Working Mom Hour

The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood

May 07, 2024 • Erica & Mads

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Join Mads for a special interview with Gretchen Sisson Ph.D., who recently released “Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and Privilege of American Motherhood,” to uncover the often-overlooked stories of mothers who relinquish their children for adoption.

Throughout the process of writing Relinquished, Gretchen learned how factors like poverty, lack of support, inadequate counseling, and limited access to resources and information force women to make choices they never imagined. She also reveals startling facts about the lack of federal regulation and the role of market forces.

As an adoptive mom, Mads believes these conversations are critical for change, so don’t miss out on this important discussion. 

In this episode you’ll discover:

  • How to understand adoption from a birth parent's perspective.
  • The broad definition of motherhood, and how birth mothers continue to mother their children in unseen ways, even after relinquishment.
  • Emotional and financial struggles mothers face and how adoption can often come from a place of limited choice.

1:52 - Defining Motherhood
6:17 - The Emotional Impact of Adoption
10:27 - Statistics, Data and Private Adoption System
13:53 - Barriers to Parenting and Examples of Relinquishment
23:17 - Ethics in the Adoption Industry
28:02 - Unlicensed Adoption Facilitators, Legal Ambiguity and Revocation Rights
40:51 - Vision for a Healthier Adoption System and Practices


Connect with Gretchen:

Website: https://www.gretchensisson.com/

Book Website: https://www.relinquishedbook.com/

Substack: https://gretchen.substack.com/

Please make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode, and kindly review the podcast on Apple Podcasts so we can reach more working moms.

We always want to hear your thoughts, concerns, questions or guest suggestions – email workingmomhour@212comm.com.

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Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, welcome to Working Mom Hour. This episode is a bit unique for us. Gretchen Sisson is joining just me today to dive deep into exploring one side of adoption that often goes unseen and unheard the mothers who relinquish their children. She's a PhD in qualitative sociologist who focuses on the social constructions of parenthood, specifically abortion and pregnancy, decision-making, teen pregnancy and young parenthood, infertility and assisted reproductive technologies, adoption and birth or first motherhood. Gretchen recently released a book called Relinquished the Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood that is getting massive buzz and, as an adoptive mom who has always felt the loss with the gain in adoptive motherhood, I'm so grateful to explore her wisdom in a way that I think will resonate with a broad audience.

Speaker 1:

I'm happy to welcome Gretchen Sisson. I just want to end by reading an excerpt from the book that I think sums all of this up really incredibly. If we were to make contraceptive and abortion access real in this country and if we were to make parenting truly tenable for those who want it ambitions that admittedly seem far away on this arc towards justice in our post-obs nation, adoption would be exceedingly rare. And what of those in more dire circumstances, parents who are homeless or incarcerated when their children are born, or have an addiction to drugs and are unable to care for themselves, let alone a newborn, or are facing a mental health crisis that comprises their ability to parent safely, or are trapped in an abusive relationship with a partner that could be dangerous to their child. I have shared stories of women in all of these circumstances throughout this book. What would happen to them if we actually built the systems that could support and serve them?

Speaker 1:

These challenges are why reproductive justice is the necessary movement in which to reconsider adoption, as it not only demands that the state not unduly interfere with women's reproductive decision-making, but it also insists that the state had an obligation to help create the conditions for women to exercise their decisions without coercion and with social supports. It envisions a world with paths to justice other than incarceration, with paths to health care that are affordable and meaningful, with paths to safety that include not just the child but their parents too, and for those who are still not able to parent. It offers something other than the policing, separation and shame of the current family regulation system, and something other than the full, permanent transfer of parenting rights and gaslighting of the current private adoption system. It embraces supported crisis care, kinship arrangements and temporary guardianships that leave open opportunities for reconciliation and reconnection with families and communities of origin. Gretchen, welcome to Working Mama. I'm super honored to have you here today.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for having me. I appreciate being here.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, okay, let's get into it. So this podcast explores the intersection of work and motherhood and family building as part of that. Adoption is one way to build a family. It's one of the ways I grew my family and you wrote this book.

