How Birth Mothers are Paying the Hidden Costs of Adoption (with Gretchen Sisson)

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Introduction – 0:00

BLAIR HODGES: Hey everybody, a quick word before we begin. This episode explores a side of adoption stories that we don't hear about very often. We're talking about mothers who relinquish their child to adoption. How it happens and how it feels. So if you're an adoptive parent, I think some of the discussion might be hard to sit with, but I do think it's worth doing.

The book that we're looking at mainly focuses on systemic issues that shape the adoption system in traumatizing ways for these relinquishing parents. So the goal is not to criticize or attack adoptive families. It's to encourage us to imagine more equitable circumstances for the future.

We also talk a bit about abortion, so keep that in mind and take care of yourself as you listen.

And before I conducted this interview, I also reached out to some relinquishing mothers, and I want to say I'm really grateful to the ones who spoke with me on background to help get me oriented.

And with that, let's go.

BLAIR HODGES: Welcome back to Relationscapes. It's the podcast where we explore human identity and human connection in order to make the world a little better for everybody.

I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and our guide in this episode about adoption is sociologist Gretchen Sisson.

GRETCHEN SISSON: We have this idea that there are so many children in need of families. And in fact, when you look at the private adoption system, we have up to 45 families that are waiting for every infant available. So you have very, very high demand, very, very low supply. This is economics one. You have demand, low supply. This is going to be expensive.

And you're also incentivizing agencies, attorneys, brokers, advertisers to find more ways of generating supply, which is, of course, babies.

BLAIR HODGES: It's not just agencies, attorneys, brokers, and advertisers who want to generate more adoption supply. The US Supreme Court has joined the effort when they overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed states to ban abortion. Several justices pointed to adoption as the solution to forced birth. Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, herself an adoptive parent, said there are plenty of families ready and waiting to adopt.

But her argument leaves out a basic question. What happens to the people who give birth and then relinquish a child? What about the birth mothers? The justices ignore them. Sociologist Gretchen Sisson does not. She spent years interviewing women who placed their children for private adoption. And her research suggests that for many, relinquishment carries lasting trauma and pain, and that the so-called choice to relinquish often appears at moments of crisis, when women are broke, isolated, and stigmatized.

It's not much of a choice at all. She says adoption can create some loving families, but it's also a system shaped by unequal conditions that limit who has a real choice about it. Gretchen Sisson joins us to talk about her book, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, right now.

 

Who Is This Book For? – 03:06

 

BLAIR HODGES: Gretchen Sisson, welcome to Relationscapes.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Thanks for having me, Blair.

BLAIR HODGES: I imagine that this book is not going to be an easy read for people who have adopted children. Because I wouldn't necessarily call it a pro-adoption book, which might be surprising for some people to hear, because I think most people have a pretty positive view of adoption. It seems like a great way for families who can't have kids to grow, or for people who don't want to have kids to give a child up for adoption, or whatever.

And having read the book now, I see that's not necessarily the story that you're telling here. So what went through your mind as you were approaching a book about adoption? Did you have people who have adopted that you had to be like, okay, I have to kind of think about them as a potential audience here?

GRETCHEN SISSON: Well, I think it was very important that when I started doing this research, I didn't know I was writing a book. When I started doing this research, I was finishing my doctoral dissertation, which I never expected anyone to read. But I didn't come in with a certain set of political ideas about adoption.

The arguments that I make in the book are arguments that come out of the data, that come out of the experiences that my research participants shared with me. And my job as a researcher is to document what I have been told and what my research has shown me. And my job as a person is to frame that from a perspective of justice.

And if I'm making a call to action, or if I am depicting what types of calls to action should be made by people who are impacted, driven by that data, you know, that's my job as a person, right, is to bring that lens to the scholarship that I'm generating. None of my jobs are necessarily to uphold systems of power, even if people in my direct circles have benefited from them.

So it is an uncomfortable book for adoptive parents to read. I have heard from a lot of adoptive parents who've read this book a range of responses. And I will say adoptive parents that are open to this conversation, that are really willing to examine their own power, that are really willing to think carefully about what they have relied on to build their own family, they come away from it very committed to changing these systems for the betterment of their child.

I do have adopted people in my life. I have adopted families in my life. I'm not an adoptive. People often ask me, am I an adoptee? Am I a birth mother? Am I an adoptive mother? I'm not any of those things. But I do have people close to me that are all of those things.

And what I always say is being critical of the system of adoption can be a way that you express your love for the adopted people in your life. And that, in fact, your love for adopted people in your family, in your community, can be what animates calls to make a system that is more rooted in justice and autonomy and empowerment rather than the one that we're currently using.

BLAIR HODGES: One thing I would say to people who might be nervous about reading it, if they have adopted kids, is that nothing in this book implicates necessarily any particular individual about what's happening. It really takes a critical look at the system of adoption.

So I think if they can buckle down and kind of lean into that area of the discussion and not feel personal blame for the shortcomings of that system, then, like you said, I think people could be motivated by the book you produced.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Well, I think we all benefit from different systems of power in different ways, right? Whether that's racialized institutions and systems of power, class-based, gender. We all have, we all participate.

BLAIR HODGES: The clothes that we wear, the food we eat.

GRETCHEN SISSON: We are all complicit, to different degrees, in the inequities of this world. It's just a question of what we feel called and capable of commenting on and changing, and how we try to shift those systems more broadly. And so, as you said, this isn't a condemnation of individual adoptive parents.

And people, I think, often come to adoption because they believe it is a better way of forming families, because they believe it is altruistic, because they believe they are meeting a need. And for those people, I think it's actually really important to understand how the system of adoption actually functions, who it actually serves, and who actually holds the power, so that you can begin to understand where you fit in that.

 

Positive Adoption Language versus Honest Adoption Language – 07:33

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, let's talk a little bit about language before we continue. You have a really important discussion that you put in an appendix at the back, and I actually think it kind of represents the heart of the book itself. And it's how do we even talk about this? The kind of language we decide to use stacks the deck toward a positive view of adoption, or a negative view of adoption, or something somewhere in between.

In fact, there's even terminology for this. You talk about positive adoption language and honest adoption language. Explain the difference between those two and how that comes up in your book.

GRETCHEN SISSON: So positive adoption language—and I didn't make up these terms, right—but positive adoption language is a set of dictions and terminologies that adoption agencies have largely adopted. So, for low punitive, yes, of course, they have largely used and encouraged others to use them.

So they'll say that a mother places her child for adoption to imply a neutrality about that action, but also to imply a certain amount of agency, that they are choosing to place the child for adoption. And there's intentionality and care there. They'll refer to mothers as birth mothers. They'll generally refer to adoptive mothers just as mothers, occasionally as adoptive mothers. So it's really about upholding the primacy of the adoptive family.

Honest adoption language—and I'm putting that in quotes, because I think these are all kind of loaded—but whether or not any of these are honest depends on the reality you're trying to communicate, which I think varies depending on your position here.

BLAIR HODGES: Positive to who? Honest to who?

GRETCHEN SISSON: Right. So, honest adoption language was kind of coined in response to this positive adoption language agencies were using. And honest adoption language would refer to a birth mother as a natural mother, a first mother, or just as a mother. It would refer to an adoptive mother always as an adoptive mother, sometimes as an adopter, if they don't want to affirm the parenthood of that person or that individual.

