17. Why Adoption Isn’t an Alternative to Abortion
A birth mom says that she doesn’t regret having an abortion—but placing a child for adoption left her traumatized. Plus, an adoptee shares her abortion story, and a researcher clears up some myths about adoption.
Guests:
Nikki Lewis, birth mom and advocate
Susan, adoptee and writer
Gretchen Sisson, PhD, sociologist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health
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This episode is brought to you by OVID, an independent streaming service offering a huge collection of documentaries and contemporary world cinema. This month, OVID has released a special collection of hard-to-find documentaries chronicling the fight for abortion rights over the past fifty years, in the context of the rise of right-wing Christianity in politics, and in the law. OVID is offering ACCESS listeners a special discount offer. Get 50% off the regular monthly membership price of $6.99 if you use promo code ACCESS at checkout! Visit www.ovid.tv to subscribe.
Logo by Kate Ryan, theme music by Lily Sloane. Additional music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions. Photo courtesy Nikki Lewis.
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[00:00:00] Garnet Henderson: Hey, everybody. Just a note at the top of today's episode that you're gonna start hearing ads on the show more often. Not a lot and not in every episode, but as an independent creator ads are an important revenue stream for me as I try to make this show a more sustainable project. That said, I want you to know that I still really appreciate and rely on your contributions, including donations and merch purchases. And by the way, there's some new merch available. So make sure you listen until the end of the episode to learn about that. I'm also trying to work with advertisers who are selling stuff that you'll actually be interested in. So if you have any feedback about an ad or if you have a product or service you'd like to advertise on the show, don't hesitate to reach out. You can email hello, a podcast about abortion.com. Okay, here's the show.
Welcome to ACCESS, a podcast about abortion. I'm your host, Garnet Henderson. [00:01:00]
Why don't you just put the baby up for adoption? This is easily one of the oldest anti-abortion arguments in the book, and it has real staying power. In fact, it even entered into the reasoning of some of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe versus Wade. During oral arguments in Dobbs versus Jackson Women's Health Organization, the case that ended Roe, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked a question about safe haven laws, which allow birth parents to relinquish a child in certain safe places without being prosecuted for abandonment. These exist in some form in all 50 states. Here's what she said.
[00:01:40] Amy Coney Barrett: Seen in that light, both Roe and Casey emphasized the burdens of parenting. And in so far as you and many of your Amici focus on the ways in which the forced parenting, forced motherhood would hinder women's access to the workplace and to equal opportunities, it's also focused on the consequences of [00:02:00] parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy. Why don't the safe haven laws take care of that problem? It seems to me that it focuses the burden much more narrowly. There is without question an infringement on bodily autonomy, you know, which we have another context like vaccines. Um, however, it doesn't seem to me to follow that pregnancy and then parenthood are all part of the same burden.
[00:02:25] Garnet Henderson: So there you have it from one of the people who voted to end the legal right to abortion in our country. Pregnancy and parenthood are completely separate. You can give birth and then just walk away. But is that really true? Well first I'll point out that in the United States, abortion is at least 14 times safer than childbirth. So to suggest that continuing a pregnancy is no big deal is to deny the truth, which is that pregnancy is inherently dangerous. This idea that adoption is an [00:03:00] alternative to abortion also ignores the fact that adoption is complicated. It can be really traumatic for both the birth parent and the adopted person.
[00:03:09] Gretchen Sisson: What Justice Coney Barrett was talking about was how relinquishment really allows women to avoid the burden of parenthood, right. The burden of motherhood. And it's an interesting way of framing it. Interesting for lack of a, a possible better, better word. Because so many of the women that I have spoken with about their experiences with adoption do not feel unburdened by their relinquishments. And in fact are dealing with their decision to relinquish over the course of their lives in a number of ways.
[00:03:46] Garnet Henderson: That's Dr. Gretchen Sisson.
[00:03:47] Gretchen Sisson: I am a sociologist at advancing new standards in reproductive health. I'm in the OB GYN department at the university of California at San Francisco.
[00:03:57] Garnet Henderson: Dr. Sisson studies adoption in the [00:04:00] context of pregnancy decision making, as well as how adoption is used politically and rhetorically in the anti-abortion movement. She has interviewed a lot of people. Who've placed children for adoption, and she says this whole idea that people are choosing between abortion and adoption really isn't accurate.
[00:04:18] Gretchen Sisson: I'll speak to the most fundamental question here, which is, whether women view adoption as an alternative to abortion. And in my research, no, they, they do not. And what I mean by that is this, that women are not really ever choosing between abortion and adoption at a single point in their pregnancy. They're never weighing, should I have an abortion? Should I give birth and give this child up for adoption. These are not two things that they're choosing one or the other. Women almost always want to have an abortion or want to parent. Or they really have no idea what they [00:05:00] want to do. Adoption becomes the path forward when they are unable to get the abortions they want, due to restrictions, or often, late gestational discovery. So they find out that they're pregnant quite late in their pregnancy. They no longer have access to an abortion. And if they want to parent and they feel like they do not have any support from their own families, from their partner, they don't have a stable income, they don't have a stable job, a stable living situation, then they will turn to adoption as a way of providing that source of stability. So adoption is really only the backup plan. I have spoken to very, very few women for whom adoption was the first choice. And most women who end up relinquishing strongly preferred to parent.
