Adoption doesn’t need protection; families and reproductive rights do—A conversation with Gretchen Sisson

By Leah Lusk, OA&FS content specialist

A new website, ProtectAdoption.org, has cropped up, with the tagline “Where adoption is celebrated and the child’s best interests are at the heart of every decision.” The site is the product of an organization called The Adoption Coalition, which says it is “a group of individuals impacted by adoption and adoption-related organizations, who are weaving together collective experience, research, and influence to make a significant impact in the adoption space.” The site does not identify these individuals.

I first learned of this site via social media, thanks to sociologist Gretchen Sisson, who authored “Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.”  (As a side note, I encourage everyone reading this to read her book immediately.) As someone who has spent years studying adoption, Gretchen is ideally suited to speak to whether adoption needs “protection.” I chatted with her to get her take, and specifically asked her to comment on what her research has shown about the talking points the website refers to as “anti-adoption” (see below).

Here’s our conversation:

Leah: First of all, can you just tell me what your gut reaction to this website was when you encountered it? Does adoption need protection?

Gretchen: My initial reaction is that if you have to work this hard to defend the status quo, then we’re already succeeding at shifting the terms of the conversation. If whoever is behind this website—which I’m sure is adoption agencies and anti-abortion organizations— if they feel like they need to create this website to protect and defend an institution that has bipartisan political support and almost universal acclaim, then those of us who are trying to introduce more critical thinking about adoption have already shifted the terms. If they feel like they must be on the defense, that means the stories from people who have lived experience are getting traction.

Leah: The site lists three “anti-adoption talking points,” and I’d love to hear your take on each of them. The first is:

A belief that adoption disproportionately impacts marginalized communities and acts as a form of punishment by separating children from their parents simply because the parents were too poor and unable to meet the material needs of their child

Gretchen: This is just demonstrably true. Poor parents and parents of color are more likely to face family separation, specifically when we’re talking about foster care and public adoption. We interpret poverty as parental neglect all the time: any time a parent needs to work the night shift and has an older sibling baby sit; any time a social worker visits an apartment and there isn’t food in the fridge; any time you have a family living in unsafe housing because they can’t afford safe living conditions and children get taken away. This isn’t just a belief, we have documentation that this is who is being impacted by the family policing system. Dorothy Roberts is the seminal scholar here – her work is essential to understanding the ways families of color (and Black families, particularly) are disproportionately impacted by these systems of policing and control. To dismiss this evidence as just a “talking point” means you’re willfully ignoring these inequities and injustices.

Leah: The second talking point is:

A sentiment that birth families who voluntarily or involuntarily have their parental rights terminated suffer long-term emotional trauma, describing “termination of parental rights” as a “civil death penalty”

Gretchen: Here they’re conflating voluntary termination of parental rights and involuntary TPR, and you can’t conflate them. They are different experiences that happen for different reasons. And whether it’s voluntary or involuntary, parents do suffer long-term emotional trauma. This is again just a documented reality, and to dismiss it as a talking point just means you aren’t serious about addressing the traumas at the root of adoption and family separation.

Leah: And the third:

A shift of focus away from adoption to providing struggling families with an adequate social safety net that grants them access to affordable housing, mental health services, and job placement assistance to better provide for their biological children

Gretchen: Private adoption impacts a relatively small number of people. We’re talking about 20,000 private domestic adoptions of infants per year. In contrast, we have millions of families that are living without stable housing, without food security, without access to the health services they need, without living wage jobs, without reliable and safe childcare. The overwhelming majority of these families aren’t thinking about adoption at all. By supporting these families, by building a meaningful social safety net – that is how you care for children. It’s also how you keep families together by making parenting more tenable.

If you are claiming that your work is child-centered, this is what being child-centered means. It means taking care of children and families, working to eliminate child poverty, and making sure we’re caring for people they way we ought to. If you view that as an attack on adoption, you’re revealing what you know to be true about adoption: that it’s predicated on all these inequities in the first place.

My refrain for each of these points is this: These aren’t just talking points; they’re data-based conclusions. We have research to back up all these pieces. If you believe that telling the truth about adoption and documenting the harms caused by these systems are anti-adoption talking points, then you see the problem. If we’re documenting the truth and that’s offensive to you, good. The system is offensive. Don’t dismiss us for pointing out the truth.

Leah: I couldn’t agree more. If adoption doesn’t need protection, what does?

Gretchen: Families need protection and support to stay together, particularly families that are vulnerable to targeted family policing. They need protection not just from family policing, but also access to a social safety net, affordable housing, food security – all ways of keeping families together.

And, of course, reproductive autonomy needs protection. People need access to abortion and to good options counseling and the resources that allow them to make choices that are free from coercion and constraint.

Leah: In the research you’ve done in talking to relinquishing mothers, did people have access to reproductive autonomy?

Gretchen: I would say among relinquishing mothers almost none of them had access to truly autonomous decision-making about their pregnancies or their child’s future. Adoption relinquishment is nearly always a decision from a place of constraint and a lack of autonomy.

Leah: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat, and for the work you’ve done in understanding the systems that contribute to adoption. I agree that we should all be thinking more critically about adoption and doing everything we can as a society to ensure that people facing pregnancy decisions have true choice and access to the support they need to make the best choice for them.

Gretchen Sisson is a sociologist who studies abortion and adoption in the United States. She is the author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with women who have relinquished infants for domestic adoption over the past 60 years. Learn more about her and her work on her website.