FRAUD AND DECEIT

The prospective adoptive parent or parents who hide a guilty secret in order to adopt are a common theme in movies.  In The Bigamist (1953) the adoptive father tries to conceal the fact that he has two wives from the adoption agency, which finds him out anyway.

In Border   Line (TV Movie 1999), an attorney who unwittingly has a crooked adoption agency which exploits pregnant Asian women as a client finds out that murder is part of the deal.

In the Canadian film Boulevard (1994) the adoption forms only part of the plot as a single mother gives up her child for its own good. This is not a new idea, and also appears in the 1938 film Delinquent Parents, Family Plot (1976), Alfred Hitchcock's last film,

Comedies often involve "finding" an abandoned baby (usually on a doorstep). The film Bachelor Mother () features Ginger Rogers as the lucky woman who finds a cute baby boy, keeps him and is suspected of being its biological mother. A  kindly landlady helps her land the purported father, a wealthy playboy (David Niven), whose father is convinced the child is Niven's and Rogers'. Debbie Reynolds starred in a remake of this movie

In The Lady is Willing, an impetuous actress comes across an abandoned baby and wants to adopt it, but needs a husband in order to convince the adoption agency. The result, of course, is romance.

Women who marry men not the biological fathers of their children also present possibilities for melodrama and romance, as in People Will Talk (), featuring Cary Grant and Betsy Drake.

Women who give up their babies for adoption and then think better of it may try to re-establish contact when the child is grown, as in A Child Lost Forever (1992), or soon after the child is adopted, as in Losing Isiah (). The best interests of the child clash with parental rights in the latter, which can become an interesting topic for research. Flirting With Disaster (1996) explores the feelings of an adoptive child. For Keeps (1988) features a teenage couple trying to decide among adoption, abortion and marriage. Frisco Jenny (1933) gives up her child for adoption; the boy later becomes a district attorney. A similar theme appears in Madame X, in which a defense attorney defends a client, who turns out to be his biological mother, in a murder case. Melodrama often wins out over reality in these kinds of films, posing all sorts of improbable events in order to bring mother and child together. Truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction, however, as the case of 

Sperm donors who connect with their biological offspring exist in real life of course, and can cause legal, emotional, and social confusion. Should children created through artificical insemination (AID) be able to track down their fathers, or must the fathers have agreed in advance (by leaving a statement to that effect with the sperm bank)? Suppose children of the same sperm donor meet and wish to marry? Or, as in a real life case, suppose siblings who were adopted at an early age (too early to know they are related), meet and marry? Is the relationship incestuous? Does the legal relationship proceed from the biological? If so, should biologically unrelated children in the same family be allowed to marry?

Single adoptive parents are also common, although their treatment varies with the decades. In the Shirley Temple film (), adoptive father () eventually hooks up with Shirley's older, adult sister. In A Father For Brittany (1998), the adoptive mother dies during the process and the father continues to fight for custody. In Here Comes the Groom (1951) and Daddy Long-Legs (), loosely based on the novel by Jean (), single men try to create their own adoptive families (but end up with perfect wives in the process, which was a Hollywood requirement at the time)

In Paternity () Burt Reynolds convinces a woman to carry his child and then allow him to adopt it. Of course he falls in love with her and eventually marries her.

Natural surrogacy (in which the biological mother agrees to give up her child, who is not related to either adoptive parent) appears in The Babymaker (1970), Immediate Family (1989)

Children who are kidnapped and then raised either by the kidnapper or by adoptive parents appear in such films as My Name Is Steven (),