Exploring the Complexities of Birth Mothers and Adoption in the United States with Gretchen Sisson, PhD and Author of “Relinquished”

welcome to the Adoptee Thoughts podcast I am your host Melissa Guido Richards an adoption educator adoptee and author of What White Parents Should Know About Transracial Adoption and its follow up workbook this season I will be highlighting adoption changemakers who are in the trenches of the adoption and foster care community champing the best interests of children these individuals will range from adoptees and former foster youth to researchers adoptive and foster parents

to child welfare workers and many more like always we will delve into the nuances of adoption and most importantly we will not shy away from the tough topics today I have the pleasure of sharing a wonderful conversation with Gretchen Sisson PhD who is a sociologist and author of the new release Relinquished Politics of adoption and the privilege of American Motherhood her studies on adoption include hundreds of in depth interviews with women who have relinquished infants for domestic adoption

over the past 60 years with a particular focus on women who have relinquished since Roe v Wade so thanks for joining me today and let's jump into highlighting one of my favorite adoption changemakers I actually want to start off by asking you because people will want to know why adoption what got you interested in this topic you are a mother right yes yeah involved yeah I started this project before I had kid this is my oldest baby in a way right

I've been working on this data collection for 14 years so I've had all of my kids since I started doing this data collection but I'm I'm not adoptee I'm not adoptive parent I'm not a birth mother so why why am I doing this project I started doing this project back when I was in graduate school I didn't know I was writing a book at the time I wasn't writing a book at the time when I started doing the data collection right I was the 25 year old grad student living in Boston

I was working at an organization called the alliance on Teen Pregnancy at the time and we did we did some work on pregnancy prevention but most of our work was really on supporting young families um and helping them lobby for better uh pregnant parenting student policies in the Boston City Schools better access to housing and child care for these young families right and I was really inspired by these young mothers that I was working with and and the gap between

what is actually true about teen pregnancy and young families and and this sort of social miss that we have about how inevitably devastating young parenthood is for them and their children the social science evidence just does not back that up right and and so this was my first time sort of being in a space where the gap between the research and the lived experience and the cultural conversation which is wildly at odds and ancestors girls who went away had come out a couple years earlier

I had read that Juno had come out a couple years earlier obviously saw that and then 16 and pregnant started airing on MTV and in the first season they had Caitlin and Tyler and and really framing Caitlin and Tyler in contrast Caitlin and Todd for those who aren't obsessed with you know 14 year old pop culture Caitlin and Tyler were this couple who had relinquish their daughter for adoption all the other others and couples that were featured on the show

were parenting and Caitlin and Tyler were sort of framed as better parents right they were more mature they were more reasonable they were more self sacrificing they were doing a better job of setting up your for their child compared to the families that wanted to parent and I'm looking at these other family these young women that I'm working with who are fighting so hard for what they need to support themselves and their kids and who I find really inspiring

and it just sort of brought up this gap again in how we understand what it actually means to support families who needs support what that looks like and again the the breakdown between what actual lived experiences are and what our cultural conversation is that's how I started looking at adoption did not would not have guessed at the time that this is where we would be you know 14 years later but I also wanted to do follow up over time to see how people's feelings about their adoptions

changed and and so it became a lot longer and bigger of a project but I'm really excited to have it out soon yeah I I was rereading some of my notes that I had in the galley and I really like how you were talking about the POV of how people view adoption and how that has been shaped by American media like 16 and pregnant and I remember being a teenager and watching 16 and pregnant and being like oh how are these kids having it and it was like you said that

that that thought process of Tyler and what was Caitlin Caitlin they were seen as more mature and even to this day I get questions about how do I of you like that adoption situation now that we see the grief that Caitlin is going through from being separated from her child and that wasn't really talked about at all what was it tenish years ago then with Juno too misconceptions about adoption are really taken by like how the media portrays it and I feel like

people don't understand how powerful of a role the media right and I think particularly got all I'll do some interviews reports like well I don't know any birth mothers you don't know you know any birth mothers right but you might and what's been interesting to me is as I as I've done this work as I've been more public about doing this work people coming like oh I'm a birth mother this is a friend I had from college right she's like oh yeah I relinquished my son before I started college

or my friend who's like yeah my my older sister relinquished a baby back in the early 80s ruined her life right and you know I think that you know these stories are hidden in in many ways but they're also erased in in a lot of ways we don't give space and they're also silenced we don't give a lot of space for them and I will say you know I know a lot of birth parents at this point through my work through my research you know I'm doing another radio interview next week and someone was like

would any of your participants like to join you and I'm like I don't know the condition of anonymity for them was so strong that that was the only way they were gonna share their story cause they don't wanna alienate their child's adoptive parents a lot of people in their lives might not know about the adoption of the circumstances under which it occurred it is hard to find people to talk about this in a way that feels comfortable for them and you know I fully respect you know

but I think that that is these stories are are often missing and I think that we also forget that oh you know there's a privilege there's an inherent privilege dynamic when you're talking about adoption which is that adoptive families almost always have more resources more more ability to get their stories out in the world than families of origin do and so you see a lot of policy makers a lot of screenwriters you know public advocates that are able to have a really big platform

