Interview with the Author of "Relinquished"

Join us for this discussion with Dr. Gretchen Sisson, the author of Relinquished, the Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.

In this episode, we cover:

• Book focuses on private adoptions between 2000-2020. Not on parents where parental rights were terminated by the state and not on international adoptions.
• Full of first-person stories from birth moms. 
• How many women are currently placing a child for adoption compared to the number of births? 
• How does this compare to the number of women who decide on abortion? Only 25 % considered adoption, and only 9% relinquished. Turnaway Study
• 90% of relinquishing moms considered parenting, but only 40% considered abortion.
• What is the demographic of the mom who relinquishes her child for adoption between 2000-2020?  
• Why do women relinquish or choose adoption? 
• What does the research show on how many women who decide against abortion or can’t have an abortion because their pregnancy is too advanced opt for adoption?
• Why do so few women who are considering an abortion not consider adoption?
• Very often, the moms in your book and in your research describe adoption as their only option. Why were the other options not seen as viable? “When women have more options available to them, they are less likely to relinquish.”
• Options counseling.
• How has openness in adoption changed things?
• Some research shows birth moms are mostly happy with their decision to place a child for adoption. NCFA Adoption Profile: Birth Parents Experience (1400 birth parents)
• The issues of substance abuse disorder, acute mental illness, or extreme poverty are real. Why is it not in the child’s best interest for the mom to choose adoption?
• Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997- “fast-tracked termination of parental rights”—failed to talk about the reality of kids growing up in foster care. 

Transcript

Please pardon any errors. This is an automated transcript.
This is Creating a Family. Talk about foster, adopted, and kinship care. Welcome back to our regulars and a special welcome to anyone new who has just found this podcast.
We are truly happy to have you with us. I'm Dawn Davenport. I am the host of this show, as well as the director of the nonprofit, CreatingAFamily .org. Today, we're going to be interviewing Dr.
Gretchen Seisen. She is the author of a book titled "Relinquish." Dr. Seisen is a qualitative sociologist at Advancing News Standards in Reproductive Health in the Department of Obstetrics,
Gynecology, and Reproductive Science at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of "Relinquish," the Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.
Welcome, Dr. Seisen, I'm looking forward to talking with you. - Thank you for having me, Don. - So the book, Relinquish, focuses on private infant adoptions between 2000 and 2022.
It is not focusing on parents where parental rights were terminated by the state and not on international adoptions, although I think you mentioned both, but not really focusing on it.
The book is full of first person stories from birth moms, first moms, and it makes the book very readable. So I throw that out there. It's not a stayed academic only type of book.
- That was the goal. - You succeeded. - Thank you. - All right, I'm going to read an excerpt from the beginning of the book, which I think kind of summarizes what you were intending with the book.
By transferring infants from poor, young, underprepared and unsupported women to mostly married, often heterosexual, typical white families of financial means.
Private adoption is believed to avert the need for abortion, nullify the purported adverse outcomes of teen parenting, alleviate the social burden of caring for under -resourced families,
appease the pain of infertility, and uphold the value of two parents, heteronormative family structure, or accommodating non -traditional families. And then you go on to say that in this common vision,
adoption is a conservative panacea. It represents a particular, effective, private solution to myriad social problems. Is that kind of a guiding principle as you were writing the book?
Certainly by the time I was writing the book, yes, that was sort of the orientation, but not really the guiding principle that brought me to my data collection, right? So when I started the project,
this was over 10 years of data collection with relinquishing mothers, and I wasn't coming to it with a critical lens already. I did not know very much about adoption.
I wanted to understand the way adoption was functioning. I particularly wanted to understand the gap between the cultural and social ideas that we have about adoption and the actual lived experiences of the people who are impacted by adoption.
So that was the goal. And I think that it was really driven by the data that I collected and the stories of the women that I interviewed that I came to that lens. Okay,
fair enough. Let's talk some about the demographics that we're talking about. How many women are currently raising a child for adoption or relinquishing a child for adoption compared to the number of births.
