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Mother’s Love, (Photo by Mark Colomb via Flickr)
Because of the fall of Roe v. Wade, we’re hearing a lot more about adoption as an alternative for women who find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. And even before, media portrayals of adoption have always painted it as an easy ethical conclusion to a difficult circumstance. But the real, lived experiences of birth parents who give up their children for adoption have never been part of the conversation. Do birth parents really see adoption as an alternative to abortion? Are they happy with their decision to relinquish their children? It turns out that for the most part, they’re not.
We talk to Samantha Gonzalez, a birth mother, and Gretchen Sisson, author of the book “Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.”
Featuring: Music:
Making Contact Team
TRANSCRIPT
Making Contact Button: Making, making, making contact. Making Contact.
Salima Hamirani: I’m Salima Hamirani and on today’s show…
Samantha Gonzalez: When I was 25, I had an unplanned pregnancy.
Salima Hamirani: It’s estimated that one in every 35 children in the US is adopted. That’s somewhere between 2- 4 % of all families. But on today’s Making Contact, we’re exploring the world of adoption from a perspective we don’t often hear — the voices of relinquishing mothers.
And just a note, we’ll be moving back and forth between “birth mothers” or “women”, and “pregnant people”. Most of the research and interviews for our show were based on people who identify as women, but we also want to include other identities.
Samantha Gonzalez: I think it began when I experienced a pretty extreme trauma, being the sole witness to the murder of my significant other in a carjacking. I was having trouble finding help.
Salima Hamirani: That’s Samantha Gonzalez, a birth mother. Like many women who choose to relinquish their children, Samantha was facing a lot of challenges-poverty, housing insecurity and trauma.
Samantha Gonzalez: And so, um, I was going through an extended murder trial, and I lost my job and dropped out of college, spiraled into a pretty extreme depression, and lost the place that I was staying at. So I ended up sleeping on random people’s couches and floors. And, uh, that’s how I got pregnant. The father had been a friend of my late significant other and sometimes helped me out with a place to crash during the trial.
Salima Hamirani: At the time, Samantha didn’t think she could even get pregnant.
Samantha Gonzalez: I had been on birth control constantly since I was like nine, and hadn’t even thought about menstruating in over a decade. So, I wasn’t worried about getting pregnant, especially not with the birth control and the condoms. I thought I was safe.
Salima Hamirani: But then one day, Samantha woke up very, very sick.
Samantha Gonzalez: So I woke up that morning, actually having wet the bed and with a really bad backache. And went to work, in a whole bunch of pain. And then it got so bad that I had to take public transit home and get a ride to the hospital. In the emergency room at the county hospital, the triage nurse told me that I was in labor, and They asked me a whole lot of questions that I didn’t have answers to, like who my prenatal care was, and how far along I was, and things like that.
Salima Hamirani: So suddenly, after having gone through a murder trial, Samantha found herself not only pregnant, but in labor.
Samantha Gonzalez: It was terrifying. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to go. I mean, I thought I was dying and it turned out I was giving birth and it was, it was just really extreme and super traumatic being there all alone.
Salima Hamirani: Samantha was in shock and still grieving. She knew that she was in no way ready to parent a child. And so, she decided to relinquish her baby
Samantha Gonzalez: The nurses asked me what I planned to do with the baby now, um, that I had no preparation. Did I have a safe place to take it? Did I have a safe place to live at all? It was a hard 36 hours of labor, and I think that that was really when I decided to place my son for adoption was just because I had been going through it alone, and I was terrified
Music.
Salima Hamirani: In many aspects, Samantha’s experience mirrors countless others – she was navigating a challenging pregnancy with limited resources. But it’s unusual in one way: she feels like her adoption story had a good ending. And, it turns out, that’s not how most birth mother’s feel about their stories.
Gretchen Sisson: Most of the mothers that I interviewed around adoption felt some level of regret.
Salima Hamirani: That’s Gretchen Sisson. She wrote a book about adoption from the perspective of birth mothers called “Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.” And Gretchen wrote the book for two reasons. For one, she had worked with very young mothers in grad school.
Gretchen Sisson: And that was what really drove my desire to look at adoption because I was working with these young mothers whose families Parenthood faced so much marginalization, stigmatization, and who were really framed as irresponsible for the choices that they made.
And I wanted to understand the ways adoption functioned in our broader conversations around young parenthood, right? The idea that these mothers and their children would have been better off if they were not being raised by them,
Salima Hamirani: She also wrote a book about birth mothers because in our current political climate, after the fall of Roe V Wade, adoption comes up a lot as an alternative to abortion. And that’s one of the main reasons I wanted to look at adoption on today’s show as well.