as adoptive parents and to tell stories about adoption as a way of family building because those are the types of stories that we so often see it's far rarer that we see stories of adoption that are actually about family separation even though every option is both yeah then stigma is so heavy like I was adopted internationally so it your book focuses more on American adoptions but even distance between my adopted family versus my first family there

the stigma is so heavy even across like oceans here and that was one of the initial reasons why it was so hard for my birth mother to kind of be open to a relationship worry about how her family after you know she had gotten married she had more kids and people don't realize that adoption doesn't just affect you at that moment in time where that initial relinquishment happens this is long lasting effect from one choice that was made because of circumstances that affects

not just one person or two people these are affecting generations of family members and I have that I I I've been talking about adoption so publicly reaching out to me and looking for resources and there's such a gap here because we are just now beginning to understand all the effects that it has that initial stigma that we think of just no affecting birth mothers people think like grief of facing a child that's that's normal they don't realize like

that is going to affect future generations of children that that person has and you know like not just like little moment right and I think that was why I wanted to do pioneer follow up data collection because the question when I first started doing interviews what I found was mothers who's who had been in adoptions longer their adoptions were older they were in a more critical space but there were some others that I spoke with who were maybe 2 3 years out that were feeling really optimistic

and really positive about their adoptions kind of in that one to two year period there's so much grief and mourning that that overwhelms everything else but then you have this window this kind of like honeymoon period where they're like feeling good right and what I wanted to know is if mothers and older adoptions are more critical and mothers and more recent adoptions seem to have more hope the system is gonna work out for them is that because adoption has gotten better over time

right are we on a historical trajectory by which adoption is getting better or does everyone kind of become more critical after more time passes and and I had so I had to I had to interview that same group of women again in 2020 to find out and what I found out was it it was the bladder right it did they they were almost all in a far more critical space so there was one woman I interviewed in 2010 her son was it was just a little bit past her son's first birthday she was feeling great right

she had a great open adoption she had actually breastfed and pumped for a long time and her son's adoptive parents were local they would come out right like she was seeing him regularly if she went to his baptism you know and and she was feeling great about the parents that she had chosen what her son's life was gonna look like what it allowed her and and then when I spoke with I asked her like what should adoption look like every adoption should look like mine right

she was in this real honeymoon space I don't wanna discount that right like I talked to her that one time I would have been like this maybe adoption is awesome sometimes you know um when I talked with her 10 years later she was like this adoption should never have happened right she's like I was dealing with a lot of trauma I was dealing with problematic ideas about what families needed to be the amount of contact she had with her child wasn't quite what she wanted

she was seeing him struggle with some aspects of having been adopted in ways that she couldn't necessarily support it's neurodivergencies that she thought his adoptive parents weren't really handling well help you know supporting him in whereas she had been at this point and her husband had had some neurodivergencies as well she thought he would have been a great stepfather for her child right and so she said I I made this decision as a 19 year old because she grew up in the evangelical church

and she so deeply believed that a child needed to have two married parents that was the only way that a child could have a good upbringing she herself was raised by a single mom she had complicated feelings about that she thought this she was setting her kid up for success by placing him with this married couple you know within four years she was married right she would had that stable home and she acknowledged I don't know what my life would have looked like

if I had parented what I have married this person what you know what else would have needed to happen so I they're they're very mothers are very keen to understand that the life that they have now is also shaped by the adoption right and they're and they're not naive and understanding that but they also they also recognize that the circumstances under which they made a it a permanent lifelong decision have shifted um and so I think that you know that was why again it was so important

important for me to follow because these are lifelong decisions because if we're going to look at how adoption serves people we can't just look at a single moment we need to look at how they'd understand these things over time yeah definitely and I really appreciate it you going into like this honeymoon period I think a lot of adoptees generally start referring to themselves coming out of the fog uh and then so it was interesting to see how it was framed for birth parents because

you know there's a lot of similarities where adoptees and birth parents are kind of like opening their eyes to this new reality of what adoption is and like we said earlier off and shape by what we were taught to believe it is versus our actual lived experience and that really differs well like your research shows that from beginning of an adoption versus years down the line and I think a lot of people have this idea that if you choose an open adoption it's open forever and unfortunately

reality is that a lot of open adoptions end up closing in the first few years and that extent of wow much it is open is dependent upon the adoptive parents that that power automatically goes to them and everybody else is kind of you know uh it's left up to chance yeah I think some of the mothers I mean almost all the mothers that I spoke with were in and what they would call an open adoption right that's what the agency told them that they were having right and they were but for some

that was getting pictures through the agency a couple times a year they didn't know what city their child lived in they didn't know their child's last name they had no direct way of contacting them right but that was still considered an open adoption because they picked the parents they got occasional pictures maybe first for the first three years or whatever on the other end of the spectrum were mothers who were babysitting their own kids going on family vacation with the adoptive parents

right so you know picking up kids from school going to soccer games and ballet recitals right like you had the full gamma and they cut everything in between all of the mothers that I spoke with wanted to have some contact with their child not all of them said that they wanted that at the beginning so there were usually that was a question of safety right there was one mother in particular who said I wanted a close adoption I was in an extremely abusive relationship I I did not want this child