Rather than placing for adoption, it'll use the term surrendering. And rather than choosing adoption, it would talk about being forced. It brings in a greater sense of coercion that you see at play. There's also a lot of language about whether you call the adopted person an adopted person or an adoptee. A lot of adopted people have different feelings about that, as you'll see.

BLAIR HODGES: Or like adopted child, right?

GRETCHEN SISSON: Adopted child.

BLAIR HODGES: Some of these people are adults, right?

GRETCHEN SISSON: Oh, that's the adopted child.

BLAIR HODGES: They're like, "I'm 40."

GRETCHEN SISSON: Yeah. And I think a lot of positive adoption language does focus on the babiness or the childness of the adopted person without acknowledging that they are going to be adopted for their entire life.

There are certain ones I use pretty carefully in my own writing and my own speaking. You know, I use adopted people. Most adopted people are okay with the word adoptee, but some aren't. And so adopted people, I think, doesn't imply a juvenile quality as they get older, but it also just affirms their personhood and who they are as they grow.

Some adopted people feel that adoptee suggests they are part of a transaction. And I think that's quite true, but they want to resist that in some ways. I mean, I use the words people use to describe themselves. So most of the women I interviewed would describe themselves as birth mothers. Some describe themselves as first mothers, natural mothers, mothers of adoption loss. When they had specific terminology they preferred, I used that when talking about their stories.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

GRETCHEN SISSON: The biggest language choice I made, of course, is the title is Relinquished. And I think relinquishment—and I use the term "relinquishing mothers a lot..."

BLAIR HODGES: I'd never heard it before I read your book, by the way.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Well, look, I didn't use that in the recruitment materials for participants, because if you said relinquishing mothers, people don't generally identify that way. They think of birth mother because a lot of them first come into that identity when they're interacting with adoption agencies.

BLAIR HODGES: And they gave birth too, so, yeah.

GRETCHEN SISSON: And so I go back and forth. I use all of these terms. But I think relinquishment implies a sense of constraint, if not coercion, that I found in a lot of the stories. But it also has some ambiguity, right? You can relinquish something of your own volition. You can relinquish something because you are forced to surrender that thing in a relinquishment.

And so I think it gives a range of those connotations, with probably more of the connotation that there is some pressure on this choice. There is a lot limiting your full autonomy in making this choice. And that's really what I wanted to convey with the title.

 

Gender Identity and Scope – 12:22

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And we'll unpack that more as we go. And I should note, you conducted over 100 interviews with women over a 20-year span. You were focused mostly on private domestic adoption. And also there are gender identity issues, too, when we talk about labels, because not everybody would identify as a mother. I think in your surveys or in your interviews there was one nonbinary person that you, at least that you knew of, that you interviewed, and no dads.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Well, it gets a little complicated who I interviewed and who actually ended up in the book.

BLAIR HODGES: Let's do it.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Yeah. So I did interview some fathers at first, and I didn't end up including them in the book for a number of reasons. One is there were fewer than five of them. They were facing a difference. And all of the fathers that I interviewed were still partnered with the mothers that I was also interviewing.

And so I felt like—it was just my lens, as someone who is coming at this from a reproductive justice perspective, a feminist perspective—I felt the story I wanted to tell was really one that was particularly about motherhood in that way. And so I ended up putting the data from the interviews with the fathers aside.

And they're not included in the book. But I did that data collection, right? I know their stories. I have that kind of in the back of my mind as I'm writing, as I'm thinking about fathers and kind of what future research questions could be.

There was one person that I interviewed. At the time they gave birth, they identified as a woman, as a mother. By the time I interviewed them, they identified as nonbinary, using they/them pronouns. And by the time the book came out, he had fully transitioned and was using he/him pronouns and now identifies as a trans man.

And I asked him, as I was doing final revisions on the book, how he wanted to be described. And he said he still thinks of himself as a mother for that child, and he was comfortable with the word mother being used to describe him. And so we kept it at describing him as a nonbinary person, because that's who he was at the time of the interview.

And so I use the word mother specifically and intentionally in a way that still feels—he still feels—included by that. But, man, it's tricky.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm glad you were clear in the book that that was kind of your scope, because you do have to make a decision about it. And you do. There are calls for more research, and there obviously are more people doing this kind of work. So for the purposes of this interview, this gives people a sense of what we're going to be talking about today and what might not get focused on as much.

 

The Long History of Family Separation in the US – 15:12

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's turn to the first chapter of the book, “Where Do Babies Come From?” Because here you place adoption into a larger conversation about family separation in US history. Not necessarily just about adoption, but about what families are worthy, who gets to have families, what families need to look like. So you go back to enslaved Black women and Indigenous women whose children were taken away. So why start there?

GRETCHEN SISSON: For this conversation broadly, I wanted to help the reader understand that throughout American history, families have been separated for many different reasons. They're not mutually exclusive reasons, but it could be reasons of economic gain, right? And that can either be because there's a value on the child themself or because of the labor of that child.

And so when you look at American enslavement, there is a value on the labor of the child. When you look at the orphan trains—which shipped poor, usually immigrant children from East Coast families to the Midwest, and most of them actually had living parents—that was often done for the value of their labor.

There's also separating families as a threat, right? A way of extracting obedience, a force of social control for parents. This, of course, you also see in enslavement, right? The threat of being sold away from their children, having their children sold away from them, was a way of rendering enslaved people more and more powerless.

You also see this, of course, in the separation of Native parents from their children and their sending to boarding schools. And you see this today in the criminal justice system and in family policing, the child welfare system, where the threat of family policing really is a way of socially controlling certain populations, particularly Black people.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And you'd find Black women relinquishing because of the threat of child protective services taking away other children they have, for example.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Exactly. And then the last one that is really most directly tied to the Native boarding schools is genocide and assimilation, right? That separating children is a way of breaking a culture.

And you see this in American history through the Native schools, but you see this happening today in Russia, which is taking Ukrainian children and raising them as Russian. Right? This is a tactic of war—family separation as a way of not just breaking a spirit, but breaking a cultural continuity.

And so you have all of these different forces. And I think in private domestic adoption today, you see all of these coming up, right? You see the intersections with family policing and child welfare. You see the money that is being made and the market demand for children.

You see some of this cultural assimilation idea, the idea of transracial adoption as kind of this post-racial idea that removes children of color, particularly Black children, from their communities and families of origin and places them in overwhelmingly white spaces.

So you see all of these at play. And I think it's very easy to think, oh, adoption today doesn't have anything to do with enslavement 350 years ago. And for the most part that's true, right? A lot of the forces are very, very different.

But I think it's important to understand that the reasons for family separation endure in a lot of important ways. And those systems—today's family policing, child welfare system—come out of this Jim Crow state that came out of enslavement. And these patterns that we see that are still separating families are not wholly independent from these histories.

 

The Rise of the Adoption Industry – 18:43

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And like you said, it's really hard to sum up that history. I'm sure I'll do other episodes, and there are other books, including your book, that go into more detail. But effectively, we moved from a system where people were commodities—children were commodities for what they could produce. Then they became commodities themselves as something families wanted. Families wanted babies. We entered this era where now the adopter was going to pay for this to happen, and there's a rise of today's adoption industry. How did we get here?

GRETCHEN SISSON: Viviana Salzer, who is a sociologist at Princeton, wrote a book called Pricing the Priceless Child. And it traced, at the beginning of the 20th century, this shift from valuing children because of the economic value they provided a household to valuing children because of their intrinsic value—the value of being a parent and having children.

