A Texas woman was free on bail Wednesday on charges that she offered her 3-year-old son up for adoption on Craigslist to ease her anxiety.

The woman, Stephanie Christine Redus, of Huffman, near Houston, was freed Tuesday after she posted $1,000 bond on a state charge of advertising the placement of a child, a misdemeanor. She is scheduled to be arraigned in Houston next week.

No one answered the doorbell when a reporter went to Redus' home in Huffman this week, NBC station KPRC of Houston reported.

Court records say Redus, 29, posted the ad, which has been removed from Craigslist, on May 1. It read:

Hi. I'm trying to adopt out my 3yr old son. I'm not in a good place in my life and don't feel like I can care for him properly but I don't know where to start. If you or know anyone who is interested in caring for him please let me know. I'm a single mom and can't do this. Thanks, Desperate.

Redus got several responses, some of which she replied to, the complaint says. One of them was from Deon Thomas — who turned out to be a Houston police officer.

The complaint alleges that Redus went so far as to ask one prospective parent for a picture and information about his other children. But Redus told investigators she never really intended to give up her son up, saying she was off her depression and anxiety medications at the time.

The reason she was off the medications?

She's pregnant again, according to court records.

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Nearly 20 years after being ripped apart from his foster parents, a 32-year-old man was officially adopted Friday in San Diego, Calif., by the woman he has always considered to be his mother.

Maurice Griffin was abandoned as a baby. At age three, he found a loving family in foster parents Lisa Godbold and her husband, Charles.

“The whole reason we got into foster care in the first place is because we wanted to adopt Maurice,” recalled Godbold.

Over the next 10 years, Godbold and her husband eventually became Griffin’s foster parents, giving him the stable, happy home he had always dreamed of.

“It was a great, loving family,” said Griffin, remembering the trips to Sunday school and brunch with his foster family.

But Griffin’s happy family life didn’t last long.

Griffin says the foster system failed him, and he was abruptly taken away from the family at age 13. He and Godbold didn’t want to get into specifics about why Griffin was taken from the family, but both of them agreed it was a very painful and difficult time.

“It’s like being abducted from your family and being told to deal with it,” said Griffin.

“It was torture; it broke our hearts,” added Godbold. “Not knowing where he was and not being able to have contact with him was like having a child abducted.”

From there, Griffin bounced from other foster homes to group homes, where he says he was abused and mistreated.

Through the years and tough times, Griffin held on to his fond family memories.

Meanwhile, Godbold tried time and time again to find her long lost foster son – never giving up.

In 2009, Godbold tracked Griffin down on the internet using social media. From that point on, they vowed never to lose each other again.

Their enduring mother-son bond led them to a San Diego courtroom Friday, where Godbold officially adopted Griffin as her son.

”I’m excited – this is 20 years overdue,” said Griffin minutes before heading into the courthouse with his soon-to-be mother.

Though the adoption proceeding was short, Griffin said it was the moment he’s been waiting for all his life.

“This is probably the happiest moment in my life. I love my family and I’m happy to be home,” said Griffin, adoption paperwork in hand.

Godbold was also overwhelmed with emotion and said adopting Griffin – even at 32 years old – was a privilege.

“This completes the circle. He’s always been my son, but this just completes the circle,” she added.

Griffin now joins Godbold and her two biological children to form a happy family once again. Sadly, Godbold’s husband passed away during the time they lost contact with Griffin.

Griffin said he would have loved to be adopted by Charles Friday too, as he was a man he always admired and loved. Both Godbold and Griffin believe Charles was proudly watching over them on this special day.

Their story of family, love, loss, struggle and perseverance is something they hope will impact other foster children and foster families out there.

Godbold says the message is simple: don’t give up.

“Don’t give up – persevere. Keep looking for that love, that family connection, whether it’s with an infant or your 32-year-old child,” she added.

Griffin lives in San Diego and Godbold lives in San Jose, Calif., but now that they’re mother and son, they’ll be getting together often.

“She’s my mother,” said Griffin. “She has always been my mother.”

Courtesy Thomas family

John and Renee Thomas with their son, Jack, 7, who was adopted from Russia at the age of 3. Jack is hoping for his brother, Nikoly, now in a Russian orphanage, to join him in the United States.

This Christmas, the best gift 7-year-old Jack Thomas could get would be the arrival of his little brother, Nikoly, who lives in an orphanage in Kursk, Russia.

"When Jack is asked about his family, he talks about his brother," said his father, John Thomas, speaking from the family’s home in Minnetonka, Minn. "He always asks, 'When is he coming home?' We just tell him we’re waiting for the call."