to ever have contact with their birth father because it would not be safe for that right but even then they kept the door cracked open so that she could have some information and then once she was able to safely leave that relationship they were able to have more more contact right and then she actually ended up relinquishing a second child and they couldn't go to the same family but they were adopted by a family in the same town and so the children and their adoptive parents are very close

and they have an open adoption together right that was such an extreme circumstance and it was the only one where mother was like I I need this to be closed now she didn't want it to be closed right she wanted to have contact with her child but for safety sake she felt that it needed to be more closed adopted parents often ask me like will your your sample must be biased because my child's birth mom doesn't wanna have contact with us or doesn't respond to our outreach and what I always say is

we think of openness as a favor for birth parents right the person that actually benefits the most from openness is the adoptee right a lot of the mothers I spoke with once you desperately wanted to have more contact with their child it was still very painful right one mother I spoke with said she has one Sunday a week where she gets to her child was a little older 12 or so should pick him up they spend the whole day together she didn't take the next day off of work every day

because she was she would become so depressed after saying goodbye to him right she wants that contact she believes it's good for him she wants to be available she she relishes their time together but it is so hard the trauma of the adoption makes it hard to maintain that connection or you know another mother that I spoke with this is in our our first interview so her son was I think 5 or 6 she had a three year old that she was parenting she's pregnant again at the time of our interview

so she's you know married and co parenting with her her husband obviously for her two younger children she would meet up once a year with her relinquished son and his adoptive mother they they had a tradition of going to McDonald's and they would get a Happy Meal and he would play on the play structure so this is an open adoption cause she's seeing him he doesn't know that this is his birth mother right so the adoptive parents haven't said this woman is is your mother right

so from her point of view she wants us to be open because she wants her son to know her right she's like everything I'm getting out of those is I could get from pictures or videos on calls right he's not getting the benefit like this is painful to me I'm going through it because I want it to benefit him so she ended up cutting off contact because she said this isn't benefiting him and it's too hard for me and then she's also worried about her 3 she's like

I've been clear with my three year old who she was his parenting this is your brother right and she's like in my three year olds gonna like spill the beans at some point I keep bringing her around right because she wanted them to have an open sibling relationship and and that clearly was not happening so I think when we talk about openness it can look like any number of things right and some of them are going to be purportedly about serving the birth parents needs

purportedly about serving the adoptee's needs but but not always easy enough or worth it enough that the mother feels like this is something that she can always continue for her own emotional and and psychological well being I did see some of the mothers that I spoke with pulling back at different points if they felt like the openness wasn't worth it for their child or was too painful for them and I think that goes into this black and white thinking when it comes to adoption

from the surface if you just hear that oh the birth mother isn't responding to my texts and my calls you know I'm trying I'm making this up but you're not really looking at the 72 other possible reasons that are affecting that that one decision just posts I've seen in like adopted parent groups and just consultations that I've done with adopted parents it's often kinds of seen as self centered almost because it's just like well keep doing this and then it's like well

it's taking a lot on my part to keep sending pictures and I don't know how that's gonna affect my child in X y and Z and then excuses are quickly made as to why they can't possibly keep the adoption open it's just it goes into that narrative once again that adoptees are told that we're unwanted and we see that she's like well you know I tried to keep this adoption open for you but they don't want contact with you what am I supposed to do you know that that abandonment is reinforced

I will say it because I view open SS primarily helpful beneficial protective for the adopted person I do think that birth mother should feel some obligation to maintain contact as much as possible right but I also think that birth parents aren't taught how important adoption or how important openness is for their adopted child right if they have been told this idea that openness is for birth parents and they're like well this is painful so I'm out right

a lot of them hadn't been taught how important that was for for their child right so that's also part of the problem and adoptive parents aren't flexible loving persistent forgiving in their outreach because they're like oh well this is primarily for you so if you don't want to be part of our kids like like your loss right if we need to come a lot of the one I totally did understand this right they're like this sucks dealing with these visits because it's hard to be around my child

I will do it like a lot of them got it right and when I say it sucks up that that's a little flipping and I apologize right it wasn't that they wanted to have contact with their child they enjoyed the time with their child but it was hard to then re separate from them that's what sucked for them but I think that if we reorientate the idea of openness for the benefit of the child then both sets of parents might be more committed to making it work rather than when we understand openness

as primarily for the birth parent yeah I think it's an excellent point and then that kind of goes into where in in your book you mention that at some point like early on birth mothers all don't understand or don't know that there are some risks that adopted people face like post adoption we are often taught that adoption is supposed to be this happily ever after solution so the child is adopted into a loving to parent household and often cases that are upper middle class

typically white and you know that's supposed to be the happily ever after where you know that's it keep that openness for the birth parent that benefits them but we're not talking about how that affects the child further on down the road can you add a little bit more on to that yeah so very few mothers that I interviewed were were offered meaningful options counseling um and and there that included for a lot of them like they didn't have any information around