Speaker 1:

Relinquished the Politics of Adoption and Privilege in American Motherhood. That is, shining a light on the unseen, untold stories of adoption, which are those of the birth parents. And you focus on the mothers and the book explores what their life was like during the pregnancy, how they came to decide on adoption and what consequences the adoption had for their lives and children. And what's interesting to me about adoption is that there are these two. You know, in most simplistic scenarios, there are these two experiences of motherhood the mother that carries and births the child, and the one who raises the child. My son was mothered by several others as well, and I've always felt like a little strange about celebrating adoption itself because with the gains are very clear experiences of loss for my son, for his birth parents, his extended family. So I'm totally curious to ask you how do you define motherhood?

Speaker 2:

I mean I think that there's a lot of ways to define motherhood or parenthood more broadly and the act of mothering and what that means to care for and raise a child, and certainly the act of birthing, I think, is part of motherhood. But I think that a lot of the mothers that I interviewed who had relinquished their children for adoption, they were in this interesting space where they were still doing some of the work of mothering without having a prescribed social way of having that work acknowledged and validated. And I think that that is an important part of the conversation is what is their role as a mother when they're not engaged in the daily work of child rearing but are still finding ways of showing up and acting and embodying motherhood for their child and the ways that we validate that or often don't?

Speaker 1:

So, oh my gosh, it's so beautiful and it's like the social construct of motherhood, it's like the biological part of motherhood. We were just talking to someone about mom brain and how like the brain is changing during pregnancy and after, and I can imagine that's just like happening, and totally I mean it's happening, whether or not they have the child once it's born. So you research family building and the social constructions of parenthood. In simple terms, what are you trying to achieve with your research?

Speaker 2:

So most of my work really looks at the gap between how around abortion look like and what the lived experiences of abortion care and accessing that type of care in the United States right now what that looks like and, similarly with adoption, what the data say about these people's lives, what our social myths and concepts of them and their children and their families are, and what the lived experience is there. But this most recent work, of course, is looking at adoption and the gap between our social and cultural narratives about adoption, how we understand adoption, why we understand adoption that way and the ways that it is so often really disconnected from what it means to relinquish and then to live out an adoption over the course of someone's life.

Speaker 1:

Yes, and so are you saying and maybe we just can say this clearly like adoption is seen. I think there's certain stigmas with adoption, of course, but what you're saying in the book is that it's very celebrated, like the adoptive parents are very celebrated and seen, whereas the relinquishing parents are like the hidden and the unseen. Is that correct?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, I think so much of our narrative about adoption is shaped by the families that are formed by adoption right, and adoptive families are far more visible than birth families and families of origin, and that understanding of adoption as a social good, as a practice, that primarily creates families, a social good as a practice that primarily creates families, that secures these bonds, doesn't pay any attention to the families that are separated.

Speaker 2:

And it's not just that. Birth families are ignored. Right, there's a lot of silencing and stigma that goes into keeping those stories from gaining traction, and that is part of what I wanted to address in the book was providing a different perspective, because so many of the stories that we hear about adoption are very adoptive, family centric.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I've. I felt that in my experience it almost was like a little bit of a cognitive dissonance because people would be like still are like oh my God, you're doing such something so amazing, Whereas we were feeling like we're grateful to have this child, and in exploring sort of like the birth parent side and even reading your book, it's like sort of heart wrenching to know that these birth parents, even with a little bit of help like I think in one point you said like $1,000 would have changed the trajectory of some of these birth parents lives and they would have chose to parent, which is staggering and sort of like eye opening. The book has gotten a lot of buzz. You're still getting like tons of news articles and all that. What, generally, has the response been? As you've been shining this light on something that I think is probably a new issue to many, yeah, the response has been very good.

Speaker 2:

You know, the trade reviews have been good. That's always validating what's really important to me is the response.

Speaker 1:

What's a trade review Like from adoption publications?

Speaker 2:

Oh no, it's like book trade. It's like Publishers Weekly Carcass Booklist Okay, got it. The book trade reviews Okay, got it. Yeah, those are valuable. My editor, that's very valuable from my publisher's perspective, my editor's perspective and mine as well. What is really personally gratifying to me, though, has been the response that I've gotten first from my participants and other birth families.

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, Like the hundred women you interviewed.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

And then that community more broadly and then as well as the adoptee community. I think that their response was not one that I necessarily could have anticipated. You know my work isn't about the experiences of adoptees or adopted people and I try to be very clear about including the voices of adopted scholars and activists and advocates throughout the book. But the research, of course, isn't on their experiences. So it has been very validating to me that they have found the book to be a valuable part of their own conversations and their understandings of adoption, so that response has been great. You know there's always going to be a valuable part of their own conversations and their understandings of adoption, so that response has been great.

