Welcome to this episode of Unraveling Adoption, an intentional space to delve into adoption's complexities together. I'm Beth Syverson. I'm an adoptive mom of a talented and empathetic 20-year-old son, Joey. I'm walking beside him while working on my own personal growth and healing. I'm also a certified coach aiming to help people who are ready to move forward in their life. Joey and I are committed to helping anyone impacted by adoption, and we want to help the general public
understand adoption's complexities better too. If you've heard episodes of Unraveling Adoption before, you will know that the vast majority of our guests on the show are adoptees. Occasionally I interview an adoptive parent or birth first parent, and very, very occasionally I interview someone who isn't personally impacted by adoption at all, but who has made a big impact for adoptees. Today's
guest is Gretchen Sisson. Author of the highly acclaimed book, Relinquished, The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. Her book is the result of a 10-year qualitative sociological study of motherhood, adoption, and abortion. It focuses on the stories of relinquishing mothers, highlighting the ways our American culture completely fails them and chooses instead
to embrace private adoption and support adoptive parenting. I first heard Gretchen speak at the 2023 Concerned United Birth Parents Retreat in Los Angeles, and I was blown away by her research and her passion for the subject. She is raising three young children and working as a research faculty member at UC San Francisco. Welcome to Unraveling Adoption, Gretchen. Glad you're here. Thanks, Beth.
I think the question that probably everybody is having is like, why do you do a big giant research project about adoption when you're not even in adoption So I started data collection for this book. I didn't know I was writing a book. I wasn't writing a book when I started doing data collection. I was just trying to finish graduate school. And I was in Boston at
the time. I was working with an organization that worked with pregnant and parenting young people, so teen moms, and doing a lot of work around supporting them and what they needed to raise and care for their children. And I was just really impressed by these young women as advocates, as mothers. And I saw the ways that our narratives around young motherhood are so stigmatizing, so marginalizing, and so very much at odds with
the experience of these young women that I was working with. I was also volunteering at an abortion fund at the time, doing a lot of work in different areas of reproductive health and justice, and continually seeing this divergence between how we think about different people's reproductive choice and their parenthood and their motherhood specifically, and
what it actually looks like in their lives. And I wanted to see how adoption reflected that and bore that out, and the extent to which our cultural ideas about adoption do or do not reflect the lived experience of Fascinating. And you are getting your master's in sociology? Yeah, I'm finishing my doctorate. Yeah, it was my doctoral dissertation. You're finishing your doctoral dissertation in sociology. OK, very good. Yes. I don't really understand sociology. It feels so big. I don't know.
Do sociologists understand it? You know, I've been doing this now for 12 years. I think I'm getting started. It's funny. I'm actually going to the American Sociological Association meeting this weekend. And it's just such a massive conference, right? And you have people that are working in areas that are really closely aligned to mine and gender. But then you also have people in criminology, right? And more theory and culture theory, you know, it's a pretty sprawling discipline.
But I also think that it can be a benefit because it allows you to bring in scholarship in different areas that are part of a shared discipline. So this project evolved a lot when I was looking at it as sort of an area around motherhood. And I have had to look at issues around poverty and inequality, around criminalization, and all these other areas that are still within sociology, but have overlaps with
fields of law, public health. And so being able to draw on different types of literature that are really interdisciplinary and That's really great. And it's so admirable the extent of the research and the weight of your book. You spent 10 years and qualitative research is, You know, I do a little bit of that, but the bulk of the data that's in the book that makes up the book is really in-depth interviews. Because I think that the way that adoption functions in people's lives is
so complicated. You're not going to get that just from a survey. Now, I did do some demographic data collection, right? I did draw on some broader samples when I cite the income levels or the racial backgrounds of relinquishing parents at large. That's from a larger quantitative sample
that just sort of looks at those individual variables. But the bulk of the book is really these much more in-depth conversations that I had with people to understand how they made these decisions and what Well, the stories in your book are so impactful, and I think that probably hits the general public much stronger than a bunch of graphs and numbers. Those stories are what really can transform people's ideas of, oh, because I thought, you know, I thought adoption was great. I