what adoption means for adopted people right other than this is gonna be so beautiful look at this family you're going to be able to give them um you know look at these beautiful pictures and their profile and they have you know and the profiles really so directly speak to the vulnerabilities of expected mothers who are considering adoption right to an extreme degree like so many of them become really starstruck by the perspective adoptive parents so if you're looking at a pregnant person who

you know doesn't have stable housing her own parents aren't supporting her boyfriend isn't showing up the way she wants him to she's struggling to finish school or she hasn't been able to finish school she had it you know for whatever reason that sort of where she is and you're looking at these profiles are like here's our gorgeous suburban house here's our Sunday dinners with cousins and our parents who can't wait to be grandparents and here's pictures from our wedding 10 years ago right

they really are designed to showcase all of the elements that speak to what birth mothers are missing in their lives that make them vulnerable to considering adoption so I think that that's one piece of it is that this becomes almost like an infatuation really early on and brothers aren't given counseling around what would parenthood look like very few of them sat down with someone who's like let's talk about what parenting might look like for you is this possible what would this look like

what kind of support would you need and most of them wanted to parent but they never had anyone who said let's figure out what that might look like for you you can do this if you want to it's gonna be tough let's figure it out right it was like adoption is going to offer more for your child a better life and so often a better life of course is tied to financial resources and I think that that's really important so they had very little counseling and most of the counseling was really

adoption promotion because at that point they're really already interacting closely with agencies so we did not see a lot of people thinking about talking to them about what other pathways might be available to them um and a lot of mothers that I spoke with who came to a much more deeply critical space after time was because they had Learned a lot more about adoption and what adoption means for adopted people and a lot of them that learning journey was sparked by seeing their child struggle

in some ways right hi friends I'm doing a giveaway of Relinquished Gretchen's book all you have to do to enter is subscribe to my channel on YouTube at adoptee underscore thoughts leave a comment saying one of the things that you enjoyed about the interview and for additional entries tag some of your friends in the comments each comment tagging a friend is another entry and at the end of 10 days once this is published and live I will announce the winner thanks guys

this was even particularly true and I talked about in the book white mothers of biracial children rarely considered their child will be in a transracial adoption if they chose white parents for them mothers color like thought a huge amount about the race of the adoptive parents they could rarely get what they wanted for their child in that way but they thought about it a lot white mothers barely thought about it at all right um and I think that that is another big problem

and then a lot of them saw like I have this biracial black child he does not have a connection to his birth father's family he has a connection to me as his birth mother but I'm white his adoptive parents are white the community he's growing up in is white and they saw the struggles that were coming from that for their child of not having anyone who looked like them in their families in their communities so I think that that was really important as well and a lot of mothers again

over time they saw their childs having challenges around the adoption they saw themselves and that was really what made them want to learn more deeply and then feel a lot more critically about what what had been told to them when they were pregnant it's really interesting to as a transracial adoptee when I talk about the struggles that I face as a woman of color who was raised in a white adopted family who had a lot of prejudices people try to say color doesn't matter

you're making race a thing when it's not when at the very beginning like adoption practices it's mentioned in your book about a lot of mothers that were pressured and forced into giving up their children for adoption it started with slave and you know these things happen with like the indigenous people we had you know the Indian Child Welfare Act that had to be enacted and then again being fought to to be taken down you know recently because people often are so used to being global majority

and being a default that they don't think about how race affects other people in their day to day lives and when it comes to adopt it's such an integral peace that factors in how children are being raised and if we're saying you know race isn't a problem and you mention the Republicans versus liberals and how they view adoption and liberals are like you know love makes a family let's not think about anything else and then the Republicans are like well you know you know

heteronorm family structure with two parents of male and a female and they're married like that is the ideal structure so we're having all these different arguments about like what makes the best family or the healthiest family but then at the root of it we are forgetting these huge other factors that go into raising children and these transracially adopted families and if we don't talk about race we're ignoring the struggles that transracial adoptees

like me go through and then what are we doing we're just pushing it to the side because these adoption agencies are just trying to get more families to place children and you go into how the number of waiting families versus the number of infants available is such like a staggering difference can you talk a little bit more about that so any man like a couple of historical examples that I include a family separation and I think it's important to understand there are a lot of reasons

that families have been separated over American history almost none of them are good none of them are good let's just say that you know all cause all of them have been so deeply abusive there is a pattern by which children are separated from their families in order to police those families to threaten families to extract obedience from parents um and to leave that threat a family separation in order to get populations to behave and to you know not challenge a white supremacist system

those are almost always families of color historically almost always black families or native families with a history of boarding school separations the Indian Adoption Project that sort of thing so there that policing element that leads to family separation there's also the market forces that shape adoption and these are more historically recent right the idea that it used to be if you look more than 100 years ago you had you had babies who there wasn't a demand for right so

if you were a poor family and you had more children than you could care for you had to go pay a baby farmer like to provide sort of like base level care for your child there's no there was no who's gonna pay you to adopt that child right but there was this early shift in the early 19th century that sort of placed a market value on children that really commodified children and but it was actually a commodification of parenthood right because children were no longer economically benefit right like

