joining us tonight to moderate

our conversation, angela tucker is the executive director of the adoptee mentoring society and a well-known voice in the conversation about interracial adoption through. the adoptive life llc, tucker offers regular consulting agencies and families hosts adoptee lounges for adult adoptees and spends her weekends mentoring adoptive youth. tucker earned a b.a. in psychology, seattle pacific university and in seattle with her husband. dr. gretchen sisson is a

qualitative sociologist studying abortion and adoption at the university of california san francisco. her studies adoption include hundreds of in-depth interviews with women who have relinquished infants for domestic adoption over the past 60 years, with a particular focus on women who have relinquished since roe v wade. dr. sissons was cited in the supreme court's dissent. dogs v jackson, the women's health organization, and has been covered in outlets including new york magazine, the washington post and npr as all things considered. and consider this. she joins us tonight to discuss her new book relinquished the politics, adoption and the privilege of american motherhood. thank you for being here. thank you all for being here. i am really thrilled to have a conversation with you. i think you and i talk for hours, so i'm kind of going to pretend like you kind of already have that earlier because the first hour highlights. yes. to add to my introduction name

is angela. i'm an adoptee and gretchen and i first met at the end of 2021 during the supreme court hearings when we were interviewed together. i think the interviewee or interviewer started off by telling us amy coney barrett had recently said about abortion, and that was that. i think her words were, you know, if women can just put babies in safe haven boxes, other people can adopt them like abolish the right to abort is no big deal. i'm so curious what. you were doing in terms of writing at that time, because this book seems so timely. yeah. and my my aunt. yes, my mother. yes. so i i had finished my data

collection 2020. so i started doing interviews with relinquishing back in 2010. and at that point, i had no idea, one, that i was writing a book. and to that we going to end up where we are as far abortion access nationwide at the time i finished the data collection in 2020 and a ten year follow up with a cohort of the mothers that i had interviewed and sort of didn't know what to do with all the data i had gathered and was working on a book proposal. so i felt really strongly that these stories were really important. i wanted to get them out in the world. i was drafting a pretty academic book and then the oral arguments for the dobbs happened at the beginning of december in 2021, when my husband and i were listening to the oral arguments we, were getting the kids ready for school as one does. and and these questions that justice coney barrett, who is an

adoptive we're asking, were basically why can't women continue pregnancies and then terminate their parental rights instead of having an abortion? she's talking about sort of like the last three months of pregnancy and as someone who has been pregnant a lot, those last three months aren't nothing. but also this idea that terminating parental rights is an easy thing and, a clear alternative for really all of this data that i had. so it took what could have been a very academic project conversation, i think gave it a political relevance and an audience that it might not otherwise have had. and that was when you and i did the joint interview, i think you and catherine joyce. kate livingston. yes. kate. kate. yes. kate, whose is in book as well. and was a great conversation. and it just made me realize are ready to have this conversation on a broader level. and i think that that's

something that i've continued to see since then. so i am really curious about the appetite for folks who aren't in kind of reproductive justice or adoption fields before we get to that. i think it'd be great to go back a little bit and i know in the adoptee sphere a lot of folks are really aware you are not an adoptee and that you are not a birth mother, nor are an adoptive mother. you do have biological children are a parent, but couldn't you share just a little bit going back about your time, writing your thesis on infertility, your time that you spent at teen pregnancy center and how that to collecting all this and having these conversations? yeah. so when i started doing this data collection again back 2010, i was at this from a perspective of someone who is studying reproductive politics and reproductive making more

broadly. and i was interning at an organization, the alliance on teen pregnancy, which is based in boston, and we did some work around pregnancy and sex education, but most of our work was in supporting young families and were incredible young women. and they would go before the boston city council and lobby for better pregnant parenting student policies. the boston public schools. they would go on beacon hill and lobby for better access to housing and child care and all the things that would make it possible for them to raise children. and i was really incredibly inspired. their advocacy and clarity around what they needed to to support their families. and this was this summer that 16 and pregnant started airing on mtv. and i can always tell based on who's nodding when i start talking about 16 and pregnant, like who my real people are. so thank you for being here. you know, and the of the show

and the content creators were transparent that the intent of this show was to make teen parenthood look so miserable that. it would make people make young women and particularly more invested in preventing pregnancy. and one of the stories on that first season was an adoption relinquishment story. caitlin and tyler was the couple, and they relinquished their daughter. the entire narrative of. caitlin and tyler's story, in contrast to the other young women who were raising their children with the idea that they were better parents, they were more mature, that were somehow more loving for having relinquished their children, that this was so clearly the superior option, right? and it was going to serve them and their daughter better over the course of their lives. and i'm hearing narrative and i'm looking at these incredible young women that i'm working with on a regular basis and the stigma and that they're facing

