In this episode of Hines On Air, Matt Hines sits down with Patricia Knight Meyer, author, speaker, adoptee-rights advocate, and author of WONDERLAND: Memoir of a Black-Market Adoption, to uncover the extraordinary story of how she says she was trafficked as an infant through a black-market adoption—and spent decades trying to discover who she really was.
Patricia describes being handed over outside a Texas hospital with no judge, adoption agency, or proper legal paperwork involved. According to her account, the attorney involved later demanded tens of thousands of dollars from her would-be adoptive parents while threatening to take the baby back. Years later, Patricia discovered there was no legal adoption record and began a search that would ultimately take around 20 years to unravel.
Her investigation led her through missing birth records, conflicting dates, hidden family secrets, adoption trauma, and a painstaking search for her biological parents. Using digitized Texas birth records and the help of a search angel, Patricia eventually found her birth mother and later reconnected with her birth father—finally gaining answers about her identity and obtaining a legally established birth certificate at age 47.
But this conversation goes beyond Patricia’s personal story. She and Matt discuss black-market adoption, adoptee rights, birth-parent rights, sealed birth certificates, adoption transparency, DNA reunions, family identity, adoption trauma, and adoption reform in America. Patricia now advocates for greater transparency in the adoption system and for Texas adoptees seeking access to their original birth certificates.
Patricia also shares how finally discovering the truth about her origins brought a kind of healing she had searched for throughout much of her life, and how those experiences became the foundation for her memoir, WONDERLAND: Memoir of a Black-Market Adoption, releasing November 3, 2026 through Unsolicited Press.
If you’re interested in adoption stories, black-market adoption, illegal adoption, adoptee rights, adoption reform, birth-family reunions, DNA ancestry, family secrets, childhood identity, trauma and healing, birth certificates, and true-life memoirs, this is a powerful conversation about the lifelong consequences of not knowing where you came from—and what can happen when someone refuses to stop searching for the truth.