thought adoption fixed a lot of people's issues. And oh, and then you read these stories and go, oh, what is the reaction to your book? It's been out since February 2024. How has Well, the response from people within the adoption community has been really gratifying and the response from adoptees particularly. And I don't take that for granted. I really am so appreciative of the way that a lot of adopted people have responded to the book and welcomed me in conversation with them. I really
appreciate that. And most of my time is spent in the reproductive health and justice space. I'm in the OBGYN department at UCSF and my colleagues, they're researchers on reproductive health more broadly. Part of what I wanted to do was bring adoption into these repro circles. And that conversation has been really valuable, too. But I think that that was a little bit of a slower conversation that sort of came after. I think a lot of people look at this book and
people who are impacted by adoption picked it up right away. Right. This is a book about adoption. This is about my experience. OK. It took a little bit longer for me to be able to convince people who were outside of the adoption community, but working on related or intersecting issues to understand how Interesting. And if you're in reproductive rights kind of circles, you're talking about abortion and adoption, which are often pitted against each other or as like polar opposites or
Yeah. So part of the research that I worked on was the turn away study, which I also talk about at length in the book. So the turn away study particularly looked at people who were denied access to abortions that they wanted. So these were women who showed up at the abortion clinic to get an abortion that day and discovered that they were past the gestational limit at which that clinic could provide an abortion or which abortion was legally available in their
state. And TurnAway looks at kind of the broader implications of abortion denial over the course of five years for these women compared to women who were able to access their abortion. The part that, you know, this little pie piece that I worked on for TurnAway was looking at how women made decisions about adoption after they were denied abortion. And what we found was that the vast majority of women who gave birth as a result of being denied access to abortion.
Ninety one percent of them were parenting the children to make a birth. So this tells us a couple of things. One is that when you deny people access to abortion, you're going to have far more people that are parenting in circumstances that they didn't plan or choose. Then you're going to have relinquishment. But I will also say that 9% of relinquishments, that's a pretty meaningful uptick because the overall relinquishment rate of all births is about half of 1%. So this is
a big increase, right? It's sort of a little hard to contextualize. So when you deny people abortions, you're still going to have far, far more people parenting, again, that 91%. But you are going to have more adoptions than you would if people had access to abortions. And because so many people in the United States need abortion care, we have between 850,000 to
a million abortions in the US every year. That even if only a small number of those are denied care and then a really small number are choosing adoption after being denied care That's still a really big increase the number of adoptions because there's only about 20,000 domestic infant adoptions in the US per year Yeah,
so it depends which way you look at it. It's a really small number of people who need abortions It's a really small number of people denied abortions are going to choose adoption But it still could be up to a 50 percent increase in the domestic adoption OK, and especially now that Roe v. Wade has been torn apart and each state gets to decide and it's just a big mess out Well, so far, our abortion rate hasn't really gone down in the U.S. since Dobbs. Oh, there are a couple of reasons why that
might be. And that might continue to change, right? Because the legal environments in a number of these states are changing. Right now, there's a lot of philanthropic funding going toward abortion funding and travel for abortion care. So maybe people in low access states are still able to access abortions elsewhere. Or maybe it's different people getting abortions who we don't quite know. It's still kind of early on. How that will impact adoption
numbers is harder to know. because we don't count domestic adoptions in a systematic way. There's no federal tracking. Like as a researcher, it is an endless point of frustration to me. So the 20,000 that I cite, that's kind of the best number that we can get, but it's still an estimate. And so if we wanted to really look at the impact of the Dobbs decision overall, we would have had to have really good pre-Dobbs data. And
we just, we don't have that. So there is some anecdotal reporting now from adoption agencies that they have seen an increase in adoptions. But even that is hard to contextualize because so many smaller adoption agencies have closed over the last five to 10 years that maybe the agencies that are still open are just absorbing clients who would have gone to a different agency. So we don't really know. And I think when we're a few more years out, when we get some more legal
clarity around the overall abortion access landscape. There is a bill in the U.S. Congress now to actually count adoption. That'll give us some better quality data. So I can't answer your question like as precisely as I would like to as a researcher. But right now, there is nothing that indicates that we've seen a sharp increase Interesting. And I know it's in your book and a lot of people in the adoption community are talking about in the Dobbs decision, that footnote that said