in their parenting and and the gap between, the cultural conversation and their experiences was something that i wanted to look at a lot more deeply. i also volunteering at the abortion fund in boston at the time, i had just finished my master's thesis on infertility and the way that adoption can kind of continually reoccurred the solution here. people don't need abortion access if they can just relinquish for adoption. people don't need to have access to infertility treatments or ways of building their families. if adoption. and certainly we don't need to invest in young families or families who are otherwise vulnerable. if adoption exists, if their children are better served by relinquishment and separation. and so this was this was really what brought me to the conversation from this this context of reproductive justice, that i wanted to look at it more deeply. mm hmm. yeah. and i think about mtv's in that

show and how it echoes throughout our culture. and in my book, i'm about the phrase that many adoptive parents say to their children, which is that your birth mother loved you so much. she chose adoption for you. i'd love to your take on that really common phrase. both the words birth mother loved you and that that bravery sort of line as. well as the choice that she chose adoption for you which i think this is kind of the crux your book is this word choice. i mean, this would be like the whole talk, like how do you respond to this one sort of accepted true trope of adoption? i'll start with the one piece about it that i like, which is that i think it validates that relinquishing love their children and care deeply about their children, they are not relinquish and they're not

terminating their parental rights because of a dis interest in their child. and so i think that's part out of it that i would pull and that i think is is validating all of the mothers that i interviewed cared deeply about what happened to their children. that looks like very different things for many of them. but that was kind of the underlying premise and that is what i think it's really important to understand. no one, even the mothers who had considered getting an abortion tried to get an abortion indifferent to what happened to their child. so i'll i'll pull that out and say, i think that is is valuable. but the broader idea that the ultimate expression love is separating your child from you, that that is the highest form of maternal that one could aspire to in these situations is think very i mean obviously, very complicated. and i mean i'm also interested what that means for adopted people who grow up hearing this idea that if really loves you,

what they're going to do is separate themselves from you. right. i think that that that that's the other part of it, not just what it means for relinquishing mothers, but that means for adopted people. you know, and the idea that this is a choice, the women that i spoke with no one was certainly one was choosing between abortion and adoption the way that justice coney barrett, her conservative colleagues, think. no, no mother was like either of things at one point in her pregnancy. most of them never considered or tried to have an abortion. a few them did. and when they were denied access, they turned to adoption. adoption sort of became the lifeline. but for most of them, they wanted to parent for the duration of their pregnancies. and that was really they that's why they continued their pregnancies. they felt very bonded to their pregnancies. most of them pretty early on. and it was sort of an accumulation of either chronic crises, deprivation or acute

crises that really led them a point where they felt parenting was untenable at the point that a decision needed to be made. and for most them, this isn't a position of empowered choice. it was how am i going to survive? how i going to ensure that my child's safety and survival and for a lot of them who were in religious place, it's and salvation that they're that's driving the underlying adoption relinquishment. i, i want to talk about the religious part in a moment, but i think of table that and want to share that when i reading your book it was really impactful for me to read the ways that use really beautifully gave the voice to all of the women that you interviewed. so skillfully. really, because i imagine you

did have to pare down but keeping the essence of what they what they wanted to say the the nuance from your book is that it's longitudinal that you interviewed these women right at that time of relinquishment and then ten years later for i worked an adoption agency when i was very young and i had just graduated undergrad. and so i just starting to see some of these dynamics in my role was primarily with the adopters, these prospective parents really had many of them and entitlement to someone else's child a belief and the way you wrote about things like when the women were presented with profile books and how they thought of those books the way that they heard promise is

around openness and then what that meant ten years later it was just sort of really well done. thank you. yeah. very accessible. and i just i wonder about i would love for you to talk about that arc that you saw over and over again of the women and if you would say, you know, ten years later, how to classify their decision, some of the women said it themselves. you know, i'm thinking of women who you wrote perhaps were very conservative in their beliefs at the time, placing and wanted to place or remember one specific story. i don't if it was erica, but wanted to with a christian did and ten years later learned and saw that her son was homophobic and. a lot of these things that she really did not agree with but

that time span, that change is what made that so. so i'm just curious if you could speak to that a bit. so the reason why i wanted to do the ten year data collection was because when i did interviews in 2010. i had i interviewed mothers who adoption went back the 1960s. right. so some of these women were very temporally far from their adoption and some of them were very close. some of them were just a year or two out and what i found was that mothers were further removed from adoption, were very critical what had happened to them. but some, not all, but some of the mothers that were much closer to their adoption had more recent adoptions, felt great about their decision. they were really optimistic. they felt very empower. and they were still, you know, showing their adoption agencies and doing panels with prospective adoptive parents. they were doing videos, brave love, writing blog posts of sharing their story and, being

upfront with what a wonderful decision this had been for them and their children. and so the question then me as a researcher was, is do they feel better adoption has gotten better, right? how we change adoption practices meaningfully enough that contemporary experiences were more more protective, less harmful, less traumatic? or does everyone feel more critical as time goes by. and the only way to do that was to the same mothers ten years later, which is what i did. and then i interviewed an additional new cohort that had relinquished between 2010 and 2020. but for those that i interviewed twice, ten years apart, none of them felt better about their over time. a few of them felt some okay, but most of them were in a far more critical place than they had been earlier.