Speaker 2:

You know there's always going to be criticism when you're talking about political issues, especially when you're talking about something that is kind of as universally beloved as adoption. Right, Adoption might be one of the last remaining bipartisan areas of support. Right, I would talk about how the Congressional Adoption Caucus is the largest bipartisan, bicameral caucus in our federal government. And so when you're taking something that everyone generally agrees is a good thing and trying to add some complexity to that, you're always going to get pushback, but I try to remind myself that my first.

Speaker 2:

I mean I have a lot of people that I feel accountable to with this book, but I'm primarily writing this book for people who have some understanding of shared values with me, who believe in reproductive freedom and personal autonomy as a worthy goal, who believe in issues of social justice and who want to see how adoption fits into those conversations. So if you're someone who's deeply anti-abortion, there are going to be a lot of parts of this book you probably don't agree with. I think there's still plenty in the conversation that those folks can learn and hopefully take away as actionable. But that wasn't who I was writing it for.

Speaker 2:

And then there are also people who are like well, poor people just shouldn't have kids, right and so if it, and those. That is not a person that I'm writing this for either.

Speaker 1:

Right, yeah, that's not like a solution or a productive thing to say. I just wanted to pull a few stats from the book so we can level set with listeners as I read these check me if I'm saying something wrong. This felt like pretty profound to read and I was kind of like do I? I did not know any of this and it feels like like I'm a woman. I am also an adoptive parent. I feel like these, these should be things that I'm aware of, but I wasn't. 86% of women will get pregnant during their lifetime. There are 1 million abortions per year in the US, but just 19,000 relinquishments.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, 86% will give birth, so more will be pregnant and not give birth for whatever reason. The million abortions that is probably a little bit high right now it's between at every year. Over the last 10 years it's been between 850,000 to a million abortions and adoptions, comparatively, are very, very rare. So the way we usually frame it is you know, 86% of American women will give birth at some point in their reproductive life. Around 25% to 30%, depending on what year you're looking at, will have an abortion. 25% to 30%, depending on what year you're looking at will have an abortion. Okay, oh, wow. And about less than 1% will relinquish for adoption. So birth and abortion are very common reproductive experiences and relinquishment is a fairly rare experience.

Speaker 1:

Yes, and the birth mothers you interviewed relinquished between 2000 and 2020. You mentioned that they all signed their paperwork for adoption. Why was that an important piece, by the way, to sort of make sure that they're all like? Was it like a control?

Speaker 2:

So I wanted to differentiate that I was looking at mothers who relinquished for adoption within the private adoption system, so through agencies or attorneys.

Speaker 2:

Okay, well, and they so they were terminating their own parental rights, rather than the state terminating their parental rights, so through a foster care or child welfare situation. A lot of the mothers that I interviewed had some involvement with the child welfare system at some point as well Not a lot, some. So I think it's also important to understand how both public and private adoption systems interact with each other, because I think that that is increasing, but because I wanted to look at this as a researcher, as a question of understanding how people are making decisions about pregnancies, how adoption decisions are made in the context of the abortion debate, where adoption is so often sort of this common ground or this presented as a solution, I wanted to look at mothers who were terminating their own parental rights, and so I tried to make that clear. But the system is very muddied right.

Speaker 1:

It's becoming even more of an arbitrary line between public and of the women you interviewed, almost none were choosing between abortion and adoption. Most wanted to parent, even though they're signing their rights. Will you tell us more about this sort of? Like experience for them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So we have this idea and again, as I just said, this goes back to this idea that adoption is a meaningful alternative to abortion. And that's just not what we found. None of the women that I interviewed were choosing between abortion and adoption at one point in their pregnancy. When some of them were denied access to abortion, they couldn't get an abortion, they couldn't afford one. They discovered their pregnancy too late to get one. They didn't know where to go. So there were a number of ways that they were denied access to abortion care. Then they might turn to adoption as a sort of lifeline if they didn't feel that they could parent.

Speaker 2:

So it's not that the issues are entirely separate, but none of the women were weighing between abortion and adoption. Most of them never tried to get an abortion. Most of them continued their pregnancies hoping, planning to parent and came to a point later in their pregnancies where that felt impossible. For some of them it was earlier in their pregnancies. That was particularly true for women who grew up in more conservative communities or evangelical communities particularly, but for the most part, most of them intended to parent, hoped to parent, and abortion was never really something they deeply considered.