(anti abortion quote propounding adoption)
Gretchen Sisson: And it’s not even just coming from the right. President Barack Obama and his statement on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade would say, you know, the promoting adoption was important part of the conversation.
Salima Hamirani: And there’s one other factor that’s important to understand before we dive into Gretchen’s book. Adoption is a multi-billion dollar industry. In order to grow and maintain that figure the industry spends a lot of money targeting pregnant women in order to convince them that, in their view, and compared to abortion, adoption is a morally just, happy way to deal with an unwanted pregnancy.
(clip from a movie or an ad or something)
Gretchen Sisson: We’re continually told that adoption is a social necessity and a social good, that this is a valid and necessary way of caring for children. And we’re told that there is a need for people to adopt that adopting is an altruistic act.
Salima Hamirani: And that’s because, well, there just aren’t that many adoptable babies for the extreme domestic demand in the US. Which is a huge problem for a 25 billion dollar industry that is entirely based on the availability of babies. Most families want to adopt very young infants, not children or adolescents. There are a lot of kids in foster care, but there are far fewer adoptable infants.
Gretchen Sisson: In fact, when we look at the private adoption system, we have more people who want to adopt than we have infants that are available for adoption.
And because private adoption is set up in the context of a marketplace, having a very high demand incentivizes organizations and agencies, attorneys, for profit brokers that operate in this space to generate supply, right? And you see that in the way that a lot of these players operate in their targeting of vulnerable pregnant people, primarily poor families, as far as separating them from their Children.
Salima Hamirani: So Gretchen set out to understand how birth mothers really feel about their adoption experiences. She interviewed over 100 pregnant people for her book in 2010, then re-interviewed a subset of those people again in 2020. What she found ran very counter to the way that adoption is presented in the public imagination
First, her findings shut down the myth that adoption is an alternative to abortion – most who want an abortion DO NOT consider adoption.
Gretchen Sisson: I think it’s important to understand that when you talk about people who want to access abortion care and mothers who are relinquishing their infants for adoption, you’re very much talking about two different groups of women. So, people who want to have abortions do not want to be pregnant. They don’t want to continue their pregnancy. So, there was a survey of several thousand abortion patients, exactly 0 percent of them said that they were interested in adoption. 1 percent said, kind of. People who want abortions have little to no interest in adoption. And that is true even if you deny people abortion access.
On the other hand, mothers who relinquish their infants felt bonded to their pregnancies early on. They were not interested in having an abortion, even if they had complicated feelings about parenting, but most of them did want to parent and then came to a point in their pregnancy where parenting felt impossible.
So, this idea that adoption is a meaningful alternative to abortion, or really vice versa, is just not true.
Salima Hamirani: In fact, research has shown that women who get an abortion are generally happy with their decision. On the other hand, Gretchen found that women who relinquish their children for adoption are generally NOT happy with their experience.
Gretchen Sisson: 95 percent of people who have abortions do not report regret and for the 5 percent that do, The bottom line is that the vast majority of people who have abortions. Feel a lot of relief after their abortion. They feel confident that it was the right decision for them. On the other hand, most of the mothers that I interviewed around adoption felt some level of regret.
the challenge is that for the vast majority of people who have abortions, you have the abortion, and that is a decision at one point in your life, and you move on with your life.
For the mothers that relinquished their infants for adoption, many of them, at least at the beginning, were in open adoptions, or had some degree of ongoing contact with their child. And so, they were constantly negotiating and re-navigating that decision, figuring out how to be in contact with their child, figuring out how to negotiate those relationships with adoptive parents as someone moved or life circumstances changed.
And I think that work, that very hard labor of parenting in a different way, obviously, than if they had been raising their child, led to more critical feelings about the adoption over time and left open the opportunity for regret to emerge at any point.
Salima Hamirani: Most of the mothers Gretchen interviewed had open adoptions, some just exchanging pictures and messages over the course of the child’s young life. But some of the mothers were in extremely open adoptions.
Gretchen Sisson: They were seeing their child on a regular basis. They would be on the phone with them directly. Some of the mothers I interviewed babysat for their children for the adoptive family. One went on family vacations with her daughter’s adoptive parents, right? Like, you have that very high degree of openness. That’s really a kinship relationship that includes both the family of origin and the adoptive family.
Salima Hamirani: Gretchen says that open adoptions like this can be help ease some of the traumas of relinquishing a child, or in Gretchen’s words, it is protective, for birth mothers’ mental health and wellbeing.
