Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood by Gretchen Sisson

Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood Reviews

• 
  Jamie Park

  I had my first baby at 18 in 2003. I was pursued relentlessly by adoption agencies, prospective parents, and even LDS elders. I spent the next few years afraid someone was going to take her away from me, which led to some other bad decisions (marriage).
  When I was pregnant way back then we still had Roe V Wade. We now live in a post Roe world and I can only imagine it was intended to boost adoptions. The adoption industry is worth billions, and with only 1% of babies being relinquished they have to do something. We don't send girls way anymore. We do however still traumatize pregnant women.
  I love the history in this book. We should never forget how enslaved mothers were brutally separated from their babies.
  Anyway, I was crying throughout the book. I could have been one of these mothers if I wasn't such a menace and anti people pleaser. I think alot about the people who wanted to adopt my baby. I ended up with a master's degree, a house in a good neighborhood, published books, and some degree of prestige. I was so poor when I had her but we got through it and ended up doing better than a lot of the families that were trying to adopt. They were very surface level successful but weren't all that wonderful in the end.
  I have already recommended this book to all my friends.
• 
  Jillian B

  This book is such an important read for anyone concerned with reproductive justice. By centering the voices of birth mothers, it opened my eyes to some tough truths about adoption.
  
  Based on substantial original qualitative research, this book makes the case that most birth mothers who relinquish their child would prefer to parent them, but lack the financial resources or social support they would need to do so well. Most of the women the author interviews were never choosing between adoption and abortion. They were choosing between adoption and parenting. It also raises the idea that placing a child for adoption is a deep trauma, even in “ideal” cases where the birth mother goes on to a successful life.
  
  This book is a rallying cry to advocate for more support for young and single parents. It underscores that an important part of reproductive justice is ensuring that those who want to parent are able to.
• 
  Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship

  Reading about adoption has been an eye-opening experience. The U.S. adoption lobby is powerful, making most of us supporters without fully realizing the issues at play. Books like this,
  The Child Catchers (an expose on international adoption) and
  The Girls Who Went Away (about young American women forced to give up babies for adoption in the mid-20th century) have expanded my perspective on the aspects we tend to overlook.
  
  This book focuses on the experiences of birth mothers, based on in-depth interviews with 77 of them over more than a decade. It’s structured similarly to the The Girls Who Went Away or
  The Turnaway Study (which this author was also involved in), alternating sections by the author explaining the big picture and putting the stories in context, with narratives from the women themselves. This is an effective format and it’s quick and engaging reading.
  
  Sisson provides a sharp critique of adoption as it’s practiced in the U.S. today, from a social justice perspective: essentially, that private infant adoption is the practice of transferring babies from families with less privilege to families with more—primarily in terms of wealth, though adoptive parents are also overwhelmingly white while adopted children are less so. (Up through the 1990s, 90% of relinquishing mothers were white, but this is now down to 55%, and many of their babies are mixed race. Even mothers seeking adoptive parents of the same race as the baby often couldn’t find them.)
  
  But we tend to erase birth families from the picture, and to stereotype birth mothers in ways that don’t reflect reality. Indeed, our adoption lobby is so strong that we tend to overlook the family separation aspect altogether while more or less assuming well-off people have a right to adopt other people’s children: for conservatives it’s about getting children into two-parent, Christian homes; for progressives it’s about singles and queer couples getting children; everybody wants infertile couples to be able to get them. But all of this centers the adoptive parents, not adoptees or the families split up to make this happen.
  
  From the birth mothers, the overall message is that relinquishing a child for adoption is the most traumatic and awful experience they have ever had (even for people with a lot of trauma—for instance, the one whose baby was born from rape). This is true even when they’re ostensibly the ones making the choice: in reality these choices are too constrained for the mothers to feel they have real agency, sometimes due to blackmail or legal misinformation, often because of the practice of choosing an adoptive family before the birth and being expected to sign final paperwork very quickly thereafter, but also just because they want to parent and feel socially or financially backed into a corner, rather than truly wanting to give away their babies. Lacking money is the primary reason for relinquishment, while a significant number of the women here were also simply unmarried and belonged to conservative, “pro-life” families and communities who wouldn’t support them in single parenting but valorize giving up children for adoption. “Open adoption” becoming the norm also doesn’t help as much as you might think. These agreements are rarely legally enforceable if the adoptive parents decide to cut off contact (as many do), and the adoptive parents have all the power in the relationship.
  
  It’s especially interesting to see the mothers’ views evolve over time: many are quite pro-adoption for the first few years (during which the adoption agencies trot them out to speak publicly at every opportunity), but become more critical as time goes on (at which point they get dropped and no longer have a platform). In the end, half the birth mothers here say they regret the adoption, and most of those who believe some good came of it still report trauma or dissatisfaction. There are some interesting wrinkles: for instance, feeling forced to give up a baby started some of these women on a social justice path, ultimately putting them at odds with the conservative, religious families they’d chosen for their babies. It’s also interesting to see the long-term repercussions for other children in the family, and on the mothers’ decisions about whether to have subsequent children.
  