Speaker 1:

So could you give us like a couple of examples of the situations? I remember one was like someone was incarcerated by the time she got out. She didn't have enough time to like get a job and feel stable, or like. Can you paint a little bit of a picture of what some of those situations looked like or could look like?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so you know the one woman you're talking. She was. She was never she's never in prison. She was in jail for part of her pregnancy there, which you know is a difference, right, because jail is sort of a more temporary thing, which is important because by the time the child was born, she, she was out in the community, she had a partner who was out in the community. She had a partner who was, if not outwardly abusive, certainly not a safe towards her, was not a safe person to be around, and she was engaged in kind of a fight where he was the instigator and it sort of anyway. That's why she was put in into jail and she was there for long enough that when she got out she felt that she didn't have enough time to find stable housing and figure out what it would look like to raise the child. She actually got housing through the agency that she was working with. They got her an Airbnb. This was also during the pandemic, so they wanted to find a place where she could be safe, and so that was the challenge for her was raising a child. They didn't have enough money to put down a security deposit on their own apartment. That was a recurring theme Often, especially for women who were younger, their own parents' ideas about their pregnancy were really determinative, and poverty was really like the most common factor.

Speaker 2:

So I looked at data from 8,000 private domestic adoptions that happened between 2011 and 2020. And the majority of relinquishing mothers have $5,000 or less of annual personal income. So they might have other sources of support. They might have a partner who's contributing to household income. Again, they might be reliant on their parents, but it means that they don't have the economic resources to shape the circumstances in which they're living, and that was really one of the biggest contributing factors.

Speaker 1:

I remember like the idea of a car seat was like brought up several times, like how I can't even I don't have a car seat, how can I get home from the hospital? Or a car you know I don't have a vehicle or like a method of transportation. I also remember, like regarding the parents and like the parental support. I remember one story you told where a woman relinquished a child her child, her first child because she thought she wouldn't have support from her mom or her parents. And then she got pregnant again and told her mom and her mom was happy and supportive and then she kept that child.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that was actually. That was an interesting story. So that young woman and then another one, they were both participants in the Turnaway study, which is a larger study that I worked on at the University of California here in San Francisco. Those were women who were denied access to abortion care, and Maria, who's the woman who you're talking about particularly. She had wanted to parent. Her boyfriend kind of pressured her into trying to get an abortion. She was denied access to abortion care. She ended up relinquishing that child because her boyfriend really wasn't supportive of her parenting Sorry, sophia. And then Emily was the other young woman that was part of the turn-away study and she really wanted to get an abortion. She tried to get an abortion multiple places and couldn't access care, and so she ended up relinquishing when she was denied care. They both, within the course of the study, got pregnant again and Sophia, who had really wanted to parent, ended up parenting her second child.

Speaker 1:

And.

Speaker 2:

Emily, who had always wanted to have, who had never wanted to continue that first pregnancy, got an abortion with the second pregnancy and I think it's really telling that neither one of them considered adoption again in that second unplanned pregnancy. Right, they both only moved towards adoption when they felt they had no other choices. And that was really what I consistently saw was that the more constrained people's positions are, the fewer options that they have. That's when adoption kind of becomes this lifeline.

Speaker 2:

And this is why, when they talk about like oh, I would have needed $1,000 to make a different decision, and people push back on that, like $1,000 isn't going to get you very far in raising a child, and that's true, but it's the $1,000 not to raise a child, but it's $1,000 isn't going to get you very far in raising a child, and that's true, but it's the $1,000 not to raise a child, but it's $1,000 to feel like you have enough control over your circumstances to make a different decision.

Speaker 2:

They will need more support after that, but what they're trying to access is even just the sort of baseline level of struggle that so many American families who are going paycheck by paycheck, day by day, are in. That's what they need, that $1,000 to even get access to that will allow them to keep their child and then do the work of survival, and I think that that's an important distinction. And I think that that's an important distinction. Really, adoption is a lack of access to a basic social safety net, and that's why the US adoption rates are so meaningfully different than other countries that do have those social safety nets at a higher level.

Speaker 1:

That was staggering. You mentioned Canada is like much lower rate of adoption because of those safety nets. Yeah, I mean the well.

