Adoption & Paternity 26 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes
Questions of who a child's parents really are, from illegal adoptions to paternity disputes.
- Season 2 · Episode 11
Abuse
A celebrity’s son dies chasing the tutor suspected of molesting him, and the investigation turns to his younger sister, whose string of injuries points to a home without attention or care.
- Season 3 · Episode 3
Stolen
A baby snatched from a grocery store leads detectives to a shady adoption lawyer and to a boy kidnapped in 1989, now being raised by a family that never knew.
- Season 5 · Episode 5
Serendipity
The deaths of a young mother and her newborn lead to a dermatologist with a hidden past and a child predator still at large.
- Season 5 · Episode 24
Poison
A mother accused of making her adopted daughter swallow detergent is acquitted by a judge whose past rulings Novak sets out to expose.
- Season 8 · Episode 5
Confrontation
A rapist who keeps returning to his victims is timing the attacks to their ovulation, and the only proof grows inside a victim who will not admit it.
- Season 8 · Episode 8
Cage
Two children found handcuffed in a crashed van lead the squad to a careless adoption broker and to foster parents whose coercive “rebirthing” therapy killed a nine-year-old girl.
- Season 8 · Episode 15
Haystack
A baby taken from his crib, a mother driven to suicide by a TV reporter, and a family DNA search that leads detectives to the boy’s real father.
- Season 9 · Episode 9
Paternity
A nanny’s murder exposes a marriage built on secrets and a boy whose father is not his biological parent, while Kathy Stabler’s baby arrives after a car crash.
- Season 11 · Episode 22
Ace
A pregnant rape victim who vanishes from the hospital leads SVU to a Bulgarian ring smuggling women into New York to sell their babies.
- Season 12 · Episode 1
Locum
A ten-year-old who stages her own disappearance reveals that her adoptive parents are remaking her in the image of the daughter they lost to a kidnapper years earlier.
- Season 12 · Episode 6
Branded
Revenge attacks on three men by a gifted hacker uncover a gang rape at a summer camp 14 years earlier, and the unit’s new ADA must prosecute the victim.
- Season 12 · Episode 22
Bang
A baby left in an alley leads SVU to his adoptive mother’s fiancé, who secretly sabotages condoms to father children with as many women as he can.
- Season 13 · Episode 3
Blood Brothers
A 13-year-old’s pregnancy leads SVU to the son of a powerful political family, and his murder exposes his father’s secret.
- Season 13 · Episode 4
Double Strands
Rollins links a New York rape to a serial rapist she chased in the South, but the suspect’s DNA cannot tell him apart from someone he never knew existed.
- Season 14 · Episode 7
Vanity's Bonfire
A toddler’s kidnapping by a woman claiming to be her birth mother uncovers a forged adoption and an affair that a Supreme Court candidate wants buried.
- Season 14 · Episode 17
Undercover Blue
When a woman says Brian Cassidy raped her years ago while he was undercover, his defense drags Amaro’s own undercover past into court.
- Season 14 · Episode 18
Legitimate Rape
A sports reporter raped and stalked by her cameraman becomes pregnant, and the man she accuses turns the trial and then family court against her.
- Season 15 · Episode 14
Wednesday's Child
A mother secretly gives away her troubled adopted son through an online broker, and SVU races to find him before his insulin runs out.
- Season 16 · Episode 15
Undercover Mother
SVU teams up with a mother who has spent three years posing as a madam to find her trafficked daughter, and runs into Declan Murphy working undercover in the same trade.
- Season 16 · Episode 23
Surrendering Noah
As sex trafficker Johnny D goes on trial, Benson discloses that he is Noah’s birth father, putting her adoption and the case at risk.
- Season 17 · Episode 8
Melancholy Pursuit
When a 15-year-old girl vanishes after swim practice and is found dead, a partial DNA match leads SVU through the secret children of a dead man.
- Season 19 · Episode 9
Gone Baby Gone
Noah is abducted from a Manhattan mall, and Benson discovers that his grandmother, Sheila Porter, planned the kidnapping.
- Season 20 · Episode 9
Mea Culpa
Stone is accused of a rape from his baseball days and asks SVU to investigate him, splitting the squad until the truth about that night emerges.
- Season 23 · Episode 13
If I Knew Then What I Know Now
A young woman who has just met her birth mother asks SVU to find the man who raped her mother at a teenage party 18 years earlier.
- Season 24 · Episode 9
And a Trauma in a Pear Tree
Benson’s Christmas trip to introduce Noah to his half-brother turns into an off-duty hunt for the men filming guests at her motel, as Rollins prepares to leave SVU.
- Season 26 · Episode 16
Let Me Bring Pardon
Ellie Hughes, comatose since her boyfriend’s attack, turns out to be pregnant, and the timing points to a rape inside the hospital.