Welcome to My Adopted Life. Here you will find resources on adoptee search and reunion and navigating adoption reunion and healing from identity-shattering events, like learning you are adopted, dealing with the shock of a DNA surprise, or discovering you are donor-conceived. I have been in reunion with both my birth mother and my late birth father since 2010. I blog about my life as a black market baby and managing reunions with adoptive family and biological relatives. I urge you to check out the resources section for links to books, talks, adoption support groups, and writing classes. 

I hope you enjoy what you find here and consider subscribing.

All the best,

Patricia Knight Meyer

Adoptee, Author, and Advocate for Adoption Reform

What one would call a Black Market Baby, my outside-the-system “adoption,” meant my “adoptive” parents reported never receiving my birth certificate, and an unsuccessful search for records would later lead me to question if a legal adoption ever occurred. After all, the state could not find my delayed birth certificate in the system, or any record of my adoption. This meant the name I used likely never existed on any paperwork until I turned 12 years old. When my raising parents filed for a Delayed Certificate of Birth, they never let on that the child they claimed as their own had actually been acquired in an outside the system transaction.

The facts were, I was handed over along a Texas hospital curb in 1970 – no judge, agency, or paperwork involved. The shady attorney they say they hired to skirt a discriminatory system, brokered me they say, and according to them, extorted them out of thousands of dollars with the threat of taking back the baby. Were they complicit? Is this true? I may never know for sure. But my search led me to a biological adopted cousin whose placement was also handled by the same attorney, and whose parents, like mine, also never received a birth certificate. I wouldn’t obtain my first true and accurate birth certificate until I was 47 years old.

Now, I’m watching history repeat itself, as vulnerable mothers face an expanding for-profit adoption industry valued at $30 billion dollars. With abortion rights restricted, more desperate women will stand at the mercy of a system designed to coerce and exploit them.

As an adoption reform advocate, and a relinquishee who has lived with the consequences of an illegal adoption, I speak and keynote at adoption conferences, appear on podcasts, and have written a memoir about my experience. I have a journalism degree from the University of Texas, a decade of experience as a book publicist, and my reunion video has 280,000 YouTube views. Thank you for stopping by.