My Facebook Algorithm Desperately Wants Me to Give My Baby Up for Adoption. I … Don't Have a Baby.

Yahoo

a day ago

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
Shortly after my 28th birthday, something strange started happening. I was suddenly inundated with two unusual, new-to-me sorts of social media ads.
'Musical, happily married, financially secure, professional couple yearn to give your baby a lifetime of unconditional love, music, extended family, beautiful musical home, world travel, limitless opportunities, financial security, sports and so much more,' one Facebook ad read. The image featured a smiling couple in formal attire under a clip art–style garland holding various baby-themed items, along with an email and phone number where I could reach them. Another, on Instagram, showed a grinning young couple, the man embracing the woman from behind, with details about the pair's mutual love for science and s'mores. 'We hope that as we add to our family through adoption we will be able to fill the hole we feel in our lives,' it ended. Clicking on the links led to Facebook pages with names like 'Jane and John hope to adopt 1st baby' or sites with profiles of the same smiling couples and details about their occupations and education levels. I was flummoxed, in part because they read like a Mad Lib of happy family keywords, but also because the existence of 'my baby' would have been news to me.
Thinking this must be a glitch in the algorithmic matrix, I continued my scroll. But as I browsed through my feed, I saw, nestled between friends' engagements, breaking news, and the odd dog photo, not only more hopeful couples 'seeking to adopt first child' but also a barrage of ads showing solo women with headlines like 'How to Become an Egg Donor' and 'Best. Decision. Ever.' and graphics that seemed to promise inconceivable financial compensation.
The models in this latter group, all young and conventionally attractive, were checking a laptop while holding a stack of papers or typing away (presumably penning an important email) on their phones. They were cosmopolitan women, engaged in running empires or drinking coffee, and apparently far too busy to be using their eggs.
I couldn't think of anything in my search history that would have invited this onslaught. They were intensely personal topics, ones I would talk about with a doctor or a partner or a particularly close friend, not at all the kinds of decisions I'd make based on an ad I'd happened to encounter in my online travels. After initial attempts to rid my feed of them failed—when I blocked one account, another would pop up in its place—I decided to take a closer look.
As I searched for the families behind the adoption ads, I found that domestic adoption can occur with or without an agency. (The latter is called private or independent adoption.) Most states allow private adoptions, but the specific laws and regulations vary. Where it's legal, private adoption allows prospective birth and adoptive parents to match directly, a process that has evolved over the past two decades. In the early 2000s, couples hoping to adopt relied on ads in newspapers and 'outreach cards,' essentially business cards with their information, which they distributed to friends, family, co-workers, hairdressers—anyone who might be able to help spread the word.
Philip Acosta was working for a prominent adoption attorney in New York City at the time and noticed that while state regulators were preventing people from running adoption ads in the papers, there were no similar laws governing the nascent practice of internet advertising. Acosta began creating websites and Google Ad campaigns for families and found 'tremendous success.' His business, the Adoptimist, is part of a cottage industry that sprang up around adoption online, evolving as the internet did to include first search engine optimization, then social media. When the tempestuous swings of the algorithms meant standard, free social media posts weren't getting the visibility they used to, many businesses shifted to ads instead. But some in the industry weren't sold.
Digital adoption service Our Chosen Child helps hopeful parents create adoption profiles, adoption videos, and adoption websites. The company does not offer ads—and that's not an accident. 'I've seen some of the ads, and they feel icky to me,' said Wisconsin-based founder Joanna Ivey. 'Because the focus is usually on 'We're kind of a perfect family and we have a lot of money and we can pay your expenses, and, you know, thanks very much for your baby.' '
Ivey, who is both an adoptee and an adoptive parent, believes that these ads can prey on women who are in an emotionally and financially difficult position and center the experiences of the adoptive parents rather than the adoptee. 'Unfortunately, that's where the money is, right? Adoptive parents are paying the bills, so that's where the focus goes,' said Ivey.
Adoption advertising is governed state by state, Ivey told me, and that leaves room for a lot of gray areas. 'Being in New York, I'm sure you're being bombarded,' she said, noting that my home state presents a unique situation. New York's atypical adoption laws deter agencies in other states from working with New York families and prohibit an agency or attorney from advertising on their behalf. If a couple in New York wants to get the word out that they're looking to adopt, they have to do it themselves. And while most have the best intentions, with no guidance for how to approach this sensitive topic, the resulting ads can swing from describing how the prospective adoptive parents met to essentially—though not in so many words—saying 'Pregnant? We want to buy your baby.'