And I always say, you know, I have three children. Literally none of them contribute anything economically to my household, right? I didn't have them because I have domestic labor that I need done. It would be nice if maybe they could get the clothes in the hamper. But that's the bar we're at at this point.

No one's doing farm labor. No one's doing domestic work, right? They're not adding value to our household.

BLAIR HODGES: At this point, apprenticing them out for—or maybe getting a bride price.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Well, you know, they're still young, so we'll maybe keep that one on the table for the future, but not yet.

And so I think that was a big cultural shift, where people began having children not because they were of economic benefit—they started having fewer children because they weren't of economic benefit—but they had them because they wanted to be parents. They wanted to raise a child. That was a project worth engaging in, that had its own inherent value.

Around the same time, a woman named Georgia Tann, who ran the Tennessee Children's Home, started developing this idea of private adoption as we practice it today. And so I think it's really important for people to understand that we think of adoption as an institution that has always existed.

Now, children have always had external care outside of their immediate biological families. But adoption as it exists today is about 120 years old.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

GRETCHEN SISSON: And I think this is not something that has endured throughout American or even human history. This is a practice that's relatively new. And what Georgia did was basically steal children.

She would steal children from poor families. If a poor family brought a very sick child to the doctor, she would take the child and tell the family they had died. If children were dropped off at school, she would just pick them up and tell their families they had been taken to a better home.

She was persistent and egregious and extremely Machiavellian in her intelligence. So she would facilitate adoptions for people with a lot of power. She facilitated adoptions for the governor of New York. She facilitated adoptions for celebrities, actresses in Hollywood.

Right? People who had the ability not just to shape the laws around adoption, but to shape the stories that were told about adoption and the way we were thinking about adoption.

And so right at the same time as people are beginning to value children for the sake of having children, you have this person who's coming in and creating a for-profit system and who has the ability to bring in these really powerful people and make them deeply committed to this as an institution.

There's a brilliant book on Georgia Tann called The Baby Thief by Barbara Raymond. I really recommend it. And look, whenever you boil a critical moment in history down to one villain, you're oversimplifying a little bit. But this is about as close as you can get to one person really shifting the course of history around how we understand private adoption and how families are formed.

 

Reasons to Relinquish: A Better Life for the Kids? – 22:29

 

BLAIR HODGES: It's easy to see how this could catch fire and spread, because the same ideas people have today about adoption—you can see how they worked in that context.

Which is: this is giving these babies a better life. This is a better thing. These other families perhaps aren't even worthy of having these kids. And isn't this wonderful that we're placing them in these better circumstances?

And that's one of the justifications today people give for why adoption is necessary or why it's good. You write about this in the book, because this is giving children a better chance. And relinquishing parents are often told, yeah, don't be selfish, think about your child—without mentioning, of course, the negative side effects and the negative things that happen in an adopted child's life.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Yeah. I mean, I think that myth is not just one they're told, it's one many of them come to believe. Because most relinquishing mothers very much do want to parent their child, but they get to a point in their pregnancies where that feels very impossible.

And once they are interacting with an agency, the adoptive families' profiles seem to speak to all of the insecurities a relinquishing parent is experiencing.

So what might that look like? It might look like not having stable housing. Their partner or potential co-parent isn't present, or isn't supporting them, or isn't interested in parenting with them, or is entirely absent, or in some circumstances is abusive and dangerous to be around.

It might look like their own parents kicking them out of the house or saying, you can't live here anymore if you bring home a baby. It might look like not having stable work, stable income, a reliable car, a way of getting childcare—any of those pieces.

It might look like struggling to finish school and not knowing how to do that when you have a child.

And the agency will put in front of these mothers profiles that speak to all of those insecurities. So look at this potential adoptive family. Here's their gorgeous home in the suburbs, while you're dealing with housing insecurity. Here are pictures of not just their siblings and their nieces and nephews, but their own parents, who can't wait to be grandparents again.

All while you are partially in this situation because of the lack of support from your own parents. Um, here are their beautiful wedding pictures. They've been married 10 years, right? They are so excited to be parents.

And one of the formulas that's often used in these prospective parent profiles is to have—and they're usually heterosexual couples—but to have the husband write about the wife and the wife write about the husband and say, you know, I can't wait to see my wife as a mother. She was born to do this job. Or, you know, my husband is going to be such a great father. He's excited to teach the kids this, this, and this, right?

All the while, the expectant mother is without a partner, or without a trustworthy or reliable partner, and trying to figure out how to piece this together on her own. And so it's so easy to buy into the idea that what adoption is offering is a better life.

And they are often not just told that, but they are convinced of that. And rather than finding ways to offer them support to raise their child, which is what they often want, they are given a way of giving their child to someone else and told that's the best answer.

 

The Economics of Adoption – 25:49

 

BLAIR HODGES: I liked the stories you put between chapters because we really get to hear the voices of some of these moms directly for pages at a time. And more than one of them brought up money. And often it was an acute crisis. It was something immediate, like maybe they faced eviction or they couldn't afford to get an apartment or something like that.

And in a lot of cases, something like a couple thousand bucks actually would have made it work for them, right? You say that addressing their immediate financial needs and connecting them with government resources would have made it possible for them to mother when that is exactly what they wanted to do.

But instead, a lot of this money is being redirected to adoption agencies and to advertising for adoption and paying for abortion crisis centers, where they're pushing people away from abortion toward adoption, even though people that go there aren't necessarily only thinking of abortion.

So the money thing—really, when you take a look at what's being spent and how these prospective mothers could actually be helped in the short term—it's a tragedy. It's a tragedy.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Maybe this is a good moment to step back and talk a little bit about the economics on a broad level, because we have this idea that there are so many children in need of families.

And in fact, when you look at the private adoption system, we have up to 45 families that are waiting for every infant available. 

BLAIR HODGES: That stunned me.

GRETCHEN SISSON: It's massive. It's massive. And that's an estimate. But agencies I talk to say, well, we don't have 45 families for every baby, but at least 10, right? So even then it's at least 10 times the supply.

So you have very, very high demand, very, very low supply, right? This is economics 101. You have high demand, low supply. This is going to be expensive.

And you're also incentivizing agencies, attorneys, brokers, advertisers to find more ways of generating supply, which is, of course—AKA babies.

BLAIR HODGES: Babies.

GRETCHEN SISSON: And when you look at what agencies are spending money on, oftentimes they are spending more on marketing than they are spending on support for birth parents or even on legal fees.

This marketing is targeted advertising to vulnerable pregnant people. So I always say your phone, one, knows if you're pregnant; two, it knows where you are.

And so if you are pregnant and you're going to an abortion clinic, a methadone treatment facility, a public hospital—anything that implies that you are pregnant, poor, unsure, in a crisis—you are going to start getting advertisements for adoption agencies, prospective adoptive parents, adoption profiles.

Those are all going to start coming up on your social media. I get them, you know, because of the things I search in the course of my research. I get these ads all the time.

Especially—I was pregnant with all three of my children over the course of collecting this data—I would get them a lot when I was pregnant, and you'll see them pop up.

And as I say in the book, no mother is giving her child for adoption simply because of one Instagram ad. But it can provide the basis for connection, for desperation, for a sense of inadequacy, for an initial connection to an agency that keeps that ball rolling in that direction.