I don't have kids anymore because I need more people to help work on my farm right I don't know there's no economic benefit to me having kids I have children because I want to I have a value on being a mother right and that shift Viviana's elder is a sociologist to who has studied that and looked at that kind of historical change and ever since that shift where parenthood has been a desirable commodity children have been a desirable commodity um and that's when you see the evolution of a market

based adoption system that involves the permanent legal transfer of parental rights so you have these two sorts of historical forces one is this policing force that leads to family separation one is a market force that that incentivizes right family separation and these have operated in parallel tracks for a while right and it's why you have a child welfare system that disproportionately impacts black and brown families and why historically you had a private adoption system

that put a market demand on white babies that we saw in the Baby Scoop era that's why that was so predominantly white women what we're seeing now actually is a is kind of these systems converging right for a number of reasons and not completely like I don't want to they're not but they're much closer tracks than they used to be a couple of things are going on there we we have abortion access we did have abortion access pretty robustly for 50 years we have it in a peace meal way now

so when you look at a lot of the women that were targeted for adoption prero unplanned pregnancy delivery weight vomits pretty quickly there's fewer white babies available fewer white babies available we pass the entire welfare act fewer native babies available and you can't you couldn't at that time introduce black children um into a private system there still wasn't a market demand that's when you start to see the uptick of international adoption right

and that's when you start to see a lot more children from um south and Central America and then Russia um and then finally Africa sort of like the oh sorry in China and and when we look at the countries that are exporting their children it was countries that are economically and geopolitically stable like don't don't export there sorry I also should say Korea not trying to race anyone I promise international adoptions not my expertise but you have this wave of of international adoptee

that are coming into the United States throughout the 90 to 2,004 and then it really starts dropping pretty precipitously so what you're constantly having is this sense of there's a demand for babies where are they going to come from right in the 60s and 70s we're gonna extract them from vulnerable white women that we can police because they don't have access to abortion then that falls then you see the increase in international adoption international adoption also

made Americans far more comfortable with transracial adoption right because you had they they weren't ready to adopt black children quite yet eventually they do eventually do from Africa from Haiti right but it started with when Asian American children and and south and Central American children and Elizabeth Rau um has an excellent but I'm looking over here cause it's right over here selling transracial adoption on on this on this impact of how now we're at this point

where the demand for babies is so absolute have we have created a market demand for any healthy babies of any race it's not an even market right but it is there right white families are are perfectly willing to adopt black children so most of them so you have this sort of commercial and at the same time you have adoption becoming increasingly a backconomic deprivation poverty and Equality right so you have more and more mothers that are relinquishing because they cannot afford another child

you again you look back 30 40 years mothers were relinquishing children because they wanted to delay parenthood right they weren't married I wasn't the appropriate time for them to parent and so they're gonna relinquish their first born child until they are in a more stable or appropriate parenting life space what you're seeing now is a majority of birth mothers are willing wishing second third fourth or more children and it is because they want to parent but they're at the tipping point

for what their family can support and afford and you're increasingly seeing more participation from mothers of color I think largely for that reason you're also seeing the ways that the public adoption system foster care which is more about policing sort of that that historic trend drawing on the private adoption system and vice versa so a lot of others I spoke with um if they had lost earlier children older children to foster care they were pregnant again the private agency would say well look

you have older kids in foster care you're probably gonna lose custody of this baby but if you do a private adoption then you can choose the parents you can have an open adoption right you're gonna have more power over this situation it's not a foregone conclusion that they're going to lose custody of another baby right you but you see the ways that these systems are increasingly tangled with one another that was incredibly long answer I hope that sort of no no it's great no

I think a lot of people don't realize how entrenched everything is before I forget because we were talking about like race and adoption in America did you ever in your studies talk about or research any of the American mothers that place children for adoption out of America into other countries no so all of the mothers that I interviewed were were American women who were relinquishing within the United States yeah okay yeah I just wanted to just touch upon that because like a lot of people don't

you know there are a number of mothers that choose to place their children into a country outside of America and those tend to be black mothers too yeah well so mostly I mean you might more about this than me I that was the impression that I have too is that those are are mostly black mothers and agencies cannot find black adoptive families for them so they look outside of the United States me I that was the impression that I have too is that those are are mostly black mothers

and agencies cannot find black adoptive families for them so they look outside of the United States and that was true like a number of mothers that I interviewed like I'm only I'm I'm a black woman my child's my child's gonna be black um I am only gonna place them with black parents and then the agencies are like we don't have any black parents they're like well I'm not gonna place and then the pregnancy goes on and circumstances don't change agencies can't find you know and um

and then they're like okay well I guess I'll give them to these white parents who already have a black child so at least they're not the only black they they make these sort of concessions um or you know there was a a one white mother um but her child was biracial and she wanted him to have biracial parents um she was the kind of the rare white mother who was really thinking closely about what her child's experience would be as a transracial adoptee couldn't find biracial or of

you know interracial couple to adopt um and so she's like well I'm gonna play some of this couple who lives in Manhattan right so at least he'll be around a lot of different people a lot of different people like he's not gonna be in all white community um you know in different part of the country right so you had mothers cut in making concessions making compromises it has been my and again you might know more about this than I do it has been my impression that American women

who relinquish for international adoption outside of the US it's usually because they they are looking for families that American agencies cannot provide them I think in my research it also showed because of how racialized America is people can view some other countries like Italy Canada and other places that adopt from America as least being less of an issue and I've talked to international adoptees from other sides of the world too it races you everywhere so it was just you know