there. a couple of things that would bring them to that place. one is that they were not receiving amount of contact with their child that they had expected, that they had been told that they could expect and. a lot of them didn't realize that open adoptions are not legally enforceable in most states and even in places. they are said to be legally enforceable. it's very unclear what the mechanism for that enforcement actually is. right. i remember when i was working a caseworker that we had that outlined this, quote, open adoption that would say can have, you know, four visits a year and x amount of pictures. and if if am remembering, i think those documents looked a little like legal document does that either signing something that has legal teeth to it and lot of agencies are very vague on this is what this means and

what enforceability is going to be one of those people back then where i would say you know this family is open to know six visits. so you know, kind of a little bit of the coercion and saying and you have no way to none of us can decide what the adoptive parents ultimately end up wanting to do once the adoption is finalized. the birth parent does not any legal rights or recourse here, and it's entirely up to the adoptive parents who is in contact with their child moving forward. so that that was that was and some others were entirely cut off from their child, too. sometimes was just like they had less contact than they wanted, didn't have the kind of contact that they wanted they were unhappy with that relationship for several of them they just the adoptive parents who had told them to expect an open would cut off contact completely bait and switch. i mean, i remember reading in your that i think it was the brackeen versus holland case the

equa case that almost was overturned that the went to the jail promised openness. yes. so the case that angela is talking was a case before the supreme court last summer. and angela actually has advanced reader copy of the book with because i wrote the book assuming that that we were going to lose decision and braxton versus holland so have an author's note that basically says that those like on june x x 2023 breaking versus holland or the equal was overturned and breaking versus holland it took it out out of the final version but we were all very surprised actually the court decided to affirm equa in way we can talk more about it. but i want to get back also to other reasons that mothers can work out, because it wasn't just about contact. the other reason a lot of them became disenchanted, pessimistic, unhappy their adoptions was that they saw adoption wasn't serving their child in the way that they had

been led to believe that it would. and for some of them this was like a really straightforward way, like so many of the mothers, particularly ones from a conservative background, relinquished because they had been taught had been led to believe that your child needs are to married parents. that's what you're that's what this adoption is going to accomplish. and whereas mother, i interviewed by the time her was three years old, the adoptive parents were divorced and she was married and co-parent and raising other with her new spouse. and she's like, well, what was the point of this if this the ideal that we were told was going to uphold who is what is this actually doing for him? but for it was it was harder? they saw their children struggling with the trauma of that separation in a way that they had been educated during the process. and for some they disagreed with the way the child was being raised, especially for the ones who came from conservative backgrounds, they picked conservative parents.

right. they grew up in the evangelical church. they picked evangelical. they came to a place where they moved on from their beliefs and their child is still in that really conservative home or one mother talked about her son had some neuro divergences as he grew up and she saw his adoptive parents really to connect with him around that and support him in that. and meanwhile, she married someone who had similar ways of seeing the world to her child and thought, you know, he would have been a great stepfather. right. and so there were all of these small moments where they felt like this beautiful life. they had been told they were going to be giving their was falling short. and for so many mothers who are experienced seeing their own pain, their own trauma as a result of that separation, if they had seen their child was doing well, i think that they would have been able to say this wasn't good for me, but if it was good for my child, i'll deal

that. but as soon as they saw that the child was struggling with any part of it, that's when they became much more critical and political in a lot of ways and their own thinking. i think this is one of the reasons why your book is so important, is this dearth of evidence around adoption. what that means, birth parents for adoptees gives us a little glimpse. i feel like secretly i hope that i have maybe not. so secret is can we talk whether termination of parental rights is even necessary or could we be a little more creative and more parents in a child's life or choose guardianship or the termination piece permanency of, sometimes a temporary situation seems like it might be time us

to rethink it. yeah one of the stories that i and i put intentionally early in the book, it's a story of a mother she had three older children. two of them are still at home, and she had a new baby. the father of her older children actually passed away during her pregnancy. so she didn't a co-parent for them, which i think left her particularly vulnerable. she dealt with postpartum psychosis after the baby was born. and i include it because it's a really uncomfortable story. she would have been the first person to say that she was not a safe for that baby at that time. but as a black woman, she was worried that if she turned to the child welfare system, that was going to lose custody of all of her. and so she ended up having to relinquish the baby in private adoption because she find support elsewhere. and this is someone who has demonstrated that she's very capable of parenting.

