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After <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/24/roe-v-wade-overturned-explained/" target=_blank>the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022</a>, sociologist Gretchen Sisson found herself struggling to answer common questions about contemporary adoption. Journalists wanted to know: Why won’t more people give up their babies when faced with unwanted pregnancy? After all, adoption is a beloved institution and a rare point of bipartisan agreement.

“I would respond that women are generally not interested in giving away their children,” Sisson writes in her new book, “<a href="https://amzn.to/3wEilLX" target=_blank>Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood</a>.” “Can you explain more? They would ask. I would try, but there comes a point at which I, as a researcher, cannot explain more. As a mother, though, I always wanted to ask them: Under what circumstances would you give up your children?”

In “Relinquished,” Sisson draws on more than a decade of research to present an authoritative look at the reasons mothers voluntarily terminate their parental rights. Like its groundbreaking predecessor “The Girls Who Went Away,” by Ann Fessler, “Relinquished” draws on first-person accounts from birth mothers who place children for adoption. But while Fessler’s work examined the “baby scoop” era after World War II, during which millions of frightened young pregnant women lost their babies to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/11/19/maternity-homes-where-mind-control-was-used-teen-moms-give-up-their-babies/" target=_blank>coercive maternity homes</a>, “Relinquished” focuses on domestic adoption post-Roe, between 2000 and 2020.

The women who spoke with Sisson come from different economic, racial and religious backgrounds. But from their stories emerges a troubling picture of a lopsided adoption industry, in which aspiring parents spend thousands looking for adoptable infants while people in crisis pregnancies struggle to pay rent.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/18/adoption-abortion-roe-dobbs/" target=_blank>Adoption is almost never a first choice for birth mothers</a>, Sisson’s research shows. But when abortion and parenting are inaccessible, instances of relinquishments shoot up. With Roe overturned and demand from potential adoptive parents fueling a sprawling industry, it’s more important than ever for Americans to ground their beliefs about adoption in reality.

The days of jail-like maternity homes may be over, but Sisson uses real birth mother experiences and the latest research into adoption to show that a legacy of coercion remains. Eighty percent of birth mothers, for instance, cite financial pressures as their primary motivator for relinquishment. Other common motivators are lack of social support and lack of stable housing. One out of 5 birth mothers are homeless at the time of relinquishment, data from one large adoption agency showed.

Birth mothers repeatedly told Sisson that if they’d had just $1,000, $2,500 — even just enough for a car seat — they would have tried to parent. Meanwhile, the couples who adopted their children often spent tens of thousands on agency and legal services. Adoption agencies and social workers emphasized the “better life” adoptive families could provide, reminding birth mothers that relinquishment was their baby’s best shot at a middle-class upbringing with two parents.

Financial desperation wasn’t the only factor for women who relinquished. Others turned to adoption agencies early in their pregnancies — often with encouragement from religious families or crisis pregnancy centers — and were quickly matched with hopeful adoptive couples. Birth mothers, especially young women from religious communities, said adoption felt like the only way to “redeem” themselves from the sin of getting pregnant before marriage. Sisson points to research showing that pregnant mothers often develop a “childlike” dependence on adoptive families, relying on them for medical bills and day-to-day expenses. Adoption agencies routinely withhold information on government benefits and parental rights.

Liz Corman

One mother described having second thoughts about adoption after giving birth to her son. But the adoptive parents and “four or five” adoption agency employees had set up camp in her delivery room.

“They don’t encourage you to wait. They don’t encourage you to think about it after. They are in the hospital with you, having you sign those papers as soon as they legally can,” she told Sisson. “If I could go back, I just wish I would’ve waited a couple days, because I wouldn’t have made the same choice.”

Sisson’s most powerful storytelling tool may be the decade-long gap between participants’ first and second interviews. While the details of their accounts differed, the women’s post-adoption experiences were almost universally characterized by a transition from tentative hopefulness to disillusionment. The “open adoptions” that agencies promised rarely panned out. As time marched on, adoptive families limited or cut off contact. Birth mothers had little, if any, legal recourse. Many were traumatized by giving birth and losing their babies, but they couldn’t speak openly about their experiences for fear of further alienating their children’s new families.

Sisson’s analysis gently coaxes the scales from our eyes. If adoption is a heartwarming practice, why are birth mothers wracked with feelings of grief and betrayal that do not abate over time? If every aspiring parent deserves a baby to love, who are we willing to exploit to meet that demand?

Ultimately, “Relinquished” refutes two widespread assumptions about adoption. The first is that adoption is a transaction, the simple transfer of private property from one parent to another. Children aren’t property, Sisson writes, and their kinship ties can’t be severed by wishful thinking or legal maneuvering. The second is that adoption is a choice. If people in crisis pregnancy can’t access <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/abortion/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">abortion</a> and can’t afford to parent, adoption becomes an opportunistic transfer of babies, rather than a service to children or parents.

“Relinquished” leaves plenty of avenues unexplored. Sisson didn’t interview birth fathers, whose involvement tends to look very different. While one of her interview subjects is nonbinary, Sisson doesn’t get into the ways womanhood and binary gender fuel our ideas about who deserves to parent. Though Sisson narrows her focus to voluntary domestic adoption in the United States in the last two decades, she encourages readers and other scholars to consider the overlap between voluntary relinquishment and America’s family policing systems. Black birth mothers, for example, were more likely to voluntarily relinquish a baby for fear of losing custody of their other children.

This book may be a tough read, especially for current or aspiring adoptive parents. It feels much better to rescue an unwanted baby than to take one from a mother who would parent if she could only afford a car seat. But, as Sisson writes, if adoption is intended to meet the needs of children and not the “dreams of would-be parents,” then adoptive parents’ feelings can’t drive the future of adoption.

What might that future look like? Sisson draws on decades of work by adoptees and reproductive-justice advocates, many of them women of color, to present potential alternatives. Perhaps we could get underprivileged children the resources they need without severing their legal ties to their families of origin. Perhaps struggling pregnant people could place babies in temporary or kinship care. Perhaps U.S. policymakers could strengthen our social safety net, giving pregnant people access to affordable housing and child care.

In “Relinquished,” Sisson vividly renders a world where children are treated like consumer products and shifted around “for the benefit of others’ family-making desires and a lucrative industry.” She also dares to imagine a different world where Americans treat adoption like the justice issue it is.

Tatum Hunter is a consumer technology reporter at The Washington Post based in San Francisco. Her work focuses on health, privacy and relationships in the internet era. She relinquished her son for adoption in 2011 at age 18.

The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood

Xavier University, BA in economics

Tatum Hunter writes about personal technology and its impact on our wallets, brains and environment. She joined The Washington Post from Built In, where she covered software and the tech workforce.

Tatum Hunter

‘Relinquished’: Gretchen Sisson presents a clear-eyed look at adoption

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Adoption’s warm, fuzzy reputation doesn’t hold up to reality

In ‘Relinquished,’ sociologist Gretchen Sisson presents a little-seen side of adoption: The women who lose their children