[00:05:52] Garnet Henderson: We'll be hearing a lot more from Dr. Sisson later in the episode, but first I wanna introduce you to the person whose story [00:06:00] inspired this episode. Her name is Nikki Lewis.
[00:06:02] Nikki Lewis: I became a birth mom at 17 years old. Right between my junior and senior year of high school, I placed a beautiful baby girl, and we have been navigating adoption for 21 and a half years now. And then four and a half years after she was placed, I found myself in another unexpected pregnancy and chose abortion as the best route for me at that time.
[00:06:24] Garnet Henderson: Nikki and I first connected on Instagram because shoutout your abortion posted a quote from her. I shared that post and then Nikki messaged me. The quote, really stuck with me. Nikki said that she doesn't regret her abortion, but that her adoption experience permanently traumatized her. So I wanted to talk to Nikki, because birth parents are often heralded as heroes by the anti-abortion movement. They've done the quote unquote right thing by carrying a pregnancy to term, and then relinquishing the child they feel they can't care for. Whereas [00:07:00] we're told that people who do the quote unquote wrong thing and have an abortion will feel regret for the rest of their lives. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you may remember that we tackled this myth of abortion regret back in episode eight. And the truth is that very, very few people regret having abortions, but as you'll hear today, a substantial number of people do regret their decisions related to adoption. Let's hear more from Nikki.
[00:07:28] Nikki Lewis: The first two weeks that I knew I was pregnant, I was the only person that knew. I didn't tell a single person. Back and forth, I went between, can I do this? I was 16 at the time and just beginning my junior year of high school. And I thought about it for a short period of time, I could be a mom. I could do this. I have an amazing family. And then I was realistic and said, no, I, I really shouldn't be doing this. I'm 16. I, I shouldn't be parenting. I can't give her everything that she deserves. And I made the [00:08:00] decision for adoption. For me, adoption has been talked about in my family for my entire life. We have other members of the adoption constellation in our family. And, so I just knew that was a route I needed to go. And so before I told my parents, before I told the father, I had decided on adoption. And then, then I took a pregnancy test and realized I was 20 weeks along.
[00:08:22] Garnet Henderson: In episode four, which was all about why people have abortions later in pregnancy, we talked about this. It's very common for younger people to discover that they're pregnant later in pregnancy and in most states, this significantly limits their options.
[00:08:37] Nikki Lewis: I think that that is where I've struggled so much in some of the dialogue that's happened within the Supreme Court and some of the abortion laws that are going across the country is that, sure, 15 weeks sounds easy for some people, people who are planning to have a child, 15 weeks sounds really far. I think about my sister just had a baby within the last few months, and she knew within a month. [00:09:00] That's great, except for if you're not planning and you're not regular. And there's so many reasons that a woman would not have a regular cycle. We don't know until we're later on. 20 weeks is not unheard of in a teen pregnancy. And nobody's teaching me how to track my periods at 16 either. So I had to make plans fast and you know, you're just on hyper drive. Like I just found out I'm pregnant. I need to tell her birth father. I need to make sure my family's okay. Find a doctor, get this thing rolling. So it, it was everything went into hyper drive in like a one month period of a time. Even 21 years later. It's, it's crazy to sit back and think about that. It was a very, a very emotional period of time. My mother gave me a box of my old stuff just recently. And the letter that I told her in was in it and, rereading that so many years later, like, I didn't even remember how, how broken I was at that point. You know, you're 16 years old and now you're pregnant. And [00:10:00] society has told me my entire life that good girls don't get pregnant in high school. Right? And I was an honor roll student. I was an athlete. I had many friends and then I found myself pregnant. So kind of working against that stigma of what I was supposed to do was a really big internal struggle. We had some struggles in our family as well. I said that I have the most amazing family, but we struggled. My mom is of the generation where you send women away. And her initial reaction was, we're gonna send you away. Nobody needs to know about this. You can come back and act like nothing happened. My dad thankfully was like, no, no daughters going away. We're gonna, we're gonna be here. But she did keep me a secret for a few months from people in her circle, and it just happened to come out unexpectedly cuz she got in an accident and I had to show up to it. And I was very pregnant and people saw it and were like, what? So there was a lot of shame in our family that that was carried with this. Going out and about the [00:11:00] looks that you get. I already looked younger than 16 too, so, it's the looks that you get the internal struggle, your family dynamic changes. I had a little sister who was experiencing this in middle school, like what's going on? My sister's pregnant, what's happening after that. And then the, the, friends, I switched schools so that I didn't have to deal with any of the harassment or potential bullying that I knew I was going to get. So there was a lot of change in a really short period of time. On top of now I have to find a family for my child. So there is a lot that goes into that. And this is not even thinking about the hormones that are changing my body. My body is changing at a time it's not supposed to be making these types of changes. So it's everything. Whew. and when you're not planning to parent, there's a lot of questions about what happens later. What gender are you having? What sex are you having? What are you [00:12:00] naming your child? Are you gonna have a baby shower? And for, for expectant moms, we're sitting there, like we just wanna get through this pregnancy. We just wanna make it out alive and sane. So those normal questions are like daggers to the heart every time.