she you know, successfully parented these older children, was still able to engage with them in a safe, meaningful way. when i spoke her, she was actually remarried, pregnant again, and had this whole like safety plan. what was going to happen if she faced a similar health crisis. but she is lost. the legal relationship with that baby because there was no type of care. there was no way for her to find a temporary support that would hold the way that they both needed to be held and what was heartbreaking about her story is that the adoptive family was very big on open adoption, particularly because this was a transracial adoption. they were white and they said, we want you to be involved in your life. we want him to have a connection to his black family. and then after the adoption, felt a tremendous sense of

relief because she said, now i can get help i need now i can go get the care that i need or the psychiatric support that she needed. and she did that because wanted him to be able to have a relationship with her. she wanted him to be proud of her as he grew up. but once she disclosed this mental health crisis that she had with his adoptive parents, they completely off contact with her. and i think that this is another example where you look at it and and you have to ask, was there no other way to do this to give them that look? why was legally severing her relationship, her child, the only path forward that she find to keep her child safe. do you think that adoptive parents capable of asking why or capable of that this is outside of your research scope? i'm thinking critically about if and truly needed to happen.

one in the private adoptions fair. do you think that's always left in the purview of? academics like yourself who aren't as closely attached to adoption? well, this is another question and i think some adoptive parents do. i don't know that. they always like the answer and i don't know that they always adjust own hopes, dreams, goals, relationships with their child and their child's family of origin. based on that answer, yeah. it's a hard it's a hard thing to answer and, you know, one of the things i talk about in the book is is open adoption is sort of the norm at adoption right now. like over 90% of adoptions have some contact between the adoptive family and birth family. but it kind of remains this broader oddity. our culture, we don't have an idea of people who are outside of the space adoption, don't

have an idea of what this looks like and remains kind of a curiosity and so navigate doing all of these relationships has to happen in spaces where most people don't have support. they don't have a lot of people that they can talk to, figure it out. a lot of agencies provide pretty support in in holding those relationships over time and is what i found. i mean, i found a lot calling about the dobbs oral arguments, but like when justice coney barrett talks about adoption as as alleviating the burden of parenthood, as she put right. i mean, the women i spoke with, they thought a lot of burden of parenthood. it different than like the everyday working of parenthood but they thought a lot of burdens as far as how they showed up for their children what the adoptive parents were making possible like they there was a constant in that relationship and that's for the people for whom it was going well. right. and i think that that is another

thing that we need to consider. and i think that when you talk like what adoptive parents are to ask and how critical they're able to be, i mean, adoptive are certainly not a but i do think that the way we practice adoption today is fundamentally rooted and privilege an equity. and i don't know how adoptive parents are really willing to go there in understanding that means for how they build their family. some of them are you know, they're they're out there. but i don't think that that is most adoption is is worked in this today. i just remember reading one of the anecdotes a woman who was pregnant to an adoption agency and first learned that the person that she was speaking to was not just a caseworker, but an adoptive mother. and that feeling of like, well, how how am i going to this isn't all options at this point. and that was really striking

some. people have talked about your book as like the updated and best sellers the girl who went away and i think that's compliment in many aspects yeah that book was really about many of the women who were also privately relinquishing without choice but being sent away to different homes and i think in in some ways there are a lot of parallels. and one that i noticed was that a good majority of the women that you interviewed were white women. there were some a couple of black women and. but one big difference is that the kids were mixed. not all kids. so i was just finding lot of interest in the racial and wondering if you could speak to

this pattern that i observed which it seemed like for the white women had black or brown children, that they were going give birth to. they seemed to not think about race when thinking about who to to be the kids, adoptive parents, the black women. that was different that was like a very important thing. i remember one case where the black wanted a black family, but the agency is like, we don't have any but we have a white family who has a black kid. maybe that'll do. and she's like, okay, but i don't care about your interpretations around racially racially. is it accurate that? we haven't seen much change that there still primarily white women relinquishing through private adoptions and what that means. so when you look at the the history of private adoption,

particularly pre roe versus wade and this is and foster's book girls who went away which is incredible and i do hope that this book can kind of continue conversation that ann started in that book. but when you look at the pre history of adoption, it was almost an entire white women and girls and it was primarily middle white women and girls and it was uphold doing this really middle class idea of what family and parenthood should be, which was entirely within the context of marriage. and most of these white women were relinquishing as a way to delay parenthood. good. right. this was a way of you're going to go to this maternity home. you're going to really have any choice in matter, in any way. the adoption is going to be completely closed. you're going to relinquish this baby and then you're going to go back home and you're going to completely forget about it. and and then when you married, then you can have more children and this sort of socially prescribed appropriate space.

