Gretchen Sisson on her New Book, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood

Per year in the U.S., there are around 4 million births, between 850,000 - 1,000,0000 abortions, and 18,000 - 22,000 private domestic infant adoptions. Gretchen Sisson, Sociologist in Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) at the University of San Francisco and author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, sits down to talk to us about the history of American domestic adoption, busts some adoption myths, and underlines how adoption and reproductive health and rights intertwine.  

Adoption is the U.S. has a long, complicated, and often painful history. In the modern day, adoption is often presented as an alternative to abortion, but Gretchen’s research showed that study participants rarely weighed an abortion vs. adoption; most often, people who couldn’t get an abortion then turned to adoption relinquishment as an option. There is no telling what the overturning of Roe will mean for the future of abortion and adoption in the U.S.—data on adoptions pre-Roe is still sparse.

Links from this episode

Gretchen Sisson on Twitter
Gretchen Sisson’s Event Page
ANSIRH on Twitter
ASIRH on Facebook
Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood

Take Action

Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice.

Read More

Hi rePROs! How's everybody doing? I'm your host Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. And y'all, welcome to the 200th episode of rePROs Fight Back! Y'all. I really, I can't believe it. Like if you had asked me six plus years ago when we were like planning to do this podcast, and I was, it was just a dream, and I've been starting to think about it, if I would be doing 200 episodes and six plus years later, like I would've never dreamed that this could be a reality. It's pretty wild to me still. And I am just so lucky. I know I've told the story about how I got really pushed and pulled into doing the podcast but it is my favorite part of my job right now. I love hosting the podcast. I have gotten to talk to so many amazing people and had so many wonderful conversations about sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. I am so lucky to have had so many amazing guests come on for 200 episodes worth of content. I love when I have gotten to meet audience members out in the street, or people run into people in the wild and find out they listen to the podcast. Like, it is unreal to me. And it's still like, I get shocked and surprised every time, and it's so wonderful and I love doing it. I am so lucky to have such an amazing team behind me. I will always be grateful to having Rachel here with me. She's been with me since we launched the podcast. And Elena taking over our social media, like, they have done an amazing job. Meg, who has edited me from the beginning to make me sound like I know what I'm doing. I'm just so lucky. I am very lucky to have had Bob who pushed me into doing the podcast when I wasn't sure, and Kathleen for allowing it to keep going on and letting me blaze my own path with what we talk about. I am so grateful to have had so many supportive people around me over the course of the podcast. I had some really great friends early on who, when this was just an idea and I was still really unsure if it was something I could do or should do, were just the absolute biggest cheerleaders for it. And I will forever, forever be grateful to Nina and Lena and Jamila and Lisa, who just were such big cheerleaders of mine and never doubted for a second. And the instant the words started to come out of my mouth about this podcast, we're like, oh my God, you need to do this. You absolutely should do this. And y'all, I was not there yet. I did not think it was something I could or should do, and I will always be grateful to them for pushing me to do it. I feel very blessed to have had so many wonderful people around me supporting me over the years, and I'm just really thankful to each and every one of them. And yeah, and all of the wonderful people who have come on to talk about such important issues, like I just, I'm so grateful and I love this podcast. I'm so grateful to each and every one of you, whether you have been with us for the whole six years, whether you joined us today, I just, I'm very grateful that you have taken time out of your day to listen to us talk about sexual reproductive health, rights, and justice. And it makes my heart happy. And I could have never imagined 200 episodes ago that we would be a multi award-winning podcast. Like what, this has all just been so much and 200 episodes in, I can't wait to see what the next 200 episodes bring because y'all, I love doing this podcast. I love getting to talk to y'all, and I love getting to talk to my guests. So, let's keep that moving, right? So, I'm so excited for today's guest. We're talking about something that in the 200 episodes of the podcast we have not really talked about, and that is adoption. I'm so grateful to have Dr. Gretchen Cenon today to talk about her amazing new book, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. Y'all, this is a wonderful book. I thought I knew so much, but I learned so many things in this book and there were so many amazing stories from women sharing their stories of relinquishment. It was just so wonderful, and I highly, highly, highly recommend it. But let's turn to my interview with Gretchen. Hi, Gretchen. Thank you so much for being here today.