So there's about four million births in the country every year. Of those, there are about 20 ,000 private domestic infant adoptions. We don't have good federal tracking for domestic adoptions.
We have none. Yes. It's not that we don't have good. We have none. Yeah, we have old. We have old numbers. They give you sort of some context, but yes, we don't have any systematic federal tracking.
There is a bill in Congress right now that would remedy that. I don't think it's getting very far in committee with this particular Congress, but I'm hopeful that we will start actually engaging in the data collection that we need to around these cases.
But my estimates are that it's about 20 ,000 of four million births. It's been fairly reliably around half a percent of all births in the United States over the last few years.
- Okay, one half of one percent, gotcha. How does this compare to the number of women who decide on abortion? - There are between 850 ,000 and a million abortions every year in the United States.
So abortion is more common, abortion has always been more common, even before Roe v. Wade, when you look back at the 50s and 60s, which was the height of the sort of baby scoop era, these really aggressive,
coercive, secretive adoptions. And of course, abortion was illegal in all the states and then in 48 of the states right before Roe. And you still had more abortions than adoptions at that time.
Abortion just is a very common reproductive experience between 25 and 30 % of American women will have an abortion at some point, less than 1 of women or a relinquished an infant for domestic adoption.
- And of those women who consider abortion, what percentage are also considering or did consider adoption? - Of women who are seeking abortion care.
There was one survey that looked at 5 ,000 abortion patients on the day that they got their abortion and asked them to rate if they were interested in adoption at all. Zero said, yes, they were interested. - Of course,
at that point, it's the day of the abortion. They're there to get the abortion. 1 % said kind of. So there was that 1%. But effectively no women who are getting abortions are interested in adoption at that point.
What we found is that when you deny women access to abortions, so when you say you're unable to get your abortion today, and we'll see more and more of that in kind of this post -dobs era,
91 % of them will parent instead of relinquishing. So you'll have that 9%, which is a meaningful increase when we look at the contrast with the half of a percent that we have relinquishing more broadly.
So it will go up meaningfully, but you're still going to have 10 times as many women that are parenting as a result of abortion denial than you will have people who are relinquishing because they can't get access to the abortions that they want.
On the other side is do women who relinquish more broadly consider abortion. And I also found that no, most women who are relinquishing didn't want to have an abortion or didn't try to have an abortion.
Some of them did, for sure. But most of them continued their pregnancies with the hope and intention of parenting. And it wasn't until parenting felt particularly untenable or precarious that they turned to adoption.
Yeah, you said only 40%, somewhere in the book, only that ever considered abortion. And these are moms who made the decision to relinquish their child. - Yes. - Gotcha.
- And the 40 % includes women who were like, well, I thought about it, but like not seriously. - Yeah. - They thought about it in passing and ruled it out quickly to people who did try to get one.
So that 40 % is sort of the high estimate and includes a range of what abortion consideration or seeking might mean. Did you know that creating a family,
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So what's the demographic of, and there is no such thing as a typical mom who is relinquishing her child, but what is the demographic of a mom who relinquishes her child for adoption?
And again, you were focusing on the 20 -year period from 2000 to 2020. Yeah. I actually think that the demographic changed a lot during that 20 -year period. I - I think it probably did as well,
but go ahead, yeah. - So when you look at the best numbers that we have from the '90s, right, we see very high participations from white women. It was almost exclusively white women that were relinquishing.
It was usually women who were relinquishing their first child. So adoption was a way of delaying parenthood until they could be married, until they could be in a more stable place. And you had a lot more middle -class white women and girls that were participating because single motherhood felt particularly stigmatized for them.
When we looked at a sample of relinquishing mothers that was particularly from 2011 to 2020, that was a sample of 8 ,000 relinquishing mothers. Only a little over half of them were white.
So you're seeing far more participation from women of color in the private adoption system by the end of that 20 year period. We're also seeing that the majority of the relinquishing mothers already have children.