BLAIR HODGES: It plants the seed for a possible option.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Right. It's critical. And I think that's the important dynamic to understand.

People think adoption is expensive because of support for birth parents and lawyers, and that is not true. Adoption is expensive because there aren't enough babies out there. And so you have to pay all of these players to find a child.

And then when you look at the supply side, as you said, most of these mothers would have needed just a couple thousand dollars to stabilize their life.

And people push back on that, saying it costs a lot more to raise a child. And I know, right? Like, I am familiar.

But I think what they're saying is not, I need $1,000 to raise this child. It's, I need $1,000 for a security deposit on a new apartment. I need $1,000 for a used car so that I can get to work and childcare and move into an apartment further out that feels more affordable. I need $1,000 so I can get a crib and a car seat so I know how to get home from the hospital and I can create a space in my life for this baby.

BLAIR HODGES: Or finalize a divorce from an abusive partner or something.

GRETCHEN SISSON: And they're looking for this stopgap amount to navigate the current crisis they are having so they can get to the other side of that.

They're definitely going to need more support than that afterward, right? They're going to need the involvement of a robust social safety system to help with housing, food security, childcare, education—all of those pieces.

But what they're looking for is the amount it takes just to get from A to B. And they'll figure out how to get to Z later. But it's that early step that's broken, where the adoption system inserts itself.

 

Abortion, Adoption, and Options Counseling – 30:48

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's Gretchen Sisson. We're talking about the book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.

We've talked a little bit about why women relinquish. Let's talk about “options counseling.” This is also something that I learned about in your book that I hadn't really heard about before. So many of the mothers you describe throughout the book didn't really get options counseling.

It's a sort of counseling where a professional sits down and goes over the actual range of options a person faces when they're expecting a child and what they might do. Talk a little bit about options counseling. And I just want to point out that only seven states require it for adoption to happen, whereas 32 require counseling prior to abortion.

So the deck is stacked hard against real options counseling.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Yes. And I think this gets at the bigger abortion-versus-adoption question, because we have this idea that women are choosing between abortion and adoption when they're facing a crisis pregnancy or an unplanned pregnancy. And in fact, that really wasn't the case for most of the mothers I interviewed.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. This was another surprise.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Most of them didn't want to get an abortion at all. Some of them did, but most of them didn't want an abortion, didn't try to get an abortion.

They continued their pregnancies because they wanted to parent, and then that plan fell apart later in their pregnancy—well after the point at which they would have considered an abortion.

Some of them did try to get an abortion and they couldn't, and then turned to adoption when abortion was no longer a possibility. So adoption is really best understood as a position of constraint.

They want to parent, they can't make that path work. They wanted an abortion, they couldn't get one, and so now they end up with adoption.

Very rarely are they choosing between the two. I don't think any of the mothers were actually choosing between the two, which doesn't mean they didn't consider both at different points. But they weren't contrasting these two ideas.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, you point out in the Turnaway Study that there were 160 women who were denied abortions. They were too late or couldn't get one where they were. And then only 15 of those went on to relinquish their infants. The rest raised them.

That's a really small percentage when you think about it that way. That's 9%.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Nine percent, exactly. And my colleague Diana Foster, who ran the Turnaway Study—she wrote a book called The Turnaway Study, which I also really recommend—when we got this 9% finding, this was women who wanted to get an abortion, showed up to get their abortion, couldn't get one, were turned away.

Ninety-one percent of them were raising the child they gave birth to as a result of that denial.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

GRETCHEN SISSON: And Diana compares this number, this 9%, to the fact that 100% of these women didn't want to have a baby. And she's like, why is it so low?

And I compare the 9% to the half a percent of the overall birthing population that relinquishes, and I'm like, oh my gosh, it's astronomical.

And I think what it shows is that it seems high compared to the overall birthing population because as soon as you constrain choices, as soon as you take away choices, you can meaningfully drive up the adoption rate.

But if there is any other option available, people will not choose adoption. If they can find a way to parent, even after they've been denied access to an abortion, that is what they are going to do.

But to get to your question about options counseling more broadly, I think it's very hard for people who are struggling with what to do and how to do it to find places of support. So even really wonderful abortion clinics that provide really good care and counseling will often not do full options counseling. They'll do what's called abortion counseling.

That means they'll counsel a patient who comes in to see: are you wanting this abortion of your own volition? Is anybody coercing you? Do you feel comfortable and okay with this choice you've made?

They do enough counseling so the person can go through their abortion and not feel coerced or regretful after the fact. But a lot of those clinics are understaffed and underpaid and don't have a lot of space.

They don't necessarily have the time to sit down with someone. Or they're being closed down, and they increasingly do not exist in a lot of parts of this country.

They don't have time to sit down and say, oh, you don't really want to have an abortion, but you don't know how to parent. They don't have time to struggle with all that complexity. They just have time to do this: is the care we are about to provide you appropriate and suitable care for you? If not, go home and think about it. They don't necessarily have the capacity to do full options counseling.

Whereas adoption agencies—the counseling the mothers reported getting at adoption agencies—was often quite biased toward relinquishment. It was very much about promoting that.

BLAIR HODGES: Because that's their product.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Because that is their product. Exactly.

And there are a few spaces that are really good. There's an organization called All-Options that provides free talk-line counseling to talk through all of your options, just as it says, and to weigh those feelings.

There are a couple of abortion providers or adoption agencies that do really good work and full-spectrum options counseling. But it's a time-intensive process to say, well, let's think about what a parenting plan might look like. What kinds of support would you need? Here are the referrals. Here's how we can make that possible.

And so I think real options counseling is very hard to find. And as you say, in most states it's not required at all before an adoption plan is made.

BLAIR HODGES: I also remember there was one adoption agency that did really good options counseling, and then by the time you finished the book, they were closed.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Which says a lot. 

GRETCHEN SISSON: They didn't have enough babies because they were actually meeting people's needs.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. I feel like if agencies really took it that seriously, they would really harm their bottom line. And yeah, that's a market problem.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Well, the agency people often ask me about—like, what is a good agency to refer people to if we have a referral—there's an agency here. I'm in San Francisco, so I tend to point to them when I talk about this, because they're over in Oakland. It's called PACT Adoption Alliance. Their new executive director—she was the director of birth parent services, and now she's the executive director for the whole agency—is herself an adoptee and a birth mother. And so she really knows, she understands these experiences. She's worked with these families for a long time.

But what's unique about PACT is that adoption services facilitation is just one part of what they do. So a lot of what they do is providing lifelong support services for adoptive families and adopted people. And so if they didn't do any adoptions all of a sudden, or if they didn't happen, they would still have a business model of robust services that they are offering people.

They are not reliant on adoptions happening in order to keep the lights on and keep providing those other services. And I think that's really important.

BLAIR HODGES: And that's a choice in how they structured their business.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Yeah.

 

How It Feels in the Immediate Aftermath – 37:47

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, let's talk about what a lot of adoption agencies don't want to talk about very much, and also what isn't shown in a lot of the media depictions of adoption.

The media—like the TV shows we usually see—tend to focus on the adoptive family. So you see a mom in a hard circumstance, and then there's a heart-wrenching scene where she relinquishes the child, and then the family goes off and has their life. And the birth mother, or whatever term we use, drops out of the story at that point.