'Perhaps there ought to be not only some guidelines but some coursework or counseling before they hit that space,' Ivey said. 'Because a lot of what I see is, you know, kind of creepy and coercive and predatory.'
Unlike the adoption ads, which offered a solution to the problem of my (fictitious) pregnancy, egg donation was positioned—bafflingly—as a solution to the (presumed) problem of my finances. One Facebook ad featuring a young blond woman wearing headphones around her neck and carrying a backpack promised up to $72,000 (the qualifier 'with multiple donation cycles' visible only if I clicked the 'see more' button) if I met certain requirements: being 21 to 31 years old, having a BMI under 30, having a high school diploma, being a nonsmoker in good health. Another, of a smiling woman holding a coffee, offered '$60,000 and the life [I've] dreamed of' if I were 19 to 30 with a BMI of 18 to 26, a high school diploma, and 'a desire to help families struggling with infertility.' It was a startling premise and, as I soon learned, one that had rightfully upset the humans who had resulted from ads like it.
'Knowing that you were essentially sold by a biological parent for a spring break or to pay off student debt is not a fun feeling,' Laura High told me. The donor-conceived creator and comedian was not being hyperbolic. These were real examples from ads she'd seen.
High, who has been advocating for greater regulation of the fertility industry for more than five years, seemed both outraged and exhausted when I told her about the ads I'd been seeing. She worries not only that these ads make egg retrieval seem as simple as getting a haircut, but also that they're being shared on platforms where teenagers and young adults spend their time, offering them enormous sums of money and presenting egg donation as a viable part of their financial plan. Like adoption ads, they're aimed at folks who are financially vulnerable, an indication of a system that values profit over people at every stage.
' 'Oh, are you out of money? Sell your body parts,' ' High mimicked. 'We view that as wrong when it comes to a kidney. We view that as wrong when it comes to a lung. So then why are we allowing this for sperm and eggs?'
One company, Cofertility, takes a different approach to egg donation that tries to address the strangeness of money changing hands. Its ads, just text on a screen, stood out from the myriad others in my feed for their design and frequency. 'How do you expect women in their 20s to be able to afford to freeze their eggs?' one asks. The answer: 'We don't—that's why we created a free alternative.'
'Free' has one major caveat: Half of your eggs won't belong to you. In smaller, lighter font below, the ad clarifies that the company pays for egg freezing and storage, and the donor contributes half of the eggs retrieved. The quid pro quo extolls the benefits of egg donation, noting that I could 'give [myself] the gift of options,' while leaving out certain, less pleasant details of a quite involved medical procedure.
'There is very little real estate,' Cofertility's CEO, Lauren Makler, told me of Facebook and Instagram ads. In its brief moment on your feed, she said, Cofertility tries to focus on fertility access. She sees these ads as less about direct acquisition and more about awareness of the company's existence and of egg freezing and donation as options.
I asked Makler how she thought Cofertility's ads had ended up in my feed. The company targets based on age range and gender, she said, and there's no one in particular it's trying to exclude. Cofertility follows the American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommendations and the Food and Drug Administration standards for who qualifies for egg donation—women 21 to 34—she said.
When I told others in the adoption and fertility industries that I was receiving these ads, they all theorized that there must be something in my search history that had brought the ads to me. Privately, I wondered whether I had also been targeted as a certain type of woman of a certain age. Could my relationship status, a parameter by which Meta allows advertisers to target its ads, have also played a role? Wouldn't a single woman be more likely to be placing her hypothetical child up for adoption? Or be more likely to want to donate her eggs if she's not 'using' them right now?
And then there's education level, another Meta-approved ad targeting parameter. How much education a donor has completed not only can be listed on their profile, I learned, but is a common consideration for intended parents. Had a college education unintentionally made me a desirable donor? While Makler didn't include this in the demographics she shared, a blog post attributed to her on the Cofertility website entitled 'How to Find an Ivy League Egg Donor' boasts that 'ninety-two percent of [Cofertility's] donors are in or have graduated from a 4-year college, and the majority (55%!) even have a graduate degree.' Another blog post notes that prospective parents 'can sort donor profiles by education level and learn more about what a donor studied and the type of school they attended.' Other companies go so far as to advertise steeper payouts to donors who've attended some form of higher education. If educated donors were such a selling point, would they not try to attract them in the targeting process?
I'll likely never know for sure what landed these ads in my algorithm. In my quest to understand their origin and rid myself of them, I have inadvertently signaled my interest. And the more I engage with them—as I certainly have over the past year—the more I receive. Alas, now more than ever, my feed runneth over with smiling couples, busy women, and requests, in one form or another, for my eggs and baby.