Speaker 2:

so there's the rate of relinquishment. And then there's the rate of adoption, right. So fewer, far, far fewer Canadian women relinquish. There's much less domestic adoption within Canada, so it's it's much less common for Canadian women. I mean, the US number is still low, right, but it's even less common in Canada, particularly in Scandinavia, where you have far more robust systems of social support. You know, danish women don't relinquish their children. But in these countries you see a higher rate of international adoption because the demand for adoption is still very high, and that's another thing that people misunderstand about adoption is we think like, oh, there's so many children in need of homes.

Speaker 2:

But when you talk about private adoption particularly, which is where most adoption of infants, well, where a greater proportion of infant adoptions occur, you have upwards of 45 waiting families for every infant that's available for private adoption. We don't need more families to participate in the private adoption system along. This idea right, like this, is a demand driven system, right, you have very, very high demand for available babies and very, very few infants that are available, and so when there are fewer infants available, efforts are either made to find children elsewhere to meet the demands of adoptive, would-be adoptive parents, or to increase the available supply of babies, which is what you see in, like the aggressive advertising of agencies. Yeah, that's targeted outreach.

Speaker 1:

Let's get into that a little bit, okay, well, maybe this is a place to start. Your book mentions that only seven. This was so sad and mind-blowing to me that only seven states require counseling before relinquishment and only 13 require a parent be given an explanation of the legal effects of relinquishment. Legal effects of relinquishment how or why is that possible? And then maybe we can get into the people who are caring for these expectant mothers.

Speaker 2:

I mean, I don't know why that's possible, right, I think this is something that is what happens when, again, you have a market-based system shaping all of these forces that is particularly motivated to facilitate the process for a market-based meaning, like the commoditization of humans, of these babies.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

And also just the market, like the. You know, because we live in a capitalist society, if there is high demand, you're going to try to generate, so you're going to try to facilitate supply. Right, and it feels like uncomfortable to be talking about children in this way, but I think it's important to understand that these are the market forces that shape what this system looks like, and so states have a lot of states have laws that are very friendly to finalizing adoptions within the private system quickly, so short revocation periods. Some states don't require paternal consent or have very easy waivers of paternal consent notification. They don't require options counseling or informed consent. They don't require independent legal counsel for relinquishing mother, so they can sign the contract without their own attorney. Oftentimes they are being advised by the adoptive parent or the agency's attorney. The adoptive parents or the agency are paying for that lawyer, so you know who the lawyer is working for, and I think that you have a system that is especially invested in making these adoptions go smoothly.

Speaker 1:

And like this wasn't common knowledge for me. So I just want to say that there's and again jump in if I'm saying anything wrong from your perspective but there's no federal regulation of the US adoption industry, so any laws related to adoption are managed at the state level, as you mentioned. They vary greatly, including how birth parents give their consent, as you're saying. And then there's also sort of like a difference between these like licensed, regulated adoption agencies, which of course course, are on their own spectrum of ethical practices. But then there's also these sort of like middlemen, called facilitators in the industry that are they're making matches online and like typically have more money than like a nonprofit adoption agency to put into advertising, and then they're stepping out without providing any sort of counseling or therapeutic support in the process, which I think is also very sort of like jaw dropping because of so much that is needed in the process and so little that is understood about the process. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there are. I mean, there are some. I mean, of course, there's some relevant federal law here, but the vast majority of the ways that adoption are practiced are shaped by the states. Federal law often comes into play if you're adopting across state lines. So if you, as the adoptive parent, live in one state and the baby is born in another state, the agency might be based in another state.

Speaker 2:

The birth mother might have lived in another state for most of her pregnancy right. Usually, wherever the adoption is finalized, the baby has to stay in that state for a certain period of time before the adoptive parents are allowed to travel back to their home state. There are a lot of things that can trigger federal law. There's also the Indian Child Welfare Act, of course, which dictates the conditions under which Native children can be placed with families, with or without the involvement of their tribe. So there is pertinent federal law here, and there are actually a couple of laws that are currently in front of the US Congress right now, particularly around marketing that I think are really important US Congress right now particularly around marketing that I think are really important.

Speaker 2:

And there's also, of course, the federal adoption tax credit, which applies to both public and private adoptions.

Speaker 1:

They're not tracking, though private adoption. No, they're not tracking. No, they're not. Which is like, yeah, most of the adoption.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, most of what adoption looks like is determined by state law, but I give these caveats to say that the federal government does have a role and could do more. Right, so they could require the Department of Health and Human Services to count and collect data on private domestic adoptions to a higher degree so that we could better understand who is being impacted and how they could regulate the ways that a lot of this advertising takes place across state lines. You know there are points that the federal government could intervene in different ways and I think that that's important to know.