[00:12:16] Garnet Henderson: Nikki did feel sure of her decision at the time, but looking back, she wishes there had been a lot more time to consider all of her options, including abortion, including parenting her child and at least considering more adoptive families with all the pressure she was under. Nikki went with the very first family that she met.
[00:12:37] Nikki Lewis: I had a family presented to me, and the very traditional story, which was, they've been trying to have a kid for X number of years and they can't, you should give them your child. And I can't lie, at 16, that is a really easy story to be like, of course I can solve all their problems, right? And in my head it was like, okay, we're done. This is [00:13:00] easy. Like now we can move on to the next phase, which was, let's get to know them. Let's figure out what's gonna happen. Me trying to please them, the entire rest of the pregnancy. They didn't live in the same state, but I shared everything I could with them so that they could feel like they were a part of this.
[00:13:15] Garnet Henderson: Nikki's was a private adoption handled directly by lawyers, not involving any agency or the foster care system. She had a distant family connection to the birth parents, but they're not part of her immediate family. And that's something she wishes she could change.
[00:13:31] Nikki Lewis: That will probably be a regret that I have for the rest of my life.
[00:13:34] Garnet Henderson: You've probably heard that most adoptions nowadays are open. Children generally know who their birth parents are and may interact with them quite a bit throughout their lives. But navigating that kind of relationship can be difficult. And birth parents really don't have a lot of protections. Here's Dr. Sisson again.
[00:13:53] Gretchen Sisson: There are a few states in which openness agreements have some degree of legal commitment, [00:14:00] but the vast majority do not. That doesn't stop agencies from using openness as a way of marketing adoption to women, including in those states where it's not legally bonding, but often birth and first parents have no legal rights after the adoption.
[00:14:23] Garnet Henderson: So in most cases, adoptive families are free to change or even abandon whatever agreements they made with their child's birth parents at any time. And unpredictable changes in the level of contact she had with her daughter was one of the things that made Nikki's adoption experience really difficult.
[00:14:42] Nikki Lewis: It's very easy for people to talk about adoption and be like, but they're all open now. There are varying levels of openness too, which we don't always talk about. So I picked her family. I knew their both their first and last name. I knew where they lived. I had their address, their phone number, but there was a, [00:15:00] about a third of her life, where I had zero contact with them. And it's not because I didn't want it. So in these situations, you know, a birth mother has zero rights after we sign relinquishment papers. So we can create a plan, but the adoptive parents do not have to honor it. Unfortunately. I wish that we would make adoption plans, a legal binding contract, right? But no, once those papers are signed, they can shut it down if they want to. So I had a very open adoption, seeing her at least annually for the first four years. And then for a few years after that, I got letters and photos and then nothing from about seven to 14. And then at 14 I got a few sporadic emails from her mother that just kind of caught me up and asked about my family. And then from 18 to 20, I got nothing [00:16:00] until I got an email, just, gosh, it's been just over a year now, an email from her mother saying, Hey, she found you on Instagram and she wants to connect. And so we've been navigating reunion now for just over a year. We saw each other a few months ago and, I always thought reunion was gonna be the best part of this. It actually might be the hardest part of this. You know, I'm back in therapy now because it has brought up a lot of old things that were never resolved from 21 years ago. You know, we hear the thank yous, but nobody asks what our how's our head, how's our hearts in those situations. And even if I had a completely open adoption and I'd seen her on a regular basis, I still wouldn't be without some of these feelings.
[00:16:45] Garnet Henderson: If Nikki could have a do-over, she says she'd make some very different choices and maybe not the ones you'd expect.
[00:16:52] Nikki Lewis: If I'd had one person just tell me, Hey, you could do this. I might have seriously [00:17:00] pushed to parent. If I had decided a parent, she would've had an amazing life. I already know that. It would've been different. And that's the language that we need to be saying is that these children have different lives that nobody's saving them. There obviously are different situations and I'm not every birth mother. And there are situations that maybe are unsafe for, for children. There are also a lot that are not unsafe and as expectant mothers, when we find ourselves in these situations that we're not being told that we can parent. Having somebody to stand behind us and saying, Hey, if you wanna do this, you can do this. And here's some resources too. Now at 38 years old, I would know exactly where to go and who to go to if I found myself in that situation. But at 16, I had no idea and nobody was telling me, Hey, Nicole, if you wanna parent, we can help you. Here's what we can do for you. You're gonna be an amazing mom. You just need a little bit of extra support.
