Gretchen Sisson
Appearances
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Who deserves to be a parent?
Texas has decided to put millions of dollars into this public-private partnership to sell the idea of adoption to people who are facing crisis pregnancies.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
None of what I argue, when I'm critical of adoption, none of what I am suggesting is that we should be imposing parenthood on people who don't want it, that we don't need more people to love and care about children in our society, or that every person is equipped to raise every child to whom they give birth at every point in their lives.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
You know, one of the stories that I include in my book is a mother who dealt with postpartum psychosis. She'd raised three other children. You know, she knew that she could successfully parent. She would be the first to say that she wasn't a safe parent for that baby at that time. She didn't have her own interpersonal support network.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
She didn't trust the foster care system, particularly as a Black woman. She was worried that she'd lose custody of all of her children if she relied on that as a way of caring for her baby while she got the psychiatric support that she needed. And she ended up relinquishing the baby for private adoption. She permanently ended their relationship when...
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Who deserves to be a parent?
there are myriad temporary solutions that could have kept their legal relationship intact, right? And I start with that story because it is really uncomfortable. I mean, she talked about these intrusive thoughts of harming the baby, right? This is not a person that you want caring for this child on her own at this point in time. But there wasn't a type of crisis care, that there wasn't a way of
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Who deserves to be a parent?
fostering that she could feel safe availing herself of until she could get the medical care that she needed to be in a safer place to care for her son. right?
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Who deserves to be a parent?
And that's why I think it's really important for us to think more creatively about how we support families in parenting, in caring for children, and think about what children actually need and see a value in preserving the relationship between child and family of origin and community of origin. And think about how we are making investments in
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Who deserves to be a parent?
communities writ large, systems of support, rather than allowing this private industry that commodifies babies to provide our primary answer to these situations.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
Before I started my work on adoption, I was studying infertility and how infertility people were making decisions around what treatments to pursue. And often they are very flippantly told, like, oh, you should just adopt. Like, oh, this is going to be the answer to that struggle as well.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
Yeah. And we don't think about, well, what would it mean to educate people about their fertility? What if fertility education was part of sex education? What if sex education wasn't just about, all of the scary things that pregnancy is so that you scare young people into abstinence.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
What if it was actually about educating people about how their bodies work, how fertility changes as you age, what it looks like? What if we provided space for people to access affordable medical treatments so that if their primary goal is to conceive, they can do that rather than creating additional demand within the private adoption system.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
But I do think that we need more people willing to engage as foster parents that don't have an interest in adopting, right? So I heard stories from mothers who found out that they were pregnant like at 39 weeks, right? And they weren't ready to parent, right? But they needed time to get themselves together.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
Mothers who are struggling with addiction, they're going to need people that they can rely on for care that don't have a primary motivation of adopting out of that system. And the foster care system has for a long time been viewed as just a less expensive option than the private adoption system. It is less expensive. It's more affordable.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
And people will engage with the foster care system because they want to adopt. We need more people that are willing to engage and provide care for without the end goal being a formalized legal relationship.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
I know that's a tall ask for people, but it's also a tall ask for our culture to reconceive of who we're trying to serve ultimately and keeping it focused on a child's needs rather than an adult's desire.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
So one of the ones that people recognize most immediately when I tell them I do work with relinquishing mothers, with birth mothers, is Juno. Right. The 2007 indie classic about a teen mom played by Elliot Page. Right. Juno comes up often.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
And a lot of the mothers that I interviewed really hated Juno and really rejected this idea that mothers who relinquished their infants were kind of just immediately moving on with their life. Right. and didn't want to have an ongoing connection or knowledge of their child the way that it's portrayed in that film.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
That was really uncomfortable for them. They also had some logistical concerns about Juno riding a bike so soon after labor and delivery, which I share with them. Right, right.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
Yeah, I think Caitlin and Tyler's story is... so important. And I think you're right. For people of our generation, this was really a crucial pop cultural moment. They were in a really optimistic place early in their adoption, right? They believed that what they had chosen was best for their child, was best for them.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
And they had, you know, Dr. Drew on the couch next to them telling them that they were more mature, more responsible, better parents for having relinquished their child.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
And I think that that is a narrative that we have like never really pulled apart. The idea that they are better parents by virtue of disclaiming their parenthood, terminating their parenthood has made them more worthy of their child. You know, they feel very differently about their adoption today than they did when you go back and you rewatch that first season of 16 and Pregnant.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
Caitlin and Tyler's journey reflects a lot of the mothers that I spoke with, right? So most of the mothers that I interviewed over 10 years came to a far more critical place around their adoption. They saw, like Caitlin and Tyler have seen, that this open adoption situation doesn't deliver on the promises that were made to them at the time.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