Gretchen Sisson: But openness wasn’t fully protective, because there was always the chance that an adoptive family could cut off contact entirely in an open adoption. Because very few of these open adoptions are legally enforceable.
Salima Hamirani: Usually, a birth mother permanently relinquishes custody of the child, with no later recourse. Once the papers are signed, she can’t change her mind, and if the adoptive family finds the open adoption too challenging, they can cut off contact at any point.
Gretchen Sisson: Openness is meaningful. Openness is important, but openness does not, it’s not a panacea for all of the challenges in adoption.
Salima Hamirani: For Samantha Gonzalez, the open adoption idea was pretty important, especially after the traumatic birth she endured. She told me that the nurses turned very cold when she decided to relinquish her son.
Samantha Gonzalez: Well, when I told them that I didn’t have a place to stay, and I didn’t have, like, any money or anything like that, they said, “Oh, well, you need to get help.” And then I said, well, I was considering adoption. And they immediately changed their mind, the way that they were speaking to me and started talking to me like I was a criminal.
They asked me, was I sure that I wanted to give up my child to a stranger? You know, what kind of a woman would do that? Stuff like that. You know, just really rude questions, that were kind of painful. And that I had no answers to. In fact, for the 36 hours I was in labor, they didn’t bring food or water or even a blanket. They only responded when I was screaming in pain, and they could hear me down the hall. But by then it was time for the baby to come
Salima Hamirani: Soon after the birth, Samantha started figuring out how to proceed with the adoption.
Samantha Gonzalez: When the social worker came in they gave me some pamphlets for PACT and a bunch of other adoption agency, facilitators, lawyers, and things like that. I was looking through them, and they all looked great, but the one that stood out to me was the PACT because they spoke about, you know, that the child needed care and racial identity information and birth family information post placement.
And so, I didn’t know what babies needed, but it seemed like that sounded right. So, I chose PACT because it was an open adoption. And I chose the family because they looked like home. They looked like a place that I would want my son to live.
Salima Hamirani: Normally mothers are discoursed from bonding with their babies if they choose adoption but in Samantha’s case, even after she chose the adoptive parents, her son needed to be kept in the prenatal ward for supervisions
Samantha Gonzalez: The first seven days of his life I was in the ward with him, holding him, because I didn’t want him to be alone, and I wanted him to be bonding with someone. And once the nurses on the ward saw that I was going to be there, they just kind of left him in my care.
Which further cemented the idea that I wasn’t a good idea to be a parent, because I was terrified and had no idea what to do
Salima Hamirani: After that, Samantha felt pretty good about handing him to his adoptive parents.
Samantha Gonzalez: When I handed them off to him, I had already met them at that point. We got together, and we discussed, you know, who we were and got to meet and see how we liked each other. They felt like people I could have been friends with. Their home was warm and inviting, we put each other completely at ease at the very beginning. And then I was comfortable, placing him in their arms.
Salima Hamirani: When we come back: we hear more from Samantha Gonzalez and her adoption journey as a birth mother. And, we hear from Gretchen Sisson, from her book “Relinquished” about what she learned from interviewing birth mothers. Stay tuned, all that and more after the break.
Lucy Kang: I’m jumping in to remind you that you are listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and want more information, or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at our new website, www.focmedia.org. There you can access today’s show and all of our prior episodes. Okay, now back to the show.
Salima Hamirani: Welcome back to Making Contact. Today we’re talking about adoption but! From the point of view of birth mothers or pregnant people who relinquish they children-Like Samantha Gonzalez, who found herself unexpectedly pregnant at 25 and who chose her son’s adoptive parents based on how much contact they wanted with the birth family.
Samantha Gonzalez: They said that they wanted an open adoption and, that they were open to having a relationship with the birth family. And that was, that was nice and important to me
Salima Hamirani: But even though Samantha wanted contact with her son, it turns out that she found it extremely difficult to maintain emotionally
Samantha Gonzalez: I had been super depressed before his birth and then relinquishing him just sunk my self-worth. I didn’t feel like I was capable of doing anything because I had basically given up. And, um, it was, it was pretty extreme depression and I, I couldn’t be around him at the time. At first, it was, because he was a baby and, you know, babies are hard to deal with, but then as he got older it was, I was just avoiding it and I needed to get help. So that’s when I started getting a lot of therapy. It still took me years to be able to visit on a regular basis, and even then, even now, I still struggle with it.
Salima Hamirani: Throughout our conversation it was apparent that Samantha wanted first and foremost what was best for her son. She knew that her being a mother to him was not the best for him. But she struggles to this day, reconciling her belief that she did what was best for him, with the ingrained social beliefs she holds about what a woman is supposed to do and feel.
