Just before the release of Gretchen Sisson’s RELINQUISHED: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, an ARC of the book landed on my doorstep. I couldn’t wait to dive in, but a 10-hour car trip convinced me to buy it on Audible rather than wait to read it, and boy am I glad I did.

I recommend the audio version, as different actresses portray the first mother narratives, which adds a compelling element to an already mind-bending analysis of the adoption industry’s practices to lure and persuade mothers to relinquish their children with the failed promises of “open” adoption.

I knew I had a doozy of a book when a simple Facebook profile pic of me holding it generated 50-plus likes and about that many comments, several of which came as part of a heated debate around who should be writing books about adoption and false narratives about first mothers. So that said, I expect even this post to stir up commotion, but I hope not. 

Inside those post comments, the old stereotype of the “troubled” drug-addled teen reared its ugly head, and boy did both first mothers and adoptees jump in to set the record straight. Another posted dissatisfaction with someone outside the community writing a book and making money off the lived experiences of first mothers and adoptees. That complaint was also addressed, with the majority recognizing that mainstream America needs to hear from both the community AND from scholars with the statistics to back their facts, which Sisson certainly has in this book. Fascinating statistics, contradicting, and in my opinion crushing, the historical first mother tropes and teen-crisis narratives that gave us the current 30-billion Adoption industry we have today. 

Sisson’s book, a 20-year study of birth mothers and analysis of the outcomes of their open adoptions, posits that the majority of birth mothers don’t want to relinquish, and would not do so if they had some measure of limited financial support. Post the Dobb’s decision and pre the upcoming election, Sisson’s timing could not be better. This analysis of relinquishment in America, the predatory practices that drive it, and the regret of first mothers who succumb to it, will spark debate across the aisles about what is needed to address the ballooning and highly unethical 30-billion-dollar baby industry, as well as family policing that as Gretchen notes is sustaining demand as traditional baby markets decline. 

Gretchen’s book compelled me to reflect on the choice this black market “adoptee” made while standing pregnant in my birth mother’s shoes at 18 years old. In 1989, when open adoption was only taking root, I chose to keep my baby. What factors led to my decision? Being a paperless black-market baby, to begin with.

I was bought by a desperate couple who skirted the system that denied them for being older, not well-off, and likely bi-racial. They never received a legal adoption or birth certificate for me, and I believe the fear of raising a baby no court had called their own led to my “adoptive” mother’s alcoholism, and my “adoptive” father’s 650-pound morbid obesity, both of which equaled financial struggles for our family.

In my experience, adoption did not look like such a shiny option for my baby. Thirty years later, despite knowing how hard it was at times, would I still make the same choice to keep my baby? Yes, I would. And I want to thank Gretchen for a book that silenced whatever little whisper in my head that still wondered if my daughter would have had “a better life” otherwise.

So after a full book binge between New Orleans and Texas, I was fully prepared and excited to be part of a full house attending the United Adoptees Zoom Conversation with Gretchen this past Tuesday evening. For those who have yet to hear her talk, here are a few takeaways: 

12 Gretchen Sisson Quotes from Her Talk with Adoptees United. 

The Commodification of Children in Adoption: “I think any world in which children are commodified, you cannot have ethical adoption. I think as long as children are commodified, you cannot get to a place where it’s truly ethical.”

The Importance of Building Supports for Families: “What we need to build is a world that values family connection, right? What we need to build is a world that supports families… as well as limiting the scope of the family-placing system, right? But the way to limit that scope is by building out these supports.”

The Intersection of Private Adoption and the Family Policing System: “I think that what’s happening now is that actually the private adoption system and the family policing system are becoming increasingly close together, because poverty is really such a determinative characteristic in who is targeted for family separation, both in the public and the private system.”

The Changing Demographics of Relinquishing Mothers due to Family Policing: “In the 2020 sample, I had far more women of color that participated. And when I looked back, I also collected data on about 8,000 adoptions that occurred between 2011 and 2020 and found a far higher representation of women of color participating in that system than we had found in previous generations.”

The Historical Newness of Modern Adoption Practices: “It’s important to remember that the way adoption is practiced today is fairly historically new… We’ve only been doing it this way for at the long end, 150 years. And the ways that we have found to care for children and families in other ways predate that dramatically, particularly in indigenous communities and communities of color.”

The Evolution of Mothers’ Feelings About Their Adoptions Over Time: “I will say that the reason why I wanted to go back and interview them [natural mothers] after 10 years was because I noticed this pattern in my original interviews in the 2010 data, that mothers who were closer to their adoption… felt more positively about their adoptions… And so that’s why I wanted to interview the same group of people 10 years later… The more time they had between where they were in the adoption, the more critically, the more cynical they were about the role that adoption played in their own lives and the lives of their children.”

The Importance of First-Person Narratives in the Book: “Part of the reason why I included the first-person narratives… I thought that they [first mother voices] were so important to The Girls Who Went Away that I tried to bring that structure into it.”

The Role of Adoptee Activists in Shaping the Conversation: “I draw on a lot of adoptee activists in the book who have already been doing other work in the reproductive justice movement that are now surfacing their needs as adopted people within that space, and saying, now it’s time to consider what this means.”

The Marketing of Adoption as a Solution to Abortion: “And the whole narrative was that they [relinquishing teen mothers] were better parents than their peers [unrelinquishing teen mothers] who were parenting. That by virtue of relinquishing their daughter, they had demonstrated that they were more mature, more responsible, more loving in a lot of ways… And it really made me want to understand the way that we perceive adoption as like a panacea. We don’t need to invest in these families over here if they should just be giving their babies to other families, right?”

The Importance of Understanding Adoption as a Market-Driven System: “You have really, really, really high demand for babies and children. You have really low supply and I’m using this market language… because I think it’s important to understand the ways that it is a market-shaped system.”

The Limitations of Open Adoption: “I’ve done a lot of these interviews, right? And I think that even if they are just anecdotes, right?… Like, even if one of these stories is true, three of these stories is true, then there’s still a pretty damning indictment of how the overall system is working.”

The Importance of Considering the Emotional Experiences of Relinquishing Mothers: “Few relinquishing mothers felt that their child’s adoptive parents considered their emotional experiences…”

HOW YOU CAN HELP

If you have yet to get the book, get it today, and after you read it, please please please leave Gretchen a review on Amazon or Good Reads. Compared to the amount of attention this book is receiving there are comparatively few, and the faster the reviews come in the more Amazon presents the book with likely readers. Also, please consider contributing to Adoptees United, the organization that made this event possible, and which runs a special program gifting DNA kits to those who cannot afford them.