatient clients, lawyers who fervently embrace their work, and quality control that is left to the overworked county employees who review private placements. Cook, who handles both domestic and international adoptions and speaks zealously about “the dream and vision of helping kids around the world,” was contacted by the FBI in 1985 during an investigation of improper Mexican adoptions that involved two of his associates in Texas; one associate was convicted of several charges in the case. However, the questioning of Cook never led to any charges against him, according to federal officials. Cook’s actions were also reviewed in 1985 by the State Bar Disciplinary Committee after a client complained that Cook had refused to return fees after a failed adoption. The State Bar found no reason to issue a reprimand, an official there said.

But he is still the target of a 1984 civil lawsuit by a Madera couple who charge that he misrepresented a birth mother’s due date in order to draw the couple into a contract. Cook denies that he mishandled the case.

Despite the scrutiny, he remains at the forefront of private adoption in California. Cook is one of the seven founders of the newly formed California Academy of Adoption Attorneys, a 22-member group that seeks to set its own guidelines, lobby in Sacramento and discourage legislative intervention. Although he handles only the occasional Mexican adoption now, he continues to seek placements of babies from foreign countries in addition to his domestic work. But more important to most of his clients, he, like his peers, is a pipeline to Caucasian infants. His services are much in demand.

SKEPTICS regard the juggernaut of private adoption with alarm. Reuben Pannor, for 14 years director of the adoption program at Vista del Mar Child Care Center, a private Westside agency, believes that the welfare of the child--and so, of the birth mother--should take precedence over that of the adoptive parents. He fears that the opposite is too often the case when lawyers become involved, that what he calls “their vested interest” in satisfying the adoptive parents who pay their fees keeps them from fairly explaining the variety of options a young pregnant woman has. He is outraged by what he considers to be an exploitative process that “preys on the vulnerability” of the birth mother by showing her only one way out. Sharon Kaplan, executive director of Parenting Resources in Tustin, is a social worker whose counseling and educational firm often works on referral from adoption lawyers--and she, too, is concerned about subtle pressures that can be brought to bear in the private-adoptive process. “Manipulation,” she says, “comes in many forms, sometimes in what is not said to families about the decision they are making.”

Kaplan is keenly aware of how difficult it is for a birth mother to keep her child, but she insists that the alternative is more complicated than the legal “problem-solving” approach suggests.

“To birth parents, I say that any decision will involve loss, so let’s look at both sides--if you keep, or if you place,” she says. “Yes, if you keep, there is a greater incidence of poverty occurring among the women, and not as many complete their college education. But if you place, there are problems too. Not everyone walks away from this: Some birth mothers will carry the pain around with them for 30 years. You have to just give them a chance to weigh both sides and make an informed judgment.”

Pannor feels that because the process is fueled by demand, insufficient attention is paid to the well-being of the supplier. He wonders about the imperative: “What are we saying here--that everybody, no matter what, is entitled to have a child? Infertility is not life-threatening. Why are we making it appear that way?”

David Leavitt has little patience for such blanket criticism. He believes that any couple with a secure family setting is entitled to adopt a child, and that the procedure can be streamlined and straightforward. He sees his role as that of legal facilitator, providing a service for clients in the same way that he might advise them on estate planning or a divorce settlement.

“A properly put-together independent adoption ends up with everyone grateful,” he says. “It’s a win-big situation. The couple gets the baby, the baby gets the couple, the birth mother gets the future restored to her, and I get paid. So it’s a completely satisfactory transaction.”

IN DURAND Cook’s law office, the transaction begins with a series of instructional videotapes for both birth and adoptive parents. On this Tuesday morning, Laura Taylor sits alone in the conference room and watches a TV screen. Like a girl getting ready for an important date, she does a lot of checking: She scrutinizes her petal-pink manicure, fingers the lipstick from the corners of her mouth and tries not to lose her composure. Delicately, as she watches the video, she blots the damp residue of mascara and tears from under her eyes.

She listens to Cook, on tape, explain the three purposes of her meeting with her baby’s prospective new parents. Legally, Cook can only assist Taylor in acting on a decision she has made on her own. He instructs her to “experience this couple” by asking enough questions to satisfy herself, to let the couple know why she is giving up her baby and to reassure them that she isn’t going to change her mind.