And your book says that's actually where we really need to lean in. What happens to the relinquishing parents after the adoption is finalized? They've had the baby, they've signed the papers surrendering any legal rights with regard to the child, and then they're kind of gone.

And your book walks alongside those women as they describe really excruciating pain and long-lasting trauma. There's a quote where you say the intense sense of loss and sadness immediately after the adoption came up in nearly every single interview. What are these women going through after they have relinquished their children?

GRETCHEN SISSON: I think there is a very, very profound grief and sense of mourning at that point for almost every mother that I interviewed, even ones who remained optimistic about the adoption.

Because they're also postpartum, right? And so they're dealing with the hormonal transition, which leaves mothers, even in the best of circumstances, deeply emotionally vulnerable at the same time that they have lost their child and they have very, very little support.

BLAIR HODGES: And their physical bodies too. They've just gone through it.

GRETCHEN SISSON: And if they had a strong support system around them, they would have their child, right? So anything that made them vulnerable to the adoption in the first place is also a limitation on the support and love they have around them after the adoption has occurred.

And so for some mothers, this was a very deep grief. For some, it was a depression that lasted quite a long time—postpartum depression. Some mothers began using drugs and alcohol very soon after their child was born.

That would often jeopardize the open relationship they might have with their child's adoptive family. But it was also sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like, "oh, well, good thing she didn't parent because now she's drinking. Good thing she didn't parent because now she's using drugs." When that was part of the loss and the trauma that had occurred, all without a support system.

BLAIR HODGES: Or she dropped out of school, or she lost her job.

GRETCHEN SISSON: And so I think there were a lot of vulnerabilities, a lot of them.

But I should also say—because I don't want to over-pathologize them—a lot of the mothers I interviewed were incredibly strong and resilient people. And that really acute grief they were able to power through.

That doesn't mean they were less traumatized. It might mean they had a partner around them that they could share that experience with. It might mean they could afford therapy. It might mean they had another child they were already raising that forced them to get through their day-to-day so they could move forward a little more.

So a lot of them made it through without some of these more dire outcomes, because human beings are resilient. We get through losses and traumas all the time.

For some of them, this was a very acute, immediate derailing. And for some, it was a lot of grief and a lot of mourning, but more temporary. That doesn't mean they weren't carrying the trauma with them in other ways over long periods of time.

 

How Open is Open Adoption? – 41:31

 

BLAIR HODGES: And you describe how open adoption is more common today than it used to be. So back when it was mostly closed adoptions, there was a lot of long-lasting trauma and pain.

The more open adoptions tend to have better outcomes, but there are still difficulties. And there's not a lot of coaching on how open adoption should work, either. And what I didn't know—again, so many things before I read this book—is that there really aren't legal agreements around open adoptions. This is at the discretion of the adoptive parents, and it's basically up to them what they want to do.

You say there are some big obstacles that come up in the relationships between a relinquishing parent and an adoptive family—things like money, politics, religion, and race. Give us a sense of the obstacles you would want a relinquishing mom to think about when she's thinking, well, it's an open adoption, so at least there's that. What's she facing?

GRETCHEN SISSON: Yeah, it's important to recognize that the closed adoptions of the past were also much more likely to be coerced adoptions. And so when we talk about closed adoptions and the trauma, it's hard to separate: were they traumatic because they were entirely closed, or were they traumatic because they were coerced? The answer is both. But it's hard to know which one of those factors was more crucial.

BLAIR HODGES: There you go, being so sociological. But go ahead.

GRETCHEN SISSON: But I think what's most important about openness today is that adoptions wouldn't happen if they weren't open. Mothers, for the most part, would not agree to an adoption if it meant they were going to lose contact entirely with their child.

That openness is a way of making adoption more appealing to mothers who are in crisis, because it lets an agency say, you're in the driver's seat. You can pick the parents. You're still going to know what's happening to your child. You're going to get pictures every birthday.

And there is a value to openness that's real for the mental and emotional health of the relinquishing mother and of the adopted person. And then there's also a marketing value of openness, and the industry relies on openness in order to facilitate any adoption.

Of the mothers I interviewed who wanted a closed adoption—first of all, there were only three of them—and they were in unsafe living environments. One was still living with her parents, and her father was not a safe person, in her judgment, to have a child around. She was still 16 and living with her father. So really, who we're taking care of in this situation is telling.

And for another, it was her partner who was abusive. So they viewed a closed adoption as the only way of guaranteeing the child's safety. They all wanted to open those adoptions once they achieved safety over a period of time.

And so I think it's important to think of openness in that way. One, it adds real value. But two, the industry now is premised on it.

But openness is very hard to navigate. And I always say openness can go very wrong. Because once the adoption has been legally finalized, birth parents do not have a legal right to see their child unless the adoptive parents allow it.

And so sometimes adoptive parents who have agreed to an open adoption will cut it off completely, or will limit contact in ways that are deceptive or manipulative.

In some states where there is some amount of legal enforceability to openness agreements, it might require the birth parent to have an attorney to enforce that agreement. It might require them to go in front of a judge and argue why they should have contact. And these are pretty high bars for a lot of mothers who are usually pretty poor to start with and don't have a lot of resources to spend on this.

BLAIR HODGES: It's also a big gamble, too. You go to court—like, that's it. Like, the family's going to want to connect with you again after that if you—

GRETCHEN SISSON: If you lose. Yeah. And do you want to put your child through that? A lot of them are weighing that, too. So even when they're enforceable, openness agreements are of dubious benefit to a lot of parents.

And so you have cases where the adoptive parents are not fulfilling what they said they were going to fulfill. But then you also have cases where adoptive parents move. Families move. Or they become estranged over time. Or kids just get busy and they don't have time to visit you for a year or two.

Or you have a shift in political belief that is hard.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Like the women who were evangelical and pro-life who then shifted their beliefs because of everything they went through, but their child is adopted into a highly religious family who now sees them as a bad influence they want to keep away.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Right. That was a pattern I heard a number of times. I would hear these stories and think, that's interesting that that happened to you. But it came up repeatedly.

Because a lot of these women were relinquishing their children because they came from conservative communities. That's part of the reason they didn't consider having an abortion. And in a lot of religious communities, adoption is not just a better life, but a way of saving the child.

It's a way of gaining redemption for becoming pregnant, for having a sexual relationship, for having a child without being married. And I saw that time and time again.

BLAIR HODGES: That's the LDS Family Services story, by the way. I have a Mormon background. They'll use this idea of a worthy family who can provide the family the church idealizes—a temple marriage, an eternal family.

And you can't do that. And part of your road to redemption will be relinquishing your child so they can have that. And that will also redeem you. You did this good thing.

GRETCHEN SISSON: And that's not just LDS. We see that in evangelical churches, in Catholic churches as well. And a number of the mothers would choose these deeply religious families to raise their child.

And then, as they moved away from the church over time, that would become another rift they had with their child and their child's adoptive family.

 

What About Regret? – 47:54

 

BLAIR HODGES: Some of them became pretty aware of the context in which they made the decision. People might ask how much they regretted it later on.

I think a lot of the women you spoke with seemed pretty forgiving of themselves because they could see they made the best choice they could make in those circumstances with the information they had, frustrated by a system that didn't provide them with other opportunities.

So perhaps there's regret and frustration, but not as much self-recrimination?

GRETCHEN SISSON: I mean, I think the recrimination piece is really complicated, because—and it gets into the regret piece. People often ask, do mothers regret their adoptions?