So this was no longer a way of delaying parenthood. This was a reflection of not having enough capacity to parent another child. We also saw that they weren't that much younger than the average birthing population,
right? So they weren't all teenagers or in their early 20s. A lot of them are their later 20s sort of just reflective of American women who give birth at any given age. We did find that most of them were living in poverty.
So over 60 % had less than $5 ,000 of annual personal income. Now that's personal income. So if they are young and they're living with their parents, right, they could have a very middle -class home lifestyle,
other sources of support. But it means that they are reliant on their own parents or their support network for social stability and financial stability. And so if their own parents don't approve of their parenting,
then they can end up in a position where they don't have enough money to control the circumstances of their lives. They can't go get another apartment and move out. They can't afford to navigate this on their own. Okay.
So why do women relinquish or choose adoption? What did you find when you were doing your research as to the causes that forced a woman to make this decision?
- Yeah, so most of the women that I interviewed again wanted to parent and they would come to a moment in their pregnancy where parenting felt particularly impossible. They didn't have housing stability.
They didn't have enough resources to buy a crib and a car seat and sort of make a space, physical space in their lives for a child. They felt that their partner was unsafe. Some of them we're dealing with really acute crises,
addiction, incarceration, right, where it would have been unsafe or impossible for them to parent at a given point. And they didn't have the support systems that would have enabled them to regain control and shape their lives the way that they wanted to before the baby arrived.
I will also say when we looked at that sample of 8 ,000 mothers who relinquished, Over half of them were contacting agencies at or after delivery,
right? So these were women who had gone through their entire pregnancies, usually hoping to parent, and it wasn't until after the baby was here already or immediately on the way that they felt that they just couldn't do it at that point.
Does that skew your results, because I'm not sure that's the norm. If we looked at the 20 ,000 domestic infant adoptions in the U .S., I don't have data on this, but it's not the norm to have a baby be born and placed at that point.
So it feels to me that that would have skewed your data somewhat. Do you think it does? Yeah, I mean, that was the very large sample. So that was the sample of, I can't remember how much I had gestational age information on. It was a subset of the 8 ,000.
That was collaborated from agencies across the country. My sample of women that I interviewed, that wasn't true. So I had more women that were considering adoption throughout the course of their pregnancies,
because I specifically recruited for that, because part of what I was trying to understand was how women were making decisions about their pregnancies. Yeah, right. There was an important subset of women that were relinquishing because they didn't discover they were pregnant until fairly late in their pregnancies.
and that late gestational age discovery of the pregnancy is part of what drove the relinquishment. They didn't have time to prepare for parenting. They found out they were pregnant at 35,
36 weeks. They didn't feel like they had the opportunity to turn that around. - What does the research show on how many women who decide against abortion or who can't have an abortion because their pregnancy is to advance?
How many of these women opt for adoption? - So those are fairly different groups of people, women who decide against abortion and women who want to have an abortion but can't access.
- And that's fair, yes, that makes sense. - So for the number of women who are denied access to abortion that can't relinquish, it's at 9%. So you have 91 % of people who are denied access to abortion are gonna be parenting in circumstances that they didn't plan or or with a partner or a time in their life that they didn't choose.
The question of how many women consider abortion more broadly and then relinquish, that's harder to gauge because we don't really know what the denominator is. We don't know how many women consider abortion and then don't have one,
right? - Right, yeah. - It's hard to measure that. We can only look at reverse engineer once we know the final result of the pregnancy. So we had that 40 % of mothers that relinquished, considered it to any extent at all.
And then 9 % of people who actively tried to get an abortion and were denied care. Then this is a question to like, for reproductive health researchers more broadly is we don't know how many people consider or try to get an abortion and can't necessarily.
If they show up at the clinic and the clinic is like, we literally cannot do your abortion that day, we can track that. But we don't know how many people want to get an abortion or think about getting one and they're like, oh, but I can't afford it or I can't take off work for three days to travel across state lines or we don't we don't know the number of people that don't even make it as far as the clinic.