Jack has been waiting several years, a long time for a little boy. What he doesn’t know is that a feud between politicians in Moscow and Washington could destroy his chance to grow up with his brother.

On Friday, Russian lawmakers passed a bill that would prohibit Americans from adopting Russian children, and if that bill is signed into law by President Vladimir Putin, it would cast doubt on even those adoptions already in the pipeline.

For John Thomas and his wife, Renee — and very likely hundreds of other expectant American families and Russian children — the latest political shift could mean a delay, a new hurdle or a brick wall.

The U.S. State Department and some high-level officials in Moscow have lambasted the legislation as punishing Russian children who need families in an effort to retaliate against Washington.

But the bill has gained ground amid a wave of nationalism, fueled by anger over a U.S. human rights bill singling out Russia and by several highly publicized cases of U.S. adoptions that ended tragically.

Since the end of the Soviet era in 1991, Americans have adopted about 60,000 children from Russia, making it one of the main countries of origin for non-domestic adoptions in the United States, according to U.S. government statistics. At the peak of the trend in 2004, Americans brought 5,862 children into their homes. In 2011, the number was down to 962 — a product of well-intentioned policy shifts, bureaucracy, corruption and other difficulties.

See the US Action Plan on Children in Adversity

European Children Adoption Services

Jack Thomas, at the age of 3, just before he was adopted from Kursk, Russia, by Americans John and Renee Thomas. He is now 7 years old and growing up in an affluent suburb of Minneapolis.

Even with foreign adoptions, which are allowed after giving Russians priority, Russia has an estimated 700,000 children living in institutions, nearly 80,000 of them orphaned, and the rest abandoned or taken away by the state because the parents were judged unfit to take care of them.

The Thomases have experienced the painful, stop-start nature of the Russian adoption process in their quest for Nikoly.

It was in December 2008, when they were finalizing their adoption of 3-year-old Eduard, whom they named Jack, that they learned he had a baby brother. They started the adoption application process for Nikoly as soon as they could, after a required waiting period.

Compliments of the Thomas family

Renee Thomas in December 2010 meeting Nikoly at an orphanage in Kursk, Russia. He was 18 months old at the time, and Thomas says she expected he would join the the family within a matter of months. Nikoly is now 4 and remains in institutional care in Russia.

A year later, John and Renee Thomas, who work as an attorney and a building contract negotiator, again flew to Moscow and then went by rail to Kursk to meet Nikoly, whom they call Theodore or Teddy. He was 18 months old. Renee Thomas says she thought it would take about the same amount of time to adopt him as it had with Jack, and expected to travel to Kursk sometime in the spring of 2010 to get him.

The Thomases are still waiting.

One of the reasons for delay, they say, is the horror caused by a woman in Tennessee who put her 7-year-old son, whom she had adopted in Russia, on a one-way flight to Moscow in 2010, with the explanation that the child was "mentally unstable" and she could no longer take care of him.

In another delay that Renee Thomas believes cost their adoption another year, the Russian government shut down adoptions for review and re-accreditation of all adoption agencies that work in Russia.

European Children Adoption Services

Nikoly in an undated photo taken at an orphanage in Kursk, Russia. (The red splotches on his face are believed to be a type of antiseptic.)

In addition, the Thomas’ dossier has gone before a series of judges in Russia, some of whom have rejected it without a stated reason, and others setting forth requirements that they are not able to meet under U.S. law. Even so, there are Russians trying to help them run the gauntlet, and they figured the problems would get ironed out.

"We expected to be traveling soon" to get Nikolai, said John Thomas.  

Just last month, when a newly negotiated bilateral adoptions agreement came into effect, designed to smooth out the process and help safeguard adopted children, things appeared to be looking up.

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"These adoptive parents have really been through the ringer," said Johnson. "This was a bilateral treaty signed by our two governments. We really celebrated it. I thought we could turn our attention to other countries. But we’re really back to Russia again."

Kids pay in human rights spat
The ban that passed the Russian parliament grew out of a dispute over human rights.

On Nov. 16, the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act passed by a landslide in the U.S. House and Senate. Magnitsky was a 37-year-old lawyer who exposed massive fraud allegedly committed by a group of Russian officials. He was arrested and died in police custody 11 months later under suspicious circumstances. Among other things, the bill denies visas and freezes assets of the Russian officials implicated by Magnitsky.

The new U.S. law sparked an angry reaction from Moscow and fueled popular anti-American sentiment.

Vladimir Putin said that the law singling out Russia "contaminates our relations."

