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Houston Press
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Oh, Baby Baby
Continued from page 4
Published on June 07, 2007
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Gandee Vasan
There's a lot of money to be made in adoptions. Jennalee Ryan moved to Texas to continue doing that.
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Mark Greenberg
Jennalee Ryan says she has a need to rescue children.
Subject(s):
lax adoption regulations, baby-brokers, Abraham Center of LifeIn actuality, there was no staff, other than Ryan's daughter, Lisa Marie Robinson, who answered the businesses' shared 800 number. And there was no human embryo bank, since Ryan ran the business out of her house, with nary an embryo to be found. And there really was no California office, because the address listed for the Abraham Center of Life's office in Temecula, California, is actually the office of an Allstate insurance salesman named James C. Webb, who, in his spare time, runs a licensed adoption agency outside Salt Lake City. But we'll get to that later.
It's not clear who ran with the story first, but the nonexistent First Human Embryo Bank became worldwide news, with stories of boutique babies and apocalyptic bioethical ramifications.
By January 2007, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took an interest in what the Associated Press called "a business that produces batches of ready-made embryos." In an anticlimactic finale, the FDA announced that month that, because there was no actual embryo bank, there was nothing for the FDA to investigate.
Ryan told the San Antonio Express-News that the media was under the erroneous assumption that her business was hands-on, rather than merely an advertising service.
Today, Ryan is careful to make that clear from the outset, perhaps because state laws dealing with adoption-esque services often require a Ouija board to decipher. In Texas, only a parent, guardian or licensed child-placing agency can act as an intermediary between adoptive and expectant parents. And only a licensed child-placing agency can advertise to place, provide or obtain a child. (The Texas Family Code, as it pertains to adoptions, defines "child" as a person under the age of 18 and does not say anything about embryos.)
Ryan is able to circumvent the regulation restricting advertising of such services to a licensed child-placing agency by not actually matching birth moms to adoptive parents. Instead, if an adoptive parent calls the Abraham Center for Life (i.e., Ryan's house), she can give the parent a list of phone numbers for licensed agencies. But she cannot introduce that adoptive parent to a birth mother.
And since she's only advertising, Ryan expressed amazement that the Houston Press would be so interested in her business and personal life. When she finally returned a call to the Press, she said through laughter, "A biography? This is so exciting! I'm that important — wow!" She later added, "How did I get to be the lucky one that gets a whole article written on them 'cause they have an interesting background?"
They were odd statements for a woman who, in 1997, commissioned a California freelancer to write a book about her. In 1998, that writer filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau in California that Ryan (Potter-Clay at the time) stiffed her for $840 worth of work she had done on a brochure Ryan wanted to promote her business. (The book was to follow the brochure.)
"I believe that a person's ethics — or lack of ethics in one instance — often carries over into other facets," Marilyn Campbell wrote in her complaint, "and as Ms. Clay is involved in something as sensitive as private adoptions, I think any lapse should be seriously considered."
Fortunately, Campbell still had some notes from her 1997 interview with Ryan in a San Diego hotel room she was sharing with Cornelius "Temporary Restraining Order" Braxton. One highlight of Campbell's notes includes Ryan's talk about interviewing celebrities such as Steven Seagal, David Carradine and Kim Fields (Tootie on The Facts of Life).The notes also state that Ryan talked of being raped, kidnapped and knifed. She of course talks about her eight kids, and how she proudly "cut the cords" on the adopted ones.
But when told the Press story would address her time in California, as well as her children and their fathers, Ryan verbally rolled her eyes. For one thing, she explained, the name change is hardly significant. It was simply because, when she was born in 1957, Jennifer was not that common a name. But by the dawn of the 21st century, the sheer number of Jennifers was such that sometimes both an adoptive mom and a birth mom might be named Jennifer, creating a nightmare of a conference call.
"There are so many dang Jennifers out there, it's so confusing," Ryan says, explaining at one point that "it's like being named Sue or Cathy."
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