Samantha Gonzalez: We’re taught that a woman is going to be a mother, no matter what, and that she somehow has, like, this innate sense of what it means to be a mother or how to do it. And me not coming with those, you know, natural, innate sense of this is a baby. I need to take care of it. I need to know exactly how, I was not doing my job as a woman, as a person, as an adult. And that, that still weighs on me, even though I know he’s taken care of and everything’s fine. I still struggle with that.
And I’ve never really been in a successful enough position financially. to take care of anyone, let alone a child
Salima Hamirani: Parenting for women comes with a lot of social pressure. Even AFTER choosing to give up a child for adoption.
Gretchen Sisson, who wrote a book about the experience of birth mothers called “Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood” says it’s not uncommon for birth parents to struggle with this. Samantha knew she didn’t want to parent and really, over a decade later, she still knows she would not be able to raise a child.
But Gretchen found that for most women who chose adoption, they initially DID want to parent.
Gretchen Sisson: A lot of the mothers were in a very vulnerable place towards the end of their pregnancy, that’s why they were choosing adoption.
Salima Hamirani: Poverty was a big common theme. And in fact, Gretchen found that if some of these mothers had access to even an extra thousand dollars, they would have kept the child.
Gretchen Sisson: And what they need that money for is not to raise their child, It’s to feel like they have the capacity to make a different decision. It’s the amount of money that they feel they need to buy a car seat, buy a crib, feel like they have the basics of what they need to bring the baby home from the hospital. It’s the money that they need for a security deposit on a new apartment so that they can move out from their parents who aren’t being supportive or they can leave their boyfriend who they feel like is unsafe to have the baby around. It’s these very basic things. That would allow them to carve out in their life a space for the baby to make that feel accessible and tangible.
Salima Hamirani: In fact, some women already had children, but felt like the cost of another would be just impossible without social support. Or, they went on to have kids after they relinquished their first. And in fact, the realization that all they needed was a little bit of social support in order to parent well changed a lot of the birth mothers that Gretchen talked to. Some of them became pro-choice when they were initially pro-life. Some became far more critical of their churches or social support systems. Because their churches and social support systems had failed them.
Gretchen Sisson: So, these women were not, particularly inept mothers, right? They weren’t incapable of parenting. They weren’t incapable of loving. They needed support. It was a struggle. It was a lot of work. I’m not saying like, oh, this would have been very easy for them. But I am saying that they could do it. And I think that is what radicalized a lot of them. Um, so a mother who would relinquish, and then a year later have a baby and say, “Oh, I, I could have gotten through that. There was nothing about me that was fundamentally inadequate to parenting.” That I could have done this if someone had just given me a little bit of support, but for so many of them, the only friendly face they encountered during their pregnancy was at the adoption agency. That was the only person willing to give any type of support or vision for what was possible. And of course that was relinquishment.
Salima Hamirani: This was often reflected in a birth mother’s view of the adoptive family. Gretchen met a lot of mothers who were struggling financially when they decided to relinquish. And the first time Gretchen interviewed them in 2010, the mothers were head over heels in love with the adoptive families.
Gretchen Sisson: When they were choosing an adoptive family for their child, So much of what was lacking in their own lives was what adoptive parents would showcase, you know, in their letters with the materials that they were sharing with the agency. A lot of the mothers were relinquishing, because they didn’t have a partner that they wanted to co-parent with. Maybe he wasn’t showing up. Maybe he was unsafe. And then you look at these adoptive parent profiles and you see these like gorgeous wedding pictures beautiful descriptions of each other and a lot of the mothers were relinquishing because they didn’t have stable homes, housing situation. And then you would have photos in the profiles of these gorgeous suburban homes and backyards and talks about walking through their neighborhood and the farmer’s market and the safe schools and, you know, I’m exaggerating a bit, but very honestly, not much, right. That’s what these profiles have done to showcase this sort of family ideal to sell this idea of, of not just the specific adoptive family, but the idea of adoption in general, what it can give to your child.
Salima Hamirani: It’s like an Instagram post from someone you went to high school with – compared to your life, theirs might look perfect.
Gretchen Sisson:A lot of the mothers that I interviewed felt very starstruck look at this beautiful family. Look at how much they can offer my child. Like who wouldn’t feel inadequate, next to these beautiful images and narratives. And I think that. So many of them had to believe that they were doing the best thing for their child. And they were in this kind of honeymoon period. And, um, it wasn’t until more time passed that they came to a more critical understanding of what happened. Both a reckoning with how they were supported or usually not supported.