Gretchen: Thanks for having me, Jennie. Appreciate it.

Jennie: Before we get started, let's make sure that I have you introduce yourself because sometimes I get excited to dive in and forget. So, would you like to introduce yourself and include your pronouns?

Gretchen: Yes. I'm Gretchen Sisson, my pronouns are she/her. I'm a sociologist with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, which is at the University of California San Francisco. I'm part of a social science research group in the OB/GYN department of the medical school where we study abortion and reproductive health broadly across the country. And my work particularly is looking at abortion and adoption and our cultural understandings of both of these practices and institutions. And I'm the author, a new book called Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, which will be out next week.

Jennie: So, you can always tell how excited I am to talk to somebody because I tend to just jump over the introduction because I'm like, okay, let's just dive right into the thing, and I almost did it today. So, y’all, first, Gretchen's book is amazing. Make sure to read it. I work in this field, and I learned so much reading the book. Honestly, from like page two. I think one of the things that blew me away was the scale, right? Like, it seems like so many more adoptions are happening when then I saw the numbers and I was like, wait, this is such a small group. That just blew my mind.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think adoption has a really outsized cultural importance in our society, right? Because, and as I talk about in the book, we have 4 million births per year in this country. We have between 850,000 and a million abortions happening every year. And we're talking about like 18 to 22,000 private domestic infant adoption. And I want to be clear, like that's a lot of qualifiers that are private domestic infant adoption. There are actually a lot more adoptions happening. Some of those are from the foster care system, some of them are international adoptions, although our international adoption numbers right now are actually very, very low as well. But the most common form of adoption in the United States is stepparent adoptions, right? So, if I have kids and I'm widowed or divorced and get remarried and my spouse chooses to adopt my children, that's the most common type of adoption that's happening. And that's very different than a private infant adoption that involves a permanent severance of parental rights, both parents, and a reestablishment of a new family. So, I choose to really zero in on private infant adoption because when we talk about adoption in the context of reproductive politics, right? When we talk about adoption being framed as an alternative to abortion, for example, that's really what we're talking about is the private relinquishment of newborns. And that was really the experience that I wanted to focus on. So, adoption is in a lot of ways bigger than that. And it can look like a lot of different things, but I'm particularly zeroing in on, on this newborn relinquishment.

Jennie: Again, showing my excitement—I jumped all over this really, like, thing that blew my mind right away instead of following the format I was planning. Okay, so we talked about that number. Okay. Let's take the step back now and do, like, some of that historical framing because I really, really love that your beginning of the book really focused on this historical framing around family separation and the history of adoption in the US because there were so much important stuff to talk about there that I thought it was really important to also bring at least some of it up here as well.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think it's important to understand that contemporary adoption, the way it's placed today—where again, you are permanently severing parental rights and then creating a new legal family—that way of practicing adoption is relatively new, right? So, if you look back, it's really only about a hundred and a little bit more years old that we've been doing that. But when you look back at the context of family separation throughout American history, that is much longer, right? And I include, I mean, and I go back and people don't understand how these things are related, but I truly believe that all of our systems of family separation are informed by prior historical moments of family separation. So, I talk about enslaved people who are separated from their families. I talk about Native American tribes that had their children systematically removed because I think that this is all part of a bigger conversation about how we understand parental love and bonds, who we decide gets to have a say in the raising of a child, and then more broadly how we think about what it means to support families and the value that we see in keeping families together or not. And again, a lot of contemporary adoption practice evolved starting in the 19th century after there was a shift around sort of the value that we placed on parenting and having children at all, right? So, before- I mean, for a certain class this has always been true, but for most Americans, kind of before the early 1800s, at least you were having children because children were of economic benefit, right? You needed more workers in your home, you needed more people who could bring in wage jobs or wages from paid work outside the home. Children had an economic utility. My children today- anyone's children today mostly have almost no economic utility, right? We don't have children because they're economically beneficial to our households. We have children because we as a society place a value on parenting. We place a value on children and childhood. And that shift- and so sociologist Viviana Zelizer, she has written a lot about this, a fantastic book called Pricing the Priceless Child, about this shift, the sentimentality and the value of parenthood that occurred. And since that shift, there have always been more people who want to adopt than there have been babies available, right? And so, this idea that there are so many children out there in need of homes, so many babies out there in need of homes, particularly available through private adoption, is just not true, right? There is such a high demand for babies and such a low supply that that market force shapes a lot of how we practice adoption today.