Speaker 2:

But to get to the sort of the second part of your question, about these unlicensed adoption facilitators because they are essentially just brokers and they act as kind of paid matchmakers between pregnant people and agencies and attorneys and they'll do a lot of really aggressive advertising for pregnant people.

Speaker 2:

Some agencies do this as well, where if you are pregnant and you Google like help for single moms in California, you might start getting ads for adoption agencies or for adoption facilitators. We actually just passed a law here in California to prevent unlicensed facilitators from advertising online because they are very, very aggressive and there is a federal bill to make that a national policy. So I think it's important to understand the ways that vulnerable pregnant people are really targeted by agencies and by unlicensed facilitators and the ways that a lot of these ads speak directly to a lot of their vulnerabilities, based on where they are in their pregnancy. So a lot of mothers are relinquishing because they don't feel like their partner would be a good co-parent and you'll see in the ads or the adoptive parent profiles it's like well, here's our, here's our wedding pictures in here.

Speaker 2:

You know we know, how long we've been together and this is what our relationship looks like. And maybe a person is relinquishing because their own parents aren't supportive and the ads will be like you know, here's our parents and they can't wait to be grandparents, and here's them with all of our nieces and nephews. Or maybe they're relinquishing because they don't have access to safe housing and the profiles will feature like here's our beautiful suburban home and our neighborhood and the farmer's market that we walk to down the street every Sunday, and it really upholds a very specific idea of what family should be and what children actually need. And I think that those ads are very persuasive to a lot of people that are in a really hard place towards the end of their pregnancy.

Speaker 1:

That's so hard to stomach and makes total sense, I guess I'll share, and I can always cut this out if it doesn't feel right. But since finalizing our but a digital sort of like marketing matchmaking platform, both very focused on ethical practices, one agency recently started speaking out publicly to educate about the risks associated with facilitators, and that's primarily because this is not for financial gain. They've diversified their model is not focused on adoption, it's more like family and well-being, and adoption is part of it. But mostly because they're called in to help in situations like with counseling birth parents, in situations that facilitators have sort of left them high and dry. So like the hospitals frequently call.

Speaker 1:

I remember one situation where the social worker was telling me she got a call and my mom had just given birth and was having second thoughts, yet the family, the adoptive family had flown overnight to get there and they were like about to arrive at the hospital and so when the social worker got there, she was providing sort of like options counseling and also I mean, I'm not even sure options counseling is the right word she was telling her what her revocation rights were, so the facilitator was telling her she had to sign today. She actually had 30 days. So she ended up signing sort of like that state's consent so she could have 30 days to decide whether she wanted to parent or but those situations are so complex.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but they don't have to sign on any timeline. Right, you can relinquish your parental rights at any point.

Speaker 2:

Um, yeah or but she could have waited right, like if there's a 30 day well I mean I, I would say, if you are not sure don't sign your, your tpr right like if you are not sure that this is what you want, don't sign your termination of parental rights. The revocation is for people who sign and and then then have oh, and then you have 30 days, then you have 30 days to change your mind afterward yeah, right yeah, and I think that actually. I mean it's. It's confused this a lot by state what mothers are actually signing in a hospital.

Speaker 2:

So, they might not be signing their TPR. They might be signing something that turns custody of the child over either to the adoptive parents or to the agency usually to the agency or to a guardian appointed by the attorney, with the legal custody versus physical custody right Like there's a lot of things that they could be signing that are not fully terminating their parental rights at that moment, but they could also sign but no one needs to tell them about that.

Speaker 2:

Well, but that's the thing is, and I would ask mothers they'd be like. Well, I signed my papers in the hospital and I would say well, what did you sign?

Speaker 2:

They don't know right, and they often are asked to sign something, a waiver. That means that they don't have to be notified about the legal proceedings as they develop. So when the adoption goes before a judge to be finalized, a lot of mothers never get a notice that that is happening, right. They don't get a notice that of what their revocation window is or when it's lapsing, right, and so I think that that's really important, that it's not always that they're signing a paper that immediately and permanently ends their legal relationship with their child at the hospital. Sometimes they are, but they don't have a lot of legal clarity around that, and, as a researcher, that's frustrating to me because I'm like well, what did you sign? Do you have a copy? No, they never get a copy, which is also like if you're signing a contract, you should get a copy. But in the end, I had to understand their lack of clarity around what they were signing as its own finding right, the fact that they didn't have a lawyer in their room to explain this to them, to make sure that they got a copy, to keep them fully informed of their legal rights. That is, that's what we can know about this. We can't always know what they're signing, when and what their rights were in each individual state. But we can know that they didn't know what those things were either and that that is its own problem.