domestic infant supply. And it's just rather disgusting view of adoption as this capitalistic enterprise of supply and demand. How does that hit you as Yeah. I mean, I use the language of supply and demand because this is a market-based system and it's uncomfortable for a lot of people, right? Because you're talking about a supply and demand of human beings. But because so much of how we practice adoption in this country is shaped by that market, I think it's important to
be clear about that language when we're using it. And what I think was really interesting about, there are a lot of things that were interesting about that footnote, but it suggests that we have a motivation to have more of a supply, which whenever you center a desire for supply, and we should also be clear, we have very, very high demand for infant adoption in the US. up to 45 families for every infant that's relinquished. So you have very high demand,
you have relatively low, low, low supply. And when you talk about needing to increase supply, what you're talking about is serving a consumer who's the adoptive parent or the prospective adoptive parent. And as soon as you use that frame, you're not making adoption about finding a home, finding security, finding safety for a child who needs it. You're talking
about sourcing children for parents who want them. And I think that that is a fundamental problem where we center the desires of prospective adoptive parents as parents, as consumers, and as people who generally hold more capital and more privilege in our society than Oh, for sure, for sure. And do you have a number off the top of your head how much average adoptive parents are paying for an infant It's hard to know. We know how much agencies charge. It's harder to
get information on pricing for attorneys. Generally, infant adoption is between $30,000 and That's a ton of money, ton of money going around. I always think, OK, and this is from an adopted parent that did this. But now that I know what I know, I think, God, if we really cared about these kids, we would take that $50,000, $80,000, $30,000 and give it to the birth mother. I'm sure it's too easy That price of the adoption is coming from the adoptive family, right? So
Yeah. Right. We also put a lot of public money into adoption, right? So the federal adoption tax credit is up to $16,000 per adoption. Wow. And a lot of adoptive parents can deduct expenses for an adoption, even if the adoption falls through. Right. So even if the placement isn't finalized. So we're putting a lot of research in that. And that's just the federal subsidy. Some states have additional subsidies.
And so if you look at the amount of private money, the amount of philanthropy that goes into this, as well as the tax credits, we're putting a lot of taxpayer money into upholding this system. or some states will take their TANF money so that TANF is a temporary assistance for needy families, right? This is supposed to be money that's going to the families that are living in poverty and
trying to care for children. They'll redirect their TANF funds to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, which are then affiliated with adoption agencies. There's like the direct money that we put into subsidizing adoption. And there's also the indirect ways that we continue to kind of prop up this industry. And so I don't know that you would get someone saying, well, I want to adopt a child, but here's $30,000 for their mother to
keep them. Yeah, no, that won't happen. We could make a different alignment with our public money about how we're choosing to support families and Yeah, that $16,000 tax cut for adoptive families, that $16,000 could totally turn around somebody's economic situation. I mean, completely. Do you have a number about how much money would fix up a So this is a complicated question. And I certainly asked all the mothers that I interviewed, and most of them wanted to parent. How much
would you have needed to parent? Because for so many of them, money was the driving factor behind their adoption. Most of them said $1,000, maybe a couple thousand dollars. They're talking about a really small amount of money. And I've gotten a lot of critical feedback from that where people are like, well, it costs a lot more than $1,000 to raise a child. And first of all, yeah, I know. But second of all, this isn't about how much money they need to raise a child. It's
how much money they need to be able to make a different choice. Right. To bridge that gap. It's the amount of money on a security deposit for a new apartment. It's the money that they need for a down payment on a car. It's the money that they need to buy a car seat and a crib so that they can feel like they have the space for a baby to come home to. This isn't the money that they need to
get to age 18. They're going to need other kinds of support, right? Which brings up the broader question of a social safety net, which is how we talk about child care, early childhood education, food assistance, housing security, living wages, all of that broader safety net that makes parenting possible. They'll need all of that as well. But what they're looking for is an amount of money that gives them the freedom to have enough control over their circumstances at the moment that
Oh, that just breaks my heart that $1,000 or $2,000. Oh, gosh, that's horrible. It's really hard to sit with that. I know you said a lot of adoptees have really resonated with your work, and I'm sure they're like, thank you. Thank you so much for bringing this out. What about adoptive You know, I've heard from a lot of different adoptive parents who are coming to this from different perspectives. And some adoptive parents