Jennie: That was such an interesting part of your book when you got into some of the practices that adoption agencies were using. But like, okay, we're gonna put a pin in that because we'll come back to that later.

Gretchen: Okay. [chuckles]

Jennie: But I also thought it was really important because I think now that we're in this post-Dobbs landscape, like, seeing how some of that could impact adoption and, like, so that led me to, like, looking to how pre-Roe some of the things were happening. Not to say that we're gonna get back to that, but it was just interesting to watch that shift and some of the more modern shifts in the ways that adoption was taking place.

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, I think that the ways that adoption is marketed have shifted a lot, right? When you look back at the “Baby Scoop Era,” which is sort of when we define kind of between the end of World War II and the decision of Roe v. Wade, so fifties, sixties and early seventies era that was sort of typified by these really coercive maternity home practices, adoptions that were completely closed, completely secretive. You'd have your baby, you would probably never hold them, and you were told you were never gonna see them again and that you shouldn't reach out to them, right? That was sort of the framework for these coercive adoption that pre-Roe, but Roe v. Wade did have a meaningful impact on the number of infants that were available for adoption pretty significantly. And by the early nineties you were seeing comparably relatively few American women that were relinquishing theirs. So, that contributed to a couple of things. One, it contributed to the pretty dramatic increase in international adoption that we saw throughout the nineties. That if American women aren't gonna be relinquishing their babies, then, then foreign women might. So, that was a lot of what we saw in the nineties and kind of peaked in 2004 and then fell pretty quickly. But the other thing that it contributed to was kind of more aggressive marketing around adoption for American women and the way that looks today. Because again, this is a supply and demand system, right? Demand is very, very high for babies, supply is really quite low. So, put into marketing adoption for pregnant people that are in a vulnerable place, so one thing I talk about in the book is geofencing, right? Where if you have your phone and you go to an abortion clinic you're gonna start to get ads for adoption agencies. You’re addicted and you go to a methadone treatment center and you have other searches on your phone that indicate pregnancy, you're gonna get ads for adoption agencies. If you're seeking out WIC support, any of these sorts of things, you're gonna start to get ads for adoption agencies, either by virtue, physically where you are with your phone or virtually based on the sites that you're visiting and the search terms that you're using. That's pretty aggressive. And that's actually, I mean, most adoption agencies, their number one expense is not legal fees. It's not support for the birth parent. It's marketing. It is Google ads to target pregnant people. And it's not just agencies, but prospective adoptive parents put a lot of money into their online profiles and social media ads. And so, it's definitely out there. This is a big- it's a big shift that's happened in the last 10 years for how agencies are reaching out to pregnant people.

Jennie: Yeah. I found that geofencing story, like, really shocking and I shouldn't have, but like...

Gretchen: Yeah, it's super creepy.

Jennie: It was still shocking and creepy, yeah.

Gretchen: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, and this is why I'm a qualitative researcher, because I think that the idea of like, oh, targeted advertising, like sometimes it's creepy, but sometimes actually I like that I'm being sold stuff that I actually want, right? But, like, what does that actually look like for vulnerable pregnant people with these adoption ads? And most of the women that I interviewed really wanted to parent, right? They were continuing their pregnancies with the intention of parenting, but things weren't going well for them, like, broadly speaking, right? Maybe they didn't get the job that they were hoping to get. Maybe their own parents weren't being supportive. Maybe their boyfriend wasn't showing up. Maybe they don't have stable housing. You know, whatever thing in their life that was making it hard to figure out a pathway to parenting and in the way that they wanted. And then these ads speak directly to all of those vulnerabilities, right? So, here's a family, here's their big suburban home, here are their wedding pictures, here are their parents who can't wait to be grandparents. Here's all the cousins at Sunday dinner, right? Here are these big vacations that they're taking two, three times a year, right? Here's their second house on the beach during the mountains. These are the types of ways that it's framed. And if you're really struggling and you don't have people in your life that are helping you figure out how to negotiate parenting, what that's gonna look like, this can seem really, really idyllic. And so, I think the stories that I tried to include in the book capture, like, how almost infatuated some of these women become with their child's adoptive parents, how intimidating these adoptive parents are to them, and really the gap between lot of them and where their child's adoptive families end up, which then make it hard for them to create meaningful relationships that will serve the child well over a lifetime.