When the tape ends, Cook ushers Taylor into his office, where the Kanuits are waiting--Cathie, an effervescent blonde in pale linen and pearls who sells advertising space for Money Magazine, and John, a tanned, athletic photographer who is admittedly nervous about making a good impression. There are shy introductions all around. Everyone takes a seat, and Cook begins. Gently, he asks Taylor to explain why she isn’t going to keep her baby.

“I just have little things I want to do,” she begins, hesitantly. Then she blurts out the truth. “My mom was kind of in the same situation I was, and she doesn’t resent me, but I know if she’d felt she had another choice she might have taken it. She was 18, and I know she thinks she made the wrong choice. Not the wrong choice--she wouldn’t trade me for anything. But I know I held her back. She and my dad are divorced. I mean, they only got married because of me.”

Taylor’s mother back in Tennessee knows her daughter is in a painful predicament; they were together when Taylor called Durand Cook, and she supports her daughter’s decision. But many birth mothers are completely alone when they come to Los Angeles to give up their babies. Like Taylor, some are no longer involved with the father of their child when they find out they are pregnant and are so dismayed that they pretend it cannot possibly be so, until it is too late to consider abortion as an alternative.

Frequently, they are also propelled here by parental disapproval. Either they lie to their parents and concoct a story about a vacation or a wonderful job in Los Angeles, or they admit their plight and find that there is no help for them at home. Joy Barkley, who came here from Wyoming, was 19 years old and six months pregnant when her boyfriend left town, telling her that she could do whatever she wanted. She knew her devoutly religious parents would not take her in.

“Thirty-nine cents,” she says, over and over, to explain the financial and emotional poverty of her situation back home. “Thirty-nine cents, pregnant, and no place to go. That’s what I had.”

Hemmed in, they find out about adoption lawyers in the newspapers, in the yellow pages, or from one of the hundreds of doctors and clinics around the country who are part of the lawyers’ referral network.

Taylor is luckier than some, because she can talk to her mother, but she has not yet told her ex-boyfriend and would prefer that Cook do so for her. In the span of two days, Taylor has become dependent on Cook: Like so many in her situation, she is hungry for someone who offers a shoulder to cry on and a plan. She clings to the side of her chair and lets the lawyer do most of the talking.

WHEN A pregnant woman contacts a lawyer, he tries, as quickly as possible, to match her to appropriate clients. Cook estimates that he finds birth mothers for two-thirds of his clients, and Radis says he found birth mothers for 45% of his adoptive parents last year.

Much of the selection process occurs before the birth parents and adoptive parents meet or speak for the first time, when they fill out lawyers’ “intake” questionnaires. The state requires certain information about health, marital status and family history. Beyond that, anything is fair game. Pregnant women can select for religious preference (the Kanuits were turned down by a couple who insisted that their baby go to “born-again” Christian parents) or appealing talents; adopting couples can request birth parents who share enough physical traits that the child might resemble the people who raise it. Taylor is relieved to learn that the Kanuits exercise regularly, because physical fitness is important to her; the baby’s biological father is a track athlete.

But adoptive parents, by the nature of their need, are eager to resolve an aspect of their lives that has been out of their control for years. Clients quickly realize that they are likely to find a baby faster if they do some additional soliciting of their own. Lawyers advise them on networking methods, which usually involve composing a resume, complete with photographs, as well as a classified advertisement for newspapers.

It is an awkward step to take--”It’s like getting yourself a job. You have to market yourself,” says Barbara Friedman, who recently adopted her second child after advertising and sending 400 resumes to doctors nationwide. Diane Connors, who also has two adopted children, recalls spending weeks preparing a resume about herself and her husband, as well as a list of likely contacts. “I went to the libraries to get lists of ob-gyns throughout the country, abortion clinics, family-planning clinics,” she says. “You try anything you can think of to make contact with anyone who might put you in touch with a woman with a baby.”

Most of the time, the parties meet in person, although some long-distance agreements have been struck by telephone. Once a birth mother chooses the adoptive parents she prefers, a series of logistical decisions must be made. If possible, birth mothers from other cities and states relocate to Los Angeles to have their babies, in part for the sake of their relationship to the adoptive parents, and in part because the legal paper work can be completed more efficiently if a baby is born in California.

