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- [00:09]
A
You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Gretchen Sisson. She wrote the book the Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. It's National Adoption Month. I did want to ask you one sort of big picture question. How did, how did world events in, in the 20th and the 21st century change adoption? I have to imagine the wars changed adoption. I have to imagine Roe v. Wade changed adoption. What were the big points which changed the way adoption was done in this country?
- [00:46]
B
This is a very big picture question and I'll try to give the concise.
- [00:50]
A
I know, I know, it's a big question.
- [00:52]
B
It is, yeah. After. So, so after Roe v. Wade and as the norms around parenting changed, as I mentioned, you really saw a pretty significant drop in the numbers of domestic infant adoptions in the United States. So those numbers dropped pretty dramatically because adoption is really a demand driven system where you have more people who want to adopt privately than you have children available for private adoption. That meant that if the supply of children, and I'm using these market terms intentionally, and I recognize that it's uncomfortable to talk about people this way as supply, but it is also how this market functions once the supply of domestic babies dropped. That's when you started to see the increase in the 90s through about 2004, a tremendous increase in international adoptions. On the early side of that, you saw adoptions from Korea, after, you know, they went through the period of war and instability, more adoptions from China, then sort of the plurality of adoptions moved to Central and South America and then Africa, Haiti. That was sort of the very, very broadly speaking, the geographic shift. And what you see is that countries that are destabilized for whatever reason are more likely to export their children. One, because they are more vulnerable to people coming in to, quote, save their children, two, because they don't have enough reliable infrastructure to create a meaningful social safety net for vulnerable families. In the same way, and this can be on a broad level, recovering from wars, disruptive governments and social policies, it can also be a single catastrophic event. So after the hurricane, the landslide In Haiti in 2010, you saw a tremendous increase of adoptions out of Haiti. And a lot of those, looking back now with 15 years hindsight, were very questionable legally as far as what was done to remove those children, what their families were told when the children were removed. If people understood this was a permanent legal separation from their children. You see this also with children that were removed from Africa after enduring the AIDS epidemic, there where adoptive parents were told these children were orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. And then of course, stories came out that they weren't, that they still had living parents. We have this idea that adoption is meant to serve children who are in need. Adoption is actually really about meeting a market demand for children. And most of these children have living parents who very much want to care for them but lack the support, the resources to do so. And this is true in this global sense that we're talking about now, but it's also true for domestic adoption, where the vast majority of mothers who are relinquishing their children very much do want to parent, but they don't have the support and the financial resources to make parenting feel tenable to them.
- [04:14]
C
Thank you so much for taking on such a big question. Let's talk to Daniel.
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A
Daniel, thank you so much for making.
- [04:19]
C
The time to call all of it. You're on the air.
- [04:23]
D
Hi, how are you? Thanks for having me.
- [04:24]
C
Sure, of course.
- [04:26]
D
So I was born in 1987 to an undocumented Colombian woman here in New York. And I always knew that I was adopted. And I grew up in a mostly white Jewish environment here in New York. And, you know, I kind of got used to, you know, my, our family of three looking a little different in public because my parents were older and, you know, and I was never super invested in locating my birth mother. But I began in earnest soon after my adoptive father passed away in 2022. And basically through Ancestry.com I ended up matching with a first cousin in Colombia who, long story, was actually on my birth father's side. And I never knew anything about him. As far as I knew, he was a quote unquote, one night stand. And so I basically sent him a DNA test and you know, that he was in fact my birth father. And we've been communicating over email for a year and we're going to visit him in this month. And so it's kind of a crazy story. And he never knew that he had a child. He was never married. He never knew that he was a father. So he's a 60 something year old guy finding out that he's got a kid.
- [05:47]
C
Daniel, we wish you the very best. Let's talk to Jennifer from Rockaway, New Jersey. Hi, Jennifer, thank you for calling all of it.
- [05:58]
E
Hi, can you hear me?
- [06:00]
C
Yeah, you're on the air.
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F
Oh. Oh, great. So, yeah, I'm an adoptee. And my story is that my mother, my birth mother was very young. She was like 16 when she gave birth to me. Very much wanted to keep me, but was forced to relinquish me.
