Our culture loves to celebrate adoption stories - and a lot of state governments put millions into promoting it. But adoptees and birth parents are opening up online about "coming out of the fog" - a term for becoming more openly critical of adoption, or facing the grief within their adoption stories. November is National Adoption Month, and Brittany Luse takes a closer look at how adoption functions in our culture by examining the supply side of adoption - the birth parents. She's joined by Gretchen Sisson, the author of Relinquished: the Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. They dive deep into the stories told about birth parents, and how our culture decides who deserves to be a parent.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is National Adoption Awareness Month?
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. November is National Adoption Awareness Month. And no, it's not one of those made-up holidays like National Nacho Day. It's a real thing. President Bill Clinton personally declared it a national priority in 1995.
As we celebrate National Adoption Month, Americans can take pride in the progress we're making. But we know there is much more work to be done.
And as a culture, we love to celebrate adoption stories. They paint a beautiful picture of a child in need going to a loving family. Sometimes those stories transcend race and identity. I'm looking at you, Angelina Jolie. But lately, the narrative around adoption has been shifting from the perfect Hollywood happy ending to something a little more complicated.
Chapter 2: How has the narrative around adoption changed?
There's a whole community of adoptees online talking about their experiences. On TikTok, there are over 50 million videos tagged adoptee.
I think it's really important to remember that in private infant adoption, it always begins with loss for the baby.
Three things I wish adopters understood about adoptees. Number one, the adopting experience is literally so complex because we're grateful that we have a family, sure. But we can also resent the fact that we are with you to begin with.
Chapter 3: What does 'coming out of the fog' mean for adoptees?
There's a popular term some adoptees use for becoming more critical of adoption or for facing the grief within their adoption story. It's called coming out of the fog. And birth parents are weighing in too.
It was my experience with adoption that caused me to start to rethink everything that was told to me about adoption because I was now living it. None of what was panning out after signing away my parental rights was the story that I was told about what adoption would be like for me.
Today on It's Been a Minute, we're taking a closer look at how adoption functions in our culture. We're zooming in on one side of the adoption triangle, the birth parents. We're diving deep into how the stories that are told about birth parents stack up against their realities and ultimately asking, how does our culture decide who deserves to be a parent?
I'm joined by Gretchen Sisson, the author of Relinquished, The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. She'll be taking us through her research with birth parents. Gretchen, welcome to It's Been a Minute.
Thanks for having me, Brittany.
I first want to talk to you about where we see adoption in pop culture, because you mentioned a few major pop culture moments about adoption in your book. What are they and what narrative of adoption are they getting across?
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.
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.
Oh, God.
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Chapter 4: What pop culture references shape our view of adoption?
You say that in reality, a lot of birth parents want to know the person they brought into the world. One study from 10 years ago found that 95% of adoptions had some level of openness, meaning there's some identifying information that birth parents and adoptive parents receive about one another.
And almost half of all adoptions at the same time had plans for ongoing contact between the birth family and the adopted family. That's something I think we see a bit more clearly in the MTV reality show, 16 and Pregnant. I think many of us remember, especially millennials, watching Caitlyn and Tyler on that show.
Hi, my name is Caitlyn. I'm 16 and I'm from Algonac, Michigan.
They had an open adoption that played out on 16 and Pregnant. And this couple is still together today with more kids they've raised themselves, which you can watch unfold on the spinoff show, Teen Mom. Could you talk to me about their story and what you think that communicates?
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.
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.
Right. Such a courageous decision, both of you.
Thank you.
How did you do it? Her?
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Chapter 5: How do birth parents feel about their adoption decisions?
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.
The communication with her adoptive parents, Brayden and Teresa, has always been complicated. The baby, she is our child. Absolutely.
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.
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.
Something that I didn't understand really until we started to actually research is how in a lot of states, open adoptions are not legally enforceable.
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.
A lot of these mothers don't have the resources for that.
Coming up, why there is so much public investment in adoption and how parental worthiness gets decided. Stick around. So we've talked about some of the aftermath for birth parents who choose to enter into an adoption, but I want to back up a bit and talk about how the decision to relinquish gets made.
We saw in the Dobbs decision in 2022, the decision that overturned Roe versus Wade, that judges and lawmakers are thinking about abortion and adoption as substitutes, like during the opening arguments. Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested having baby boxes that birth parents could leave babies in with no consequences. These are called safe havens.
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Chapter 6: What are the challenges of open adoption?
Chapter 7: How do socio-political factors influence adoption?
She was suggesting that that should take care of the issue of not getting an abortion.
You and many of your amici focus on the ways in which the forced parenting, forced motherhood would hinder women's access to the workplace and to equal opportunities. Why don't the safe haven laws take care of that problem? It seems to me that it focuses...
And Justice Samuel Alito said in his opinion on the Dobbs decision that a woman who puts her newborn up for adoption today has little reason to fear that the baby will not find a suitable home. But do people who are pregnant see it that way? Like, why do they choose adoption?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Chapter 8: Why do some parents choose adoption over abortion?
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?
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
communities writ large, systems of support, rather than allowing this private industry that commodifies babies to provide our primary answer to these situations.
So there's been a lot of conversation about adoption, I think mainly because many adoptees are talking about their experiences online. I've seen suggestions made by some adoptees for how to make adoption different or better. Open adoptions are tricky, as we discussed, but some are saying making guardianship more common could be a solution.
So someone else can care for a child without it ending the birth parent's legal relationship. But also, I want to bring in the third side of this triangle for a second. Adoptive parents.
A recent survey found out that of those who have ever considered or are currently considering adopting, almost a quarter said it was because they experienced fertility issues or other barriers to conceiving naturally. And that can be tough. All of the failed IVF treatments and the pregnancy losses and Negative one-step tests that often come with that, that can all be really, really painful.
So many people dream of raising a child for their entire lives. And when that dream can't be realized, it's heartbreaking. In many cultures, it can also be stigmatizing too. So I get why adoption looks like a better option. But if we as a culture begin to place more emphasis on the right to parent the child you have, where does that leave people who can't have one naturally?
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.
That's very much how it's framed. Yeah.
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