Jennie: I think a really important thing to do, like, is to draw this really clear line of, like, adoption being presented as an alternative to abortion. What did your research show?

Gretchen: I mean, I didn't find any people that were deciding between an abortion and an adoption at the same time. No one was like, should I, like,- option A) abortion, option B) adoption. Like, which of these am I gonna choose? That doesn't mean that none of the women I interviewed didn't consider both. At some point plenty of them did, but for a lot of them it was, I wanna have an abortion. I don't wanna be pregnant anymore. And then they couldn't get an abortion. They were denied access to having an abortion. They couldn't afford it. They didn't know where to go to get one. They were too far along in their pregnancies. So, that was no longer an option for them by the time they started thinking about adoption, right? They had already ruled that out or had it ruled out for them, right? And again, as I said, most women wanted to parent, they never considered adoption at all either because they had personal anti-abortion beliefs and they just didn't feel comfortable with that. Or because they just, they generally wanted to parent from day one. A lot of them were excited to find out that they were pregnant. Maybe only, like, one or two had planned their pregnancies, but like most of them, these were surprises, but they were happy surprises for a lot of these participants that I spoke with. And they felt bonded to their pregnancies early on. They were excited to have a baby. But it's later in their pregnancies when, you know, there's something they can't quite figure out, right? Something's not quite fitting. And that's when adoption becomes a lifeline for them.

Jennie: I really loved that your book was full of stories from women telling their story in, like, its entirety. And I think that really helped drive home the points that you were trying to make throughout the book. It was so wonderful to hear from the relinquishing mothers. Do you wanna talk a little bit about the impact that you saw on relinquishing mothers?

Gretchen: Yeah. Well first, I mean, this book is in a lot of ways modeled after Ann Fressler's brilliant book, The Girls Who Went Away.

Jennie: Such a good book.

Gretchen: And I would really encourage you to pick up that book as well which is about adoption pre Roe v. Wade you know, so it's a chapter written in my voice with, you know, my sort of academic historic sociocultural analysis. And then I wanted to include as much first person narrative as felt possible. And that was important to me, like not just as a feminist to be including people, but I think also, like, readers are smart, right? They can see the connections that I'm seeing and I want to see how all of these are fitting together, right? Like, how anti-abortion politics collide with our lack of a social safety net, with family policing and racist forces, with these super conservative gendered ideas of family, how all of this comes together in an individual story. I can- I'm happy to sit here and explain that to you in many, many paragraphs, but readers are gonna get it just as well, if not better, from seeing the stories in their completion. And so that was really important to me as a scholar, as a feminist, as a writer. So, I'm glad that you felt like it worked. But I mean the impact that they had and all the women that are included in this book, their adoptions were between 2000 and 2020. I had a cohort of women that I had interviewed with adoptions older than that for some of my earlier research. But I really wanted to zero in on this 20 year period. So I really wanted to zero in on this period from 2000 to 2020. And then there was a group, a subsample of women that I interviewed in both 2010 and 2020 to see how they felt about their adoption over time. Because when I did my earlier interviews in 2010, there were a handful of women in more recent adoptions who were feeling pretty good about their adoptions. They felt really optimistic. They were pleased with the amount of contact they had with their child. They really felt empowered by this decision that they had made was the best thing for them, the best thing for their child. Great. Whereas mothers whose adoptions were further in the past were like in a much more cynical, critical space. And so the question, the research question for me at the time is, well, is adoption getting better when more recent adoptions are happier? Or does everybody become less happy over time? Like I would've loved to find that adoption- I dunno if I would've loved, but like, that was a plausible explanation at the time. But I had to go, so I had to go back and reinterview them.

Jennie: I really enjoyed that.