And regret was really, really hard for them to weigh, because so many of them would look back and be like, well, I didn't have any choice, so I can't regret it. Right? This situation was out of my hands.

And I think for those mothers, they could move away from that recrimination piece because they felt they had been so manipulated or coerced that they were able to give grace to their past selves.

But for a lot of other mothers, the regret question was complicated because I was asking them to choose between two different lives.

BLAIR HODGES: They couldn't know—would they have met their current partner if they—stuff like that.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Exactly. I mean, one mother I asked—she relinquished her first daughter, went on, got married, had another child. And I asked her, like I asked all of them, if they felt regret about what happened.

And she said—I think she put it really beautifully—she said, I don't know that I'd have the partner that I have and the child that I'm raising right now if I had made a different choice with my first pregnancy. But if I could create a world where I had all my children with me, that's the one I want.

And I think that really shows the struggle they're going through. It's hard to—how do you feel about a counterfactual? What if, what if, what if?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. We all do it about certain things in our lives, but the stakes seem pretty high when it's a human life.

GRETCHEN SISSON: That desire to have your family together, one way or another, was what was really underlying.

 

Coming Out of the Fog – 50:03

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for that added context, because I don't want to give people the impression that there's one singular story. There obviously isn't. And it is really complicated when you start to get into what regret even is, or counterfactuals.

Like you said, you had the opportunity in your research to talk to a lot of women kind of around the time they relinquished, and then 10 years later. So you got to see how those stories change.

The story a woman tells in the wake of relinquishing a child isn't going to be the same story she tells 10 years later. And there were patterns. There were cycles.

Women often experienced that immediate sorrow and trauma, then moved into what you call a honeymoon phase, where they're trying to do their best—especially in open adoptions—to have pictures, to feel love toward their child, and maybe to be connected to the adoptive family.

And then a lot of them would move through what they would call coming out of the fog, where they sort of wake up, and the honeymoon goes away.

Reading their stories and seeing that cycle—I think it's one of the most powerful things your book does—is showing that there are a lot of different stories about adoption.

But you've got to listen to when those stories are being told, who's telling them, and what the purpose is. Are they doing advertising for an adoption agency? Are they on a message board talking about difficulties they had?

And by the way, I think this is part of the problem. We don't get a lot of these stories because being vocal about it can jeopardize their connection with their kid.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Absolutely.

BLAIR HODGES: So we also have incentives against the telling of some of these stories, and against people being more critical of the adoption system itself, because that can put their relationships under threat. It's rough.

GRETCHEN SISSON: I think that was actually really telling. So many of my participants had a lot of questions about anonymity and how I was going to keep their stories as confidential as possible, because they knew speaking critically about their experiences could jeopardize their relationship with their child. And I took their confidentiality seriously. You can't ever guarantee it in a research project, but I was as careful as possible in the stories, in what I shared, and how I chose to share them.

A lot of the mothers talked about this in different ways. I started the research in 2010, kind of the heyday of message boards. And I found a lot of participants through message boards. I would interview a couple mothers, and then they would go post on the message boards to tell people to contact me, which was great.

BLAIR HODGES: Snowball effect.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Snowball effect, yeah. And a lot of them talked about how, because there were so few spaces of support that birth mothers could find, they found each other on these message boards.

They gave a lot of support and care, particularly for mothers who had relinquished very recently and were in that immediate grief period.

BLAIR HODGES: It's probably Facebook groups now.

GRETCHEN SISSON: It's probably Facebook groups now. A lot of them are closed. I'm not in them, but they're closed, which is appropriate.

But the agencies hosted the message boards. So if anybody got critical on the message boards, they would get deleted. And now the message boards no longer exist.

I remember a number of mothers told me that agencies briefly started allowing expectant mothers who were considering adoption to join the birth mother message boards. They quickly stopped doing that because mothers would come on and say, I'm thinking about adoption. What should I do? And everybody would say, don't. Don't do it.

So you had to have a completed adoption to be part of the support group on the message board. And then eventually the agency shut them down because the voices became too critical.

Mothers talked about this in another way, too. Agencies will often have a panel of birth parents come before prospective adoptive parents to talk about adoption. And mothers would tell me that when they were in that honeymoon period, they would get invited back again and again—for panels, to make videos, for social media content.

And then as soon as they started having more complicated feelings, they would stop being invited.

 

Relinquishing Moms Want Changes – 54:21

 

BLAIR HODGES: What things would they start complaining about? What did they want to see change?

GRETCHEN SISSON: Yeah. I mean, they would say they were really struggling with the open adoption, right? That they hadn't seen their kid in a while, and they were frustrated or angry about that because they had been told they were going to be more involved in their child's life, that they were going to have more contact with them.

Most birth mothers in open adoptions do want to have more contact. Over 70% want to have more contact than they are currently getting in the open adoption agreement. So that's very common—a very common frustration.

BLAIR HODGES: They might even say they didn't like how the agency handled it to begin with. They were maybe given promises or assurances that didn't pan out. They might see resource disparities, too.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Just a few. Just a few.

But they would also say that a lot of them would see their child struggle in some ways with being adopted. This is particularly true—they didn't expect that. That did not come up when they were talking about adoption. And they would be disappointed or frustrated with that.

That came up the fastest for children in transracial adoptions.

BLAIR HODGES: That's something options counseling could go over, among many things—

GRETCHEN SISSON: Yeah.

And so if they brought up any of these pieces—say, you know, my kid is biracial, Black and white, and they are in a fully white community, and they don't have any contact with their Black family, they don't have any other Black kids at their school—and I'm really frustrated with how the adoptive parents are handling this—that would be a problem.

One of the mothers I interviewed, her son ended up being neurodivergent, and she felt that his really conservative adoptive parents didn't quite know how to handle that and were responding by being really strict with him and authoritarian with him.

And she was really—I mean, she wouldn't say they were abusive, but she said very clearly, that is not how I would parent him or how I would have chosen for him to be parented.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And she'd have to feel completely helpless in that, because she doesn't have any—

GRETCHEN SISSON: Right to intervene at all.

I think a lot of them also saw their child's desire for them. They saw that their child wanted to be with them more. This was particularly true for mothers who had other children. Their relinquished children would want to be in more contact with their siblings.

One of the mothers I interviewed had a son she was raising and got pregnant very, very quickly with another baby. I think the boys were about 13 months apart. And she just didn't have the capacity to care for another baby.

And so she ended up relinquishing her second son and lived in the same neighborhood as the adoptive family. The boys went to school together.

Her son who was adopted had a family that was much more financially well off, while she was struggling as a single mom. And she saw the boys trying to maintain this friendship.

The son she was raising was really jealous that his brother had the new shoes, had the family vacation every year, got to do all these cool birthday parties, whatever.

And the son she had relinquished was jealous that her other son had her.

And she actually kind of stepped back. When I interviewed her, she hadn't talked to the son she had relinquished for about a year. The boys were both teenagers when we spoke.

He was really struggling with interacting with her. And so the open adoption was really just between the brothers at that point.

She stepped back because she wanted them to be able to prioritize their relationship without her inserting herself, recognizing that for him—the son she had relinquished—his most important relationship was his brother at that point.

And so I think you see all these ways that adoption can become very, very complicated, even when all parties mean well.

And there are plenty of times when not all parties mean well, when parties are not showing regard, respect, or love for everybody that's present.