[00:17:56] Garnet Henderson: When Nikki decided to have an abortion four years [00:18:00] after placing a child for adoption, she says it was a comparatively easy choice.
[00:18:04] Nikki Lewis: I mean, I still was young at 21. You're still, I still consider every 21 year old, very young. But I knew where I needed to go and what I needed to do. And I knew what I didn't want at that time, which was, I cannot place another child for adoption. And I can't parent. So there's only one other option there. I think back to both of my pregnancies sporadically. I know what my situation was when I decided to have an abortion at 21 years old. I was not in the right place. I was a married woman. It was with my husband. I was not supposed to be with him, but if you looked from the outside, it should have been the perfect situation. I knew I couldn't do it. There is not a moment though, where I am filled with regrets, where I wish I would've changed my mind when it came to my abortion. But every single day, my adoption story impacts my [00:19:00] life in some way, whether it is me full on crying, because I don't know how to handle these feelings, the therapy that I'm taking specifically related to my adoption trauma, the way my family's been impacted, the conversations that my sister and I have now about parenting as she's navigating, being a first time mom. And I will probably never be a mom in the traditional sense. So my adoption has impacted every part of my life. The jobs that I've had, where I've lived, the fact that I do not have children, is directly related to my adoption story. That is something that I wish people would talk about or think before they say adoption should be an alternative to abortion.
is.
[00:19:44] Garnet Henderson: This episode of access is brought to you by Ovid, an independent streaming service offering a huge collection of documentaries and contemporary world cinema. This month, Ovid has released a special collection of hard to find documentaries, chronicling the fight for [00:20:00] abortion rights over the past 50 years in the context of the rise of right wing Christianity in politics and in the law. Included are films about what it was like to live in America when abortion was completely illegal, such as dear Dr. Spencer, and a remarkable six part series with God on our side, which Chronicles the rise of the. Religious right in America. Ovid is offering access listeners a special discount. Get 50% off the regular monthly membership price of $6.99 if you use the promo code access at checkout visit www dot ovid, that's O V id.tv to subscribe.
I wanna get back to Dr. Sisson now because it is eerie just how closely a lot of Nikki's experiences are reflected in what she told me about her research.
[00:20:54] Gretchen Sisson: My work has looked at women over 10 years after their adoption relinquishment. [00:21:00] Many of the women I speak with a few years out from their adoptions speak very optimistically, very hopefully, very positively about their adoptions. And for a while I thought, well, maybe, maybe adoption as a practice is just getting better. The longer I talk to them, the more cynical, and the less happy most of them are. And I think that is a reflection of lack of support, weaning support, maturity of perspective, struggles with the child's adoptive family. I remember speaking with one woman who was about a year out from her adoption. And I told her, I was like, well, what should the ideal adoption look like? She's like, well, it should look like mine. My adoption is going so well. I spoke with her 10 years later and she's like, well, I don't think this adoption ever really needed to happen. And I hear sort of refrains like that so often, because one year out [00:22:00] she's in the thick of it, and her agency is bringing her back to talk to panels of pregnant women and prospective adoptive parents. And she's still being told that she's a hero. And she's facilitating these online message boards and these online groups. And then she realizes that she does have this sense of grief and loss and no space is made for that.
[00:22:22] Garnet Henderson: As we heard from Nikki, openness in adoption is not a guarantee, but it is true that most adoptions nowadays are open to some extent. So most birth parents still end up doing quite a bit of parenting. Placing a child for adoption. Doesn't just free them from those obligations. And because many birth parents wanted to be parents, this whole process can be really painful.
[00:22:46] Gretchen Sisson: I think that women in general are quite resilient and there are a number of them who have come to a very good place in their relationships with their child and their child's adoptive family that they do [00:23:00] feel very good about. But those, the circumstances surrounding those adoptions are usually very unique and they're usually the women that were in the most dire of circumstances. So, women that were in a, for example, a truly abusive relationship at the time of their pregnancy and feel that by relinquishing their child, they moved them into a place of safety, a, family that would be safe for them. And they have a really wonderful open relationship with their child's adoptive family, they've been able to stay very present in their child's life. They feel good about it. Now to me, the tragedy there is that there was a way out for the child, but not the mother. She was stuck in this abusive relationship for a while after this child's birth. But I do think that most women that I speak with would describe their adoptions as traumatic and [00:24:00] their separations from their children as traumatic.
[00:24:02] Garnet Henderson: Remember, Nikki said that all she would've ,needed was one person to tell her she could do it. She could be a mom and she's not at all alone in that.