Speaker 2:

I also think that you know a lot of mothers will sign openness agreements, They'll sign matching agreements during their pregnancy. Those well, the matching agreements, are certainly not legally binding. You cannot relinquish your rights to a child who hasn't been born yet. But they might believe that it is legally binding and in some some particularly unscrupulous agencies will tell them well, you signed this, and so if you're having second thoughts now, like you're going to be sued for fraud, right, for misrepresenting this. Or they'll say, if they help them access housing during their pregnancy, like, well, you can keep your baby if you want, but you're going to have to pay us back for your housing and your medical care. That you, if they received any support. Most of the mothers I spoke with didn't receive very much, if any support from their agencies. But this does happen too, where they are standing legally and then they're never quite able to make an assertive, proactive case for what they need and they, most of them, can't, of course can't afford an attorney of their own. So you'll see that coming up again and again.

Speaker 1:

Just as like hurts my heart. How? And again, just as like hurts my heart, how were you during, while writing this? Was it just because you researched this and you're able to sort of compartmentalize, or did it was?

Speaker 2:

it sort of like an emotional ride. I mean, yes to all of those things, right. Yes, you have to compartmentalize. Yes, it was hard While you're doing the interviews.

Speaker 2:

I think I was able to stay in a very researchery place, right, of sort of staying apart, which isn't to say that I don't have a lot of empathy during. You know, I don't feel a lot of genuine empathy during those conversations. But I will also say that there is something when you hear the same traumas and the same injustices over and over again, it's not that you become inured to it, but you stop being surprised by it. You're like, oh well, of course they did this unethical thing, like everybody has told me that, right, so, so it makes it easier to hear.

Speaker 2:

I became a lot closer to the interview data when I went back and read the transcripts, because you can take a lot more time with them, right. Then it's just me and the transcript and you can dive into them a lot more deeply and try to understand what's actually happening. I mean, I was doing two or three interviews per day, right, and this was in the thick of COVID, that I was doing my data collection in 2020. And I had, like, I had a one-year-old who was still nursing, who just turned one, and I had both kindergarten and first grade happening on Zoom downstairs as I'm doing these interviews. So like there was a lot of compartmentalization then, like moving from like an interview to parenting to, you know, switching up a Zoom call to getting out some kindergarten activity, you know, all up a Zoom call to getting out some kindergarten activity, you know all of those sort of things were happening and, in a way, that had to keep me moving forward in the moment a lot.

Speaker 2:

But I think that that's why it took me almost a year between finishing my data collection in 2020 and having a sense of the book that I wanted to write, because I just needed to spend time thinking about the stories, rereading the transcripts, understanding how they fit together and what argument I wanted to make, and then, when I sat down to write the book, it actually wrote very quickly, right, but I don't think it could have written very quickly if I hadn't taken the year of not writing a single word Processing healing Sort of like processing and putting them together.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, what would need to change, like what do you want to see happen and what would an ideal future state be in order for? The way I wrote this question is not exactly how I want to write it. How I want to say it, because I said what would need to change for adoption to be largely as healthy as possible for birth parents today? Are you seeing a trend towards more ethical practices? But I don't think that's necessarily the right question to ask. I guess, like what is a healthy future state? Maybe it. Maybe it is less adoptions, no adoptions.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, and I talk, you know, at the end of the book, I talk with a lot of people who are engaged heavily in reform. I always ask the mothers that I interviewed like how they would want to change the system. I mean, their number one thing is always like less money. Involved in like every way at the marketing stage, you know, involved in like every way at the marketing stage. You know, like all of the incentives are wrong and they're not designed to create a system, certainly not a system that is attuned to the needs of relinquishing families or families of origin, but also not intended to be child-centered, right, they're not about really what a child needs, which is what adoption purports to be. And so you know and I also talk in the book to you know adoption abolitionists who want to envision a space where this isn't the way that we care for families, and I think that both of these conversations are really relevant. But I think the idea of adoption abolition feels very radical and uncomfortable for some people, because we have been in this world where we believe adoption to be so fundamentally and intrinsically good. I think what that world actually looks like is one that has these systems and structures and care in place to make adoption unnecessary. If fewer adoptions are happening because more people are able to plan their pregnancies, have intention around their pregnancies, have control over the outcomes of their a greater degree of control over the outcomes of their pregnancies and raise the children that they want to raise in the communities and under the circumstances in which they want to raise them. These are all good things that are rooted in autonomy and justice and care, and I think that if we are prioritizing all of those pieces, we are going to have fewer adoptions.