Gretchen: And it's just, yeah, well, I, I did too, and I dunno that I could have expected how stark of a contrast there was between some of the interviews in 2010 and 2020. So many of them were in such a more critical space 10 years later. For some of them, their adoption had closed or if not completely closed, their relationships with their child's birth families were strained, they weren't happy with the amount of contact that they had. They believed in retrospect that they had been misled or coerced in certain ways, or that they, at the very least, that they hadn't had all their options presented to them. A lot of them felt like, oh, maybe, you know, maybe I did the best I could at 19, but why wasn't there someone else around me being like, you know, you can do this. Let's figure out a parenting plan. You know, they really felt poorly served in the long run. And so, I think that, that, that was something that really came through in the ten-year follow data. And that's not to say that every birth mother was, like, miserable when I talked to them, right? Like, people are resilient. A lot of these mothers had other children. They were in happy relationships. Like, they found a lot of satisfaction, but that doesn't mean that the adoptions were not traumatizing for them. And I also think there was one mother that I interviewed who was in a really great place, right? And the way I always share her story is, you know, one of the early questions that I ask early in the interview is,ou know, when did you last see your child, right? What does your contact with your child look like right now? Well, she said, she's like, oh,well I haven't seen her in like a week or so, but like, I just saw her adoptive dad like two days ago because we bought, we bought a new TV and he has a truck, so who's helping us pick up the new TV, you know, like, and it was just this sort of narrative, and it sounds like a silly thing to talk about, but it just shows that like she's talking about her, her daughter's adopted father in the same way that I talk about like my brother-in-law, right? Or my cousin, right? Like she's become a part of their family. They still live locally. You know, she does school pickup on some days when she can. She babysits her daughter. She goes on family vacations when it makes sense. When she got married, her daughter was her bridesmaid and her wedding, right? Like, this has become a familial connection. And what she was very clear about was, this is not the system working well, right? We came to this place because we are a good fit, because we love each other, we respect each other. We did not get support from our agency in figuring this out. We had to find outside counseling to establish these relationships. They have come to this place that was really novel—this is not what adoption usually looks like in our country—because of who they were as individuals and not because the way adoption is practiced, set them up for that type of relationship. So, I think that those stories, like even when, when even the people who are like, actually I'm feeling really good about this relationship right now, when those people are even, like, but the system still sucks. That's when you know something's really broken.

Jennie: Yeah. The stories of the system and how it was working, like, in some of the stories was just so shocking. And I mean, in all, none of them felt good, but in some of them it was just so stark of, like, how much these relinquishing mothers were failed was really upsetting.

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, some of them told me things that were just, like, straight up illegal. Like, I would be listening to them, I'd be like, I don't think that that's legal. And they're like, yep, it's not, but what am I gonna do? Right? Like, they don't have resources to legally challenge anything. Adoption agencies have a good amount of money in a lot of cases. I mean, there are also cases of agencies like suing birth mothers who have spoken out, getting them to remove social media posts, sending them cease and desist letters if they, you know, have a blog or a YouTube channel. So, there's a lot of silencing that happens around relinquishing mothers. But there's also, like, a lot of the mothers were, like, how are you gonna anonymize me? Like, are you gonna use my child's real name? I'm like, no, I'm not gonna use anybody's real name. There's one real name in the book because that's very clear what she wanted. Everything else has changed. Locations are often changed, genders of children are often changed. Everything is, you know, I wanna protect them. Because a lot of them also said if I'm in an open adoption and my child's adoptive parents find out I'm being critical about adoption, they could limit my contact with my child. And so we think of openness as a good protective, connective piece of the adoption practice, but actually it really serves to silence mothers in a lot of ways as well.

Jennie: So, one of the things that was clearly on my mind reading this book is now that we're in this era of post-Dobbs, how is that going to impact adoption at the moment? And I know it's probably way too early to have all of the data in, but are you hearing whispers or starting to see some data of, like, what are the impacts of people not being able to get access abortion? And obviously a lot of those states still have really terrible social safety nets.