it did not. i mean surprised that didn't work out well any of these women right and i think this is sort of called the baby scoop era this time of really intensive, coercive, secretive adoptions that the end of world war two until roe v wade. none of this is to say that families of color were protected from family separation. of course they weren't. but that happened within, like family policing and child welfare systems, rather within the private system, there wasn't a market demand for children of color the same way that there was for white babies and the whiteness. private adoption lasted for as long as collected demographic information, relinquishing mothers. when we stopped doing that the nineties or so. but when look at the data from the nineties, it was virtually no women of color were in the private adoption system. i don'tnow why we stopped collecting federal adoption is an endless point of frustration.

me as a researcher. but there you have it. i was to get demographic data on about 8000 adoptions that occurred between 2011 and 2020. when you look at that demographic data, you see far more women of color participating. you did a generation earlier. so it's still the majority white women but it's only about 55%. so see and it's the difference is mostly black women that are are participating more heavily indigenous native women are not to be relinquishing private adoption at any meaningful increase that probably to do with the indian child welfare act. either someone's or their relinquishing through other ways, probably both latino women are participating at a higher rate than they were before is basically zero. but really, you're seeing a lot more participation from black women. and i think that that's because the driving factor for relinquishment today is more

about poverty and the capacity to than upholding this specific idea family. so most of the most relinquishing mothers today already have children they're already raising children. they feel that they don't have the capacity raise and care for another child and that's what's driving the separation. so we are seeing a lot more women of color now. when i did my data collection in 2010, those were almost entirely white women because those going back to 2000 and i think the shifts toward increasing racial and ethnic diversity has really happened in the last 15 to 20 years. and so when did the 2020 data collection? i really to try to include more women of color in that sample but as you mentioned just because the mothers are white doesn't mean that the children are right. a lot of them had biracial children and there's a lot of complicated ways that that plays for them and their children for

some of them. and one of the the story that i opened the book with haley. haley was 19 when she relinquished her son. she had someone she was 15 that she was raising. and her family was really supportive, actually, of her parenting at that point. they weren't thrilled, she said, but they were supportive, right? she never considered relinquishing child when she got pregnant was 19. they were very clear like this, baby is not coming home. and got like an hour into our conversation. and i kept being like, why weren't your showing up in the same way the second pregnancy? so i don't know. maybe it's because his father was black and i was like, oh yeah. and we've been talking for hour like now, you know? and i think that for a lot of the white mothers like their white. one like some of them were clearly struggling with their own racism or not just held racist ideas about who they could parent. some of them, a lot of their were unsupportive of them raising a child of color.

but even if that wasn't the factor, it still impacted how they thought about their decision and. a lot of the white mothers, their privilege kept them from understanding their child was going to be in a transracial adoption and if they chose white parents, the mothers of color, all about that but had to make compromises. right so. as you mentioned, the black mother who is like, i'm only going to really go if we can find black parents needs the i mean black parents but here's this white couple that's already adopted a black baby. so they won't only black member of their household as as good as they could do for her. there was one story about a latina mother. she herself was an adoptee central america. and she grew up in a white family in white community. and she was just very that she didn't want to have white parents. she did not want put her child in the same centric households in spaces she had grown up in and. and she ended up relinquishing

her child to an asian-american. and so she talked about wanting to help her develop an identity as a latina. but i don't have that identity. i grew up in a white family, so we would have to learn that together. right? and so you just continually have sort of dislocations and separations of identity, you know, or there was there was one white mother of a biracial child. she's like, and i wanted to find, you know, interracial couple or, biracial couple or family of color to, adopt her, couldn't find that. so she's like, well, i ended up just choosing parents who lived in new york city because i figured then she wouldn't be in an entirely white community right. and they were just continually having to these compromises in, what they were able to give their children within their adoptive family. yeah, it's back to what ricky sondra said, which was like it's a a choice, less choice

resources, women or something like that. ricky has a lot of good women. we're going to get your questions maybe in about 5 minutes. so think of them and then you'll come up to this microphone and ask them hopefully in the most concise manner. we all know that is q&a is where one person talks for a long time and understand sometimes it's because this is just a very emotional, personal topic. so no judgment there. but we also want to make sure everyone has time to questions if they have them. but before we get to your questions, let's talk about money and marketing. i think it was new to me to read about the geotagging that happened happens. and i know there's raleigh had written that i don't know where she got this but that 20% of agents she's money spent on