[00:24:12] Gretchen Sisson: So many of the women I speak with are relinquishing their children because of circumstances where they have so little social power. And it's truly a reflection of how little our society invests in families. The number one reason women relinquish is that they don't have money. They don't feel like they have access to their own money or their own economic power. Many of them come from middle class families that could afford to support another child, but if they don't have their parents' support and their parents have the money, they don't have the money. And so they end up relinquishing and, and I ask them, how much money would you have needed to feel like you could parent your child? And that's often [00:25:00] a shockingly low amount, often in the hundreds of dollars, thousand dollars, $1,500. This is enough money for a security deposit on an apartment. Or in one case a woman was like, I just needed to be able to buy a car seat so that I could feel like I could get home from the hospital. And then I could have been able to figure it out. Now these are retrospective assessments. Like maybe at the time it felt there was more in their way, but you're not talking hundreds of thousands of dollars. You're talking a pretty low level investment in families. In women and children and being able to keep families together. And a lot of the women that I speak with, they're at a particularly vulnerable moment and an inflection point in their life when they're making this pregnancy decision. These are women who, with a small amount of investment are gonna be [00:26:00] able to hold down a stable job. They just need to get into the apartment, then they can get a job and then they can hold it down. And They need someone to get them from A to B so that they can see the way to Z. Most of the time when I interview these women, they're a year or two out from the adoption decision. And oftentimes if they're a little bit more than that, a couple years out, they are often married or partnered, and maybe have other children and they're living pretty stable lives. And what's happened between the relinquishment and where they are now is just that they found a way to kind of like pull together that minimum investment. They had a partner that was a little bit more supportive, or they had a partner that their parents just liked more and they decided to support them a little bit more or, they got married and thus their families were a little bit more supportive of that pregnancy. And the circumstances are not radically different. Again, adoption becomes this private way of [00:27:00] shifting children and infants from families with less power and less economic means to families with more. And that's in and of itself a conservative ideal, because it averts the need for a social investment in addressing these disparities.
[00:27:20] Garnet Henderson: In other words, adoption is a private solution to social problems.
[00:27:25] Gretchen Sisson: That's what gets at these kind of broader conservative ideas underneath adoption, because adoption is not just about averting abortions. It's about upholding a specific idea of who gets to be a parent. It's about upholding a really heteronormative idea of the American family that's headed by two parents, married couple, that's probably white and probably middle class. And you certainly have other types of families that are made possible [00:28:00] by adoption, but the practice of adoption in the United States has been shaped by a history that is rooted in these ideas where adoption was designed to be secretive for a large portion of its history, because the idea was that you could pass your adopted children off as your biological children. And, that was the aim, to uphold this idea of a very specific conservative concept of what family could and should be. And in that way, it's a fairly regressive practice at its core.
[00:28:41] Garnet Henderson: There's a period of American history widely known as the baby scoop era. This lasted from the end of world war II until the early 1970s. During this time, when teenage girls and young women who weren't married got pregnant, they were often sent away to maternity homes. When they gave birth, [00:29:00] their babies were placed for adoption, sometimes without the birth mothers ever, even seeing them. Typically, they knew nothing about their children's adoptive families and had no contact with them whatsoever. Clearly these adoptions were traumatic for everyone. Mostly this phenomenon involved white girls and women and infant adoption rates were very high during this time. They reached an all time peak in 1970. Remember, that's three years before Roe versus Wade. Over 89,000 infants were adopted that. But a lot has changed since then.
[00:29:35] Gretchen Sisson: When we look at which women relinquish, and first of all, it's not many. There's almost a million American women per year that have an abortion and you're talking about, I put my estimate about 18 to 20,000 per year that relinquish for domestic adoption. So the scale is not even comparable. But when you look historically at profiles of birth parents it's [00:30:00] almost uniformly been a white phenomenon, for a number of reasons. One is that there is demand for white infants. They're viewed as more adoptable. Two is that there's a historical tradition of kinship care in communities of color. And third is that there's more of a tradition of single motherhood in families of color and particularly in black communities, there's less stigma attached with that, whereas the stigma was very high for white single mothers when you look back like the fifties, sixties, and seventies. And most of our ideas of women who relinquish are kind of based on these historical profiles. I have a research paper that I am working now it's, looking at data from over 8,000 adoptions, I think that that profile is changing. When you look back at these young white teenage girls in the fifties, sixties, seventies, what was leading them to be [00:31:00] targeted for adoption was really a very specific gendered and social powerlessness on their part. But what makes women vulnerable to adoption today is a powerlessness that's rooted in economic vulnerability, and that is no longer racialized in the same way. So there are far more women of color that are relinquishing today than there were then, and far more even than we saw in the eighties and nineties. I also think that they skew a little bit older. And they're no longer, this is no longer just about first births. When I look at this demographic profile from these data of 8,000 adoptions there's a pattern of women who already have several children and are relinquishing later births because they feel that they cannot care for another child. Which means that the pattern of relinquishment is in some ways converging with the pattern of who we know is getting abortions. And for these women, for whatever reason, they're not interested in having an [00:32:00] abortion or they're unable to obtain an abortion. And so they're seeking an adoption for the same reason that other women might be seeking an abortion.
[00:32:08] Garnet Henderson: So now that Roe has been overturned and several states have banned abortion, are we about to see the adoption rate dramatically increase?