Gretchen: It is too soon, but I don't- I'm not even quite sure what it's gonna take because we don't have good data on adoption pre-Roe, right? We haven't rigorously tracked federal adoption data since like the seventies. We have some numbers out like the early nineties, but they stopped tracking adoptions on a federal level. So if there is like a slight increase or even a meaningful increase, we’re not gonna know for a long time. But I also think that- how these changes are going to build more over time, right? And people talk about Dobbs as having a big impact on the adoption rate, which I think it might have a significant one, but not nearly the scale that most people believe which I can talk about those recent in a second, but we also had like covid relief and child tax credits still in place in a lot of parts of the country at the same time. And to me, the child tax credit is a policy that's gonna have a much bigger impact on adoption relinquishment rates than Dobbs, right? Because any support that you're offering parents to make raising children even slightly more financially feasible, you're gonna have a meaningful impact on adoption because so much of adoption relinquishment is driven by poverty. So, and you know, hopefully now this, you know, the tax credit is going to get reinstated, and we'll see. But I do support for families is gonna have a dampening effect on what the Dobbs decision does. But to go back to this, people really believe that if they're denying access to abortion, we're gonna see a tremendous skyrocketing of adoption numbers. And that's not true. What we found in the Turnaway Study is that over 90% of people who are denied access to abortion care are parenting children as a result of the pregnancies that they were forced to continue. Only 9% are relinquishing for adoption. So, you're gonna have far, far, far more people parenting as a result of abortion denial than you're gonna have relinquishing for adoption because of abortion denial. But at the same time, because we have so many more people who need abortion care and relatively few adoptions, even that 9% is like a 50% increase in the number of adoptions, right? So, we could have way more adoptions than we used to have during Roe, but we're still gonna have so many more people parenting children at a time that they did not intend to parent because of that. Now, there are a couple of things that could impact this further, right? And this is something that we're not gonna see right away. We're only not even quite two years out, people might be able to raise one more child than they intended to have. They might be able to raise two more children than they intended to have. What happens over time as abortion access continues to be denied? Are they gonna have three, parent four more children than they have the capacity to parent? Like, that's where we might see more relinquishment, right? Because historically adoption was about delaying parenthood, right? You, this is your first pregnancy, you are not married, you shouldn't be a single mom, you're gonna relinquish this baby and then you can have kids when you're married down the line and appropriate timeline or setting. But what we're seeing now is that most birth mothers already have children. They're relinquishing subsequent children because they can't afford them. And so I think that we might see that with Dobbs over time. Also, if abortion is criminalized behavior, if criminality is a reason for a family policing and foster care systems to be involved in a family that can increase family separation too. So we did not see a higher rate of foster care involvement after five years for women who were denied access to abortion. But like, again, we don't know how all these layers of social factors are going to manifest over longer and longer periods of time.

Jennie: There are just so many things going wrong, right? The system is not working the way it should. The social safety net—you did a really great job of illustrating how that is keeping people from parenting the kids that they wanted. There were just so many failures. So what, what can we do to fix this or make it work better? Honestly, after reading the book, I'm very much, like, burn it all down. But like, is there like a- what can we do to alleviate some of this harm? Maybe that's the better way to ask.

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, I think that really thinking critically about adoption is the first step, right? That we, for so long as a culture have thought of adoption as a beautiful family building institution, right? I view every adoption that happens as a failure, it means that we have failed to keep a family together, right? What does that mean? And it doesn't mean I think children should be in unsafe homes, right? That's like a criticism that's like lobbed at me. And everyone who's critical of adoption is like, well, would these babies be better off homes? No, obviously, right? But I think of one mother that I spoke with and she was older. This wasn't, this wasn't a research interview, it was just a conversation that we were having kind of about my work. And she, like, well, you know, my adoption wasn't the result of poverty. I was just 16 years old and my home wasn't safe to bring a baby home too. And I'm like, okay, okay, was it safe for you as a 16-year-old? And she's like, oh no, of course not. I was like, okay, then we've already failed. Right?

Jennie: Right.