  What’s especially disturbing is the systemic push for adoption in spite of all this: the U.S. government wants to drum up more adoptable babies. Per the Dobbs opinion, the reduced adoption rate is a problem to be solved by outlawing abortion, and government money goes to many of these pro-adoption groups, which target pregnant women seeking help. Sisson found, however, that women weren’t actually debating abortion vs. adoption—they decided whether to give birth first, then moved on to whether they could make parenting work. (And unlike adoption,
  abortion is rarely regretted and easily put behind you.) Other developed countries have far lower adoption rates than the U.S., presumably because they’re providing more support to new parents—one group helping new mothers to keep their kids found that $500 was on average enough to make the difference (up to more like $2500 now with housing prices). As one of these women says: “If they took the money they spent telling me how empowered I am for giving up my kid, just a small part of that money, and gave it to me when I was pregnant, I would actually have been empowered to raise her.”
  
  Of course, to do this one must believe keeping families together is important, rather than judging parents as inadequate for being in a tough spot while offering redemption through relinquishment. Perhaps what’s most noticeable is that despite all this effort, only 18,000 to 20,000 babies are given up for private adoption in the U.S. annually, out of 4 million births: under 0.5%.
  
  A few areas where I’d like to see more: there is some suggestion that adoptees aren’t necessarily better off in adoptive families either, as they have higher rates of depression, anxiety and other mental health struggles, but that isn’t the focus. My interest was piqued, however, by the fact that 20% of the participating birth mothers were adopted themselves! Sisson suggests that perhaps adoption is most normalized for them, and their adoptive parents are naturally pro-adoption and thus more likely to encourage it. But I can’t help wondering—given that adoptive parents are also disproportionately well-off, so presumably could help their daughters out if they chose (and that’s why the birth mothers are parting with their children to begin with! "A better life" in which heartrending decisions don’t have to be made for lack of cash)—whether this is also a sign that adoptive parents’ love is more conditional, whether they are less likely to help an adult child whose decisions they disapprove and less invested in non-biological grandchildren. On the other hand, it is a small sample size.
  
  I also want to know more about the demographics of women relinquishing infants. One mother, who volunteered with a crisis pregnancy center, notes that it’s those women most capable of parenting who plan for adoption, which I’d noticed too: these mothers aren’t impoverished so much as they are broke. Many are college students, were recently laid off, etc., which explains how a one-time cash infusion can help so much. And in a way it makes sense: someone who grew up in generational poverty knows how to manage in that situation and has examples all around her of parents making do. These demographics may be affected by the author’s methodology, however: she recruited participants through adoption-related support groups, message boards, and listservs, and while she appears to have sought participants in spaces with both a pro- and anti-adoption bent, these would be places most accessible to people either with time and transportation to attend meetings, or who have a device and the technological know-how to participate in online groups (perhaps by 2020 this was no longer a major barrier). Of course, recruiting from those places also selects for people who remain very invested in adoption.
  
  At any rate, overall an informative and eye-opening read. My biggest criticisms are that the structure can be a bit nebulous, and some of the sections toward the end felt less compelling. There’s one on the portrayal of birth mothers in media, and a section about the importance of including the right to parent one’s children as a reproductive justice issue, which feels mostly geared toward academics and activists. Still, this is a quick read and one I learned a lot from, so I’m glad to have read it.
• 
  Hayley

  Absolutely breathtaking. A must-read for anyone interested in bodily autonomy and reproductive justice. This is a deeply researched book about mothers who have relinquished infants for adoption, uplifting voices that have been erased from the discourse around adoption and abortion for far too long. As Dr. Sisson explains through these women's stories, people of all political leanings have uncritically embraced adoption as this perfect solution for many social issues surrounding parenting - but that's not the reality for so many birth/first parents. Many have been coerced by private adoption agencies or felt they were left with no other choice but to relinquish when they preferred parenting or abortion but didn't have access to the resources they needed. And that says nothing of the larger structural issues of the adoption industrial complex and what makes a "good" family, another topic that Sisson covers in-depth. This book is heartbreaking in so many ways, but SO needed. It helps fill an enormous gap in social sciences research on reproductive autonomy. Will definitely be a common citation in my own work!
  
  Thank you to St. Martin's Press for the ARC.
• 
  Jenna

  This book is chock-full of important and timely information about adoption, a topic I know I’m not alone in knowing shamefully little about. In particular, this book is interested in exploring exploitation and general poor practices within the private adoption industry; the mental health impacts on mothers who relinquish children for adoption; and how social inequities and injustice leave mothers vulnerable to making the decision to relinquish — a “choice” that often doesn’t seem like much of one at all in a society in which having children is so expensive and where minimal supports are offered to mothers, parents, children, and families in need. This is a heavy, more scholarly book -- literally a research project, as described in the methodology section in the end -- and it definitely reads like a thesis or dissertation and took me some while to get through as a result. However, the density is leavened somewhat by occasional first-person excerpts from mothers who were interviewed. (The readers in the audio version do a great job with these too.) I wish there could have been more of these and that the overall text had been revised and edited down for more mainstream readability, but it wasn’t a dealbreaker, and I’d rather this info be available in some form rather than not at all.
• 
  Laura Solar

  Adoption isn’t a subject I ever gave much thought to, but overall, I saw it in a relatively positive light. Relinquished taught me so much and completely made me rethink the way I feel on the subject. While incredibly well-researched, the writing never feels too academic or inaccessible, and the way birth mothers’ stories are interwoven throughout gives the book a really nice flow. Reading about the trauma experienced by mothers who have relinquished devastated me, particularly when many years had gone by with little to no progress on healing. The chapter I found most intriguing discussed how adoption is shown in pop culture, and how much it shapes the opinions of viewers. I can certainly admit to never giving birth mothers much thought in the past, but seeing the way they are presented with this new lens truly appalled me. I found it so interesting to see how the birth mothers interviewed came from vastly different backgrounds and situations, but all came to the same basic conclusion when reflecting on their adoptions: Abortion access is essential, and adoption is not a solution to unplanned pregnancy.
  