I wanted to see if any participants that you talked to had any interaction with that when it comes to the sample size of the the women and pregnant parents that you talk to how did you collect all these people for your study I found people in a lot of different ways and I found them in very different ways in 2010 than I did in 2020 I should say I did a lot more interviews than are included in a sample in the book because I interviewed a lot of mothers that relinquish

in the 80s 90s earlier than that but I wanted the books this sample in the book to be really contained to adoptions between 2000 and 2020 the sample has shifted right you look at some of my earlier research papers like it has kind of these older adoptions and so the book is really again two thousand and 20 20 in 2010 minded my first recruitment I I sort of did initial recruitment online ad and support groups online support groups blogs etc um but I will also say a bit one of the biggest boo

boons are fortuitous things that happened in 2010 was that so many adoption agencies still had message boards at the time for their birth mothers and I would interview one or two birth mothers and they would post them on their agencies message boards right and this is actually excellent because if I'm if I'm recruiting people only from support groups like they're already in a really critical space but the message boards were just for people who were at all stages

their adoption journey through this agency and they were still relying on agency mediated spaces um to make those connections happen um so a lot of times I would ask someone to be like if you know anyone else if you are on a message board if you're in a closed group please share the call and that's how I got a lot of participant um because a lot of those places are close people who aren't birth mothers and I'm not I don't wanna insert myself there direct um but once I had spoken with a few

I got a lot more and then the message boards all shut down um they shut down in 2012 13 14 they are kind of a thing of the past but I had already had contacts with these women and so I was able to follow them over time once they were already in the sample um in 2020 I did additional recruitment that was a lot easier because it's so much easier to do targeted online marketing I knew so many more birth mothers to start for them to send mothers to me um I did outreach through some agencies um

which is interesting because I don't wanna just be recruiting from spaces that are adoption critical spaces I wanna be recruiting different points and how they're understanding their adoption and that are finding me in different way so it was it was a lot it was a lot of different outreach and a lot of different ways and I think that the sample is the sample is good right it was very white in 2,010 the initial recruitment that is that's what adoption looks like in the last 20 years

certainly in the last 10 years we see farm women of color participating in the private adoption system obviously would have allowed to include more voices of color in their earlier sample but I don't think that the whiteness of my earliest sample is that much of an outlier right I think that that is sort of where private adoption was and had been and I think that the diversity of my 2020 sample reflective not just a better recruitment but all the real shift in who's participating in the system

and I think that goes into the demand of adoption cause people don't see it as like business that it is a multi billion dollar business especially in private agency I feel like a lot of agencies back in early 2000 and even before that it was what families wanted and people don't see it as children being commodified based on race there is still to this day race based pricing of children and we have headlines that say black babies cost less we have people labeling children in adoption agencies

as multiracial to make them more marketable for the families looking to adopt because of their proximity to whiteness if they have a closer proximity to whiteness then the agencies can charge more than they can make more money and it's just a cycle that keeps going and going and I don't think people are very aware of how it is a market and I also really liked how you talked about how adoption is marketed and there was one point where you were talking about you got an email what was it from

oh yeah it was an advertising agency look I don't know why I get these email the things people email Alyssa I mean and you know but I have to believe it is it's because people who work in the adoption space believe that what they are doing is is deeply good right they believe that it's a social good and so if you ask them for something they will often just send it to you because they don't think they're doing is a problem right like I have I have data on thousands and thousands of adoptions

that agencies have just sent me because I asked for it right like you know I mean people like how did you get data on 8,000 adoptions I was like oh I just I asked agencies like there's a couple really big agencies and they'll just send it to you right because they they believe in what they're doing you know why would they not share it um so that's a side note but yes I did get an email from an advertising firm that at the time they were Geo fencing Planned Parenthood another abortion clinics

on behalf of Bethany Christian Services and they're like they're telling me Tommy straight up right so that if you took your phone you go to an abortion clinic you'll start getting ads for adoption agencies they did this you know instead of the line of the email like if you're not the appropriate person you know to receive this like please forward it as like I'm not the appropriate person or for this but they also geophense like methadone clinics

there have been other cases where they were geophensing Medicaid healthcare sites cause they're really targeting low income pregnant people agencies will also buy strings like you can you can look in online advertising databases to see who's buying certain Google Words and they'll they'll buy strings on like help for single moms California they'll start getting ads for adoption agencies um you know they're they're really aggressive and targeting these groups