Gretchen: We've already failed to give you safe circumstances to live in. And I think that is what it's about. It doesn't mean that we're gonna be able to keep every family together in the short term, but it does mean that we need to look at the forces that are separating families that are leading to the relinquishment of children to really reconsider where we should be investing. And we spend a lot of money on adoption. I mean, not just adoption tax, federal adoption tax credit is 16,000 for adoption, right? But we also state subsidies for foster care adoptions. We put taxpayer money into crisis pregnancy centers that often partner with adoptions. Texas is putting millions and millions of dollars into a pro adoption marketing campaign, right? Like, we already spend a lot of taxpayer dollars on adoption as a system, whereas relatively similar comparable investment could prevent all that from happening in the first place, right? And so, it's a question of priorities about where we are spending. And I think the more progressive place to spend our dollars is not on promoting adoption, but on keeping families together. And there are, you know, from like the reform versus the burn it down perspective, like I think that there is so much that could change about how we practice adoption that is really important. How it's marketed, how it's sold. I mean, gosh, there's a bill right now in Congress to track adoption, collect data on this. Like, as a researcher, I'm like, yes, please, we just need to know the scale of what we're talking about. There's plenty of policy that could be enacted here that won't necessarily expand the scope of the adoption industry. That I think is really valuable. But to me, those types of reform questions are far less interesting than thinking about how we're supporting families in the first place.

Jennie: Yeah. I think one of the stories that was super heartbreaking—I think it was like early in the book—where the woman was like, if I had like two or three thousand dollars I could have parented instead of relinquishing. And like, that's just devastating.

Gretchen: Yeah. And I get pushback, right? From people who are, like, takes more than two thousand dollars to raise a kid. For sure. And the answer is yes, right? Of course it does, of course. But it's not, “I need a thousand dollars so that I can raise my child to age 18.” It's, “I need a thousand dollars to get through this immediate crisis right now that is gonna push us towards separation.” You know, millions of American families in poverty, they live from paycheck to paycheck, they have food insecurity, they don't have stable, safe sanitary housing, right? Like millions of families are already in that space, right? But they have their children, they can keep their children not again, gosh, not all the time for sure. Because especially if they're not white, right? Because family policing is so real. And I'm not trying to diminish that.

Jennie: So, there are so many things that are going wrong right now. Or just like the system isn't working the way it should. The social safety net, you did a really great job of explaining in the book how that is keeping people from parenting the kids they want. So, there were just so many failures. What can we do to fix this or alleviate some of the harm that we're seeing?

Gretchen: Yeah. So, there are a number of federal bills now that are up that are looking at ways of kind of introducing more ethical practice or less...you know, harm reduction practices within the system. So I mean, the most basic one is just gathering data statistics on adoption. We don't have good federal counts for adoptions right now. Another is limiting the ways that adoption can be marketed, making it so that unlicensed providers cannot be marketing adoption across state lines. So, there's a couple of pieces there that I think could be productive, but what I am most interested in is really thinking about policies that will allow us to keep families together. And the nice thing about this is that I think they're about adoption, but these policies are really just about supporting the millions of American families that are living in poverty already, right? So, family preservation policy just looks like housing accessibility, living wages, food assistance, the child tax credit. All of these pieces are going to go a really long way in making parenting more tenable for people who want to keep their children, which again is most of them I spoke with. And so I think that those policies that just reflect our basic ability to provide a social safety net and care for people in this country, those are the types of policies that are also gonna keep families together.

Jennie: Yeah. What really struck me is the story you had early in the book where it was one of the relinquishing mothers talking about how, you know, if she just had a couple thousand dollars at that time, she would've been able to not relinquish. And like that's just devastating to think something so small could have made such a huge difference.

Gretchen: Yeah. And I think that people have really questioned that story and been like, well, does it really just take a thousand to raise a kid? And the answer is like, no, of course not. It takes far more than that, right? There would've been a need for kind of ongoing support, you know, in the form of all of the things I just mentioned. But what they're talking about when they give these relatively low numbers, a thousand, you know, two thousand dollars, most of them were in that range. Some of them are even less. They're talking about the amount that they would need to get through the immediate crisis that they were facing at the time that a decision needed to be made, at the time that a plan needed to be put in place. So, it's really about getting into safe housing quickly, right? Having the ability to have a safety deposit to get into a new apartment, having the ability to buy a crib in a car seat so that this feels a little bit more manageable and tangible. And I think that those are the sorts of things that they were lacking the resources for at the time, either at the end of the pregnancy or right after the baby was delivered. Things that would've just made it feel more immediately possible and then they could get into this space of sort of everyday American parenting and poverty struggle. And I'm not trying to minimize that, right? I'm just saying that a lot of people are there. And again, they would've needed some larger scale help over time, but that thousand number is what they would've needed to keep their child.