  Through countless interviews with sociologists, adoptees, birth mothers, and other experts, Dr. Sisson has written a thoroughly compelling book that will make you rethink what you’ve been conditioned to believe and demand we work to change it.
• 
  Matthew Dimick

  “Safe, legal, and rare” was once the expression of those advocating for reproductive choice while attempting to court more conservative or moderate “pro-life.” However, this mantra has fallen under a great deal of criticism by pro-choice and feminist scholars for fear of the stigmatization impact it may have on the abortion procedure.
  
  Considering the conclusions and recommendations of Sisson’s book, I was waiting for her to adapt this slogan for adoption.
  
  Before I continue, I want to be clear: overall, I believe this book is beneficial for contributing to a better understanding of the third part of the adoption triad—birth mothers. I appreciated that this book is a helpful empathetic tool in understanding the perspective of birth moms. For many adoptive families, the inner world of birth moms remains a mystery or unknown. Perhaps these stories might offer possible answers to adoptees trying to imagine the experiences of their birth parents. The 10-year later perspective is an incredible addition and shows what changes over time. Though many of the narratives express dissatisfaction with having chosen relinquishment, even those who are still certain they made the right decision share the grief they experience. Hearing their stories about manipulative practices from private adoption agencies or cohesion from community and family is heartbreaking. The need for better advocacy for birth mothers is demonstrated in the narratives about the breakdown of relationships in open adoptions with adoptive parents and unmet expectations demonstrate. Clearly, abusive practices exist, and changes should be made to enhance the autonomy of women and provide access to legal counsel that is not part of the agency’s agenda. In this sense, the book is 5 stars!
  
  But ultimately, those narratives (and the research) act in service to Sisson’s adoption abolitionist agenda.
  
  Sisson exposes adoption as a policy panacea for pro-life politicians and judges to inoculate against arguments for abortion access. Adoption stands as a barrier to full reproductive choice. Furthermore, through research and personal narratives, Sisson demonstrates that the lack of a social safety net means that many of these women lack autonomy to parent and are forced into relinquishment. She cites stories where women say for $500-$2,500 they would not have needed to place their child in an adoptive home. She juxtaposes this with the money that is spent by adoptive parents to adopt—drawing a distinction of power between the birthmother and adoptive parent. The powerless and the powerful. By the end of the text, Sisson’s perspective is shared that adoption is akin to other colonial practices and should be abolished for the sake of true reproductive freedom.
  
  “If we lived in a more equitable world,” she writes, “adoption would fade into obsolescence.”
  
  Yet 19th-century feminist made this same point concerning abortion.
  
  Indeed, many arguments against adoption in Sisson’s book seem taken right out of the pro-choice playbook including arguments about overall satisfaction with decisions/grief/guilt. Or painting the practice as immoral. Indeed, even some of the recommendations have profoundly glaring parallels to the pro-life rhetoric. For example, the proposed mandatory counseling before choosing adoption.
  
  It is shocking the comparisons are not addressed in the text and I feel that Sisson’s failure (or decision) not to acknowledge these similarities weakens her argument.
  
  I was particularly surprised how quickly Sisson dismisses the selection bias evident in her methodology of drawing from support groups/snowball samples. In the experience of anyone who has ever worked with support groups—often those are the individuals feeling the most grief, anger, or ambivalence about a given subject. However, Sisson reasons: “because these groups represented a range of ideology around adoptions—with several promoting and endorsing adoption with others being more critical—the use of these groups as sites of recruitment should not suggest that these women are particularly more in need of support than other relinquishing mothers.” This just seems like a rationalization to avoid critical engagement with the inability to capture the voices of those who do not seek support groups. I do not expect that every voice could have been captured or that Sisson; that would simply be unreasonable. Why couldn’t she have acknowledged this as an actual limitation?
  
  Another limitation is a lack of control data. Sisson presents data on the outcomes of women who were turned away from abortion clinics; but how could a study capture women turned away from the adoptive process? How do we capture what life might have been otherwise for both these birth mothers and their children? This is expressed in some of the narratives—knowing one made the right choice while also holding regret. Concerning the data on satisfaction of decision making—how do we capture how social stigma against birth moms and the social expectation on mothers to feel a certain level of attachment impact their perspective?
  
  Last, as a person who studied social ethics and as a clinician who has often been engaged in conversations around medical ethics—particularly autonomy—I think this text would have benefited from engaging in what autonomy means. Sisson longs for a world where a person can make a choice without undue duress or limiting factors—but that is hardly ever the nature of moral decision making. Even decision made due to (often previously held) religious or personal values is looked upon with suspicion.
  