I wish I had the date. But yeah. So why do so few women who consider an abortion or get an abortion not consider adoption?
Most of the women that we looked at who were able to obtain abortions in the turnaway study. - Wait, stop a second and give a brief explanation of the turnaway study. You were involved with that and it's an important study.
- Yeah, so the turnaway study was this bigger project that looks at what happens when people are denied access to abortion care. And I of course looked at the adoption piece there in that overlap, but it was a longitudinal study for 10 years that looked at what happened to people who were denied access to the abortions that they wanted and compared them to people who were able to access abortion care and sort of looked
at the divergence between these two groups. Not just obviously on adoption, but how it impacted their relationships with their children, how it impacted their financial outcomes, their mental and emotional health outcomes,
their physical health outcomes, their relationships with their partners, their credit scores, right? To sort of see how people were fearing and how people felt really about either being able to get the abortion or not over time?
And how impacted their future family planning? Did they have more children within that five -year period where those more likely to be planned pregnancies? What did that look like? So that was turn away. And again, I got to sort of carve out and look at how adoption,
consideration played into how people were assessing their options, what that was. But what we found, of course, is that, again, most people who are doing access to abortion are going to end up parenting.
But of those who were able to get their abortions, we found very low interest in adoption. There was the sense that if I can't have my abortion, I'm just going to be parenting,
because I'm going to go through an entire pregnancy, right? If I'm going to be forced to continue this pregnancy, then I made the decision to parent effectively or parenting is being imposed on me. The idea of separating from the child was not desirable.
There was also a particular concern among women of color. Black women, particularly, that if they chose to relinquish their children would end up in foster care, that their children would not be well cared for within the adoption system,
and so thus they were not going to consider that. I think the threat of the foster care system was very real in how a lot of women of color particularly were assessing their options. We know that children of color,
black children who are available for infant adoption do not tend to with a long. There is a higher market demand for black children than there was a generation ago for sure. But that is a belief that they had that was shaping whether or not they were going to consider adoption at all.
So very often the moms in your book and in your research, the ones who chose to relinquish, Obviously, they described adoption as their only option. Why were the other options not seen as viable?
- So for many of them, abortion was already off the table. So they had either tried to get one and couldn't. They didn't want to have one. So a lot of them felt very bonded to their pregnancies early on.
They wanted to parent and they got to a point in their pregnancy where abortion literally wasn't an option or they found out that they were pregnant too late to have an abortion. So, for whatever reason, abortion is already off the table. The reasons why they felt parenting wasn't an option varied a lot.
They were most commonly rooted in finances, in financial constraint. There were also many women who came from conservative upbringings and had really deep -seated beliefs around adoption as a reflection of their faith,
right, an expression of their faith within the church who believed that this was going to be the best outcome for their child, that as a single mother they were not going to be able to provide what their child needed,
that they needed to be doing everything they could to make sure that their child was raised in a two -parent family. There was also this aspirationality when they looked at prospective adoptive parent profiles.
So this means they're already in contact with the agencies or looking at profiles. And I think for a lot of the women, the ways that adoption is messaged to them is communicated with them at that point can feel very overwhelming.
A lot of them felt almost starstruck looking at these profiles, right? So if you're looking at a young woman who's unhappy in her relationship, who doesn't necessarily have stable housing, whose own parents aren't supportive of her parenting or who doesn't have that broader family support or community support.
Looking at these profiles of prospective adoptive parents with their gorgeous homes and their happy wedding pictures and their own parents who can't wait to be grandparents and the pictures of all the cousins at Sunday dinner and these family vacations and trips to the beach and trips to the mountains.
And a lot of them were very persuaded by this idea that adoption was going to represent a much better life for their child and became convinced that the only way to give that child the better life was to separate from them.