are really ready and welcoming to this conversation. I did a book reading in Chicago at a wonderful independent feminist bookstore in Chicago. And the woman who owns the bookstore, she was an adoptive mother, and she did a really gracious introduction. And she said, like, this is one of the hardest books I've ever read. Right. But she was coming to this from a place of wanting to understand and wanting to get it right. And
I've heard that from a number of adoptive parents. who in an effort, not just someone who people who are socially concerned, generally left of center kind of progressive lens of wanting to understand this issue, but who also understand that it's part of their duty as an adoptive parent to understand how these systems work and that this is going to allow them to better care for their child and make space for the complex feelings that their child might have as they grow up. So
I've heard from those folks. I've also heard from plenty of adoptive parents who want to tell me that their adoptions are very different, right? Not my child. You're not talking about my adoption. And I am not trying to critique anyone's individual adoption. I don't know. I don't know the circumstances of everyone's adoption. I don't know what kind of relationships you're able to maintain or, you know, I can't speak to
that. As a sociologist, I can just look at this as a system and see what the patterns are and how this is working and who it's serving and how it's functioning in our broader capitalist country. And then I hear from adoptive parents who are just very defensive, right? And think that anytime you're critical of adoption, you're saying that you want children to be in unsafe homes, right? What about parents who are struggling with addiction? What about parents who are incarcerated? What about
parents who have severe mental illness? And they want to make space for this to be really necessary and good. And for me, that reflects, I mean, there's ways you can engage with that pushback substantively, which is, yes, parents who are incarcerated cannot raise their children right now. But there's this case out of Texas that just came out last week about an attorney who was paying incarcerated women to relinquish their
babies. There's still exploitation within this system. And even if a parent is incarcerated, why is permanently fully legally separating their child from them the best that we have to offer? And that's not even getting into the fact that we overly incarcerate people in this country, right? And like the intersections with our criminal justice system and how that works, right? So all of these issues are entangled and you can engage with that at the
top level. But what I hear in those questions is I want adoption to be a good and necessary thing. Right? Rather than challenging and saying, what I want is for children to be able to have safety and security. How can we best meet that? Sometimes it's not going to be in their family of origin. I am not suggesting that it is, but why are we motivated to have adoption be part of that answer from the outset? Maybe it is for some people at some point, but
why do we start from that starting point? And then there are the adoptive parents that don't hear it at all, right? So there's adoptive parents in my life who have chosen not to engage with me about this, and I notice that, and that's fine. And maybe they're not ready for this conversation. They don't have to be ready on my timeline. I hope they're ready for the conversation when their children need them Yeah, for their kids' sake. Yeah, well, as an adoptive parent, none
of this is easy to look at. I mean, when I read The Primal Wound when my son was in crisis five years ago, It was a very bitter pill to swallow. And I looked at that and I said, okay, I have a choice here. I can just throw this book in the trash and say it's all bullshit and I'm just going to keep going while my kid is trying to self-destruct every time I turn around. Or I can try to figure this out and try to quit continuing traumatizing my kid. you know, try to do the
least amount of harm as possible. And it's really tough. And if any adoptive parents are listening, I encourage you to pick up Gretchen's book, pick up The Primal Wound, and just take that bitter pill somehow. Get it down there somehow. Find community that can do it with you, get a coach, get, you know, find
a support group. There's lots of ways to do it, but it's imperative that we can kind of get a handle on this for our Well, and I think also it's important to recognize that adoptive parents are part of our broader cultural frame of adoption, right? So many of them come to adoption believing and wanting to do something that is good and altruistic. Yes,
most of us do that, right? And so to then be told this thing that you did that you thought was really good and caring is actually far more complicated, like
that's hard, right? And for those parents who aren't coming to adoption first, but who have gone through a really long journey with infertility and struggled with that and are sort of reconciling themselves to adoption and moving forward with that plan and feeling like they're doing something good, but also grieving, because we don't make space for people to talk about infertility
and to share that. And so I don't think that most adoptive, almost no adoptive parents are coming to this from like a malevolent or malicious place, right? And so I think that we need to recognize that and meet people where they are. And for adoptions that have already been completed, I think there is a lot of capacity to talk about how we reduce harm and how we care for adoptive families as units in I totally agree with you. And what can we do to help those