  In the post-Dobbs world, reproductive choice is at risk. Although I long for a more equitable and socially just USA, we do not seem to be getting closer to those ideals. Adoptive families exist in an imperfect system, also struggling to provide for their children, overcome inequality and stigmatization, and trying to be morally good in an imperfect world. Maybe there’s a world where everyone has what they need and moral decisions can be made in a perfect vacuum(maybe that world is New Zealand!).
  
  This is why I was disappointed by the ultimate conclusion of the book: it could have been grounded examination in the development of a more equitably adoption process with realistic policy proposals but instead chose to point towards sweeping aspirations peppered with a few (sometimes contradictory) recommendations.
  It spites the good (the creation of adoptive families) for the sake of the perfect (a world where social/economic equality is reached). Perhaps in that world, adoption would be rare--but even in that world I would hope it would still be support rather than stigmatized.
• 
  Claire

  The timing of this book is so pertinent to what is occurring in the US at the moment and it is heartening to know that the injustices that exist around the societal narrative and cultural conditioning of adoption are being given such in depth study, backed up by case studies of mothers and especially the re-interviewing of them 10 years down the road, where in virtually every case, things changed significantly and not for the better.
  
  There is so much to share from this, but I'll be coming back to note down what I want to remember from this book.
  
  If you have any interest in the subject of family preservation, and creating conditions where families are supported not separated, read this. If you want to know the truth behind the experience of relinquishing a child (a lifelong trauma), not to mention the impact that has on the child (loving family or not), become more well informed by reading this excellent work.
• 
  Megan

  Incredibly pertinent read following the aftermath of the 2022 archaic ruling of Supreme Court decision Dobb’s v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization (known to the public primarily as the case overturning Roe v. Wade ) made by a conservative-packed majority not as representative of what most Americans want/believe, but instead straight down partisan lines.
  
  Unfortunately, the judiciary and its highest body, The Supreme Court, were dispelled of any hope for what the Court has always been known for: remaining neutral in the face of controversial political decisions, and governing instead by what they cite as their clear interpretations of our constitutional rights.
  
  Everyone seemed shocked when Roe was overturned, and I can’t, for the life of me, understand why. Mitch McConnell very openly expressed his desire to pack the Supreme Court with the youngest and most conservative judges years before the decision, drawing from The Federalist Society’s list of judges who hold the highest number of decisions restricting reproductive freedoms - and making a deal with Donald Trump that he would support him and encourage his fellow Republicans to support him as president, if Trump fulfilled just one obligation for him: ensuring that judges with the most restrictive records on abortion rights were given any open seat on the Court.
  
  Amy Coney Barrett, whom this book mentions as a pivotal figure in not only overturning Roe but also as a Supreme Court justice whom pushes the “adoption as an alternative to abortion” argument. During oral arguments for the case, while pretending as if actually considering both sides, Barrett theorized :
  ”It seems to me that the choice more focused would be, between, say, the ability to get an abortion at twenty-three weeks or the state requiring the woman to go fifteen, sixteen weeks more, and then terminate parental rights at the conclusion.” Relinquishment, Barrett argued, would allow women to continue pregnancies while still avoiding the “consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy.”
  
  These conservative justices conveniently gloss over extensive studies throughout decades, showing that over 99% of women did not regret their decision to terminate a pregnancy, but rather, every mother interviewed for this book, as well as cited in other studies, described their adoption experience as “mostly negative”, “not a choice at all”, “something they were forced into”, and sadly, “the most traumatic event of their lives.”
  
  Is it any wonder women feel this way? Nearly every, if not all mothers interviewed, stated they’d wished they had been given more support, counseling, and resources by the state, so that they could parent their own child. Even pregnant women who initially sought out abortions but were either denied on the basis of strict anti-abortion state policy, or were simply too far along in their pregnancies to have an abortion anywhere, would have preferred parenting to adoption. Conversely, not a single mother who has terminated her pregnancy or chosen to parent her child has expressed regret over not taking the adoption route instead.
  
  Why is this? Do we really need to pretend as though it’s some sort of mind-boggling mystery? Of course women terminating pregnancies after a few months, never experiencing the procedure as “the loss of a child” will not suffer the same depression and lifetime of regret that relinquishing mothers are forced to endure.
  
  There’s unmistakably an inevitable bond that develops between a mother and her child when she is forced to carry that child to full-term, giving birth to the baby, holding the baby in her arms, and starts imagining a life with this child, starts to forget that the child will not be going home with her.
  
  To grab an infant out of a new mother’s arms to hand off to an adoptive mother once the woman who gave birth to the child has been able to bond with and since place a name, face, and personality to the baby, is of course going to be cruel and cause a lifetime of loss and trauma for these young and/or not yet financially stable women.
  
  The relinquishing mothers almost always initially are coerced to give up their newborn to a “more deserving family”, at least to some extent, by the adoption agencies they consider (I don’t believe “more deserving” is ever used by the agencies or its workers, but it is certainly much implied).
  
  At a time when they are highly vulnerable, a time which is short and where making a quick decision is thought to be critical, women are rarely informed about their other options. Given that most have either faced stigma amongst their friends, family and community (or imagine that their family will not accept their decision to parent) - it is all too easy for these women to accept the praise being given them - at a time when they feel unworthy - they’re “heroic”, they’re “selfless”, they’re “unbelievably mature and wise.” But if that were true, then it begs the question: why shouldn’t they parent their child if they indeed possess such wonderful qualities?
  