Some lawyers even make arrangements for temporary housing for birth mothers. Radis, who estimates that 90% of his birth mothers come from out of state, keeps a list of people who will rent houses or rooms to birth mothers throughout their pregnancies. Cook often settles his birth mothers at the Care House, a residence in University City, near Oceanside. In 1983, Cook’s financial stake in a Fresno residence for pregnant teen-agers led to accusations of impropriety--and of pressuring prospective birth mothers. He no longer has any financial interest in such homes; the Care House is funded by a Presbyterian church.

The birth and adoptive parents decide, together, how close they want to be in the coming months. There are delicate questions to face: Will the adoptive parents be allowed in the delivery room? Will one of them serve as the labor coach? Will the birth mother see her baby, or leave the hospital without ever having held it in her arms? But the initial commitment is usually made within a few weeks of meeting--and sometimes, as in the Kanuits’ case, within a day.

Circumstances seem to dictate a certain amount of haste. Rita Martin, who is 32 and gave up a son more than two years ago, says: “You’re extremely upset because you don’t know which way to go. Your time is running out, and you need to do something--now.”

If an adoptive couple don’t respond to a birth mother quickly, they might not get another chance. “You have to get excited about them right away,” Barbara Friedman says, “or they’ll choose somebody else.”

AFTER ONE hour in Cook’s office, the Kanuits’ excitement is almost palpable. As they answer Cook’s questions--Taylor still has very little to say--they try to reassure her about what good parents they will be. Yes, they both work, but they have a full-time housekeeper and flexible schedules; their children come first. They have a nice house where the baby could have its own room. They are college-educated, but would not pressure a reluctant son or daughter to attend college. They want their children to do whatever makes them happy.

When they take a break, Cook escorts Taylor to another room, and as they walk down the hall she is animated for the first time today. She babbles nonstop. “I like them,” she says, relief in her voice. “I really like them. They’re really neat. I mean, really neat. And she’s in advertising. I like that. I’ve always been interested in that. They just handle their life so well.”

Cook sits Taylor down. “Where are you in the decision-making process?”

She barely hesitates. “I’d like them to be the couple. They have all the qualities I’d like them to have.”

“I’m going to be real lawyer-like now,” Cook says. “Do you want them to adopt your baby?”

“I think I really would. . . ,” Taylor begins.

“Well, if I read between the lines, ‘I think. . . .’ ”

“OK, no,” Taylor says hastily. “I do want them to. They’re really nice.”

“Do you need to go home and think about this and pray about it, or call somebody?”

“Well, I’d like to go home. . . . I’m pretty sure. I’m positive. Really. But I always like to think.”

“We want this to be a final decision,” Cook says. “Please, please don’t choose these people if you aren’t sure. Not just because it would devastate these people, but because they have a little girl. And if you should change your mind this little girl might say, ‘When is my other mom going to come for me?’ So you have a double burden.”

Cook leaves Taylor while he briefly consults with the Kanuits, then returns to tell her that they would like to continue talking to her. He tells Taylor that he figures she is “98%” decided. He sends them out to lunch together, to see if they can make up that last 2%.

At 3 o’clock, after a chicken sandwich at the Melting Pot in West Hollywood, Taylor talks with Cook again while the Kanuits wait, nervously, in another office. Taylor tells him that she is now 100% sure.

“Do you know how you’re going to tell them?”

“No,” she says. “What’s the best way?”

“Well, you’ve got to be real direct, because they’re out there in never-never land, and if you say, ‘I’d kind of like it,’ they may not catch on. As long as you say, ‘I want you to be the parents of my baby,’ as long as you get that in, you’re OK.”

She does. As the Kanuits embrace her, Cook grabs a camera and has Taylor and the Kanuits pose for photographs.

The next morning, Taylor gets on the train for Oceanside to stay at the Care House until the baby is born.

“It’s not a done deal,” Cook cautions the Kanuits. “She could change her mind, the birth father could put pressure on her. But it’s as done a deal as it can be at this point.”

California law prevents the deal from being done until about six months after an infant placement; the state legislates everyone’s right to back out. If Taylor goes through with her decision, the county Department of Children’s Services will assign a worker to collect the necessary documentation, visit the adoptive parents’ home, and interview both adoptive and birth parents, as they would with any adoption. Birth fathers must be told, and although they almost always give their consent to adoption, they have the right to withhold it.