adoptive parents? Well, of course, help the adoptees for sure. I mean, I don't think they get nearly enough services throughout their life. I think it should come with a lifetime of therapy whenever they want it, you know. But what can we surround the adoptive parents with as well? What services can we provide them to get more education, to get more understanding, to get more support, so they can be the best parents they can be under these tricky,
tricky circumstances? What I get from your book and from what you're saying is that this whole thing is just super complex. There's no black and white. There's no adoption is good, adoption is bad. It's just extremely complex. And if we can be open to that complexity and be able to hold all of it and work as hard as we can to make adoptees' lives better, that would be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that adoptive parents are
not the enemy in this equation, right? And I think that it's important to recognize that caring for adopted people is going to require caring for adopted parents and the adoptive family more broadly and making space for that. You know, so many adoptees that I've talked with who have a lot of complex feelings about their adoption, but worry that if they are upfront about that, or want to have a conversation about that, that it expresses an amount of unhappiness or disloyalty. to their adoptive
parents. That's a shortcoming of parenting, right? That's not giving your child access to their full range of emotions around how their life has been shaped. And I think that that's important. I also think this is important when it comes to open adoption. And I don't believe that open adoption is any type of panacea for all of the challenges that are really inherent in a system that commodifies children. But I do think that we have seen some really notable harm reductions for
children that are in more fully open adoptions. And that requires a lot of the adoptive parents. It requires a lot of just logistical work, making that a continual priority. being always open to that, putting your child first. And it can be emotionally hard. Yeah, context. And I think that we sort of create these open adoptions and then just say, OK, go forth and maintain a lifelong relationship
with this person that you don't really know. Yeah, have fun with that. And we don't give support around, like, counseling and anger management and conflict resolution and negotiation and just overall communication. And particularly when you introduce trauma, people are less prepared for all of these challenging interactions. And so when we decline to think about how to support adoptive I agree. I agree. There needs to be so much more scaffolding of
support all along, all along the way. And a couple of minutes ago, we talked about infertility and that's another fraught industry, completely using unethical practices and kind of getting people into this grind of trying to get pregnant. And it doesn't provide the therapy that's needed for the grief if it doesn't work. And that's just a whole nother layer. I guess it's kind of in that whole reproductive justice area. Is I did my master's thesis. So before I started my work on adoption, I did
some work on infertility. It doesn't come up in the book, but it definitely has informed my thinking. Because again, the first critical feedback that I always get is like, oh, well, you just don't want children to be safe. But the second is like, well, what should people do who want to have children and can't? we don't support people who are struggling to conceive in really any way, right? Infertility treatments are expensive. They're not covered by insurance. They're not really accessible. We
don't educate people about their fertility, right? Our sex education in this country is entirely about preventing and avoiding pregnancy. I mean, if it's not just like abstinence and all this like moral, religiously laden framework. But I think that's important because people don't really know about their fertility. They don't know how fertility declines with age for women. This is all new information, right? And it's like you're told
that you need to prevent pregnancy, prevent pregnancy, prevent pregnancy. And then should you struggle to conceive, you don't really have a framework of knowledge to move forward. And a lot of fancy tech companies will sell things like egg freezing or these high-end infertility treatments rather than talking about, well, what would it mean to actually support people in their childbearing during
years that they might be more likely to have natural fertility. And so I think that the ways that we teach people about their fertility, that we think about fertility is really, really flawed. And that if we had a more productive and proactive model for thinking about that, then maybe people would be able to conceive children in different ways and reduce some of the demand. But there's always going to be some people who can't conceive with their partner. And
so what do they do? And this gets back to the point where no one owes anybody a baby, right? And I don't mean that flippantly, right? I have a lot of empathy for the people who go through the pain of infertility, who can't conceive, who don't have a way of
creating the family that they want to create easily. But to me, those challenges are independent from adoption because when you center their desire for a child, again, you are making it about adoption And then the bigger picture answer is that we have a really narrow way of thinking about parenthood and family and care for children in this country. We always need more people to care for children. We will always need children who need broader
