00:07:02.080The highest number I ever heard, I think, was $5,000.
00:07:04.840And it's not about how much money they need to raise their child.
00:07:09.280it's about how much money they need to navigate a particular crisis that they are facing at that
00:07:15.920point how much money they need for a security deposit on a new apartment um how much money
00:07:22.280they need to buy a crib and a car seat and feel like they've got their act together enough to
00:07:27.760bring the baby home um enough money that they can uh buy a car to get home from the hospital or buy
00:07:35.020car seat so they can get home from the hospital. They're not looking for resources to raise a child
00:07:41.240until they're 18 years old. They're going to need more support, a lot of them who are living in more
00:07:46.300acute poverty. But really what they need is just a level of resources to navigate that immediate
00:07:52.620crisis. And we don't live in a system where women, especially mothers, are given those kinds of0.57
00:08:00.280resources, right? Well, we live in a country that puts a lot of money into making adoptions0.99
00:08:07.340possible, right? We have really high tax credits for adoptive families. We have a lot of state
00:08:13.100subsidies for adoptive families. We do a lot to make sure that adoption is possible. We put a lot
00:08:20.300of state dollars into crisis pregnancy centers that will counsel on adoption. We put a lot of
00:08:24.780philanthropic dollars into making that possible. But all of this investment is predicated on the
00:08:31.180idea that adoption is inherently good, right? That something superior is being achieved to
00:08:39.480actually putting a parallel investment into allowing families to keep their children.
00:08:43.860So we actually spend a lot of money on adoption. It's just not on allowing people to make
00:08:49.140empowered decisions. It is going towards propping up a system of adoption and the transfer of
00:08:56.500children. Right, right. And until I read your book, I actually didn't know anything about how
00:09:02.440subsidized adoption was. And I think that will come as a surprise to a lot of our listeners,
00:09:09.500that adoption is highly subsidized and that, you know, in a lot of cases, it wouldn't take that
00:09:17.120much money for the mother who is relinquishing her child to be able to continue to raise her
00:09:24.240child on her own. And adoptive parents are often, you know, typically wealthier than the mother who
00:09:33.300relinquishes the baby. And yet they're the ones getting the state support and not the mother,
00:09:38.180correct? Right. I mean, the federal adoption tax credit is up to nearly $16,000 per adoption.
00:09:44.720And that is to cover the expenses of the adoption, right? We hear a lot of when we talk about adoption reform, often it is about making adoption more affordable, more accessible for people. I think one of the reasons adoption is so expensive is because we subsidize it, right?
00:10:00.440So we have a system where we have a very, very high demand for babies.
00:10:06.400We have this idea that adopting a baby is an altruistic act that we need more people to engage in.
00:10:15.000In fact, we have upwards of 45 waiting families for every infant that's relinquished.
00:10:22.660So you have really, really high demand and really, really low supply of babies that are available.
00:10:28.360And one of the ways that agencies need to find more mothers and babies to facilitate these adoptions, of course, is through marketing. And they engage in really aggressive marketing and marketing and advertising is often one of the most significant expenses, if not the most significant expense for most adoption agencies.
00:10:49.980when you look at their tax filings, more than legal fees, more than support for the birth
00:15:17.040And I was just really inspired by these young women that I was working with whose parenthood was so stigmatized and marginalized and who were deemed so unworthy of investment.
00:15:31.000And I thought they were incredible the way that they were advocating for themselves and their children and their families.
00:15:36.580And I kept coming across this narrative of adoption as a panacea.
00:15:41.640Right. I was also volunteering with the local abortion fund.
00:15:44.720I was working on my master's thesis on infertility at the time, and this idea that adoption is just going to solve all of these, quote, problems, right?
00:15:54.560If you just make babies from one family and give them to another family, you don't need to invest in vulnerable families in the first place.
00:16:01.380You don't need to provide meaningful abortion access.
00:16:03.940You don't need to consider what it means to support people that can't build their families the way that they want to.
00:16:10.480We don't need to think more creatively or assertively about any of those challenges. Right. And that really put me on the path of wanting to consider how adoption functions in the lives of the women that are relinquishing infants.0.69
00:16:28.300I do think that adoption has been glorified in a lot of ways in the media.
00:16:34.400I have spent a lot of my career looking at our pop culture and our broader cultural understandings of both abortion and adoption.
00:16:42.600And I think that those stories are really important.
00:16:45.220You know, a lot of people will tell me, oh, I don't know any birth mothers.
00:16:48.140Like, we don't know, you know, any birth mothers, right?