[00:32:15] Gretchen Sisson: I think that when abortion becomes harder to access, one, we will expect adoption rates to increase. Now, how significantly they increase depends on how prohibitively and how definitively prohibitively some of these barriers are in place. But I also think that it will change the shape of who is relinquishing, and how, and why. First I'll just say, when we look at these like 18 to 20,000, adoptions on an annual basis, that very roughly equates to just under 1% of American women who will relinquish, compared to our approximately 25% of American women who will have an abortion. These again are not comparable experiences. [00:33:00] Adoption is rare. Abortion is not. But when we look at the Turnaway data, of the women that wanted to have an abortion and could not get one, 9% relinquish, 91% parent. And when I was talking with my colleague Diana Foster, Diana is looking at this 9% and she's like, why is it so low? A hundred percent of these women wanted to have an abortion and 91% of them are parenting. And I'm looking at the 9% coming from my adoption perspective. And I'm like, oh my gosh, it's so incredibly high, because I'm comparing it to the 1%. I'm like, oh, this is a tenfold increase almost right. It's a, you know, 0.9 to nine. It's interesting, right? Because it is, it is both a very small number when you consider that none of these women wanted to have a child at all, and it is a very huge number when you consider the potential increase that it represents when women are going to be denied access to abortion on a wider scale. The other really [00:34:00] interesting thing about this 9% is that it exactly mirrors the pre-Roe relinquishment rate for unmarried women during the baby scoop era.
[00:34:09] Garnet Henderson: So if we go based on those numbers from the Turnaway Study, which you can hear more about back in episode seven and eight, we're potentially looking at a tenfold increase in the adoption rate post-Roe. Now we probably aren't going to see a jump that big, because many people will travel for abortions and many people will self manage their abortions using pills, an option that wasn't available before. But we're almost certainly going to see some kind of increase. And Nikki says there are a lot of things that need to change to make adoption more ethical.
[00:34:43] Nikki Lewis: I would like to say that there are obviously a lot of changes that have happened, but there are still agencies that if you're signing with them, they will send you to another state, they'll put you in a housing complex. And they will send you to their doctor and pay your housing. But there's some stipulations with that. And [00:35:00] there's some feelings that go with that. And, and those are coercive tactics that you can't change your mind once you're in that, right? If somebody is paying all of your expenses and helping you, you feel obligated to give them the one thing that they need from you. So we need to stop commodifying these children. Every agency or every attorney or anybody who is selling, and that's gonna be a very harsh word for some people to hear, but selling a child. We're not always looking at what does that dollar amount include? And that's what we need to have. We need to have it broken down. We need to see how this money is being used. On top of that, are we having the best interest for in expectant and birth mothers and adoptees post placement? Are we offering support and care for both of them throughout a lifetime? I know that there are quite a few agencies that once we hand over a child and sign that paper. They don't need us, right? We're we're nothing anymore. And I will be honest that I was fine right after. It was 20 years later, before I started to process my, my trauma. [00:36:00] 20 years is a long time. And in that I didn't have anybody else that was saying, Hey, are you okay? Do you need any support? But also supporting adoptees. We need to be able to move away from some coercive language too. Having those uncomfortable conversations in the real world that actually talk about the reality of adoption.
[00:36:20] Garnet Henderson: If you've listened to either of our episodes about crisis pregnancy centers, you won't be surprised to hear that many crisis pregnancy centers have cozy relationships with adoption agencies, and adoption agencies use similarly aggressive tactics to market, to pregnant people.
[00:36:36] Gretchen Sisson: I think that this is something that not a lot of people realize until you sort of make a few strategic clicks on your social media and then you'll be bombarded by it. And I wanna be clear that I think that this system is equally predatory to potential adoptive parents as well. I think that this is a system that extracts a lot of money from people that are hoping to adopt in addition [00:37:00] to marketing to women who are pregnant and in a moment of vulnerability. Part of my interest in this came about because a couple years ago, I was forwarded an email from an ad agency that was essentially using geofencing to target the mobile phones of women in abortion clinics with ads for adoption agencies. In this case it was Bethany Christian services, which is actually the biggest adoption agency in the country. This agency was based in Boston and they were prosecuted by attorney general Maura Healy. They are no longer allowed to do this and there are regulations against geofencing in several states, but there are also no regulations against geofencing in many more states. And there are other ad agencies that are continuing to do this. They do it not just at abortion clinics, but methadone clinics, crisis pregnancy centers, [00:38:00] other places where you would expect to find women that might be facing a a pregnancy at a moment of crisis, at a moment of vulnerability. We also see adoption agencies buying Google ad keywords for pregnancy help or, pregnant no money, pregnant low income. These are never results that are about parenting support. They're always other crisis pregnancy centers that are usually closely affiliated with adoption agencies or adoption agencies themselves. And then you'll see, a entire kind of like second level operators that are working with people that are hoping to adopt, to buy Google ads themselves, to develop Facebook ads and Facebook pages and boost their Facebook pages and boost their social media ads and their profiles, and spend a lot of money on professional photographers and their websites to target expectant [00:39:00] women with these online profiles. And they'll encourage couples to spend just thousands of dollars into marketing themselves as prospective adoptive parents to women who, if they had that much money, wouldn't be relinquishing at all. I've spoken with women who are so captivated by a lot of these adoptive family profiles that are so curated, and the idea that their child could have this family... one birth mother I spoke with just talked about how her her son's adoptive father is a news reporter, and his mother's a fashion designer, and they just seemed so glamorous and they had this house in the suburbs that just seemed so amazing to her. And they had pictures of their international vacations, and how she was just