Recently, I was watching an episode of a popular counseling show where the therapist asked a mother, “Does your daughter know your story?”
I thought this was such a powerful and important question to ponder — one that removes the mommy veil and invites us in to see the person behind the title. As we continue to explore motherhood issues, it’s important to acknowledge the myriad stories that surround it, including the stories of women whose children were adopted.
In her book “Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood,” researcher and author Gretchen Sisson exposes the unseen and marginally represented side of adoption as told from the women who have “relinquished” their children.
“Relinquished” does an excellent job of telling the stories of mothers leading up to and beyond their decision to relinquish a child. Why was it so important to you to tell their stories — and what drew you to this particular area of research?
I was drawn to these stories after working with young mothers — pregnant and parenting teenagers — and seeing the ways that their parenthood was marginalized. As a researcher, it made me want to look more deeply at the social myths and underlying structural inequities that shape who we, as a country, support in parenting — and who we stigmatize. That’s when I began looking at adoption more deeply.
I was also volunteering at the local abortion fund, and I had just finished my master’s thesis on infertility. In each of these roles, I was seeing the ways that adoption was framed as a solution; it was the “answer” for limited abortion access, for lack of affordable infertility treatments, for poor families who struggled to care for their children the way they wanted. I was continually confronted with the idea that transferring children from one family to another would be the answer and would avert the need for public investment or accountability. I wanted to interrogate this more deeply, but focusing on the stories of the women who were impacted by systems of adoption.
It seems that one of the intentions of the book is to reframe the way we look at building families. How have your perceptions and ideas changed regarding family building since telling the stories of these women?
The book is less about how we build families and more about how we support (or fail to support) certain families over others. I don’t think that framing adoption as “family building” is the right paradigm, because it centers the desires of adults (as prospective parents) and erases families that are separated by adoption. Even those who advocate for adoption would, I believe, say that adoption is supposed to be about finding families for children, not about finding children for adults that want them, and the language of “family building” is more about the latter. Understanding the stories of relinquishing mothers — the women who are separated from their children through adoption — forces you to acknowledge [what] it means when babies and children are made available for adoption, and the hard circumstances that lead to those fractures.
You do a remarkable job of weaving stories of the women featured together, uniting them in the pivotal decision to relinquish. How has the decision to focus on their experiences shaped your research and the telling of their stories?
This book, and my research and work more broadly, are all entirely rooted in the telling of women’s stories. So many of our cultural ideas about adoption are based on social myths, misinformation and antiquated ideas of worthiness, as well as straightforward racism, classism and heteronormativity. These understandings of adoption do not consider and are not accountable to relinquishing parents (or their children). It’s only by considering their own stories — why they relinquish and under what circumstances, how they feel about it over the course of their lives and how it serves (or doesn’t) them and their children — that we can begin to develop an understanding of adoption that is rooted in lived reality and complexity.
You present adoption in a manner that few have done — revealing some of its dark history and the politics of relinquishing. How has the decision to remove the veil impacted you or any of the women interviewed?
Many of the relinquishing parents and adopted people who have reached out to me about the book have found it validating to understand their stories as part of a larger system and bigger historical arc. The way we practice adoption today has been shaped by older systems of family separation. For white women and babies, family separation has been rooted in the market demand for white children; for Black families, it has been rooted in the policing and regulation of families and communities of color; for Native families, it has been about challenges to tribal existence and assimilation. These older practices continue to shape adoption today, as both a marketplace and a system of social control. You can’t always see these roots in individual stories (though sometimes you can), but when you see patterns of practice, you can better understand how adoption functions on a social and cultural level. I think these broader frameworks can then be valuable to those who have lived these stories to better understand what happened to them.
Your research spans the course of a decade. In what ways has the conversation changed around adoption?
After the Dobbs oral arguments and decision [the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2022 that abortion is not a constitutional right] both drew on ideas of adoption — adoption as a meaningful alternative to abortion and adoption as primarily about ensuring a supply of children to prospective parents — people who had never thought critically about adoption became willing to consider it more deeply. I think that was the biggest conversational shift, and I wrote this book to respond to this specific cultural and political moment.
You break down some of the stereotypes people have about relinquishing mothers with some contemporary references, from “Friends” to “Juno” and even an “ER” episode. According to the women you’ve interviewed, have any modern-day portrayals of this process come close to getting it right?
The portrayal that most mothers were drawn to wasn’t about adoption, per se. Many of them mentioned “The Handmaid’s Tale” as reflective of their experiences: a class of women obligated to supply a higher, more “deserving” class of families with children. That this show — meant to portray a patriarchal, theonomic dystopia — came the closest to getting contemporary adoption right, in their opinion, tells you most of what you need to know.
In describing the politics of adoption, there is a united theme of parenting within the constraints of poverty. Would you cite this as the central determining factor for mothers who decide to relinquish?
Lack of financial resources was the overwhelming reason that women relinquished their children. Often this meant living in poverty, but not always; it just might mean they were dependent on their own parents or a partner for their financial stability and didn’t have the power to shape the circumstances that would have allowed them to parent. For some, they couldn’t afford the security deposit on a new apartment so that they could move out of their unsupportive parents’ home, or away from an unsafe partner. For others, they couldn’t afford a car seat and crib that would have helped parenting to feel feasible. A few mentioned that they just couldn’t afford six weeks of unpaid postpartum leave or couldn’t take the risk of not having a job to return to. These mothers needed support in lots of ways, but the core challenge was financial constraint.
Ideas behind adoption can be very layered. what are some of the things you would like the reader to take away from “Relinquished?”
I hope readers will take away a deeper sense of the complexity of adoption and more nuanced ideas of how the system works and who it is designed to center. Most importantly, I hope they will continue to seek out the stories of adoption and family separation from the perspectives of birth families and adopted people to better understand how their experience fit more broadly with values of autonomy, family and reproductive justice.
For more information about Gretchen Sisson, or to get a copy of “Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood,” visit relinquishedbook.com.
