Mike Marler was stunned when he opened an email that told him that his newborn daughter had been adopted. Then, he started calling lawyers.
It was September 2024, and the Utah man was scrambling for help.
“I went into panic, freak-out mode,” he said. “Every lawyer is like, ‘Dude, you’re in Utah,’” referring to the state’s strict adoption laws.
“I don’t get it,” he remembered saying, and then was told, “Your kid is gone.”
His daughter had been born five days before, and twenty-four hours after that, Marler’s ex-girlfriend had placed her for adoption.
He had planned to be at the hospital to bond with his daughter immediately after she was born. The mother had sought a protective order against Marler months earlier, which a court commissioner granted, but it explicitly allowed him to come to the hospital.
Marler believed that the order would ensure he would be there when his daughter arrived, and he wanted a role in raising her.
But in Utah — where adoptions are finalized under some of the least restrictive laws in the country — an unmarried father’s parental rights depend on a different process: State law requires them to take specific steps before a child is born if they want to preserve those rights.
They must file a paternity action in court, and show that they financially supported the mother during the pregnancy. And, they must add their name to the state’s “putative father registry,” a list where unmarried men sign up to assert their parental rights if a child might be placed for adoption.
Marler didn’t know the registry existed. He never added his name before his daughter was born.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “It’s like a hidden thing.”
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Mike Marler at his home in West Valley City, Friday, Jan. 30, 2026.
Utah law says that any unmarried man who has had sex with a woman is considered on notice that a pregnancy — and potentially an adoption — could result. Because of that, the law says, the responsibility falls on him to protect his parental rights, including by adding his name to the state’s putative father registry.
But state data shows that only a handful of men have added their name to the registry in recent years — last year, there were the lowest number of registrants in at least a decade, at just 13 names. Utah officials acknowledge that most people are unaware the registry exists, and Utah does not fund public awareness campaigns or other efforts to inform men about the requirement.
Marler challenged the adoption in court, filing both a paternity case and a civil lawsuit against his daughter’s mother and the adoption agency who placed her. A judge dismissed his paternity claim, ruling that he had not complied with Utah’s requirements before his daughter was born.
He still has the civil case pending, though only money is at stake. Even if he prevails, the adoption would not be undone.
Through her attorney, the woman who placed the child for adoption declined to be interviewed. The Salt Lake Tribune generally doesn’t cover individual adoption cases, and is not naming her to protect the privacy of the adoption.
In court filings, she said she made the difficult decision to relinquish her child because she didn’t feel Marler would be a “fit parent.” She was not required to notify him of her decision, her attorney George Chingas wrote in a motion asking a judge to dismiss the lawsuit.
“It was his responsibility to assert his parental rights in a timely fashion,” the attorney wrote. “This he failed to do.”
‘Very difficult to reverse an adoption’
These strict requirements for unmarried fathers stem from a law passed three decades ago, after two high-profile custody battles in other states prompted Utah lawmakers to act. Known as the “Baby Jessica” and “Baby Richard” cases, each involved a birth mother who placed a child for adoption, only for the biological father to later contest it.
After years-long legal battles, judges in Michigan and Illinois ultimately ordered adoptive parents to relinquish children to their biological fathers. Photographs of the toddlers crying and reaching for the parents who had raised them as they were handed over ran in newspapers across the country, becoming emblematic of the anguish surrounding the cases.
(Barry Jarvinen | AP File Photo) Otakar Kirchner, left, carries away his son, known as “Baby Richard,” as the boy’s foster family watches at right in April 1995, in Schaumburg, Ill.
(Lennox McLendon | AP File Photo) The 2 1/2-year-old girl known as Jessica cries as she is strapped into a car seat and taken away from the home of Jan and Roberta DeBoer August 2, 1993, in Ann Arbor, Mich. Jessica, who was at the center of a two-state custody battle, was taken and given to her biological parents, Dan and Cara Schmidt of Blairstown, Iowa.
In Utah, Sen. Charles Stewart wanted to affirm that a child’s rights matter more than “the father who comes back to make a claim for a child he fathered out of wedlock and didn’t know existed.” During a 1995 hearing, he urged state lawmakers to pass the bill he sponsored to create Utah’s putative father registry.
Today, Utah is one of 33 states which have a registration process for unwed fathers. In some states, the law allows for a father to register both before a child is born and during a short window after — but in Utah, a man has to add his name to the registry before birth and start a paternity proceeding in court.
The registry is managed by the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Vital Statistics. On its website, men are able to register their names and read step-by-step information about how to protect their paternity rights.
The list is kept private from public view, but adoption agencies and attorneys have access and are required to check it for a father’s name before a birth mother is able to relinquish a child for adoption.
The registry isn’t widely circulated though, and in recent years, sometimes as few as 17 men have registered. Last year, that number was the lowest it’s been in at least a decade — just 13 men added their names.
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
“We know the existence of this important resource isn’t widely known,” DHHS spokesperson Charla Haley conceded.
Though there’s no money dedicated to making sure more people know about it, either, Haley said, “we are committed to making sure the application process is as clear and accessible as possible for those who need it.”