 

Reproductive Justice – 58:35

 

BLAIR HODGES: And for the system to change, people have to ask for that and demand that.

There are some groups of adopted people who kind of lead the charge there. We talked about factors of why relinquishing parents might be less likely to do that.

But also, the same factors that led them to relinquish would probably make them less likely to get politically active—things like levels of education, poverty, exhaustion, shame, fear of losing contact with their kids, et cetera. So if the system is going to change, we need to think about what changes you'd like to see happen and who's going to lead there.

And you introduce readers to a lens of "reproductive justice." This is a way of thinking about society, relationships, and individuals through a lens of equality and fairness, a lens that tries to get exploitation out of the equation. I wanted to close with a discussion about what you think needs to change in the overall system, through that reproductive justice lens.

GRETCHEN SISSON: So reproductive justice as a movement and as a theoretical lens is largely a response to reproductive rights as a framework for change. Reproductive rights is about legal rights and access to make different reproductive choices. Reproductive justice is really about the circumstances of people's lives that give them control and autonomy over their reproductive choices.

So you can have the legal right to have an abortion or not have a legal right to have an abortion, but if you can't afford an abortion you want to have, or you can't afford to parent a child you do want to parent, or you don't have a safe home or community to raise your child in, then you don't really have a choice. Right?

And the thinking of reproductive justice came out of Black feminist thought. And it is a really crucial lens, I think, for understanding this. And this is actually where the whiteness of private adoption has siloed it from a lot of reproductive justice thinking.

Because the market demand for so long in private adoption was for white babies. That is no longer the case. So we are now seeing more and more women of color disproportionately participating in the private adoption system.

And they have long been targeted in the public adoption system, which is foster care, because we know those families are policed to a far greater degree. So you have a lot of advocacy led by adopted people in the private adoption space, and a lot of advocacy led by impacted parents in the family policing space.

And I think we are seeing an increasing breaking of these silos, because the same systems of family separation are working in all these different ways. And I think that is where the movement is going—how do we bring a lens of reproductive justice, economic reform, and social reform together to really build systems that support families from the ground up?

And this is why when people talk about, well, what does a family preservation agenda look like, I always say, well, the good news is it's going to impact millions more families that aren't impacted by adoption or family separation anyway. Because it's just about building a social safety net.

It's about making sure people have access to housing, childcare, food stability, living wages—all of these pieces that allow people to navigate their lives. And we have made policy choices that make parenthood untenable for people.

And that's where you see separations, both public and private ones. And I think the real momentum is building in that space to reframe how we're thinking about care and safety and support.

 

The Adoption Abolition Movement – 01:02:23

 

BLAIR HODGES: I think more progressive-minded people are likelier to pick up this charge. But there are still some obstacles there.

You describe pro-choice feminists who, for example, love the idea of chosen family. They love that this is an option for queer couples. They honor adoptive families as legitimate families.

And they might not take a step back and look at the economic conditions and the considerations we've raised here. So reproductive justice requires us to take a further step back, to zoom out, and think about the privilege operating within the system of adoption and to interrogate it from there.

And there are some people who outright advocate to abolish the adoption system in general. This is where I wondered about your role, because you're a social scientist. You try to separate personal feelings from what you report. But you also have a kind of advocacy role.

So you have preferences about what kinds of policies you'd like to see happen, I imagine. Do you talk about those? Do you take a side between people who say we just need to reform the system versus people who say the system is already too unequal and we need to do away with it?

GRETCHEN SISSON: Yeah. I mean, I think there are reforms that can be done in service of creating real change to the system. And then there are reforms that are just about putting a Band-Aid over things in ways that allow the system to endure.

And I am more interested in reframing how I think about this on a fundamental level. And I think the idea of abolition—and this is not just about adoption, but when we talk about prisons, when we talk about poverty, these deep, entrenched social structures that we believe are immutable and inevitable.

When we talk about abolition, it's not just about making adoption illegal. No one is arguing we should make adoption illegal. It's about building systems that replace the ones we have that aren't serving the people they claim to serve.

And Ruth Wilson Gilmore talks about abolition as being about presence, not absence. It's not about just getting rid of something. It's about building something else instead.

And that's where, when we talk about social safety nets, systems of care, kinship care, and rethinking more broadly how we understand safety for children and support for families, and how we piece that together—that's what the abolition vision is.

I include advocates in the last chapter who are adopted people themselves, doing this work to reframe adoption from a reproductive justice lens and to envision what abolition could look like. I obviously find a lot that is deeply appealing about their model.

And I think that is the advocacy we should be listening to most closely—people who have lived this, who have lived the impacts of this system their entire lives, and who want to imagine ways we can create a better world.

Even if I am more comfortable with a more reformist or incremental approach, I think the lives and stories of impacted people should always be our North Star in terms of what we are moving toward. That's why I wanted to end the book there.

BLAIR HODGES: Before we get to regrets, challenges, and surprises, I want to share what was maybe my biggest surprise in this book. I expected women and relinquishing parents to go through real trauma and difficulty, but that over time they could heal. And a lot of them do, in a sense. They continue to live their lives and so on.

But when it came to their attitude about the adoption itself—not a single one of them, according to your research, said they were happier later on because of that choice. None of them said they felt better about making that choice over time. And out of all the women you interviewed, only two said they basically felt the same. The rest had come to feel worse about it.

And to me, like you said, the North Star guiding adoption policy ought to be the real lived experiences of the people who are doing the relinquishing and the people who are being adopted. The people who are being adopted, as we talk about in other episodes, have a lot of difficulties they go through. And the people who are doing the relinquishing don’t report being happier about it in the end.

That was a big surprise to me, honestly. And maybe it shouldn’t have been? I don’t know.

GRETCHEN SISSON: I mean, I think we have to let go of the idea that the way we are currently practicing adoption is about meeting the needs of children and families of origin.

We have to recognize that the way the current adoption system is built is entirely about generating money and income for brokers and about meeting the needs of adoptive families.

BLAIR HODGES: And for some, they think it will decrease abortions. And the research shows that’s not true.

The Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade tried to make it all about adoption—like, isn’t this great for adoption?—and it’s just not true. As we’ve pointed out, when people face a choice, they would much rather keep a child or abort a child than relinquish a child. So the solution to abortion the Supreme Court is trying to push through—it’s just not there.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Well, and obviously I’m bringing a left-of-center approach to my work, right? Because I believe that’s where the data takes you, especially when you look at public health data on the safety and legitimacy of abortion care.

From that sense, it’s a deeply political lens, and that’s who I wrote the book for. I’m writing for people who believe two premises. One, that people deserve reproductive autonomy. And two, that poor people are capable of being good and loving parents, and that poverty deserves support. That poverty doesn’t automatically disqualify you from parenting. Those are the two core ideas the argument is built on.

If you don’t agree with those things, that’s fine. I’m not really talking to you. You can read it, and I hope you’ll get something out of it. But I’m trying to build an argument for people who share those starting points but still don’t understand adoption very well, or don’t see how adoption fits into those ideas.

The argument I offer to people on the right, and to people who disagree with me on abortion, is that if you actually want to prevent abortions, building support for parenting is the fastest way to do that. Instead of putting money and resources into promoting adoption, the best way to dissuade people from getting abortions is to make parenting feel like a path they can actually take. That’s family preservation. That’s the common ground.