Jennie: Yeah. I think the other one, and this might have been the same person, I can't remember, was trying to get into housing and yeah, there was, like, such a long wait and then she talked to a friend in a different part of the state, and they got in much quicker. So like, just hearing things like that of how the social safety net in the system was just not being as supportive in the ways that could have been helpful at the right time, right?

Gretchen: Right. And getting housing for yourself as an adult is one thing, but getting housing for yourself and a baby is an added challenge. And in contrast to that, some agencies will provide housing support and make that really easy. And some agencies will provide, you know, reimbursement for housing or they'll help someone get settled into an Airbnb or a temporary apartment. Some will relocate them, some agencies have dorms, right? And they will relocate mothers from across the country to their state where their agency is to live in their dorms. And if you're really struggling with housing or you're not- you don't have a safe living environment, that is a real lifeline. But what it also does is it creates a sense of obligation for a lot of the mothers that I spoke with, right? And some agencies, this was overt, after the baby was born it was like, oh well if you decide to keep this baby you know you would pay us back for your housing, right? And for some it wasn't that coercive, but it was, well, I felt like I owed this family my baby because the agency had helped me get housing. And for agencies that relocate mothers, it can really pull them away from any support that they do have, right? So, even if it's not a lot, right? Even if it's insufficient in their own community for them to keep their children, you know, the agency can really isolate them in a lot of ways. And that has echoes of the pre-Roe maternity homes, right? Where when you move someone away from their home and make them feel really geographically dislocated from everyone that they know, or if they're on a housing wait list and they leave the state and they're no longer a resident at that state, they can lose their spot in line for housing. So, there's a lot of layers to this and where they can find support and what strings are attached to different types of support.

Jennie: That was something I don't think we talked about, but like the sense of obligation that I feel like ran through so many of the stories where they had met, like, the adoptive parents and like then had made connections with them. So, then there was like this sense of obligation. I just felt that through many stories—that was kind of this thread that came through in many of them.

Gretchen: Yeah. There was one story that—I think I included this in the book—where the mother went and had dinner with the prospective adoptive parents and their son—they had a three or 4-year-old already—and he was drawing pictures of her with his baby brother in her belly, right? And so, she feels not just an obligation to the adoptive parents, but to this whole family, to this small child who's eager to be a big sibling, right? And I think that that was, that reflects the ways that almost everything, when people talk about ethical adoption practice, almost everything is a double-edged sword, right? Because birth mothers being able to pick out the parents is better than them not being able to pick out the parents, right? If you want a successful open adoption, it's good for people to know each other during pregnancy so that you can make sure that this is someone that you're gonna be able to be in a working relationship with for the rest of your life, right? But at the same time, that pre-birth matching can confer a sense of obligation and can make it really, really difficult for a lot of the mothers to feel like they can still change their mind after the child arrives.

Jennie: Okay, I wanna be respectful of your time, so let's wrap it up. I like to always end with action items. So, what can our audience do right now to take action around adoption and making it better?

Gretchen: You know, I would encourage them to read the book. I'm really- obviously really proud of the book and, and I really think that I worked hard to put the voices of the women that are most impacted by this front and center. And so, I think listening to their stories is one of the most important things that we can do right now. And I would also encourage folks to follow some adoptee voices on social media. There are really active, vocal adoptee communities on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and I think you'll learn a lot just from understanding their experiences as adopted people. And they do a lot to push back on the idea of adoption is necessarily this, this path to a straightforwardly better life. And so, I think one of the most important things that we can do as a movement generally is listen to the voices of impacted people. So I hope folks will take it, take the time to try and do that.

Jennie: Well, Gretchen, thank you so much for being here. Y'all make sure to check out Gretchen's book. It really is amazing.

Gretchen: Thank you.

[music outro]

Jennie: If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jennie@reprosfightback.com or you can find us on social media. We're at @RePROsFightBack on Facebook and Twitter or @reprosfb on Instagram. If you love our podcast and wanna make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you wanna make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at reprofightback.com. Thanks all!