Adoptions in Utah also can’t be undone under the 1995 law — even if a birth father was lied to, such as in the Baby Richard case, where the birth mother told the biological father that their child had died, when she had actually placed him for adoption.
This is called Utah’s “fraud immunity law,” and what that means is biological fathers can sue a birth mother or adoption agency in civil court — but all they could win is money, not custody of their child.
Wes Hutchins, a Salt Lake City adoption attorney who represented Marler in his lawsuit, said Utah’s fraud law is unique, and has helped spur its reputation as an “adoption tourism” industry — where birth mothers and adoptive families travel to Utah to complete adoptions under laws which ensure quick — and irreversible — outcomes.
“In Utah, we have this series of legislative findings where the Legislature in Utah finds that the adoptive placement should be stable, and shouldn’t be questioned down the road,” he said. “This becomes very, very difficult to reverse an adoption.”
A protective order
Marler sued both the birth mother and Premier Adoption Agency two months after his child was born, in November 2024. He accused the agency of encouraging her to conceal the planned adoption from him, and alleged that she violated the protective order by not telling him about the birth and preventing him from bonding with the baby in the hospital.
The couple had been excited about the baby and had a gender reveal party with their families, Hutchins wrote in the complaint. They had picked out her name, according to the lawsuit, and had decorated a nursery.
(4th District Court) A sonogram of Mike Marler’s daughter was included as an exhibit in his civil lawsuit.
But their relationship later deteriorated: In the lawsuit, Marler accused his ex-girlfriend of using drugs during the pregnancy — which she denies in her response — which he said led to their breakup. She accused Marler of physically abusing her, and told Commissioner Marla Snow during a protective-order court hearing that she feared for her safety and that of her unborn child. Marler denied the allegations during that hearing.
Snow granted the protective order, according to a transcript filed as an exhibit in Marler’s lawsuit. But the court commissioner added: “This protective order is not going to be used as a way to keep this father away from seeing this child.”
Chingas, the birth mother’s attorney, wrote in a court filing that she decided to place the child for adoption because, after their break-up, she didn’t believe that Marler would be a fit parent because of his criminal history and how he had treated her. Court records show that his ex-wife obtained a protective order against Marler, and that in 2019 he pleaded guilty to three felonies, including stalking, after admitting he lied to police about an incident involving her.
The attorney argued that she didn’t violate the protective order because “she was not ordered to do or refrain from doing anything.”
Premier Adoption’s executive director did not respond to an email request for comment, nor did the agency’s attorneys.
Potential overhaul of Utah’s adoption industry
Critics of Utah’s adoption industry have argued that the state’s legal framework not only cuts out fathers, but exploits pregnant women who adoption agencies often pay to come to Utah to deliver and place their children for adoption.
In Utah, birth mothers can sign away their parental rights just 24 hours after birth, and the decision is immediate, permanent and can not be revoked. In nearly every other state, birth mothers are given a window of time to reconsider.
The state’s law also places no cap on how much adoptive parents can pay toward an expectant mother’s medical care, housing, lost wages, travel or other living costs — including cash payments for unspecified “postpartum expenses.”
Legislators here know that the state has a troubling reputation when it comes to adoption, and Rep. Katy Hall, R-South Ogden, has introduced a bill which would overhaul the current adoption system.
But the legislation largely centers around birth mothers — like enacting a cap on how much an adoption agency can spend on living expenses — and doesn’t directly address biological fathers.
In an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, Hall said she believed that there are issues involving the state’s putative father registry — something she said she didn’t know about until she started work on this bill.
However, Hall said she didn’t try to address that during this session because her proposal was already sweeping, and, she conceded, this issue seemed like “a hot fire storm” when it came up in interim legislative meetings.
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rep. Katy Hall, R-South Ogden, speaks on the House floor in January 2024.
Hall’s legislation, HB51 — which has been passed by the House and was amended and sent back Thursday by the Senate — would require expanded data collection on adoptions, and Hall said she hopes that new information could inform a future bill that would address fathers’ rights.
Utah Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, who has previously worked on bills related to the registry, said she supports Hall’s bill — and agreed there is more work to do to protect fathers’ rights.
A decade ago, Escamilla sponsored a proposal that created an interstate compact linking Utah’s registry with other states. She took up the issue after hearing from her constituent biological fathers who didn’t know about the registry and were fighting for parental rights.
She has been hoping since then for a holistic, federal fix, she said, since not every state has a registry and because birth and adoptive parents continue to come to Utah from other states.
“This is a state that focuses on family and children, but we also want to protect the integrity of a process that’s very complicated and complex,” Escamilla said. “To me, it’s important that that integrity is protecting everyone, biological parents, adoptive parents as well.”
Yet recent efforts to create a nationwide registry have faltered.
After fighting in court for a year and a half, Marler said he can no longer afford to continue. His civil lawsuit remains pending, but his lawyers withdrew last fall and the case has stalled. He’s not sure he’ll ever meet his daughter.
“You almost have to grieve it like your child died,” he said, “because otherwise you’ll go insane thinking about a kid you might never meet.”
Marler said he hopes that one day, when she’s older, she might look for him. He imagines the two of them sitting down together, talking for the first time.
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