Health
Researcher on Politics of Adoption Focuses on Birth Mothers
Gretchen Sisson paints a nuanced picture of the American adoption system in her new book, “Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood,” where she shares the stories of the industry’s lesser-known characters: birth mothers.
Through a decade of research and dozens of personal anecdotes, the book challenges conventional ideas around adoption in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
Sisson started doing research for the book in 2010 while working for an organization that focuses on pregnant and parenting teens. It was then that she began thinking more about the cultural ideas and norms around parenthood, and how that differed from the lived experiences of the individuals she was working with.
“I wanted to understand how adoption was actually functioning in the lives of the people most impacted by it,” said Sisson.
Sisson is a sociologist who studies abortion and adoption at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. She says there’s a common perception that pregnant women are often choosing between abortion and adoption. That’s not something she’s found in her research.
“Adoption is primarily a constrained choice,” said Sisson. “When you take away other options, when you make abortion inaccessible and when you make parenting impossible, that’s when people turn to adoption. That was no one’s first choice.”
The book makes reference to the Turnaway Study, which followed 956 women who sought abortions in the United States, including 160 who gave birth after being denied an abortion because their pregnancies were too far along. It found that 15 of those women, or 9%, gave birth and chose to relinquish their infants for adoption, which means the other 91% chose to parent.
Sisson says that that shows adoption will never be a meaningful alternative to abortion in the lives of most American women.
“We have this idea that there are a lot of children who are in need of homes. We actually have far more people who want to adopt from the private adoption system than children available.”
She says we need to rethink who adoption purports to serve.
“We need to be centering what children need and what children need is their families of origin as well,” said Sisson. “As soon as you center what prospective adoptive families want, you’re making this about what adults want rather than what children and families actually need.”
Read an excerpt from the book below:
In every private adoption, there is one shared moment. Most frequently it’s at the hospital, within hours after giving birth. Sometimes it’s at the adoption agency or perhaps in the back room of a church. This is the moment when a lawyer or social worker hands the mother a legal document to begin the process of terminating her parental rights, and—whatever brought her to that moment—she takes a pen and signs it.
A surprising number of the mothers I interviewed could not remember signing their papers. They know they did, but the moment was so fleeting, so wrapped up in the other paperwork of birth certificates and medical consents, and for several, so traumatizing that their otherwise sharp recall becomes hazy when describing the act of signing. But that is the moment on which the adoption hinges. The course of what happens next diverges.
Some mothers see their babies discharged with the adoptive parents while they stay in the hospital a bit longer to recover from a cesarean section. Some leave to go home first, while their newborn stays in the neonatal intensive care unit under the care of their soon-to-be legal parents.
Some go home to empty apartments, others to older children. Some are pumping breast milk to be bottle-fed to their baby; others are doing everything they can to suppress lactation. They are all recovering from pregnancy and birth, and they are all starting a lifelong process of understanding what adoption will mean for them and their child.
To begin, they are mourning. The intense sense of loss and sadness immediately after the adoption came up in nearly every interview. One woman described it as a “black hole of depression”; to several, it was an “out-of-body experience.”
Rebecca, who relinquished her daughter in 2009, shared: When I left the hospital, we went home. But I couldn’t bear, like, even looking at the apartment. When I looked at it, I could see where I could make a baby work. Coming back home, my belly was empty and so were my arms. So was my heart. I just felt like my whole world was just shattering around me and I couldn’t stay there. We ended up packing up some stuff and then we got in the car and we went and we got drugs and drove up to this lake town in the middle of winter and got a hotel super cheap— because it was outside of tourist season. We just drank and did drugs to try to forget it. I don’t know that he really felt anything, but I know that I didn’t want to. I was constantly crying. There were many moments I would just burst out in tears and scream, “I want my baby back.”
Rebecca’s emotional collapse was a refrain shared by so many mothers, but for Phoenix (who relinquished in 2012), the collapse was quite literal: “I was starting to feel like the ground was falling out from under me. . . . When my son left, I just fell to the floor. I just folded in half. It was like the muscles in my body stopped working.” These mothers were newly postpartum: hormonal and bleeding, just starting to heal, still leaking breast milk, and mourning their missing child. For some, this grief translated into immediate regret, but for most it didn’t. “Even while I was crying harder than I’ve ever cried in my life, I remember saying, ‘I still think I’m going to do it,’” Phoenix shared. “The way I was thinking of it at the time, all I had to offer was my love. But since it was an open adoption, he’s still going to have my love. He’ll have even more love because this couple who paid the adoption agency my yearly salary to adopt him were going to love him.”
Even Rebecca, screaming in a cheap hotel room that she wanted her baby back, did not try to revoke the adoption: It was such a conflicting thing because I did indeed want my baby back. But I knew that she deserved better than what I was going to be able to give her, and that made it hurt even more. Every time I would consider revoking the adoption, I would talk myself out of it because her parents had already had her for so long. You know, how could I do that to them?
Nearly 70 percent of relinquishing mothers say they wish they’d known more about their legal options for revocation after signing their papers, and even more wish they’d known more about their rights prior to signing the papers. But without that knowledge, very few considered regaining custody, even in these early days when they were in the depths of their grief.