Within 45 days of the initial placement, the county presents the birth parents with a consent form, which, when signed, shifts the balance of the relationship. Before a consent is signed, a birth mother can simply reclaim her child. After the consent, she and the adoptive parents both are regarded as having rights to the child. But her desire is no longer enough: To get her baby back at that point requires that the birth mother prove that she has been defrauded and that information has been willfully withheld from her. In 80% of these cases, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Abbe Soven says, the decision is in favor of the adoptive parents.

BIRTH MOTHERS work hard to keep from changing their minds. Anita Wright, a tall, slender 19- year-old who gave up her daughter two months ago, often reminded herself that she was carrying the baby for its adoptive mother, to distance herself from the child. “You have to play games like that so you won’t think it’s your baby. So it won’t get to you,” she says.

For all her determination, she had trouble getting through her hospital stay. “I got up early the next morning, after the baby was born, to see the baby and say my goodby,” she says. “I felt I owed her. So I looked through the window--I didn’t want to hold her--and I said, my mind to her mind, that I was sorry it had to be like this, and that I wanted to say goodby.

“Then I cried, and that was that.”

Not every mother manages to walk away. Lawyers say that the two weeks before and after a birth is the rockiest time for a birth mother, whose denial system can no longer protect her from the truth. About 10% of the time, a birth mother cannot give up the child she has promised to an adoptive couple--or she does, and then decides she wants the baby back.

Adoptive parents, who may have decorated a nursery at home and spent hours shopping for baby clothes and toys, can barely speak of losing a baby. They often refer, with a protective degree of detachment, to having had a “relinquishment.” Diane Connors recalls happily thinking of the months before her adoptive baby was born as her “pregnancy”--as close to the real thing as she would ever get. Some adoptive mothers even have baby showers. And then a birth mother changes her mind. Either the baby never comes home, or worse, becomes part of a new family only to be taken back weeks, or even months, later, after the baby and adoptive parents have closely bonded.

Connors and her husband, Steve, came to Durand Cook looking for a baby and had an “idyllic” experience, which yielded their daughter, Connors says. They went back for a second child and soon got the call they were hoping for from Cook. “He said, ‘I have a sure thing for you,’ ” Connors recalls.

It turned out to be anything but. After four months and more than $8,000--the $2,500 first installment of Cook’s fee and more than $5,500 in living expenses for the birth parents--Connors got a call from the doctor in Northern California saying that the baby, a boy, had been born. He sounded a bit hesitant, but Connors was too excited to dwell on that. She hopped a plane and went directly to the hospital.

She was not reassured by what she found. According to a delivery nurse, the father had gotten drunk after the birth, returned to the hospital and insisted on holding his child.

Connors called a counselor she was in contact with, who agreed to go talk to the birth parents. Connors called her again from the airport, where she had gone to pick up her husband and daughter. The counselor said Connors’ instincts were right. There was a problem with the father giving up the baby.

When her husband and daughter arrived, Connors had numbing news. “My daughter ran off the plane and said, ‘Can I see my baby brother?’ ” she recalls. “All I could think of to say to her was, ‘I think there’s been a mistake. I think this isn’t our baby.’ ”

(Adoptive parents can, and do, back out as well. Leavitt estimates that it happens in only one of 200 cases, and then usually because the adoptive parents find that they underestimated the magnitude of the commitment or because they are having marital problems.)

Without a baby, again without hope, having lost whatever was spent on the birth mother and at least part of the legal fees, adoptive parents search for an explanation. Often, they chide themselves for moving too fast, for ignoring what seem, in hindsight, like warning signs. Often, they blame their lawyers.

But adoption lawyers are quick to point out that the final responsibility for asking questions rests with the birth and adoptive parents--and that, even with careful inquiries, there will always be unavoidable failures. Clients also must take responsibility for some of the financial gamble. Cook says he makes it clear to clients that it is not his policy to refund his fee; he prefers to encourage them to re-apply the $2,500 to another try. David Radis has a policy of charging $400 for his initial consultation and waiving the rest of his fee if an adoption falls apart. Karen Lane bills on an hourly rate for completed legal work, “usually $600 to $1,000.” Leavitt has no set policy but would not refund if he felt that he had tried to warn clients away from a risky situation.

The 10% failure rate may be excruciating to the parents who fall into that category, but it is an acceptable level of risk to the lawyers. Leavitt points out that, for a woman in her late 30s, a natural pregnancy and birth presents even greater risks.