advertising and the geotagging for those who haven't read the book yet was you know if you go to planned parenthood or anywhere like that, then they will i don't know how the phones work, but get your information so that then you're going to get targeted ads for adopting. it's not just planned parenthood, places like methadone clinics and, public hospital. i'll maybe i'll read just a little because i think that's i think it's pretty funny. there's a lot of the book that's funny. but i think. in 2016 i was inadvertently included on this email that was also being to adoption agencies, employee adoption employees across the country, company advertising can mobile geofence planned parenthood locations, other abortion clinics we will geofence planned parenthood locations and other abortion clinics. it wasn't the best written email tag all the in the clinic drill down demographics women 18 to 24

place an ad in a mobile app you have options. the ad will direct traffic to your landing page. when women leave the clinic, they will continue to see your ad for 30 days. we finished a large campaign with bethany christian services. if you are not the appropriate to contact, please for the information to the correct contact. thank you. i was not the appropriate person contact the banner ads copy offer would appear on the phones of anyone in or health care facilities that provided abortions. copley advertising a boston based firm, soon settled with then massachusetts attorney general maura healey, is now massachusetts governor maura healey. and without admitting liability agreed to stop geofencing clinics solely in that state, but only after they ran a campaign targeting 140 abortion clinics and methadone centers. for bethany christian services, one of the largest adoption agencies in the country, this legal intervention in massachusetts doesn't mean that geofencing has gone away. in 2022. choose life marketing, a digital marketing firm that works

primarily with anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers and adoption agencies, was still not just physical geofencing clinics, but virtual geofencing. virtual geofencing allows adoption agencies to advertise directly to people have visited specific urls, including clinic sites or places to order abortion pills, online. the ability of these ads to appear in people's most innocuous searches or at their most vulnerable moments makes them especially invasive. it's difficult to overstate how captivated many mothers are by the adoptive family profiles they find online. while the profiles are designed to help adoptive parents match with the expectant mothers considering relinquishment they also serve to spark interest in and increase their commitment to the idea. adoption itself. you said that was funny. i think that my mother emailed me. you and people, other people ask, well, why did they make like i don't know, they think what they're doing is good, right? and i think that and you know, and that gets a little bit too

my first one of my first questions about adoptive parents being able to see that perhaps they participate in a permanent solution to a temporary problem. and because i do think and i know so many adoptive parents genuinely believe that they're doing good as well. but how we get beyond that. yeah intentions don't intentions can harm and hurt me as an adoptee i feel. yeah well i think that in every and every point in history, people who separated families have had good or least had a good intention that they could right. so indian boarding this was way of helping native children assimilate this was going to make them a success within white culture right right. certainly during the pre roe

babies scoop era of white children. this was what was going to save children from being called a -- on playground. these were our good intentions. the orphan trains, the sending of children from east coast cities to the midwest. this was for them working on midwest farms, for labor was going to be what they needed to thrive. and instead of growing up in the inner city, the children weren't actually orphans. to be clear, they had living parents. so this context of serving children by removing them from their families has always been understood to have good intentions. so you see this in the foster care system today, which disproportionately polices families. this is how we're supporting by taking away children. one anecdote that i pull from dorothy roberts research is a family that they are paying rent on in apartment. the apartment wasn't safe. i think it had black mold and,

maybe a pest infestation. and it was considered a safe place for the children to. be and they go before a family court judge and the judge takes the children away. and the question for the judge, why don't you do something for? the landlord who's not providing a safe environment and the family court judges, all i can do is take the children. i'm a family court judge. right so this is viewed as what's good and safe. the children, but has no there is no value that. what is good for the children is having the connection to their family of origin and finding to make them safe in that space. and so i think good intentions count for very little. you're talking about reasons to justify a child from the family. there are some instances where i mean, not can parent any child at any point in their life. i'm very clear on that there are plenty of times when families

need support and children are not going to be able to the safety and security that they need that family. i don't see why legally severing the relationship of that child to their family is the best that we can offer those families at that time here. we have about 13 minutes before we can have gretchen all our books. so please come on up to the microphone. if you have a question while we wait, people, i know there's all the questions in the brains. i can see them. i can see inside your brain. there you go and so many questions that i can just say up here, i'm an adoptee. thank you so much for this book. so you talked a little bit about, you know, from the conservative sort of of view arounds like you, adoption solves a parenting problem. but i've also heard that from folks on the left, too.