kinship networks of care. community networks of care, so that if you have a family in crisis, but we don't prioritize that, right? A lot of people who go into fostering children do that with the intention to adopt, right? Because the most expensive way to adopt, they're not actually wanting to provide temporary crisis care and support for reunification with that family when that time comes. We don't necessarily value that model of temporary care, crisis care, intermittent
care and what that looks like. We also don't value the care that extended family gives children. Caring for a niece, a nephew, your cousin's family. If that happens outside the framework of parenthood or guardianship, it's really invisible labor. And it doesn't give people that
identity and that valuation of being a parent. And so when we continue to think of adoption as serving this inherently conservative idea of family, usually two parent married, a lot of the time a heterosexual family, you're really upholding this pretty narrow idea of nuclear family and where children can access care and where parents or where adults can fulfill a desire to I get that. And it's, it is very complicated. I so appreciate you bringing all these issues to the fore, especially coming
from outside of the adoption world. I think that's pretty extraordinary. And it gives you a unique lens, I think. Perhaps you're not so bitter and you can look at it more neutrally, you know, just as an observer, you're from the outside looking into this system and it must be fascinating. What is one thing that you would like people, after they read your book or after they hear Well, I hope that people will, one, listen
to adoptees a lot more. And I do think that being someone outside of the system gives me a different perspective, but I often think that when adopted people share very real criticisms, of adoption, it's And like, oh, you're just you're just angry. And so many are like, no, actually, I had a great experience, had a really loving family, but I'm still seeing the ways that this system isn't set up for that and didn't prioritize
my well-being. And so I don't have to deal with that backlash. But I do think that I try to continually remind people to listen to adopted people. And I have learned so much from the community of adoptees that I found largely on social media, on Instagram, on Twitter. And I know they're really robust on TikTok. I'm not young slash cool enough to be on TikTok, but I hear that they're there. And I think that listening to these voices is really the most important thing that
we can do. if we want to understand how to build I totally agree with you. I often tell adoptive parents, the best thing you can do is to go listen to adult adoptees, especially some of them that have done some work on themselves and understand what's going on. And I've learned so much from them as well. And I'm just honored to be in their presence whenever they let me. So I am with you. It's a fascinating community and full of a lot
of love. And a lot of people in the community truly want to make things better. And you are one of those. Thank you. Very much, Gretchen, for being here. How could people get a hold of you or how can they find So the book is available wherever books are sold. It is Relinquished, the Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. You can buy it anywhere that you usually get your books. And then I am on Instagram. It's just
Gretchen.Sisson, my first and last name. And I love to connect with readers. I love to connect with adoptees and relinquishing parents in those spaces. Please do find me. We'll definitely pick up Gretchen's book. It's available Yes. And an audio book. Oh, audio too. Yeah. And the audio book is great. They had a great cast of diverse voices for all of the individual narratives. So I've gotten a lot of really good feedback. If audiobook is
Oh, I'm so happy for you. That's great. And it makes it more accessible to people too. Well, thank you very much for being on. Thank you for all of your work. And I'm grateful to know you and to have connected with you. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much, Beth. And listeners, I wanted to let you know about three exciting events coming up that Unraveling Adoption is producing. First, on December 22nd, 2024, Miyoke Ikuro is going to be leading another medicine circle for
adoptees. So if you're an adopted person who has experienced plant medicine or other transformative therapeutic modalities, you would love this coaching integration group. Next in January, January 11th, 2025. We're going to be hosting an online screening of Crystal Park's film, Because She's Adopted. This will be an online screening, so come join us. There will be a Q&A afterwards with the filmmaker.
And lastly, our big event on February 8th is the Adoption Healing Quest in Southern California, with a hybrid screening of Bryan Stanton's film at Ghost Kingdom in the evening. But the main daytime event is in person in Seal Beach, and we hope to see many people from all over the adoption constellation at that wonderful event. Find out about all three of those events at unravelingadoption.com slash events. Thank
you all for listening. Please share this episode with anyone you know who might be interested in Gretchen's book or in her views about adoption from outside as a neutral sociologist. And please share this episode to get the word out. And thank you again for listening. Gretchen and I want you all to