But an independent adoption is not a natural birth, and success statistics do not mean that everyone walks away happy. Psychotherapist Annette Baran is co-author with Reuben Pannor of “The Adoption Triangle” and of a chapter on open adoption in the upcoming “The Psychology of Adoption.” She preceded Pannor as director at Vista del Mar and is now in private practice. Her concern is for the birth mother: She has seen these women in counseling after the fact, and what she finds is “an amputated individual in most cases. It isn’t resolvable. There is a lingering pain. Forever.” She and Pannor would like to see an overhaul of the system, incorporating the two things that adoption lawyers would like to avoid--a longer decision-making process for the birth mother and a greater emphasis on counseling.

They are also uncomfortable with the economics of private adoption, which Pannor regards as being based on “elitism.” The median age of a birth mother is 20. One-third of the time she has managed to finish high school, but in almost as many cases, she has not--while half of the adoptive parents have graduated from college, are in their mid- to late 30s, and have an annual gross income of more than $50,000. As Pannor sees it, “We’re taking advantage of an impoverished part of the country, of the underprivileged.”

Lawyers are quick to refute the accusation that they are buying babies. “People don’t understand the difference between helping the birth mother and buying a baby,” Leavitt argues. “The right birth mother, when the doctor discharges her from care, has nothing material from this. She’s no richer than she was the day she got pregnant. The adoptive parent is paying for the wedding, not buying the husband.”

The disagreement is waged in Sacramento, where Pannor lobbies for legislation to protect birth mothers and lawyers fight what they regard, according to Leavitt, as attempts to make private adoption “as hazardous as possible.”

Leavitt is particularly vehement in his defense of the system. “The public perception is that it’s contrary to the laws of nature to do this: ‘Why have women, if not to birth their babies?’ People think that’s the way things should be. The social work corollary is that any woman who will do this cannot possibly be normal and needs weeks of psychiatric care and foster care to give her more time to change her mind. The system is utterly humiliating and unfulfilling.”

The controversy is an “ideological dispute,” says Jim Brown, chief of the adoption branch of the state Department of Social Services. “The lawyer sees adoption as a legal event where he wants to make sure his clients’ desires are achieved. He’s dealing with the interests of the adults who are paying his fees--the adoptive parents. Social workers care only about the interests of the child. They see this not as a one-point-in-time event, but a lifetime’s decision, with effects that go on in perpetuity.”

IN THE MEANTIME, it is business as usual. On Thursday mornings, Superior Court Department 43, Judge Abbe Soven presiding, is the only giddy courtroom on a long hallway of trouble; it looks, as much as anything, like the site of an infant’s birthday party. There are ebullient adoptive parents, sisters in party dresses and hair ribbons, brothers squirming behind bow ties, fussy grandparents, friends with video cameras, and doting lawyers who like to reflect that this is the only legal specialty that is supposed to have a happy ending for all sides.

And there are the babies--who are about to become part of the family they’ve lived with since they were born. In her chambers, Soven asks a few formal questions and then utters the sentence, “It is in the best interests of the child that this adoption be allowed.” Inevitably there are tears of delight. The judge is often asked to pose for a photograph with the family she has certified. And that, as far as the law is concerned, is that.

The Kanuits still do not know whether they will see the inside of Soven’s chambers this time. Taylor, whose baby is about to be born, seems as certain as she can be, but there are always rough surprises, pregnant women who never realize how they truly feel until they give birth. There are months ahead of agonized waiting for the Kanuits. All they can do is hope that, sometime next winter, they will get their day in court. If everything goes right, Taylor, by then, will be long gone.

But not forgotten. Diane Connors, who went on to successfully adopt a second child, has never met the biological mother, has never even heard the woman’s voice, because the out-of-state placement was handled by a lawyer, by phone. And yet she cannot get the woman out of her mind. On her daughter’s first birthday a few weeks ago, “I thought about my baby’s birth mother,” she says, “so I sent her a letter. She went through a lot of pain and guilt, and I just wanted her to know that her baby is fine, and well-loved. I won’t write again--it’s time to separate--but she’ll always be with me. She’ll always be with me. Even though I’ve never met her.” She imagines that, several states away, the little girl’s birth mother might have thought the same thing.