by Adele
Gretchen Sisson is a sociologist studying infertility, abortion and adoption. She decided to publish this book about her research on adoption decision-making during the 2021 Supreme Court oral arguments for overturning Roe v. Wade, thus trashing the nationwide right to abortion. Conservative justices claimed eliminating abortion would not force the burden of parenting upon women because they could simply surrender their babies for adoption. Even liberals tend to present adoption as a positive choice and as common ground in the abortion debates.
ADOPTION IS NOT A SOLUTION
Sisson contributed to “The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion” (2021) by Diana Greene Foster, PhD. One finding was that 91% of women denied an abortion decided to parent, only 9% choose adoption. Her current book also shows women do not tend to choose adoption as an alternative to abortion. They choose it as an alternative to parenting, but only under duress.
Her work builds on Ann Fessler’s research from her book, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (2006). Both authors interviewed over a hundred birth mothers and included some interviews in their books. The women describe the situations leading to the relinquishment of their infants and its negative impact on their lives.
Fessler’s subjects surrendered infants during the 1950s and 1960s. They had little to no choice due to social pressure, most being unmarried, often teenagers. Relinquishment traumatized them, but media depictions of modern adoption claim it is now a mostly positive experience. Sisson’s subjects relinquished infants between 2000 and 2010 and varied in age, race, and economic class. They had relative legal and social freedom to make reproductive choices.
NEGATIVE VIEWS OF THOSE WHO RELINQUISH THEIR BABIES
Sisson shows how this supposed choice to relinquish actually comes under high pressure from circumstances. Some initially decided adoption was their only option to give their babies better lives. Interviewing them ten years later, Sisson found all had more negative views of adoption in their own cases and in general. “Kate” stated, “I don’t know anybody who would, all things considered, choose to place their kid for adoption. It has a lot to do with external factors that are not in their control. If I had a choice to change those external factors, I would have changed them up and parented.” Even the supposed reform of maintaining contact in “open” adoptions was often more complicated than expected and subject to the will of adoptive parents.
Interviewees discuss adoption agencies’ numerous unethical tactics. They target vulnerable women with advertising appearing on mobile phones in response to the phone’s location. A woman may receive adoption advertising after visiting a crisis pregnancy center or a drug treatment facility, or if she uses a pregnancy application. They manipulate and coerce women considering adoption during pregnancy and childbirth.
Sisson’s research led her to study birth mothers and adoptees forming the adoption abolitionist movement. They recognize for-profit adoption as a form of human trafficking that treats children as commodities.
Rooted in slavery, white supremacy and colonialism, modern adoption originated in removing, often forcefully, Black and Native American children from families and kinship networks. International adoption agencies take advantage of war and disasters without changing the situation. They just remove children from families and cultures, as Russia is doing to Ukrainian children today. Abolitionists are often affiliated with the Reproductive Justice movement, a human rights framework created by Black feminists.
Sisson explains, “Abolition is about creating the conditions under which adoption, as it is practiced today, becomes obsolete.” Some organizations provide peer support and emergency help to new birthmothers. Their ultimate goal is a justice system that finds ways to keep children in their families, sometimes under guardianship arrangements. Currently, tax money funds right-wing projects like anti-abortion centers and tax credits for adoptive parents. Instead, it can support projects proven to work in other countries and in the U.S. under the 2021 American Rescue Plan. These include universal basic income, parental leave, affordable housing, and access to employment, healthcare, education, drug treatment, and childcare. This movement of survivors shows we can resist commodification of people and instead create a society of truly human connection.
Adele’s review of this great study shows how capitalism can adapt to and twist our “feminist” mind to reduce our self-expectations as men and women. I loved Adele’s quotation of Sisson about the obsolete nature of the abolition and its relationship to tax and economy: “we can resist commodification of people and instead create a society of truly human connection.”
Thank you Adele for this deep and sensitive commentary on Gretchen Sisson’s study, which you and she conclude by insisting, “Abolition is about creating the conditions under which adoption, as it is practiced today, becomes obsolete.” She is speaking of legal adoption in a capitalist society. The system itself (agencies and the well-intended) is better protected than the parents and the children, many of who suffer life-long from emotional consequences, even in successful cases.
However, adoption has played many roles in society for thousands of years. Adoptions outside the formal official systems are doubtless widespread, whether permanent, temporary or by mutual consent. These are not limited to mostly white middle-class traditional parents but exist in a huge range of settings and cultures.
Although some of these arrangements primarily serve capitalism, like the farm families who adopted orphans from cities around 1900 to help with farm labor, paid surrogate mothers, and third-world adoptions, others benefit parents and children to varying degrees. Infants with deceased or dysfunctional mothers need immediate parenting to thrive. Research with monkeys proved this in the 1950’s and surviving neglected Romanian orphans who grew up without adequate orphanage staff in the 1980’s sadly had to reinforce it.
Other unsung relationships develop when extended families care for nieces & nephews for limited times in the children’s lives. Teenagers may choose to leave home, or parents often kick their kids out when life becomes unbearable.
Guardianship is a more formalized such arrangement, but its consequences may resemble the effects of legal adoption or divorced parents. One 15-year old Detroit boy who has achieved excellence in athletics—and scrapes his grade together, receives much admiration from his birth family and community. Yet he persistently blames himself because his drug addicted mother did not take care of him.
Methods for Infertile couples to have biological children can be considered a form of adoption today: egg and sperm donation and IVF. Here the benefits are solely to the system and the affluent would-be parents. Doubtful if it is beneficial to the child who would otherwise not have existed. Surrogacy at best barely benefits the birth mother, even considering only the financial reward to her as exponentially small portions of the overall cost of these procedures. Recently a beautiful baby girl was born to a two father couple in California. Her mother is Colombian and was hired in Colombia. The family assured me the baby has dual citizenship. They did not say if the mother also was a dual citizen, although it is marginally possible that she preferred to stay in Colombia. So many questions remain: has she suffered side effects from pregnancy and childbirth? How have relationships to her other children changed? Will she be considered a prostitute in her community? How does she feel about her dual-citizen daughter?
There is so much more to this topic. It is unseparated from what kinds of societies do we wish to create. A philosophy, theories and practical experiences will need to be integrated to create models for adoptions of the non-capitalist future.
(Link for monkey experiments: https://ipsychology.net/harlow-monkey-experiments/)