Texas is actually just establishing a new modern adoption campaign that specifically targeting black and Latino women in Texas that they're pushing really heavily um you know and and it's because this is a this is a problem this is a solution in search of a problem right like this is we we believe adoption is good we need to promote adoption whereas if you just spent the same amount of resources on supporting families you would need to have adoptions but we believe live adoption is a good thing

we believe that a low adoption rate is a bad thing right I participated I can why I got invited to this meeting I'm not sure but in 2020 I was invited to this meeting from the department of health and Human Services yeah um which I talked about in the book and the premise of the meeting was our domestic adoption rate is really low what are we gonna do about it and I'm like so why is it low right is it is it just low because people are parenting their children

because then what's the problem right like you know and and research has consistently shown even even in super adoption promotion spaces anti abortion spaces in their out their kind of Venn diagram has a large overlap between those two kinds of spaces um you know they acknowledge that knowledge of adoption is high right consideration of adoption is high as far as on the part of adopted parents like a lot of people consider adopting a child almost everyone knows adoption exists right so so low

adoption rates are not a reflection of people being like what's adoption I don't know what that is or people do know they have seen it they have come across it right it's just that they are not interested if they have any other path and so I find that this this idea that we should be promoting adoption in response to anything in response to a low adoption rate in response to a high abortion rate like none of these things are really related when we look at how pregnant people are making decisions

and if you don't see something intrinsically good with adoption then it is totally fine if the rate is low and I will say as someone who's like in the abortion space a lot right like I'm at the OBGYN department here at UCSF like I I come to these questions from like no one who works in the abortion space or does abortion research no one's like oh the the abortion rate is going down that's a problem our question is is it going down because two people need or want abortions or is it going down

because people can't get abortions that they want right if the abortion rate is really low but everybody who wants to have an abortion is still getting one that's totally fine right and what we have what we don't ask this question around adoption because we believe adoption is good we believe more adoption is a good thing to have in a society whereas I see higher rates of adoption as a fundamental reflection of greater levels of inequity and lesser levels of support for families

yeah and it's interesting because like when the Supreme Court was was going against like you know uh my mind is blinking but if you in the abortion debate we have people like referencing like the domestic supply of infants and like right there like that just shows like the domestic supply of infants you're talking about human being as they are like a product on a shelf and if we have like like the US Department of Human Services where you were at that that meeting um like

developing strategies for overcoming barriers to private infinite options like why is that the focus here to get more babies to feed this demand for this business meanwhile we know there are hundreds of hundreds of thousands of children who are older children in foster care who are in need of homes who cannot possibly be reunified with their biological families but yet we're here trying to look for a problem and you know create advertising yeah to to target these families to get more kids

you know it can be like I will also say when it like when it comes to the foster care system right what we actually need are more people willing to serve 1 we need to like think very critically about why children are in foster care in the first place and like I am very persuaded by a lot of the abolitionist arguments that take a deep look at the disparate impacts of these systems are having on punishing people and and what that means so sure men isn't like

there should not be as many children available in foster care for a number of reasons but assuming that there are what we actually need in our communities are not more adoptive parents but more people who are willing to care for children in their communities without adoption right we have this idea that the only way to support families in need is by separating those families and is legally establishing another one right that you have to have ownership over a child

in order to care for a vulnerable child right and you see this with a lot of parents who are like we're fostering but but to adopt right there you know they're going to be heartbroken if that child reunifies at some point that's actually what we need and this is why people you know when I'm critical of adoption which I always am at this point um you know the idea is that oh that means you want children to be in unsafe homes like no that is absolutely not what I want

I just think that the idea that we need to legally separate children from their families and move them to a different family is a very uncreative way of thinking about how we care for our vulnerable children right and I think that it does a great deal of harm that we have never acknowledged and are not willing to acknowledge because we are still willing to commodify these children and and offer them of value to families who want to adopt and so I think that until we can sort of

break that idea that the best way to care for children is through adoption where this this system is going to continue to be deeply flawed entirely flawed I think that like studies and like books like yours are so important because there is that misconception where like people are assuming that birth parents are placing their children because the alternative is unsafe living conditions whether it's from abusive families whether it's from drug and alcohol problems

and other horrible and complicated systemic issues often and and they just see it as like black and white like well if they didn't place then the children would be suffering or the children would be in garbage garbage bins like that's what adoptees are told yeah like if we speak out about the complications of adoptions like well would you rather been aborted would you rather been a garbage can like those aren't the only alternatives there and that's why I spoke with a person I once was like

you know my adoption wasn't about lack of money I was just 16 years old and I didn't have a safe home to bring the baby to and I was like well then we've already failed if you at 60 like I was and I said I was supposed to safe home for you to be in and she's like oh no of course not I was like then we have already failed right we have failed you as a 16 year old are still so young and I'm not you know if she's not in a safe home of course she has a safe home for her child

we have already failed to account for those conditions right or whethers who are um you know dealing with drug addiction and can't get access to treatment and that's why they relinquish again I don't you know I'm not naive I know what it takes to raise children I don't want people who are addicted to opioids raising children really either I'm not saying that every any person at any point in their life can raise every child what I'm saying is if we offer opportunities for housing

for treatment for stability people will take them to care for their children not in every case right like I'm not I'm not looking at this with rose color glasses but if we make it a little easier for a few numbers of people the adoption rate is not high right we're not talking about millions and millions of families per year we're talking about what it takes to care for the people we already have as parents rather than just commodifying their children