Speaker 2:

And a lot of times and I write in the book like I went to in 2020, I went to a meeting at the. It was hosted by the Department of Health and Human Services and the idea was oh, our domestic adoption rate is going down, like, what can we do to increase it? And there was never a question in the room. I mean, I was asking it to myself, but among most of the people in the room were agencies, advocates you know, lobbyists for the adoption industry and it was never said. Well, what is the intrinsic value of increasing adoption? You can increase adoption, right, if you make it impossible for people to parent, if you make it impossible to access abortion care. If you constrain people's choices, your domestic adoption rate will go up, for sure. But why are we invested in that at all? And I think that that's what we need to understand that very, very few adoptions is likely a reflection of higher levels of social support, and that's what we should be working towards. Incredible.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much. I just have a couple final questions. One is that I know you interviewed at least a couple of expectant or birth fathers in this process. It wasn't the focus of your book, but do you have any insights on their experience that you'd like to share?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, the fathers that I interviewed were all still in a relationship with one of the mothers that I interviewed, okay, and so their stories were very aligned and and so their stories were were very aligned. What I thought was most telling was the fathers that were entirely removed from the process. But I couldn't. It's hard to recruit, so some fathers never, were never told about these pregnancies or these adoptions. And you know, I've heard from birth fathers after who had no awareness that this was happening.

Speaker 2:

Some agencies cultivate this right Because paternal involvement can complicate an adoption. It's one more person that you need to get a consent form for. And so they'll say to a mother, like, don't, say you don't know who the father is, right, sign this waiver. Or and this is particularly true for fathers who were Native American and who were tribal members, where the Indian Child Welfare Act could have been triggered Like, say, the father is someone else, Right, because they didn't want to involve the child.

Speaker 2:

These are these things are illegal, to be clear Right, and they're asking the mother to like commit perjury, asking the mother to like commit perjury, and and but there and this wasn't a lot of cases, but it was a handful of just the people I spoke with and I've since heard again from other fathers who, who were really intentionally kept out of that process. That is obviously a hard population to recruit as a researcher, and I will also say that because I began this work wanting to understand the way that adoption is rooted in, like reproductive autonomy or lack thereof and kind of what that looks like. I, you know, I really just I made the decision to adhere closely, um, to mother's stories, um, I think that that is, there's more work to be done in this space, certainly, certainly, and I, um I look forward to other researchers delving into that.

Speaker 1:

So, what is okay. So you're a mom, you're a working mom, obviously, Um, and you have two girls, right?

Speaker 2:

I have. I have two boys and a girl.

Speaker 1:

Oh, two boys. Oh, you have three. Oh, my gosh, how old are they?

Speaker 2:

Uh, 10, nine and four.

Speaker 1:

Oh my gosh. Um okay, what tool or service is your favorite? Um favorite support right now in working motherhood?

Speaker 2:

Oh, it feels cheating to say my nanny, but our nanny has been with us since my eldest was six months old, five months old, I guess.

Speaker 2:

So she's been with us now for over 10 years. She is absolutely the only reason that our family functions and she is absolutely the only reason that our family functions. And she, she has an acknowledgement, like, of course, she has acknowledgement in the book. In the book, oh my gosh, so good. You know, this is the only reason I was able to write this project at all, I mean, let alone do the data collection. So she is absolutely the only reason I get anything done as a mother or as a professional. So good, so good, very fortunate.

Speaker 1:

Gretchen, thank you so much for being here today and sharing your wisdom and shining a light on these important issues with our community. Where can our listeners find you?

Speaker 2:

is Instagram. Gretchen Dots is in. I'm on Twitter. I'm trying not to be on Twitter, but I am still there, so Are we all yeah?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, awesome. Huge thank you and best of luck with the rest of the promotion of your book. It is so. Everything you're receiving is so well-deserved, so Thank you very much. Thanks so much, all right, bye-bye.