And I always tell the story of Leah, who, you know, when I first interviewed her in 2010, talked about how every adoption should look like hers.
Salima Hamirani: By the way, the names of the mothers Gretchen references from her book have all been anonymized for their privacy
Gretchen Sisson: She loved her son’s adoptive family so much. She really felt like this is the best thing she could have done for him, for her, for them. This is going to be beautiful. Every adoption should look like hers. And when I asked her again in 2020, she just said, this adoption never needed to happen. If I had been given just a little bit of support. This adoption didn’t need to happen.
Salima Hamirani: Of course, not all birth mothers had bad experiences. Though many mothers came out of a “honeymoon period” and changed their minds about the adoptive families, some mothers DID remain happy and hopeful that they had made the right decision.
Samantha Gonzalez: I definitely don’t regret it. It was the best decision that I’ve ever made in my entire life and that’s something that I will maintain.
Salima Hamirani: Samantha for instance, despite her own struggles of self-worth, has a good relationship with the adoptive family of her son.
Samantha Gonzalez: His family is great. They’ve always been very welcoming, and including me in their family, and sometimes in their holidays, that’s always awesome. And so, we’re all really good friends, uh, him and me, well, he’s a teenager. So we talk whenever we can, but you know, it’s not a lot because he’s a teenager
Salima Hamirani: (from interview) Does he know he’s adopted? That you’re his birth mother?
Samantha Gonzalez: Oh yeah, he’s, he’s been, um, impact his whole life, and they’ve been talking about me and his story and. His birth father and everything like that, his whole life, and I mean, if he ever had any questions, he knew that he could always talk to us or ask anything, and we would always tell him the truth.
Our history isn’t traumatic. There’s a lot of stories out there. I mean, it’s like, it’s like birth mothers are just used as baby factories and then put away.
Salima Hamirani: Which is why Samantha, like Gretchen, believes we need to expand the way we think about raising children and how that could look. She even started working with an organization called Reproductive Justice in Adoption that does just that. If, for instance, you want to get an abortion, you should easily get one. If, however, you decide you want to carry the child to term,
Samantha Gonzalez: okay, so, your choices are actually not really that limited. You’ve got like, kinship care adoption, you’ve got foster care, you’ve got all sorts of ways of keeping this child alive that may not necessarily, um, have to do with adoption, but there’s also adoption.
So, we wanted to make sure that you knew your options. We wanted to make sure that pregnant people knew their rights, and we wanted to make sure that they knew what they could do to stop coercion from happening.
Salima Hamirani: In fact, Samantha’s organization partnered with Planned Parenthood to put up a website about non-coercive adoption choices. You can find that link on our website.
But Gretchen says we have to think bigger. First there are states that are passing laws to try and prevent coercion on the part of adoption agencies, or that would require a birth mother to have her own attorney for the adoption procedure. But, there’s also the kind of large-scale social services that would provide a safety net for all pregnant people, regardless of what reproductive choices they end up making.
Gretchen Sisson: That sort of policy agenda is rooted in things that seemingly have nothing to do with adoption because they’re largely just about supporting vulnerable families. Affordable housing, living wage jobs, accessible child care, early childhood education, food security, all of those pieces that are going to support millions of other families that are living in poverty that aren’t at risk of separation, are also going to help keep families together.
But then the other piece is, I think that we have to question whether permanently separating someone from their child a full legal separation is really the best way to care for those children, whether that’s in the child’s best interest or the parent’s best interest.
Are there other ways of caring for children that allow them to have a really strong and resilient connection to their family of origin? The idea that children can only have security, connection, and permanency when you have completely legally cut off their relationship to their family and then created another family unit, like that’s actually a fairly uncreative way of thinking about what children and families need
Salima Hamirani: And she says, while we continue to hear from the first-hand testimony of birth mothers and adoptees it’s important to remember that the adoption industry was not the primary way communities dealt with children whose parents were not in a position to take care of them at the time of their birth.
Gretchen Sisson: This idea of a marketplace-based adoption system is historically new. It’s only lasted 150, 200 years, like, at the longest. This is what is the anomaly, thinking more deeply and more about other ways of caring for people is how it has been done for most of history.
Salima Hamirani: That was Gretchen Sisson, talking about her book “Relinquished does it for today’s show. You also heard from Samantha Gonzalez throughout the show, talking about her experience as a birth mother. And that does it for today. If you liked today’s show and want more information, please visit us online at www.focmedia.org. I’m Salima Hamirani, thanks for listening to Making Contact.