Russian legislators then drafted a bill to counter the U.S. law, with provisions restricting organizations and individuals linked to the United States.

Just before the first vote in the Duma, the proposed ban on American adoptions of Russian children was tacked on as an amendment. The legislation was named after 21-month-old Dima Yakovlev, a Russian boy who died in Virginia after his adoptive father left him alone in a hot SUV for nine hours.

Americans may lose right to adopt Russian kids

After the Duma approved the legislation on Friday, the U.S. State Department registered its disapproval.

"If Russian officials have concerns about the implementation of (the adoption) agreement, we stand ready to work with them to improve it and remain committed to supporting inter-country adoptions between our two countries," said acting State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell. "The welfare of children is simply too important to be linked to political aspects of our relationship."

The bill is now heading for Putin’s desk for his signature.

Compliments of the Thomas family

John Thomas and his son, Jack, who was adopted from Russia at the age of 3, in an undated picture taken at their home in Minnetonka, Minn.

Opponents of the ban are still hoping that the president will veto the bill, despite his comments while campaigning for re-election that U.S. adoptions should no longer be allowed. More recently he has remained silent on the issue.

Over the past week, Russian opponents of the ban have launched petitions and small protests at the parliament building, and several high-level officials have registered strong opposition to it, including Russia’s foreign minister and education minister.

Johnson of the National Council for Adoption says he’s hoping the domestic opposition will dissuade Putin from signing the adoption ban into law.

"One good thing that’s happening … is a movement brought on by Russian citizens and the foreign minister who has spoken out against this legislation … saying it’s not the right way to stick it to America,” he said. "Hopefully more politicians will feel comfortable speaking out."

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Barring that, he said, he hopes Russia will at least make provisions to finalize the adoptions that are already in process.

"There is a precedent … to negotiate pipeline cases," he said, citing examples in Guatemala and Kyrgystan. "But given the animosity that Russians feel towards this, I hope that’s not a conversation we have to have."

For the Thomases, despite politics, the adoption effort is now in overdrive. They understand that Nikoly, who turned 4 in June, could be moved at any time — and in fact may have been moved already to a Russian institution for children as old as 18.

"That's major," said John Thomas. "That's where bad things start to happen."

For Renee Thomas, her greatest fear is that the boys will not be allowed to grow up together. But she tries to stay positive for Jack.

"This morning as I was making him breakfast, he said 'Mom, wouldn't it be great if we woke up Christmas morning and Santa left presents and Teddy under the tree?' My response was 'Let's hope for next year.'"

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ARLINGTON, Texas – Ten years after a baby was left wrapped in blankets outside an Arlington fire station on a cold day in 2002, a little boy spent his birthday with the firefighter who found him.

After being one of the first infants found under the state's Baby Moses Law, which designates fire stations as a safe haven, Koregan Quintanilla was adopted by a loving family.

He's now 10 years old, and he asked to return to the fire station celebrate his birthday with Wesley Keck, the firefighter who found and cared for him a decade ago.

 "He was asleep at the time; I touched him enough to get him moving, to let me know that he was breathing. I picked him up and brought him into the station," Keck recalled.

Read the original report | More from NBCDFW.com

Koregan has dreams of being a firefighter some day.

"He wants to be a lawyer. He wants to be everything all at once because he's 10, but always first -- fireman, always first," said Koregan's mother, Rebecca Quintanilla.

On Thursday, Koregan was chief of the station. He got to ride in a firetruck, flash the lights and shoot the water gun.

Koregan said he's not special -- just another kid. But to the firefighters at Station 12, he's a little boy they won't forget.

"I was excited that I got to meet him," Koregan said. "I'm glad I get to come here and see everyone, because this is my fire station that I was abandoned at."

Koregan was adopted on National Adoption Day. The next one happens Saturday.

Across the county, 4,500 children in foster care are expected to join their forever families.

When Ed Muir stepped off the plane in North Dakota, his brother Kenneth Corcoran spotted him immediately.

"Hell, I recognized him as soon as he came off,” Corcoran said, according to WDAY6 News. “I looked and said, there he is."

Muir, 84, and Corcoran, 81, hadn’t seen each other since 1932. That’s when their mother died and their father, unable to care for his five children, sent Corcoran and two other siblings to an orphanage. Muir and a brother stayed with their father, who raised them in Chicago.

The brothers reunited thanks to nine years of online sleuth work by Corcoran’s daughter, Pam Gregerson. But Gregerson came up short, unable to find her father’s siblings, according to the Naples (Fla.) Daily News.

