Rehoming 101: The Legal (And Devastating) Practice of Sending Adopted Kids Back

Parents are rehoming their adopted children on the internet, just like pets. And it must stop.

What’s rehoming? It’s the practice of adopting children and then sending them back to the adoption agency — or using sites like Facebook to find them a new home — when they’re no longer wanted.

As a Rehoming 101 for public awareness, this ongoing series/investigative report aims to expose and end rehoming, using evidence-based research, historical and current analyses, and recent adoption commentary.

To see how this got started, review Dear White Woman Who Returned Her Adopted Kids and In response to those who support returning adopted kids, two open letters to those supporting this practice.

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Part 1: The Exchange

It’s a sunny, humid summer afternoon in a city so crowded the heat waves rising from the cracked and patched sidewalks mingle with congested air. There are offices and row homes and cars and bikes, all the inanimate things competing for a role in city life.

Tucked away in a public hospital’s maternity ward, in a windowless room where the smell of bleach and sweat mingles with crisp recirculated air conditioning, a small woman reclines in a bed and cradles a stripe-capped newborn boy.

Around her, nurses bustle about. Scrub-clad women clean up afterbirth and spilled fluids, the evidence of every new mother’s ultimate physical sacrifice. A man in a smart gray business suit, inappropriate for the season, lurks beside the birthing bed with a practiced, timid smile.

Within three hours of holding her baby, the mother relinquishes her parental rights. To the lurking stranger, she hands over her sleeping child, who reassures the woman that her baby boy will be loved and given a secure future. A life better than she — his mother — could ever provide.