Tyler Baltierra continues to call out the pitfalls of the adoption industry, 17 years after he and his now-wife Catelynn Lowell placed their first daughter, Carly, for adoption. The ‘Teen Mom’ star recently raised some eyebrows when he debated whether private adoption should be considered a form of human trafficking.
Earlier this month, Tyler had Dr. Kristen Kirkland on his Cate and Ty Break It Down! podcast to discuss adoption. Dr. Kirkland— who is a medical doctor, anti-trafficking advocate and author and an adoptee herself— agreed with Tyler that the definition of adoption is shockingly close to the definition of human trafficking.
Tyler– who, as fans know has been very outspoken against adoption since the Carly’s parents cut him and Cate off in 2024— stated that both concepts are similar because in both cases people are paying for other humans.
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“It costs, you know, upwards of $50,000 to adopt a baby,” he said. “…It is one of those things where now we’re crossing into not only psychological things that are unethical, but now we’re talking about actual policies and, like, how money is involved and how every other
country in the world knows that commodifying children, human beings, is not ethical.”
Dr. Kirkland explained that she was a family medicine doctor who took a special interest in human trafficking, only to eventually discover shocking similarities between human trafficking and adoption. She also shared that she was adopted at birth.
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“The more I educated about what trafficking is and how we define it on a legal level, the more I realized that a lot of the circumstances surrounding my adoption actually met that definition too, which was shocking for me,” she said. “It took me a while to realize and the day I did, I really wrestled with it for a good bit. Like, could this seriously be true? But I think that it is.”
Tyler agreed, adding that he feels things get even more unethical when the birth parents are minors themselves. (As fans know, this was the case for Tyler and Catelynn, who were both 17 years old when they placed Carly for adoption.)
“I mean, there’s two sets of minors here,” Tyler continued. “There’s the [birth] parents who are having this child and there’s a baby. And then there’s adults who are, you know, paying lots of money to acquire this other minor. And I think that’s where the lines kind of get blurry and people are like, ‘We need to like kind of focus in on that because I think that says a lot about how this industry works over here.'”
Tyler and Dr. Kirkland— who has spoken about the correlation of American adoptions and human trafficking before— both agreed that they get a lot of negative feedback for talking about this topic.
“When you say stuff like, ‘Well, adoption is very similar to human trafficking,’ people just immediately get on the defensive,” Tyler said. “…I think that is probably one of the most-triggering statements that I see. People get really like, ‘Whoa, like, how dare you?’ And I think if people were to not be so defensive and be a little more just curious about…even if it’s shocking to you [to hear that comparison], instead of getting so defensive, why don’t you pause for a second and ask [us], ‘How are you coming to this kind of correlation?'”
Dr. Kirkland— who has a book about adoption coming out in 2028— explained why the definition of human trafficking is so similar to what happens with private infant adoptions.
“The definitions [of what counts as human trafficking] from the United States and also the United Nations are similar in structure,” she said. “The wording is just slightly different, but the meaning is the same. We use a model called the Palermo Protocol, which is… the structure of how we describe trafficking in the law. It’s the act of obtaining a person…by means of force, fraud, or coercion, for the purpose of exploiting them for profit.”
Dr. Kirkland said that if a minor is involved in one of these acts, it already qualifies technically.
“So if I think about it through that lens, which is very much how I came to this after years and years of studying trafficking and then coming out of adoption fog, the minor is already involved in private infant adoption, and then that means force, fraud, coercion,” she said. “I started
learning about especially the coercion. There have been periods in history of force and certainly there’s been fraud in adoption too, but the coercion is a really big key.”
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“Unfortunately, coercion is a big part of recruiting parents to relinquish,” Dr. Kirkland said. “And then identity exploitation, identity trafficking…exploiting an adoptee for profit. We know the industry is very much for-profit and exploitation is making a profit on
that transaction or adoption.
“…For a lot of private infant adoptees, we very much see the mental health ramifications of forced assimilation into a family of strangers,” she added.
Tyler spoke about how he— and other birth parents— are subtly coerced into going through with the adoption.
“Even having adoptive parents at the hospital in the same wing of the hospital, you know, while this birth mother is planning to relinquish is a very subtle form of coercion,” he said. “Because how can I possibly feel safe enough to change my mind if I know that I’m going to break this family’s heart, [and they’re] right next door and have the car seat in their hands?”
Tyler said that ‘Teen Mom’ fans often argue with him when he says that he and Cate were coerced into giving up Carly, due to the fact that the scene played out on Catelynn’s episode of “16 and Pregnant.”
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“A lot of people even talk about mine and my wife’s story about like, ‘You weren’t coerced. We watched it happen. We watched you do this,'” he said. “And it’s like, ‘Yeah but you don’t understand that I was also a child.’ You know what I mean? And so I’m listening to all the adults around me who are telling that it’s better to do this than it is to parent and that kind of stuff.”
Tyler brought up the fact that birth parents are often asked by their adoption counselor to fill out a “pros and cons” list for relinquishing the baby versus parenting him or her. He stated that he found that concept weird, even back then.
“I kept thinking in my head at that time, ‘Well, people have children all the time and never do pros and cons lists,'” he said. “So in my head, I’m like, why are we doing that with young vulnerable women who are in crisis pregnancies, clearly, or else they wouldn’t be in the situation to even think about relinquishing?”
Dr. Kirkland pointed out other factors that make human trafficking and infant adoption so similar, in her opinion.
“There is so much other overlap too,” she said. “The money being exchanged for humans is just a small part of it.”
She stated that the factors that make a young person more likely to be trafficked for sex or labor, etc.— such as having prior trauma, being economically unstable or having very little adult supervision— are very similar to the reasons biological parents give for choosing to relinquish their baby.
“The overlap of the factors that lead to trafficking and the factors that lead someone to relinquish, they’re so similar,” she said. “Like the Venn diagram has a huge middle circle. And so, it’s interesting to see just how similar. …Pimps would target maybe group homes– where there were minors who weren’t as well-supervised or who were impoverished or who needed their basic needs provided for– so that they could exploit them for commercial sex. So similarly to what we were just saying, you know, we target impoverished families or people in crisis unexpected pregnancy.”
Catelynn and Tyler have both been outspoken about biological parents choosing alternatives to adoption, such as kinship placement.
“I think it’s one of those things where it goes back to a permanent solution that affects more than one person for a really temporary crisis situation,” Tyler said of adoption.
You can listen to the full podcast episode here.
(Photos: MTV; Instagram)