- [06:21]
B
And then.
- [06:24]
F
We actually connected a couple of years ago after like 52 years of being separated. And, you know, I had my issues, but in meeting her and seeing how it had so deeply impacted her whole.
- [06:43]
E
Life.
- [06:48]
F
It'S a real thing.
- [06:48]
E
Like, she.
- [06:51]
F
She actually couldn't even have other children. Something happened and she was never able to have children. So there was immediate healing there. But, yeah, so it's a thing for the mothers. I mean, it's a thing for the child, too. I certainly had my issues growing up.
- [07:09]
C
You know, Jennifer, I want to dive in here because I want to bring in our guest. I think she can comment on this. You interviewed more than 100 women from. For your book and for your research. What did they tell you about why they wanted to relinquish their children? And did you talk to them 10 years later?
- [07:31]
B
Some of them I did, yes. So I have interviewed mothers who go back to that Baby Scoop era, before Roe v. Wade. But the heart of the book is the interviews with mothers who have relinquished from 2000 to 2020. And for a cohort of them, I was able to interview them in 2010 and then again in 20 to understand how they were feeling about their relationships as it progressed. Some of them felt critically about the adoption the whole way through. Some of them felt more positively. At the beginning, they had this was especially if the adoption was relatively new the first time I spoke with them, they might feel very hopeful, very optimistic about what adoption was going to accomplish for them and their child. And they often found it much harder to navigate. They had very little support after the adoptions were finalized. Many of them had less contact with their child than they had been told they were going to be able to expect. And a lot of them felt much more critically and cynically about how they had been treated as time went on. There was one young woman I interviewed in 2010 who felt so bubbly about her adoption, she was like, this is going to be great. You know, I know my son's adoptive family loves me. Every adoption should look like mine. And when I spoke with her in 2020, I call her Leah. In the book, I said, Leah, you know, when we spoke.
- [09:19]
G
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- [09:44]
B
To an unmarried mother. And a lot of these sound like very retro ideas, right? And this is what. These are the same ideas that we see bubbling up about who gets to be a parent, who is worthy of what kinds of support, where is that support going to come from? I think that's very important. And most of the mothers, really, all of the mothers that I interviewed had very profound grief around the adoption. Some of them carried very significant traumas over the 10 years that I spoke with them.
- [10:15]
A
Let's talk to Ellen. Ellen, can you be real quick with your comment?
- [10:21]
E
Yes, I can. Thank you. I'm thrilled that you're doing this topic. I am an adoptive parent. I am a parent who adopted their baby. And she's from Guatemala and she's wonderful and perfect. And I, I wanted to say I go through sort of a ritual every year on the night before her birthday where I kind of thank the birth mother who is in Guatemala. And I think of her. I spend time kind of trying to put my mind to her and, and the fact that she would have been in labor. And I'm sure she's. I know she has a gap in her life for this, you know, on that day. And I, at some point, hopefully, we will look her up and try to have an open adoption. And I gotta say that Daniel, listening to him was just wonderful for me. So thank you and thanks for approaching this.
- [11:09]
C
Thank you so much for calling in. I've got about a minute left. Gretchen, what changes do you think we need to see in adoption and to better support women?
- [11:21]
B
I think we need to reframe how adoption operates in our political conversations. And there are many ways that I could answer this question, but this is the one I'm going to land on, on now that we're on live radio, because I think for so long we have understood adoption to be this mutually agreeable common ground in our conversations about abortion. Whereas in fact, it should be parenting and figuring out how we can support people to parent the way that they want to. What does it mean to make parenting possible? What does it look like to make sure that all families have access to stable housing, food, security, accessible, affordable childcare? What does it mean to make that path tenable for people? That's really where our justice efforts should be focused.
- [12:08]
C
The name of the book is the Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. Gretchen Sison, thank you so much for joining us.
- [12:15]
B
Thank you, Allison.
- [12:18]
C
Stay tuned. We'll hear a special live performance from the cast of the Seat of Our Pants.
- [12:24]
H
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- [12:54]
I
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