like there's this like, oh, abortion is for people who don't want to be pregnant and adoption is for people who don't want a parent. well i'm reading this book is you know anyone the reason that no it's not true. so how can we engage with other folks who are politically similar, they want to do reproductive, you know, be for reproductive justice to make sure including adoptee and birth parent perspectives. yeah thank you. thank you for being here. look, i think i didn't write this book for right wing people, right? they can read it if want. i hope they'll learn something. but wrote the audience for. this book was people who are left of center share values around reproductive and wanting to support families and and haven't thought critically about before. and i think that there is it particularly the reproductive justice movement the history of

the reproductive rights conversation always been choice based right like you have these three options you can parent you can have an abortion you can relinquish for adoption. they don't use ordering because you can choose to place a child for adoption. right. and these are odds in neutral moral value. and we're not looking at the circumstances that lead people, make constrained choices, sacrifices within, the context of those three paths. right reproductive rights as a legal rights based framework is not going to do much better than that which is why i really want to root the conversation for moving forward. the reproductive justice space which has to account for the conditions in which people able to raise their families. i think that that i mean, the reproductive justice movement has always been led by women of color. it comes a response. this choice based rights framework. i think that this is where we need to be considering all of our all of our work in this

space, around abortion, around parenting around safe communities. i think that's really valuable. and that's where i am trying to move this and this book. but to your other point that this is not just a conservative priority, right? everybody loves the congressional adoption caucus is the largest bipartisan, bicameral caucus in our federal government. and and are plenty of elected leaders in this book. who i agree with on most things that i, i call out for a lot of their positions and their sort of overly simplistic ideas around adoption. adoption is always the common ground in. the abortion conversation, particularly that's really not ever rooted in the experiences of people are impacted and adoptees well as relinquishing parents that's that's i'm hoping to move right that's where i'm hoping to change this conversation to to introduce

more complexity there. i always say i'm a sociologist. i don't have to give the answers. i can just make things more complicated. but i do think that. the frame, the reproductive justice frame is is the only way that we get to a solution here. so. it's a great question. thank you so much for that. i do think in my work in a couple of weeks, i'm going to speak give a keynote at the american bar association's conference for children's rights and parent defenders and. i've already started conversations with the judges. they're primarily around like this is a little bit to your question, but primarily around asking judges to define the difference between. poverty and neglect. because it's a little bit of what you shared where they're like, i'm just, you know, i'm just going to and it's like well, in the few who have asked

this question, who are across the political spectrum have not been able to answer that? and i, in my opinion, let's let's kind of dig our heels in there to, get a definition, and then see what might come in terms of change and think to that point. the difference between poverty and neglect like. it takes a pretty minimal investment to radically change, right? so a 5% increase in food assistance. a community lowers the foster care separation rate by 14%. right. similar like some like tax credits for families lower maltreatment by a far greater proportion. right. so the more the more help you give for families survival. you have children in safer homes in number of ways and i think that that's that's important to

recognize we put a lot of money into adoption to upholding adoption in this country when a similar investment in in families would go a really long way in keeping families together. have a chapter in my book called how much do they do i cost and this is ten year old adoptee who's asking his parents, you know, how much did you pay for me to adopt? and then asks them if you had given that to my birth parents, would they have been able to keep me so i think perhaps the conversation is going be advanced because people are growing up, because you're having giving folks a voice that didn't ordinarily have it. thank you for waiting. yeah of course, i was working through traditional surrogacy. and so it's interesting you brought that up. i've asked my parents exactly that but never the follow up because my mom birth mom did want me she inherently went into the process to give up. and so i notice that started. he was only used once in the book in reference another book, did you look into it. why isn't it part of the conversation and where does it

fit in? because i was adopted, but i don't see my story i have never seen my story reflected. and so i'm trying to create spaces that i don't know any other surrogate kids, anyone does or doesn't meet them. so yeah, yeah, i to introduce i'm sorry this is i think we get a group. yeah, there's a whole community. yeah, yeah, yeah. going to add something real quick. yeah. yeah. we're here for you to. yeah. and these women right up here actually have a resource. i'm thinking about the. yeah, yeah, there's a conference, i want to make sure that they are doing it right, but i want to make sure the woman that you just heard is leading this conference in denver, untangling our roots,

which the march which starts at 820 on the 28th. but we bring the adoption assisted reproduction and npe non paternal event communities together because so much overlap and i know we've discussed too in all of our communities we can help each other need to thank you thank you for being thank you for your question thank you all for being. i think that this is absolutely part the conversation. and i think that if you start this work from that perspective of adopted people donor conceived surrogate people who gestational for via gestational surrogacy that very clear because as i started with mothers that were willing terminating their own parental rights for non surrogacy. it's not it's right it's not it's not present here but i think that you start with impacted people like angela and

the donor and the donor surrogacy community that coalition building is absolutely the way we move this conversation forward. so when you come to when when the question is like what happens next and where these coalitions are going to form, what the where the political is rooted, they aren't separate issues that's just not where i started for for this data collection people people ask me like, is your next book going to be on surrogacy? and i like i don't probably not. but, you know, i think that that is that is the next part of the conversation. and i think that part of the challenge not challenge, but part of the complication around this is that nothing is secret anymore. and people who were donor