  Relinquishing mother Christina explains after an initially positive experience (which many mothers call “the honeymoon period”, in which they see themselves as being trapped in a fog in which they eventually snap out of) that the adoptive parents began to increasingly limit contact, and all of the love and support she’d initially felt from the agency and community simply vanished as soon as she’d handed her baby over.
  
  As she states in the book,
  ”There’s no doubt that I could have parented her, though, so it’s hard to feel confident in my choice. That’s been really hard to navigate – I feel like I don’t have say in anything because I surrendered my rights. I don’t really wish what I have now on any other birth mom. There will always be women who choose adoption, but I want it to be better for the women to come.”
  
  Cassie, another young woman who relinquished her son at the age of 22, explains how she had been feeling very low about herself, making just $9/hour with family she didn’t feel she could turn to for support, and how she’d initially just visited a center for a pregnancy test, which quickly turned into an immediate campaign to convince her of how wonderful it would be to give her baby up to a “family in need”:
  ”They were extremely supportive of the adoption, though. They were like, ‘it’s such a smart, mature decision’, which is pretty much what everyone told me…I immediately felt like adoption was my only choice. I went to an adoption agency.
  
  I wasn’t super excited about adoption, but I went there. The agency has such a lovely, warm, welcoming performance that they put on. They say, ‘oh, you’re so smart and responsible, and you’re doing, like, the most wonderful, best thing.’ They seemed so nice. They just said, this is just going to be such a wonderful, happy thing for you and for your baby.”
  
  While it’s wonderful that this book gives a voice to the birth mothers, who are all too often overlooked as soon as they hand their baby over (and all too often portrayed as ignorant, incapable, even unstable, in popular pop culture) I had to deduct a star for two major reasons (at least, to me).
  
  The first reason being that although I certainly do not blame the interviewees, I could not understand why the book’s author did not edit many of their answers by at least taking out the filler words. A good journalist/researcher can change or omit a minimal amount of words without fundamentally changing the understanding of the women’s stories. Many of the birth mothers spoke extremely articulately. Yet, just because some used filler words such as “like” or repeat themselves doesn’t make them inarticulate. Often it’s just a nervous habit that can be overcome with enough practice.
  
  I just feel as though the author could have done away with this wording. It doesn’t paint the birth mothers in an ideal light (even though as I said, I recognize it’s often anxiety leading to these problems) - yet many readers may unconsciously develop a bias of these mothers as indeed being immature and not ready for parenthood. How your story is told matters.
  
  My second gripe is even though at the end of the book, in “a note on adoption language” Sisson mentions that she primarily uses “gendered text”, given that her research has been primarily on women - with one nonbinary participant, who still chose to describe herself as a “mother” - she “does not mean to erase the experiences of nonbinary or transgender people who have given birth and relinquished their parental rights.”
  
  Considering she often refers to “pregnant people” in the text, and even feels it necessary to mention her research has been primarily on women, just continues to undermine the fundamental truth of pregnancy, which is that only women CAN get pregnant, making it a WOMEN’S ISSUE.
  
  With all of the new oppressive anti-abortion legislation being enacted throughout the nation, now is not the time to raise such trivial matters as “preferred pronouns”, or to in any sense pretend that men can get pregnant. I remember reading a book about abortion stories in 2021 or 2022, which referred to “pregnant people.” I have no issue with people identifying however they want: what I DO take issue with, however, is when a very, very small minority’s rights infringes upon the rights of a historically marginalized majority.
  
  I was right to worry back then as I am right to worry now, I believe: shortly after that book was released, and the radical left had taken to referring to pregnant mothers as “people”, my state Senator, Marco Rubio, stated a relevant point in the face of their own (il)logic: “I don’t understand how you are framing this as a women’s issue, when your Party has repeatedly stated that it is people, not women, who get pregnant.” My point? Let’s shelve the pronoun debate when we have a much more serious issue to address.
  
  Of course, I’d still recommend this book, and I hope to see continued studies showing the truth about adoption, the darker aspects of the stories in which agencies seek to silence, as opposed to the rosy-lensed view in which most Americans have come to believe is the most definitive picture of the experience.
  
  (Yikes, didn’t mean for this review to be so long!)
• 
  Heather

  I grew up being taught that adoption was the obvious solution for unwanted pregnancy. I mean, adoption makes everyone happy! Adoptive parents get a baby! Baby gets a stable and loving home! Birth mom doesn't have to worry about raising a baby she doesn't want! I could say SO MUCH about this book, but the short version is, it turns out this is another thing I was taught that doesn't work quite the way I was taught. That's really turning into a thing!
  