really captivated by this [00:40:00] idea of what her child could have. It really becomes a way of pulling women in. Another woman who was really alone in her life at the time, she was living far away from her own family, who were not particularly supportive, and her relationship had just ended, and she was looking at these images of this big, extended family that all lives close to each other, and the sense that her child could immediately have a network of older siblings and big cousins and grandparents nearby, they're feeling very drawn to these families that are an answer to their vulnerabilities, really what they want for themselves, as well as their children. Women are not relinquishing because they see one compelling ad. But if you're in a place where you're already like, well, I dunno what to do. I can't see a way forward. I'm feeling stuck. You suddenly see these ads that seem [00:41:00] like an answer. And then you connect with an agency and you know, their counselors are telling you that you're so brave and strong for considering this option, think of this gorgeous life your child is going to have, they're extraordinarily motivated by a devotion to their child. And I think that it's worth considering how aggressive this marketing is. And how much money, again, these prospective adoptive families are being asked to pour in, because a lot of these couples have poured, probably years of themselves into infertility treatments and their own quests to become parents.
[00:41:36] Garnet Henderson: Of course, there are birth parents who are happy that they chose adoption, and there are many wonderful adoptive families, but it's clear that many of these adoptions simply wouldn't be happening. If birth parents had more resources and support.
[00:41:52] Gretchen Sisson: I have talked a lot at this point about adoption as a conservative institution. I believe that it is. I believe it represents a [00:42:00] privatization where there should be public support. I believe it represents these regressive ideas of what family could and should be. I believe it is a way of exerting social control over women and the options that are available to them. I believe all of those things are true. I also believe that adoption is very appealing to a lot of progressives. It appeals to our ideas of chosen family. It appeals to our ideas of loving people that do not look like us and people that we do not have biological ties to. These things are very resonant on the progressive side of the political spectrum. And families that are formed by adoption are always more visible to us than families that are separated by adoption. And this is true on the political left as well. And I think that we want to celebrate our friends who are adoptive parents, we want to celebrate our political leaders who are adoptive [00:43:00] parents. And we can do those things, but we are not considering the systems that are allowing adoptions to occur the way that they currently occur. This is not an attack on any specific adoptive families. This isn't an attack on how families are formed. What I am saying is if we invested in American families, the way that we should be investing in American families, if we tackled issues of poverty and inequity the way that we should be, you would be eliminating most adoptions at their core.
[00:43:38] Garnet Henderson: I wanna close out today's episode with an important perspective we haven't heard yet. And that's the perspective of an adoptee. The anti-abortion movement treats adoptees as though their very existence proves a point. Adoption. Good abortion, bad. Many adoptees have spoken out about the ways in which [00:44:00] adoption was traumatic for them. And many have also spoken out in favor of abortion rights. When they do this, their very existence is often used against them.
[00:44:10] Susan: So often people will say, oh, you wish you aborted or, oh, you you know, you wish you didn't exist? I'm like, honestly, yes. Honestly, I really feel like I wouldn't miss my life. I wouldn't miss not existing. I wish that she'd had the choice. Not saying I wish that I was dead or I wish that I didn't exist. I wish that she had had the choices that I had.
[00:44:31] Garnet Henderson: That's Susan. She was adopted and she's also had two abortions.
[00:44:35] Susan: I was adopted at the age of about four months domestically. I was born in the late 1950s, so before Roe V Wade. And I was adopted in 1960. In my case, it was a transracial adoption, and so we weren't allowed to pretend that we weren't an adoptive family. So I always knew as well. My parents were very [00:45:00] conservative and pretty modest about things. And I think until, maybe nine years old, I thought everyone was adopted. I think when I did realize that it was quote unquote different then I started being more curious. I started searching when I was in college. About 18 or 19 years old. And I found her I think about a year, it took about a year. When I was 12, which was not that long after I learned about, you know, what the real deal was. I found a book in the public library in my small town called the search for Anna Fisher. It was written by Florence Fisher, who was an adopted person who was searching for her origins, her records, did a search, found birth family, and I think it was published in 1972 and it just blew [00:46:00] my mind. And then she went on to form a very well known organization called ALMA, which was adoptee's Liberty movement association. So I wrote to them right away. I was 13 and, and I said, I'm adopted, would you help me? And they said, sorry, we can't until you're 18. And so I remembered that, and when I was 18, I wrote them again and I said, I'm 18 now. And I started going to their monthly support groups, which involved a lot of search support, and advice, and things. My birth mother had basically kept this a secret for, you know, all these years. At that time it was 20 years. When I found her I think she'd been waiting in fear and dread that this would ever happen. It wasn't like, I, I think, you know, some birth mothers really long for contact with the child that they relinquished. And [00:47:00] she really wanted to put it behind her. And also the fact that it had been a secret from everybody all that time. She was not excited about it being revealed, so it was very hard at first, but she did agree to meet me. The first day that we met, we went and had lunch in a diner or something, and the waitress was like, I think I ordered then she's like, oh, and what do you want, mom? And we ended up developing a relationship. She ended up feeling more comfortable and we ended up having, kind of a friendship for quite some time, but it was fraught and very conditional, meaning that I needed to maintain my secrecy, or her secrecy, her privacy, and not tell anybody who I was. I think at first, when I was, you know, I was young, [00:48:00] I was really willing to do anything. I was like, sure. I'll, I'll wear a Mickey mouse suit. I'll do , you know, I'll do anything just so long as we can have a relationship. And the more years went by the harder that was to maintain, and then I had children, and it just, it, it wasn't something that felt good in the long run.