00:16:51.400But I've been surprised in the course of this work, people who have come up to me and said,
00:16:57.780a woman that I went to college with who I knew for years said, oh, I relinquished my son before we were in college together.
00:17:04.400Or another friend who mentioned that her sister had relinquished a baby. Or another friend who found a brother that she didn't know existed on 23andMe after her own mother had passed. And these stories are out there, but they have been silenced and stigmatized in a lot of ways.
00:17:23.260There's so much shame associated with relinquishment that they often go untold, which is why I think the cultural depictions have taken on outsized importance because the interpersonal conversations aren't happening to the same degree.
00:17:36.540Right. And I can think of so many movies and TV shows where the adoptive family is the savior in this situation. And you do see it played out like, oh, this is the happy ending. And I mean, it's really good PR for adoption is what it is.
00:18:00.400Yeah. I mean, people like to be saviors, right? People like people love being saviors.
00:18:06.960Yeah. And I think that that is a meaningful part of it. And it gets back to what I said earlier
00:18:11.920about how adoptive families just broadly have more power in our society than birth parents.
00:18:17.720But I also think that there is a lot of intentional silencing of birth parents. So you'll see some of
00:18:24.700the mothers in the book that I spoke with were really hesitant to share candidly the details of
00:18:30.220their stories until I talked through a lot of what they're, you know, how I was going to try
00:18:34.600to protect their identities and their anonymity, especially if they had children under age 18.
00:18:39.940Because most of these mothers are in open adoptions. They have ongoing contact with
00:18:44.640their child and their child's adoptive parents. And they're worried that if they're overly critical,
00:18:49.300they're worried that if they share their stories, they're going to lose contact with their child
00:18:53.640because that's almost entirely at the discretion of the adoptive parents.
00:19:19.620And most birth parents can't afford an attorney for a big legal fight.
00:19:23.380of course, and that can have another meaningful silencing effect. Or, you know, some of the women1.00
00:19:28.920I interviewed had gotten cease and desist letters from their adoption agencies for being public
00:19:33.660about their stories. And again, I think that there are a lot of ways that birth parents are silenced,
00:19:39.200both within the broader culture and then intentionally, legally, by players that have
00:19:44.240an investment in moving forward a certain idea of adoption. So I do think that that's really
00:19:49.620important um but it's not just about like even scripted stories like i do in the book you get
00:19:56.000into some specific depictions on on television both scripted and reality tv um but if you look
00:20:04.140at celebrity adoptions right angelina jolie madonna uh kind of in the early 2000s um adopting
00:20:10.920from africa and the narrative that these children um were aids orphans and then it comes out you
00:20:17.460know, years later, they weren't actually AIDS orphans. They had living parents, living parents
00:20:21.340who wanted them, um, but couldn't, uh, afford them. Right. And that they were very content
00:20:26.860about that when reached by the press years later. Um, and, but that sort of white savior story
00:20:32.600is really powerful, um, and can get a lot of cultural resonance because it, it coincides
00:20:40.100with our ideas of what makes someone a better parent, um, and what is deemed a better life
00:20:45.640for a child. And that's another thing I want to dig into, because we talk a lot on this podcast
00:20:52.100about what makes a quote-unquote good mother, what makes a quote-unquote good parent, because we see
00:20:58.480these false ideas on social media all the time of good parents. And, you know, you say in the book
00:21:08.080that we're often, we often see adoptive families as the quote better choice, as the good parents,
00:21:15.000as opposed to the bad parents, who are the ones relinquishing their children. And a lot of that
00:21:20.980begins with the language that we use around adoption. And you really parse that language,
00:21:27.100that, you know, that language is shaped by the adoption industry, that we're placing a child,
00:21:32.280that people are choosing adoption. And the title of your book, Relinquishing,
00:21:37.120kind of flips that script on its head a little bit.
00:21:39.540Yeah. And I chose that very intentionally because I wanted to convey that adoption does so often come from a position of powerlessness, that it isn't an empowered choice. Right. And when we talk about placing children, choosing adoption, that language doesn't reflect the position that so many of the mothers I spoke with were in at the time of the adoption.
00:22:07.640And so I think that's really important.
00:22:09.120I mean, even the language of birth mother, some relinquishing mothers don't like the
00:22:27.040It's hard to find ways to talk about adoption that don't rely on agency language.
00:22:32.320And actually, the original title for the book was going to be Choosing Life.
00:22:37.640It's now one of the titles of one of the chapters.
00:22:40.500And that ended up being too academic-y of a title because people were concerned that it would come across as an anti-abortion project.