  The two most impactful things for me were this:
  
  1) Most women who relinquish babies aren't choosing between abortion and adoption, they're choosing between parenting and adoption. And it turns out that deciding that you're not in a place to parent - especially when that decision isn't really based on who you are but on outside circumstances - circumstances that could change! - is pretty traumatizing. Carrying a child that you'd love to parent to term and then giving it away is really hard! I mean, when I type it out that like it seems like common sense, but boy, does the pro-life community just blow right by that. Most women actually don't regret having an abortion. Most deeply regret relinquishing a baby for adoption even when their child ends up in a loving and happy home. Because the child still isn't with them.
  2) A lot of the birth moms interviewed over the course of this book talk about how the message they received from crisis counselors, adoption agencies, etc. sometimes subtly and sometimes blatantly, was that they didn't deserve to be mothers. Sisson really interrogates how we as a society fail families of origin over and over and over, especially when they're not in privileged classes. It's not a coincidence that adoption pretty much always transfers an infant from someone with few resources and little societal privilege to someone with lots of resources and more societal privilege.
  
  Anyway, as someone who was raised in a very "Adoption is the answer!" community and who seriously looked into both domestic and international adoption for a while, I found this book to be challenging, thought-provoking, and kind of devastating.
• 
  NoraDawn

  This is a very thorough, researched, and well written book about what a disadvantaged pregnant person experiences when/if they begin to explore the possibility of adoption. I learned so much about what that experience is like, the pressure placed on the expectant mothers and the feelings that follow, as well as the many ways they are treated dishonestly, unfairly, and without compassion. One of the most interesting things to me is that restricting abortion does not lead to an increase in infants available for adoption. I'm glad to be so much better informed about this topic after reading this book.
• 
  Jenna Deaton

  Relinquished is an interesting and at times heartbreaking look at the topic of adoption. In reading this work, I have recognized that there is a lot I did not know about private adoption and about the way options are presented to those who are pregnant. I will definitely be looking deeper into this topic and I’m thankful to the author for writing.
• 
  Alexis

  this was enraging and horrifying. It’s exclusively about babies who are relinquished as infants, not foster care (a different and separate ethical problem).
  
  The short version is that infant adoption, as practiced in the US, is unethical and in my opinion, maybe not reformable. Certainly not as long as adoption is arranged by agencies with a vested interest in maintaining themselves. We like to think that adoption has moved on from Georgia Tann and the Girls Who Went Away. In a lot of ways, we haven't. We may not send girls to unwed mothers' homes, but girls and women are still pressured into adoption explicitly and implicitly, and the ways in which the agencies operate are still unethical and in some cases illegal (violations of ICWA, threatening women if they don't go through). Their business is supplying babies. They lie to women about adoption, promising support and access that don't exist. They sponsor adoption related education in schools (sometimes the money for this is taken from block-granting TANF that could have been used to support families).
  
  We know that women, when they have the choice, usually choose to parent or have an abortion. Adoption is by far the least popular choice. But agencies and conservative politicians love adoption. They set up a system of political and social pressure that denies women the alternatives. True reproductive justice means that all choices are available and accessible: avoiding pregnancy, abortion, adoption, and parenting. Meanwhile they promote a social narrative that sees birth mothers as selfless and adoptive parents as saviors.
  
  The stories of the birth mothers profiled arr heartbreaking and complex. Too often their stories are not told because we want to believe in the fiction that it’s all about what’s best for the baby. I know I have a bias here — as I’ve said my own mother was a birth mother. But even without that bias I think this book would have convinced me.
• 
  Professor Petit Fours

  A must-read for those who want to seriously interrogate our current adoption systems and the ways that America makes motherhood and parenting increasingly untenable.
  
  Sisson is very clear in highlighting what this book is about--her focus is on the experience of birth mothers (I'm using her most commonly used term in this review)--even though there are plenty of important voices to listen to when interrogating our systems. As Sisson highlights, this group is neglected in both support/policy networks on adoption, as well as popular narratives around adoption (where they are often portrayed negatively if at all). Sisson gives this group room to speak, the book contains many long quotes from her interviews, and between chapters, there are uninterrupted retellings of some birthmother's stories (often at multiple points in time).
  
  Recent changes in abortion policy have elevated adoption as an alternative to abortion, but Sisson also counteracts this argument to show that, for many of the birth mothers that she spoke with, the choice wasn't between abortion and adoption, it was between adoption and parenting. With somewhat small amounts of money and additional resources (as little as $500-$2500), these women would not have relinquished their children.
  
  

  A fraction of this combined public and private outpouring of money could render much of the adoption system moot.

  
  
  To really improve the system, we need to have adoption organizations that are willing to put themselves out of business by creating robust support networks for women who are considering adoption, highlighting the many choices that they have around pregnancy, and helping them to plan to parent alongside the potential to relinquish. Unfortunately, the current adoption system is driven primarily by private agencies who have no interest in anything but removing children from their birth families.
  
  I've seen many pro-adoption activists highlight how adoption still requires a birthmother to carry a child to term, which is not easy physically or mentally. However, this book highlights an important argument that isn't as common--relinquishment is also not easy physically or mentally. The birth mothers profiled dealt with grief, depression, anxiety, regret, and intense sadness over the ways that their adoption was handled both before and after birth.
  
  I read Roxanna Asgarian's
  We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America last year and this book served as an excellent companion. While that book looked at the child removal and foster system, both tell the story of how a functioning social safety net could improve parenting, not only for those who are struggling but for all families.
  
  * Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for access to an eARC in exchange for my honest review. *
• 
  Erin Matson

  Domestic adoption happens most of all because the birth mother doesn’t think she can raise a child. Usually it’s about money and/or deeply gendered and and racialized notions about who is fit to parent. In this brilliant, deeply researched book, Gretchen Sisson lays out the horrors of domestic adoption from the perspective of relinquishing mothers. It’s a brutal and sad read, and infuriating because even modest social supports might have prevented the tragedies these women experienced.
  