Then Gregerson’s teenage son took to the search in July. He found Muir, of Naples, in 15 minutes.

During a reunion weekend last weekend, the brothers hit it off and discovered they share the same favorite song — "Wabash Cannonball." (Corcoran wants the song played at his funeral.)

"Those two old guys are totally twins. They're identical,” Gregerson told WDAY. “They look alike, they act alike, how they raised us. Everything is the same."

With one exception: Muir is a Republican; Corcoran is a Democrat. But no matter.

"It's the best weekend I've ever had in my 81 years," Corcoran said, according to the Naples Daily News. "I want to see him every day."

Muir told the Naples newspaper that he had worried about his three siblings who were sent to an orphanage.

"I often thought about the rest of my family, how they ever turned out, but I had no idea,” Muir said.

Corcoran was eventually adopted and grew up in North Dakota. He joined the Navy, married and had six children. He retired as a railroad lineman. The two siblings who were sent away with him have since died.

Muir took his mother’s maiden name — which made finding him trickier — and worked as an electrician. He raised four children.

"Eighty years is a long time being separated," said Muir, according to the Daily News. "It's sad to think of all those lost years. I don't know how to make up for it. I just told him I'm glad we were able to get in touch with one another."

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Jenna Glazer, left, with her wife, Elise Bacolas outside family court in Brooklyn. The couple was celebrating Glazer's adoption of their 5-month-old daughter, Maya, whom Bacolas gave birth to through artificial insemination. The couple married last year on July 24, the day same-sex marriages became legal in New York.

NEW YORK -- Jenna Glazer had long waited for the moment she would legally become the second mom to her infant daughter, Maya, erasing any uncertainty about her ties to the child she had with her wife.

That day came in mid-July, just before Glazer marked the one-year anniversary of her wedding to Elise Bacolas, Maya’s other mom, on July 24, when same-sex marriage became legal in their home state of New York.

After a few minutes before a family court judge in Brooklyn, the adoption was approved, and a beaming Glazer held up Maya in the air as loved ones offered congratulations and cheers. No longer would the name of Maya’s second parent be blank on her birth certificate.

“It’s the same thing like with marriage, you know. We were committed for 12 years, but being married felt differently,” Glazer, 40, said through tears outside the court in mid-July. “The minute that she was born, I thought that she was mine, but it feels really nice. It feels really nice to have it final.”

The couple is one of many across the country who are raising some 2 million children in same-sex households, according to advocacy and research groups. But though the path across the marital threshold is easing for same-sex couples, they are still facing a complex route to parenthood.

For lesbian couples, donor insemination is one option, though potentially expensive, while for gay couples, some choose surrogacy, though that can cost more than $100,000 and is clearly allowed only in some states, advocates and researchers say.

With those challenges, the more common way to become a parent today is through fostering or adoption, but some states explicitly ban same-sex couples from doing so, said Laura Deaton, policy research director at the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank focused on the LGBT community.

“The complexity and the difference in state law is what renders LGBT parenthood very uncertain and challenging,” Deaton said. Even states geographically next to one another, such as Iowa and Nebraska, “couldn’t have laws that are farther from each other in terms of how they define marriage and family.”

Twenty states and the District of Columbia allow same-sex couples to obtain stepparent or second parent adoptions (which is what Glazer did), according to the American Civil Liberties Union. 

But in at least one state where they don’t, North Carolina, the existing legal parent would have to give up their parental rights for an adoption to occur. Same-sex couples are suing to overturn that ban. 

Courtesy of Statia Grossmam

Jenna Glazer , left, and Elise Bacolas with their daughter Maya when she was two days old.

“Many of our families carry huge packets of paperwork with them any time that they travel so they have their powers of attorney for each other, so that they have their guardianship papers or adoption judgments,” Deaton said. “Most families don’t think twice about proving that a child is theirs, but LGBT families are constantly in fear that they are not going to be able to do so.”

Deaton said her organization had found that the tough impediments to becoming parents for same-sex couples hadn’t dictated where they live. But Glazer, a director at a nonprofit helping young women with breast cancer, and Bacolas, a senior project manager at an online marketing firm, said they couldn’t imagine leaving their supportive corner of Brooklyn, where they recently joined a play group for same-sex families.

“... we hope for people to see that progress is going to happen whether they like it or not, and that it’s really time to stop thinking that it’s OK to discriminate against people,” Glazer said. “People are going to have families whether people agree with it or not. We’re going to love each other whether people agree with it or not. And instead of creating divisiveness and discord and anger and hate … be a part of a positive change.”