00:22:51.420Particularly Gloria Steinem, who wrote an earlier proposal, was like, well, I can't blurb this if that's the title because people will think I'm blurbing an anti-abortion project.
00:23:00.000I said, well, Gloria, I can change the title. But I do think that deconstructing that idea of choice is a really important part of this project. And recognizing the constraints that are put on people when they are in the position of relinquishing a child is really meaningful.
00:23:19.260but to get back to your your bigger question of sort of what is what makes a good parent what
00:23:24.300makes a worthy parent we are going to take one more quick break here and when we get back i want
00:23:30.760to deconstruct that just a little bit more what exactly do we mean when we say worthy parent and
00:23:38.880you know, usually what we're saying is, what is a worthy mother?
00:24:08.880turns. That instinct to trade didn't disappear. It just grew up. With no minimums, no monthly fees,
00:24:15.520and 100 free trades, TD Easy Trade taps into that instinct. Because you are made to trade,
00:26:33.500And, you know, I'm sure she is, right?
00:26:35.820I'm sure that that's part of the reason that she chose them is because all of this imagery
00:26:41.560keys in really directly to what we believe is necessary to be worth parenthood, worthy of a
00:26:51.220child in today's society. Right, right. And again, it's what is a good parent? What is a good
00:26:58.580mother? And that's increasingly being shaped by what we see on social media. Is it the big house
00:27:05.560in the suburbs with the nice green lawn and the beautiful kitchen that looks like it could be an
00:27:11.480movie with Diane Keaton. Like, are those the things that make you a good parent? We're being
00:27:16.940told that they are. When in reality, you know, those things are easily obtained by money,
00:27:25.620but it doesn't necessarily make you a good parent. Right. And I think it's just as a reflection of
00:27:32.580this broader idea of how we believe being poor makes you a poor parent. Right. And we believe
00:27:38.380having access to resources inherently makes you a good parent. None of these things speak to how
00:27:44.340patient you can be with the child, how loving you can be with the child, the amount of resiliency
00:27:48.440that you can convey. And I think that those are really key factors. And I say this as someone
00:27:55.780who is raising my own children and really aware of the ways that having access to resources can
00:28:05.200make parenting easier, for sure, of course. But it doesn't give people the skills or the connection
00:28:15.060that make them exemplary as a parent. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Is the rise of the
00:28:24.060adoptive parents as influencers or adoption influencers, is that a new thing? I'm only
00:28:30.080just seeing it fairly recently i don't know how new it is i think that it is taking prominence
00:28:38.880in in a number of ways now that it hasn't before but i think that it was always there to a greater
00:28:45.640degree i think what we have said i'm thinking particularly of a few accounts that have gotten
00:28:51.860a lot of traction that do a lot of boosting of of each other um to sort of surface this narrative
00:28:58.840of adoption as as really beautiful um i also think that this speaks to like the the kind of
00:29:05.040invisible religiosity of a lot of influencers right yes um because so much of domestic adoption
00:29:12.300is shaped by religion and i think that that in both evangelical faiths and in the lds church
00:29:20.380there's this idea of adoption as really um as a reflection of your faith right as a reflection of
00:29:28.700one's own relationship with christ and you know in a lot of ways um and so i think that um just
00:29:37.300as a lot of influencers portray religion in really specific ways um and sort of embody that without
00:29:47.100being overt about it that frequently um i think that adoption is a reflection of that as well
00:29:53.420right absolutely i mean there is so much hidden faith in a lot of these influencer accounts uh
00:30:02.800that i think a lot of people don't even realize is there and that is a part of kind of the social
00:30:07.340media literacy that we try to talk about on a regular basis on this show you know just kind of
00:30:13.220to understand the underpinnings of of a lot of these accounts and your book does that in so many
00:30:20.440brilliant ways to just understand the underpinnings of the adoption industrial complex,
00:30:26.620which I think is an industrial complex that a lot of people don't realize is.
00:30:33.860Yeah, I would agree with that. I, you know, I think that a lot of what I try to do in the book
00:30:41.280is a lot of handholding for people who haven't thought critically about adoption before,
00:30:46.220Because I think that even the phrase adoption industrial complex is going to feel really jarring to a lot of people who have never really thought about this deeply. And I'm not saying that in a judgmental way. Most people haven't.
00:31:00.220But I think that once you listen to the stories of the women who are impacted by these systems, who participate in these systems, who have their lives shaped by these practices, that's kind of where you get very quickly is understanding adoption as an industry, as a market-based force.
00:31:20.900Again, getting back to these ideas of supply and demand around children and what that means.
00:31:27.100And so that's where I try to take people.