  The anti-abortion movement is a crock, and the notion that adoption is a solution to banning abortion even more-so. As many of the women Sisson spoke to point out, the trauma of adoption can be never-ending.
  
  Finally, I want to be clear there are other forms of adoption not interrogated, or in some cases, much introduced at all in Sisson’s work. I would be remiss to say I am an adoptee myself, under very different circumstances than the people she interviewed. And I can solidly say my adoption by my father is one of the best things that’s happened to me. That doesn’t negate the important point she’s making about the women in this country being pressured to give their children to wealthier families.
• 
  Elizabeth

  this book, about a topic i have thought and learned a lot about, still offered me more perspectives i haven't been fully present to. it helped deepen my empathy and my commitment to talking honestly about the unethical nature of how non-kinship adoption happens. it mixes history with a lot of personal stories and is really well-narrated. this book was thoughtful and deeply human.
• 
  CJ

  This is an amazing and deeply-researched book about the lived realities behind the happy stories we tell ourselves about adoption. I would recommend this to anybody.
• 
  Robyn

  FDigitalLibrary | Devastating | Earlier this spring, I attended a presentation by a transracial adoptee and his adoptive mom, in which they stressed the point that "Adoption always starts with the death of a relationship". While this was a family with a lot of love and support for each other, the presentation, and the emphasis on grief being an inherent part of adoption, made me start thinking more critically about something I hadn't deeply considered before. In my volunteering with foster youth, I have dealt intimately with "failed adoption", and I have seen the results of people who think all they have to provide is a White home, a middle class home, and those things *automatically* make them "better" parents than the biological parents. I've seen the fallout of churches pushing their parishioners to adopt, creating communities in which couples are coerced into adopting in order to bring children to the church and adoptive parents are socially shamed out of admitting their struggles, seeking help outside of the faith, or questioning the dogma of their ultimate right to others' children. I've seen cultural ties severed, biological parents spoken of disparagingly, savior narratives, and a rush to dismiss an adoptee's trauma in favor of the idea that they were "meant" to be parented by the adoptive parents. I've seen people applaud at foster-to-adopt hearings, walk away, and never think of the child again. In my personal life I've known wealthy adoptive parents who received children at birth from mothers who selected them during the pregnancy. I've known teen moms who raised their babies and teen moms who relinquished because their parents decided. I've known adoptees of various ages. I've even known a young father who didn't learn there had been a pregnancy until three years after the baby was relinquished and he could not know his child. I've known lots of people who have had abortions, both friends and in my volunteering in support of PPA. I have a family member who was adopted by kin following maternal death during childbirth. I feel like I have been surrounded by many different types of parenting stories.
  And yet, somehow I never sat down and thought about whether adoption, in general, makes sense and is equitable. It was just one of the choices, right? I fought for a society in which pregnant people could choose parenting, adoption, abortion. Relinquished made me reconsider my assumptions, and opened my eyes to some prejudices I didn't know I had about what is "best for the baby" and "best for the mother". In my portion of the foster care volunteer world, we want reunification if it can be managed. We try to help parents to parent, find the social and emotional supports, keep families together as much as we can. I know what separation does to all parties. And I know the statistics of the long-term effects of adoption on adoptees, especially transracial adoption. But I had simply failed to apply that knowledge to birth mothers. I recently reviewed a memoir about a couple's experience with foster-to-adopt, which made me deeply uncomfortable because it was all the ways the adoptive parents wanted to game the system to get the baby they wanted, so *they could have a baby*. It was all centered on their desires, and their longing for someone else's child. Relinquished extrapolated my unease with that couple out into unease with the adoption system. That someone has the money to support their want does not elevate them to a position of being more worthy of fulfilling that want. This was almost a one-sitting read, so it's really filled up my thoughts. I suspect I'll have a couple of critical notes after it's settled (the very last section veered abruptly into changed terms, and as a disabled person I take deep exception to activists who use the term Crip. I know what they think they're doing and, no. I hate being called Crip or being told someone is fighting for Crip justice so much that when I hear it I can't see that person as working alongside me, a disabled person, in good faith. Stop it.), but as I write this review I've already recommended the book to three people. On a Sunday evening when I don't generally pester people.
• 
  Amber Jimerson

  This is a must-read, regardless of whether or not you are involved in adoption.
  
  It is certainly not every day that someone personally unaffected by a life experience would choose to dedicate so much time and energy into investigating, researching, comprehensively understanding, and then giving a voice to those most marginalized in that experience. This is what Gretchen has done with adoption and with mothers who have relinquished children to adoption. In the process she has tied together many fundamental truths about how we got here and why, and where we might hope to go in the future.
  
  I've been in the same spaces she drew insight from for many years now and yet there was so much data and information I was surprised to read. 'Relinquished' will be a top recommendation going forward.
  