[00:48:24] Garnet Henderson: Susan's birth mother became a surprising source of support for her when she had her first abortion.
[00:48:29] Susan: I was 25 years old, I was in a fairly new relationship, wasn't living with the person, and became pregnant by accident. And I ended up in one of those crisis pregnancy centers, because, Yeah, I thought it was a crisis. You know, I had never heard of them. But it turned out that it was in the basement of a church, and it was pretty traumatic. I contacted [00:49:00] my birth mother. Like I said before, my adoptive parents were very conservative and I didn't think they would take well to the news. But I kind of felt like, well, she's been in this position before of having an unexpected pregnancy. And she was incredibly supportive and kind, and she said that she totally supported my decision. And she said, you're lucky that you have this choice. And I was like, yeah, I am. I am lucky. And the implication of that is that she did not have that choice because when she became pregnant abortion was illegal and also implied in that is if she had had this choice that she probably would've taken it. I think she was talking purely about my opportunity to choose what was right for me in my life at that time, and that she [00:50:00] didn't feel she had that choice open to her. That's all she was saying. And I agree with her. I agree with her and and so she ended up being extremely supportive of me, and sent me a little care package with some tea and some nice cozy things. And I felt grateful to have been able to talk to her about it and to feel like she was a person who cared about me, that she had my back, somebody that I could tell honestly, about what was going on.
[00:50:34] Garnet Henderson: But when Susan needed an abortion years later, under different circumstances, things were harder.
[00:50:41] Susan: This was the first pregnancy that I had as a married person. It was planned, it was wanted. And then when I was 24 weeks pregnant, I developed severe preeclampsia. And, they basically said that if I [00:51:00] continued with the pregnancy, that I could have a stroke or I could die. And it was, we were on the brink. It was very sudden onset, very shocking. It was a extremely, painful decision. They said it was, the fetus's chance of viability were very, very small. And if I went through labor, my viability was very, very small and it was just a very dangerous situation altogether. So that's, that's the choice we made and it was, you know, excruciating, it was extremely painful. And I feel like I believe them when they say that it saved my life. There was only one doctor around locally who performed abortions at that stage, and I was very grateful that he was really proficient and good at at it. And one thing that when I went into his office afterwards he showed me this wall of [00:52:00] pictures of babies. And he said that these were all the babies that had been born after he had done this procedure for people. And that just gave me a sense of hope.
[00:52:11] Garnet Henderson: Susan did go on to have two children by the way. And now has a grandchild.
[00:52:15] Susan: I talked about how my birth mother was very supportive when I had my first abortion. And when the second one happened, it was very interesting that my adoptive parents were of course devastated about the news and they were like, Oh, my gosh, what do you need? We'll come out. They were just like, they were devastated along with me, you know, it was their grandchild. And my birth mother was so interestingly not that she was not supportive. She was more like, Oh, well, it'll all work out. You just put this behind you. And I think, because that was what she had to do, she was just like, she just put it behind her. She was like, just not [00:53:00] gonna think about it. We're just gonna go into the future and it's gonna be okay. And I was shattered. I was absolutely shattered. So in a way, she was able to really be with me for the first time when it was like, this is my choice. This is what I need to do. And then when it was clearly traumatic, it was harder for her to be with me in my loss, because I think she had a hard time coping with her own loss and her own losses.
[00:53:33] Garnet Henderson: Access is produced by me, Garnet Henderson. Our logo is by Kate Ryan and our theme music is by Lily Sloane. Additional music in this episode by blue dot sessions. And, big news. We have some new merch. You may have noticed that the one thing we don't have in our tea public store is hats. And I'm a big baseball cap girl. So I'm running a campaign on a different platform, bonfire to get us some hats, some hats [00:54:00] that say, say the word abortion. That link,, as well as the link to our regular merch store and the link to donate to the show are in the notes. Remember, I love, love, love it. When you share the show with friends, please subscribe to access wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating or review, and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @accesspod.