For so long, both pro-choice and anti-abortion camps have tried to make adoption the common ground. Instead, parenting is—and always should have been—that common ground.

BLAIR HODGES: And I think we can recognize pretty quickly what’s stopping them from doing that. I think it boils down to racism and anti-queer sentiment in general—this idea that these families aren’t worthy of having these kids. There are fears about race replacement and all kinds of other things we talk about in other episodes.

So it’s not entirely "irrational," so to speak, for them to reject this obvious solution, which is supporting moms—because they don’t want to support those moms.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Right. Because they’re not being honest about what they’re trying to accomplish.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: All right. Well, that’s Gretchen Sisson. We’ve been talking about her book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.

She’s a qualitative sociologist who studies abortion and adoption at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at UC San Francisco. One of the longer titles, Gretchen, I think I’ve seen here— [laughs]

GRETCHEN SISSON: It’s a lot. It’s a lot of words!

BLAIR HODGES: But it’s a very important title, too.

I really urge people to check the book out, because you’ll get first-person accounts interspersed throughout the chapters. This is kind of what I try to do on Relationscapes, so I wanted to talk with you from the sociological standpoint, because that’s the strength you bring. We’ll have other episodes where we talk directly to relinquishing parents so we can hear from them more directly. But if people want to do that right now, check out the book Relinquished. That’s where you can get these first-person accounts. It’s terrific.

Gretchen, thanks so much for putting this book together and for getting these voices out there.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Thank you, Blair.

BLAIR HODGES: We’ll be right back with "Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises" after this.

 

Pod Recommendation: What Your Therapist Thinks – 01:11:51

 

BLAIR HODGES: Hey, everybody. I wanted to take a quick second to say that if you're enjoying this show, I have another podcast that I think you might enjoy. It's called What Your Therapist Thinks.

This is a mental health show where actual licensed therapists come on and open up about what they're really going through, what they're thinking about as you're sitting across from them.

And if you haven't been in therapy, or you haven't been in a while, I think the show will give you a really nice inside look at what to expect and the kind of insights you can get from therapy—on things like performance anxiety and why people cheat, what people-pleasing really looks like and how to deal with it, what's up with ketamine therapy, and a lot more topics besides.

So two things kind of make this a standout show for me. The first is that co-host Felicia Keller Boyle is a licensed therapist. So I like having somebody who's trained and has professional obligations on board to speak to the best thinking in the field and to kind of do best-practices-type stuff.

Right? I put a lot of stock in people who have that kind of training and background.

And also her co-host, Christy Plantinga, is sort of a stand-in for people like me. I'm not a therapist. I'm not trained, but I'm interested in mental health. That's kind of what Christy does for the show.

They're a dynamic duo, and I really love the conversations they have with other licensed mental health professionals they bring on in each episode.

So if that sounds like something you'd be interested in, again, I recommend you check it out wherever you get your podcasts. It's called What Your Therapist Thinks.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:13:06

 

BLAIR HODGES: We're back with Gretchen Sisson talking about the book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.

We always close with "Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises." It’s a choose-your-own-adventure for our guests, where they can talk about something they'd change about the book now that it's out in the world, what the hardest part about putting the project together was, or something that really surprised them in the course of making it.

Gretchen, take your pick.

GRETCHEN SISSON: I mean, I think one regret—and I remember at my first book event, someone asked me, what isn't in the book that you wish was in the book? And I was like, everything's in the book. I said it all. Everything I needed to say.

And now, almost a year and a half later, I have a very different answer.

The one thing that I think is missing—not that there aren't many things missing in the book—but one thing...

BLAIR HODGES: There's only one!

GRETCHEN SISSON: There's only one!

One of the things I think is missing, that I wish I'd engaged with more, is that I don't really talk about disability, and the way disability is used as grounds for taking children, separating families, or dismissing people's ability to parent.

It didn't come up. And there were a lot of mental health challenges that came up—postpartum psychosis, some other mental health diagnoses—that I write about in the book. But none of my participants really brought up physical disability or those sorts of issues. And I do wish I had been able to explore that more.

There's a really great book called Unfit Parent by Jessica Slice, and I really enjoyed reading that. I learned a lot from it. And that's something I'm going to be thinking about in future research, because I think—interestingly—she's an adoptive mother as well.

So I think there's a lot of conversation to be had around the ways disabled people rely on adoption to build their families, as well as how their own parenthood is policed and regulated in different ways. I wish I had included that in some capacity. It didn't come up in my data collection, which is why it was missing, but I feel like I could have explored it more in other ways. And that's a regret I have.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm really glad you mentioned that. In fact, I'll recommend right now what I call a Fellow Traveler episode—conversations connected to this discussion. We actually spent time with Jessica Slice earlier this year talking about Unfit Parent, so people can check out that episode, as well as the book.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Oh great!

BLAIR HODGES: And we also had an episode with Eliza Hull. She compiled a book of essays by disabled parents, and this comes up there as well.

So I'm really glad you mentioned that, and I agree—it definitely fits into this conversation. And no book can cover it all. Ableism kind of sneaks under the radar sometimes, too.

Gretchen, thanks a ton for spending the time talking with us about Relinquished. I highly recommend this book. It's terrific. Are you working on anything right now? What's your current project?

GRETCHEN SISSON: I am actually just about to start data collection on a new project. And one piece of feedback I heard a lot about this book was, well, what about the parents that really can’t do it, right? What about parents who are struggling—who are incarcerated, or are entirely unsupported, or who have addiction? And I think that’s a valid question.

If we want to talk seriously about what it means to create systems of care, it requires looking at those really hard cases more deeply—not just in the context of adoption. But what does it actually mean to value people’s parenthood and to value their connection to their children? And broadly, that’s what I want to look at next.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, Gretchen, I enjoyed Relinquished so much, and I look forward to more from you down the road.

GRETCHEN SISSON: Thanks, Blair.

 

Outro – 01:16:54

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to Relationscapes. If this is your first time, welcome. I hope you'll check out some other episodes. In fact, I'm going to recommend a fellow traveler episode to this one. If this topic is something you want to hear more about, check out Angela Tucker's episode. It's called “The Truth About Transracial Adoption.”

And will you do me a favor? I'm asking people to take a second to rate and review Relationscapes in Apple Podcasts. Last year, I made a goal to hit 100 ratings by the end of the year, which we did! But now the ratings are coming in a little bit slower, so I need people to go rate and review. Let's see those ratings and reviews come in.

Matter of fact—I'm just going to read one on the fly here. Let's see. All right, here's a review from SP_Review. Love that underscore. It says:

“Relationscapes is an informative, inviting, genuinely compelling podcast that explores relationships with depth and clarity. The podcast brings a thoughtful, steady presence to each episode, guiding conversations in a way that feels both informative and warmly human. It tackles complex interpersonal dynamics without being preachy or abstract. It's accessible to listeners no matter their fluency on a topic. It also provides guidance in a way that's actually actionable. The discussions are well researched and reflective. They unfold using a conversational style that invites listeners in.”

Wow. I mean, that's one of the most specific reviews I've gotten. Thanks, SP_Review. Thanks for doing that.

You can also leave a review. Just go to Apple Podcasts and let me know what you think. Or you can rate the show in Spotify if you're still listening over there.

Mates of State provides our theme song. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and I hope to see you soon in another episode!

 

[Note: Transcripts are lightly edited for readability. For total accuracy, always refer to the audio.]