  Gretchen has created such an important work, maybe precisely because it does not come from someone within the adoption community. I hope many outside of our echo chambers engage with her work and continue the conversation.
• 
  Kt

  Very interesting book...A lot of view points that I have not thought about. I am adopted from El Salvador and I have never once thought that my parents who adopted me did it to make themselves look better or thought they were better than the birth mother. I always viewed it as they rescued me and gave me such a better life than I would have had in El Salvador. I never have thought of it as white privilege or that they think they are better than my birth mother. It was interesting to hear the women who relinquished their children point of view. There were not many points in this book that I agreed with or felt as an adoptee.
• 
  Kelly Pramberger

  Important and informational book about adoption. This topic is close to my heart. I read a lot of books about adoption so I knew I would have to get this one. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.
• 
  Mrs. Read

  Relinquished is not an op-ed or think piece. Although illustrated by actual case histories, the book is based on years of study of the effects on birth mothers of surrendering of their infants for adoption. Writer Gretchen Sisson leaves no doubt about her own position on abortion* and relinquishment (strongly in favor of the former and opposed to the latter), and her assertions should be considered with that in mind. Based on her interviews she believes that most young unmarried pregnant women want to bear and raise their child and are permanently damaged by their inability to do so because of sectarian, social or economic barriers. The writer is sharply critical of organizations ostensibly intended to “help” such women but which use their (often government-provided) resources to firmly direct them to adoption. There appears to be virtually no guidance available from either pro- or anti-abortion groups to connect them to available resources which might enable them to keep and raise their own children. The writer provides striking evidence that commercial “adoption agencies” are exactly that - commercial businesses whose financial success depends on a supply of healthy white infants (as Dr. Sisson shows, almost all potential adopters are white people who want white kids, and she herself cites examples purporting to show that trans-racial adoptions are problematic at best).
  The title of the book should really be “Relinquishing” rather than “Relinquished” since virtually its entire focus is on the women doing/causing the act and not the infants to whom it is done. Even if one disagrees (as I do) with some/many/all of its writer’s premises, Relinquished provides painful insight into the nature and influence of the Adoption Industry. Recommended accordingly.
  
  * Although neutral on the political issue (as I am on all political issues), I firmly believe that abortion is fraught with moral problems. The book promotes the right of people “[to create] the families that they wanted at that time in their lives.” What if, à la Susan Smith, one decides that the family she wants at that time in her life includes no children? What has she a right to do with her 14-month old son? her 14-week old son? her 14-days-before-scheduled cesarean male fetus?
• 
  Crystal Palmisano-Dillard

  This book gave me a new perspective and a lot to think on.
  
  I work in child welfare (primarily foster care) and initially only worked with foster parents and focused on their perspective, then as I began to work with youth in care I learned a new perspective and this has added to my understanding.
  
  There is so much more we can do as a society/country to support families. Such small amounts (one mom indicated $1,000) would have been enough to allow them to parent instead of choosing adoption. The overarching themes of shame for having mental health struggles, being unmarried, or not having financial stability seemed to nearly always play into the decision to relinquish.
  
  It was fascinating to see how the mom’s perspectives changed from their initial decision and that first year after to several years later.
  
  A shift from thinking a child only has so much room in their heart for family to include extensive family units may have changed how the adoptive parents interacted and often excluded the birth parent. While not explored deeply, I wonder about their decision making and if it was out of preservation of what they saw as their family, fear, or control.
• 
  Zach Church

  This one turned me upside down. For most Americans (including myself) and I'm sure for many adopted people (including myself), this will be a very different answer to "what is a good adoption?"
  
  Sisson's argument, backed by substantial qualitative research and heartbreaking verbatim testimonials from birth mothers, is a persuasive case that adoption in America is extractive and traumatic, for birth mother's most of all, but for children as well. The solutions she points toward are reasonable, good policy for a number of other reasons.
  
  Of course, we can probably expect adoptions to increase in the coming years following Dobbs and other legal assaults on abortion and abortion access, so this work will be even more important.
  
  It's not a comfortable read, and adoptive parents especially may have a hard time. But it is a critical viewpoint for anyone involved in or considering being involved in an adoption.
• 
  Michelle Ramponi

  I don’t typically read non-fiction but the topic fascinated me so I picked it up. I’m glad I did, but it took me a long time to get through. Information rich and not always “to the point”, I did learn a lot about topics that interest me politically: reproductive health, abortion, adoption, women’s rights, access to resources and commonly accepted “family structures”.. The author makes her well constructed case that adoption is no solution for Americans’ reduced access to abortion. A fascinating well researched and constructed read!
• 
  Hannah Im

  This is the second book I’ve read about the impact of adoptions that no one talks about. First one was What White Patents Should Know about Transracial Adoption by Melissa Guida-Richards last year. That was from the perspective of the adopted child (written as an adopted adult). This book was just as powerful. I’m so glad we are now talking about the full picture of what it means to give up a child for adoption, especially in light of the Dobbs decision.
• 
  Kate

  “After the Dobbs decision came down, I spoke with many reporters who asked variations of the same question, ‘Why aren’t women who are denied abortion more interested in adoption?’ I would respond that women are generally not interested in giving away their children. ‘Can you explain more?’ they would ask.”
  
  Everyone should read this. My jaw dropped at the beginning and stayed dropped the entire time.
• 
  Sarah

  An eye-opening and wrenching examination of adoption that centers the experience of birth mothers and critiques the societal forces, particularly poverty, that influence the industry.