You know, I remember Caitlin and Tyler not feeling that loving connection to the adoptive family that they had been counseled on during Caitlin's pregnancy.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
And you have to trust our decisions. A lot of the mothers that I interviewed in 2010 felt really positively about their adoptions at the time. But when I went back and interviewed them 10 years later, most of them come to a harder place for them, a more critical understanding of their adoption.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
They had less contact with their child than they wanted or than they had been led to expect they would get. That was really common in the stories that I heard from mothers who wanted what they had been told to expect at the time of the adoption.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
That doesn't mean that the mothers understand that when they sign these openness agreements. They believe they're signing a binding contract. But even in cases where they are legally binding – The relinquishing mother does not have a lot of power if the adoptive parents choose not to follow that agreement. It would require going to court. It would require getting a judicial order.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
A lot of these mothers don't have the resources for that.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
So there has never been comparable rates of abortion and adoption, right? Abortion is a very common experience. Relinquishment is a relatively rare one. And this is true even when you look back pre-Roe v. Wade. Even when abortion was illegal and adoption was extremely coercive, secretive, this is the peak of domestic adoptions, you still had more abortions than you did adoptions at the time.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
But I think that what the justices are suggesting, that people don't need access to abortion because adoption exists, fundamentally misunderstands, one, how people make pregnancy decisions, and two, the reasons that they might relinquish. So people don't make pregnancy decisions choosing between abortion and adoption. They're choosing between abortion and staying pregnant. Right.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
People who seek abortion are fundamentally uninterested in adoption. There was one survey of abortion patients that asked them if they were interested in adoption, and 99% said no, 1% said kind of, 0% said yes, right? People who want abortions just are not interested in adoption. But most of the mothers that I interviewed who went on to relinquish, they wanted to parent.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
Most of them didn't consider having an abortion. They continued their pregnancies because they intended to raise this child. And it wasn't until either an accumulated series of crises or a major breaking point happened where parenting felt impossible. So that's what we know about how people make pregnancy decisions. They're not choosing between abortion and adoption.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
And we know that they're not relinquishing because they couldn't get an abortion necessarily. So when we did a study of people who were denied access to abortion care, 91% of those who were forced to continue the pregnancy because they couldn't get an abortion, 91% of them were parenting. Only 9% were relinquishing. Wow.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
Now, that 9% is meaningful compared to the half of 1% of overall births that are relinquished. So if you constrain people's choices, if you deny abortion access, if you make parenting impossible, people will relinquish because they don't have another path.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
But they are not generally relinquishing just because they were denied abortion care. We are going to have far, far more people parenting in circumstances that they didn't choose as a result of abortion denial than we are going to have an increase in adoptions.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
Oh, because if it worked, it would be so easy and clean, right? Adoption is an easier solution than actually addressing the root causes of addiction. inequality, of poverty, of family separation in our country. Introducing a private solution is straightforward from a policy perspective, but we do, we put a lot of money into upholding adoption.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
The federal adoption tax credit, which applies to both public and private adoptions, is almost $16,000 per adoption.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
That's in addition to state subsidies, which are mostly in the public adoption space, but those exist as well. in addition to state funding that can go to crisis pregnancy centers that partner with adoption agencies that encourage referrals for adoption agencies.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
So all of this is public money that is really going into a system that involves transferring babies largely from poor families and communities to families with more socioeconomic status and affluence. That's the refrain that I keep coming back to. I think this is just an easier way of saying we don't need to make these public investments in vulnerable families.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
I think that Americans just fundamentally do not see poor people as worthy parents. And I think that that is really the defining characteristic of adoption today. It used to be about different things, right? So when you look back at private adoption before Roe versus Wade, most relinquishing mothers at the time were young, white, middle-class girls and young women who
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Who deserves to be a parent?
And the adoption was a way of delaying parenthood until they could be married. We didn't see that same pattern of relinquishment in communities of color. I want to be clear, they were not protected from family separation. It just wasn't occurring within the private adoption system.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
What happened was the supply of infants was very low. And that's when you see the increase in international adoption really take off through the 90s, peaked in 2004, and then fell pretty quickly. you saw white families adopting children of color in a meaningful number. And today you see pretty high demand for any healthy babies.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
And I think that that has also allowed the targeting of more black and brown American women for domestic adoption as well, which is what we're seeing in Texas now.
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Who deserves to be a parent?
This is a state-funded campaign, right? This campaign, the Modern Adoption Campaign, came directly out of Texas' publicly funded Alternatives to Abortion program. This is what they're going to offer people in lieu of abortion access, is they're going to tell them that adoption is this really empowering option. that's intentionally targeted to black and brown communities.