7 Celebrities Who Put Their Children Up For Adoption

Find out what happened to these famous parents…

When Rod Stewart was just a teenager, his girlfriend became pregnant and since he was “absolutely stone broke,” the couple decided to put the little girl up for adoption. She was named Sarah Streeter by her adoptive parents and grew up not knowing about her famous father. Rod was able to meet her later in life and they kept in touch sporadically but after Sarah’s parents passed, Rod said he was making more of an effort to be in her life.

“She was put up for adoption when I was 17 or 18, I think,” Rod shared on The Joy Behar Show in 2010. “Since her mom and dad have died, we’ve tried to come together and be close together, and it’s working out pretty well. I never felt like I was her dad, because I didn’t take her to school, change her nappies, there was no paternal thing there, but I'm trying.”

When Roseanne Barr found out she was expecting her first child, she was just 17 years old and decided to give her up for adoption. When Roseanne later rose to fame, tabloids uncovered the adoption paperwork and tracked down her daughter Brandi Brown, who was a teenager at the time. Roseanne was thankfully able to personally connect with her daughter before it all made headlines.

“I went away to Denver and moved into a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers. My family wasn’t too supportive. I gave my baby up to the Jewish Family & Children’s Service in Denver. They said they had a couple that had waited seven years for a Jewish baby. But the day they came to take my baby away, I whispered to her, ‘You remember this, I’ll see you when you’re 18.’ I always knew that. I always knew we would get back,” Roseanne told People.

When David Foster was a young adult, he welcomed a daughter with a girlfriend whose identity hasn’t been made public. The couple decided to put the little girl up for adoption, but David was able to eventually reconnect with her later in life. She now serves as secretary to the Board, Director, Business & Stakeholder Relations of the David Foster Foundation.

Patti Smith was only 19 when she became pregnant with her first child. At the time, she was living in her parents’ laundry room and studying at Glassboro State Teachers College in New Jersey -- from which she was eventually kicked out. When neighbors started being judgmental towards Patti and her parents, she went to live with a surrogate family until she gave birth to her baby girl. Around 2010, she was able to reunite with her.

“I’ve reconnected with that child. She’s part of our family. She’s 57 years old. I brought her into the world, but I didn’t raise her,” she told The Times. “Now she is like family and friend -- it’s strong. She doesn’t live near me, but she’s certainly part of my world.”

Kate Mulgrew was 21 and had just landed her breakthrough role on Ryan’s Hope when she found out she was pregnant. Looking back, she says she was “alone and flooded with terror.” With no one to help her and not wanting to have an abortion, she decided to give the baby up for adoption. Her pregnancy was written into the show, and when she gave birth in 1977, she passed her daughter onto Catholic Charities. In the years that followed, she searched for the baby to no avail.

“Then, in 1998, by chance, I ran into the nun who supervised the adoption. For 20 years, Catholic Charities had refused to give me any information about my daughter. Sister Una finally relented and sent the adoption registry forms to both my daughter and myself,” Kate told AARP.

She continued, “Today, I see Danielle as often as I see my sons, and we have grown very close. She also has a close and loving relationship with my sons, Ian and Alec, her two half brothers…My daughter’s capacity for forgiveness is something I have never seen before in my life. That sense of abandonment was excruciating in her life. There is not enough time to make up for it, only enough time to love. We cried a lot. All we can do is move forward.”

Back in his early 20s, David Crosby and a girlfriend welcomed a little boy. Shortly after his birth, the infant, named James Raymond, was put up for adoption. Three decades later, James sought out information about his birth parents, discovering David was his famous father. At the time, he decided not to reach out, feeling that since he was also a musician, it would appear he was only reaching out for “selfish reasons.”

But in the 1990s, when David was ill and preparing for a liver transplant, James’ adoptive father decided to write a letter to the musician in the hospital.

“So I wrote a letter to David at UCLA Medical Center, where he was. I explained in the letter to David that we raised...the little boy that he gave up for adoption,” he told CBS News. “I felt obligated as one father to another. If David didn’t survive, how would I then feel, knowing that I’d harbored this from him? I would have to go on the rest of my life knowing that James’ biological father died without ever knowing this.”

David admits he had always wondered about James, and after his surgery, he reached out to connect. The pair have now gone on to create music together, even forming a jazz-rock band, CPR (Crosby, Pevar & Raymond). They’ve toured together and James wrote and produced David’s 2021 album, For Free.

Joni Mitchell was a young struggling musician when she found out she was pregnant with a little girl. With her boyfriend out of the picture, Joni ended up marrying a friend, folk singer Chuck Mitchell, in the hopes of being able to keep the baby. Unfortunately, the marriage quickly deteriorated, and at eight months old, Joni gave up the infant for adoption.

“The main thing at the time was to conceal it,” Joni told the Los Angeles Times of her pregnancy. “The scandal was so intense. A daughter could do nothing more disgraceful. It ruined you in a social sense. You have no idea what the stigma was. It was like you murdered somebody.”

Joni thought about her daughter for years and even wrote songs about her. In 1997, they finally reunited with the help of a fan who had started a website to find Joni’s long-lost daughter. Joni later told People that the hole she had in her heart was finally filled “the day I saw her again.”