for other people and I think that that is really that to me is what it keeps coming back to yeah and if we think about like all the money that goes into like advertising to get more people to choose adoption all the money from like tax breaks and all these things that go to two adoptive families and then we even have like in some families in some cases there are stipends that families will get until the child is 18 sometimes even a little bit longer and like people don't realize that

there are a lot of programs out there but then like you mentioned earlier there are limitations when it comes to the birth parents and like access to things like Wick and this is stigma for like those programs and for like food stamps and for housing programs we need to wrap up but before we close I wanted to to ask there was this one point in the book where you said that people often ask you like why are women who are denied abortion more interested in adoption

and I really loved your what are your responses to that and where you basically said like well why would you like what would the situation be where you would place your child and I feel like that that's where people need to develop more empathy when it comes to adoption situations and really put yourself in the shoes of a pregnant person in crisis because at the end of the day what would make you comfortable carrying a child for nine months you know going through 24 hours of labor

going through a C section possible pregnancy complications you know like all the things involved with motherhood like what would make you comfortable to place and that that was just like such a profound like moment to me and it made me curious like how your thought process of adoption has developed from like the beginning of your research to now and like what it took you to like get to this point where you can see this when you don't have any personal ties to adoption if that makes sense

you know as I have three children in between starting this data collection and writing this book and so a lot of those I interviewed had children same age as my kids when I did my final round of data collection right kind of across the spectrum and no mothers are relinquishing because they love their children less than I love my children right no one is is relinquishing their child because they care less they want less of the world for their child right there they are relinquishing

because they have come to believe that their survival or their child survival or their salvation depends on it right cause you know one thing we haven't had a chance to talk about and you know again we could talk all day but are the religious constraints of how people understand what family right so you have to bring people to the point to the brink where they think the only way for them to survive for their child to survive to be safe to thrive is contingent on separating from them right

and I think that level of constraint is where we're really failing people you know you can increase I can tell you how to increase the adoption right it's not pretty right if you push people to such a place of desperation you they'll relinquish right and that's why I chose the title relinquish because I think it reflects the surrender right it reflects not being in a position of power as you are making these choices and I think that that is what we need to understand we need to see each adoption

as a failure to care for a family right and and we need to stop seeing it as as this beautiful family building institution and we need to look at what that means that what we as a society as a country allowed to occur that that separation felt like what was necessary for that mother thank you is there anything else that you want to add before we add I don't think so well I I know I do have one thing I guess which is that people often ask me like why I don't talk more about adoptees in my work

and that is just a straightforward I don't I didn't study adoptees right I didn't study adoptee experiences and that wasn't an omission as more as like I this is where I'm going to focus giving my reproductive health background giving my reproductive justice work this is where I'm going to be you know I have I have Learned from and cited a ton of adoptee advocacy organizing scholarship memoir in this book I want the book to be account very accountable to adopted people and I know that you know

that's a lot of your audience right there's adopted people and so I wanna say that right this book isn't about adopted people it's not trying to say that this is a comprehensive view of adoption in the United States that's not possible without centering adoptees but I do think that this is a missing part of the conversation so far and I that's what I have tried to do is to bring the voices of birth mothers to this conversation and I'm grateful for all the adoptees

from whom I have Learned including you who from whom I have Learned so much in the in the process of this research and you know I hope to continue to be an ally in this work to be in good conversation with this work and by having my focus on birth parents I am like I hope you hear that I am not trying to say we don't also very critically need adoptee voices in this conversation I really appreciate you mentioning that and I think it's important for listeners to hear that as well and like

one of the reasons why I like loved your book as an adoptee is because I feel like a lot of the information that I've Learned about adoption and about birth mothers is a lot of like misconceptions like you said from the media from you know like previous studies that adoption agencies put out that are very you know biased often times and so to have like a comprehensive book that list like all of these women that have gone through these experience

helps adoptees understand how complicated the issue is as well because it's often not broken down like this we often don't have a comprehensive resource that lists all these things that have interviewed so many different women and pregnant people in crisis and you know give us this different perspective so I think that's really important for adoptees and former foster use to understand especially the intricacies with you know the the social and economic issues in the United States

but I really really appreciate you taking the time to to speak with me today where can people find you find information about your book tour like where can they connect yeah so I think best social media point of contact at this point for me is Instagram I'm still on Twitter but I'm a little bit begrudgingly so my grandma's just scratching dot sisen the book has its own website which is relinquished book com and there's an events page there I'm gonna be in San Francisco New York Seattle

Portland all over the all over the place I would love to have a really robust audience of adoptees at all of any and all of the events let me know as conversation partners I'm really looking forward to those conversations you know so would love to have people buy the book request the book from the library come see me on tour I think that these are gonna be some really good conversations with audiences that really haven't thought deeply about adoption before in some cases and so would love

would love to see some of your listers along the way so thank you so much of course I'm so glad that you can join me today and if you would like to hear more from Adopted Thoughts make sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform you can find more about me my books and more of my work at adoptee thoughts com or at adoptee underscore thoughts on Instagram or TikTok for the past few years I have now children of adoptees you have your phone you go to Planned Parenthood

like Wick sites um you know they're putting millions of dollars into that in relinquishing their children a reproductive health background right Boston DC Philly I have a number of events where I have adoptees as