The couple is hoping that the shifts in attitudes toward same-sex families will come nationwide before Maya can understand the differences, and recent polls show that may already be taking place.

A Pew Research Center survey published Thursday found a steady increase in support for allowing gays and lesbians to adopt children, from 38 percent in favor in 1999 compared with 57 percent opposed, to 52 percent in support in 2012 and 42 percent against.

“In many ways divisions in views about gay adoption mirror those of gay marriage,” Pew said in its analysis. “People who believe that gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry legally also tend to believe gay and lesbians should be allowed to adopt children. And people who oppose allowing gays and lesbians to marry often also oppose allowing them to adopt.”

Support for same-sex marriage has continued to grow, too. In May, a Gallup poll found that 50 percent of Americans believe same-sex marriage should be legal and bestow the same rights as traditional marriage, compared to 48 percent who don’t. It was the second time in the poll’s history that a majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage.

The Supreme Court is also expected to take up one of the few cases that have made it through the lower courts, where judges have separately ruled that California’s ban on gay marriage and denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples are unconstitutional.

But supporters of marriage between a man and a woman have vowed to continue to push for constitutional amendments that define marriage as such. They recently won such a vote in North Carolina in May, bringing to 31 the number of states that ban same-sex marriage, and are campaigning to overturn same-sex laws in Maryland and Washington.

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At the Bacolas-Glazer home on a recent evening, the couple alternately tended to Maya, who babbled and smiled often, and later watched her on a night-vision monitor after putting her in her crib as they talked about their path to parenthood.

On their first try at donor insemination a few months before same-sex marriage became legal in New York, Bacolas became pregnant. They began the adoption process when Bacolas was six months pregnant, and had to go through a home evaluation with a social worker, submit to a background check and supply letters of recommendation and good health (Glazer, a three-time cancer survivor, had to get a letter from her oncologist), among other things.

Though second parent adoptions are allowed in New York, making it less difficult compared to other states where it is not, it still was not a simple process and showed their commitment to having a child, the couple said.

“You have to go out of your way to create this family, and that just goes to show how much we want it and how much we fight to get here should speak volumes to the fact that we want … to have a family and we are a family,” Bacolas, 40, later said outside the court.

Jerry Ruotolo / Courtesy of Jerry Ruotolo

Glazer and Bacolas on their wedding day on July 24, 2011.

The couple said they hoped that such heated and hard discussions they hear in the national discourse today about same-sex families would soon be a thing of the past, or take on an increasingly positive tone, as Maya grows up. 

“When she is old enough to understand the news, if this discussion is still going on, I think it’s difficult not to take that personally. I don’t want her to grow up thinking that there’s something wrong with her family or that she has to be worried what if something happens to one of her mommies,” Glazer said. “I really hope she doesn’t have to hear it and feel that her family isn’t as good as another family because ... we are and she’s lucky, she’s got two parents who love her.”

Comments? Questions? You can email the reporter at miranda.leitsinger@msnbc.com

CINCINNATI -- Ohio officials are investigating a private adoption agency that helped place children with a man now accused of raping three boys in his care.

The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services tell the Associated Press on Friday that it's opened an investigation into ACTION Inc.
The investigation follows the arrest last week of a 39-year-old Troy man charged with three counts of rape and one count of compelling prostitution in Miami County. He also faces child rape charges in Montgomery County. Police accuse him of hiring out a 10-year-old boy for sex with other men.

If the state finds wrongdoing, it could revoke the agency's license. Messages for comment were left at ACTION's office in Dayton.

Two other men - 29-year-old Jason Zwick, of Beavercreek, and 31-year-old Patrick Rieder, of Dayton - have been jailed on related rape charges, based on the allegations that the adoptive father hired out the 10-year-old boy for sex.

Meanwhile, Ohio and Texas family services officials have been sharing details of the children's adoption from Texas. Texas authorities say the Troy man adopted three children - one of them a 9-year-old girl - in 2011 and was in the process of adopting the fourth.

Troy police said the man regularly had sex with the three boys at his home in a quiet residential neighborhood of ranch homes in this western Ohio city of some 25,000 people. They arrested him last week and seized items including a video camera and two wooden paddles in the master bedroom, along with four laptops and an iPod.

Texas authorities didn't release any other details on the children but said the adoption was handled through ACTION Inc. adoptions agency of Dayton. A Texas spokesman said Thursday that it appeared that proper procedures had been followed, including background checks on the adoptive father. Troy police say they don't know of any past criminal activity by him.

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