Of course, Rieper didn’t take the situation sitting down. He had to defend his side and take a strong stance on the decisions he made. He argued that the birth mom had been extremely emotional when she gave him up for adoption, which was why he felt that it would have been unethical for him to simply thrust the paper in her face and force her to sign something that obviously pained her. For him, that was the ethical thing to do. He hadn’t considered the baby’s wellbeing back then. For the couple, he simply had to find a way to get out of the fix he was in.