conceived 20 years ago when no one could imagine 23 and me thought this could be a secret forever and that they didn't have to be accountable at all to the children that were born from these systems in this way way, you know. and so i anyway, i don't want to get too, too far afield from your question, but think that i have actually seen a lot of connection within the adoptee the donor too, because that's all happening in the organizing. and i think it's really it's really exciting and it's it's great to see those connections being made because that's who can actually an agenda for change. that was tyson. basically what i was going to say is. i think your book is fantastic tastic, but it just scratches the surface and where you're to expand on that i'm a baby scoop

era mother and i know you started the book after that ironic i also raised four foster children i was in fostering 20 years and i know how broken that system is but listening to us so it's not being taught at the school girls and women's studies if you walk around and ask anyone in a normal setting and say baby scoop and they have no idea you're talking about and the reason we have a concern is we don't feel it and we that this is all a continuation of the same profit industry. people pay money for babies one way or another and how it's being handled. and so do see yourself expanding with more books. i would i would hope to write another book. i say, though, i don't know that it will.

how squarely in the adoption space. it will be i'm very of my role as a as a researcher who is not directly impacted in this space. you know, i think that the next i think the next conversation needs to be this explicitly political organize and conversation and what that looks like from a coalition building perspective, a policy agenda perspective of and i don't think that i'm necessarily the right person to write book we got some ideas about who could be i would guess but you know i am i am very eager to support that work. i hope that my scholarship can help support that work well we'll see what comes next but i'm excited i'm excited to be part of this conversation. i've been very validated by the impacted the adoptees, the mothers who have found that the book really resonates with them and to the extent that i can

support them they take charge of that conversation that's what i would like my role to be going forward so i will be loving thank you very much. final question. yeah. okay. yeah, i'm here. i'm an adoptive mom from, the eighties and so my son, who's now in his thirties really has educated me and started me thinking about what it meant from his viewpoint. and i'm just wondering number for infertility got me there grief was a big part of that and and as an adoptive parent in the agency i we adopted through the agency that you worked with angela and we got no no education about how to be the best parents we could be to these kids. and so i'm here saying i'm willing to work that adoptive parents can know more about this and be more willing to ask those

questions. and i think to be challenged by not not terminating, you know. but i joining together in parent nathan found his birth mom and that was a real challenge me but now my grandkids have eight sets of grandparents. yes. and i have, you know, better for them. they know everything now. and so thank for doing this. and i hope i can support. your work politically get this stuff done. so thank thank you. i don't know what time it is. we'll do one more final. yeah, i will be quick. this is not a question, but it is a statement and you've mentioned a couple of times that you're not part the triad, so to speak, and it seems as though you feel like that sets you and i don't know, like you have less authority or something like that, i just wanted to say that

as soon as i started reading this, i found out that you were a and that you were not associated any of the triad. i'm awesome. people will listen to you because i get not all adoptees feel this way, not all of you. i got all the not all the and all the denial i can point to now. and so this is fantastic. even if you are not the person to read the book to do the same thing with adoptees, i think that would be fantastic if if you could find enough adoptees who are willing to talk. yeah, well, thank you thank you for saying i mean, i think think i hope that i have done work to build with these impacted communities. and i hope that that comes through in the book. people who are impacted in this space have different feelings about me as someone who's not adoptee, who's not a relinquishing writing this work. but that's part of the reason why i structured the book the way that i did and wanted to include the first person narratives at the length that i did because i, i believe as a

scholar as a writer, readers are smart and they can come in to the same conclusions that i did as a scholar, if i share these stories and, you know, some criticism that i've gotten from the book is, like, oh, did you like curate these stories in service to this political agenda? and i'm always clear. no, this is where the data took me. and i think that sharing as much of that data and as close to its raw form as i could, that hopefully readers will come to the same place. so thank you to close out let's let's get a little fun fact. i know gloria steinem blurbed your book and i think she blurb it before the title was relinquished or what was the title before? what was it going to be? so gloria turned 90 yesterday. happy birthday to gloria steinem. gloria blurbed, a very early

version of the book and at the time the title was called choosing life and it was supposed to be a commentary on the anti abortion rhetoric around and like it's a better title. but but gloria basically said i can't blurb this book because people think i'm endorsing an anti-abortion project. and i said, i can just the title, gloria, that one's really easy so i did. and so gloria's blurb is on the inside cover here and and i'm grateful. i'm grateful for her endorsement, her support and her investment in generations of that have come after her. and i will but i will also add one caveat that second wave white feminists, including gloria, have not always understood this conversation as of their work and, her her blurb a lot to me, not just because i have a great deal of respect for

what she has accomplished for of american women. but because i think it represents the fact that we are now ready for a conversation in a way that people weren't necessarily before. well, congratulations on this really remarkable working for bringing us all out, for having this wonderful this is a better world. your book and your words and the words of all of the women are out here. so thank you.