- And adoption profiles, by the way, for any listeners who are not familiar, they can be digital, but they're usually actual books or brochures or whatever that are put together by the prospective adoptive parents that kind of highlights their life.
and it gives a visual image of what it would be like to be raised in their family. - Yeah, and a lot of the mothers were finding these online, right? Because I think more and more prospective parents are creating their own websites,
are making their profiles available online, are buying Google ads, and there's a whole section in the book on this sort of online marketing and the outreach that not just agencies, but individual prospective adoptive families will do so that when mothers are searching,
not even for something specifically having to do with adoption, but really a lot of search terms that suggest that they're pregnant and living in poverty. So if they're Googling how to enroll on WIC or how to find housing for a single mom,
they're going to start getting fairly aggressive advertising for adoption agencies and prospective adoptive parents. And so that was the way that women who were not even initially considering adoption who weren't necessarily in contact with an agency were sort of starting to be sold this idea of adoption as the solution to what position that they were in.
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I want to talk now about what is called options counseling. First of all, why don't you explain what options counseling is and then who is doing it?
Yeah, and that's a good question because actually not enough people are doing real full options counseling. So options counseling helps people who are pregnant, not sure what the best path is for them to go through their options,
weigh all of them, and sort of make a plan to move forward. All abortion clinics and abortion providers are providing some counseling of some type,
but it's not always full options counseling. It will often be a type of abortion counseling, which is a conversation with someone to make sure that abortion is the right decision for you,
right? Before they do the abortion, they want to make sure you're not being coerced, you feel comfortable with this decision, this is your own choice, you fully believe this is the right choice for you. You go through that counseling and they're like,
great, we'll do your abortion today. And if you're showing conflict or if they believe there might be coercion or if you're feeling conflicted about it, they might say, we don't think you're ready for this abortion,
but maybe come back another day, like take some time to think about it and come back another day. But a lot of abortion providers don't have the capacity to do full options counseling, because options counseling can be time intensive,
and it can involve a lot of different areas of expertise. Parenting planning involves a really deep knowledge of your specific state's legal policies and social benefits and how to get enrolled,
what different service options are. Right. A lot of abortion providers are, you know, medical clinics, they're not necessarily equipped to develop a full parenting plan or they certainly don't have expertise on adoption.
They might have a referral that they can make, but they're not necessarily doing a full options counseling, which means that full options counseling is actually fairly rare. Some OBGYNs are equipped to do it,
but not often, right? There's an organization that I really love called All Options that provides free on the phone options counseling that will go through all the options. They also talk to people about pregnancy loss,
their feelings after an abortion, their feelings after an adoption, but it sort of requires this kind of like independent non -profit organization to provide that because most pregnant women are not gonna be encountering a full,
robust, informed options counseling during the course of their pregnancy. Similarly, most of the mothers that I interviewed were not given full of counseling at the adoption agencies as well.
And a lot of adoption agencies were doing a fairly limited type of counseling. First of all, most of them don't refer for abortion at all, particularly those that are religiously affiliated organizations,
they're not gonna be referring for abortion care. And that was a limiting factor. Now, by the time they were in touch with adoption agencies, they weren't considering abortion, Right, so I don't think that a lot of them were going to be seeking out that referral anyway,
but they also weren't getting parenting planning happening. A few of them were, right? A few of the mothers that I spoke with, the agency sat down with them and they said, "We'll make the adoption plan with you.
"We'll look at what that might be, "but we're also gonna develop "a really full, robust parenting plan "so that after the baby is born, "you feel like you have both a parenting plan and an adoption plan that you can choose between.
But most of them did not have that experience. Most of them, once the child arrived, really only had the adoption plan and then felt like they didn't have another choice that was tenable and actionable from where they were.
So most adoptions, in fact, the vast majority of adoptions in the U .S. now infant adoptions, have some degree of openness and openness can mean any number of things.
It is a non -defined term. Has openness in adoption changed things for mothers who are either considering or have placed for their child for adoption?
Most of the women that I interviewed said that they would not have relinquished for a closed adoption, right? So if the only option available to them was to have a fully closed adoption,
they wouldn't have done it. We don't necessarily know what they would. and agencies know this and attorneys know this,
right? They talk about how mothers are in the driver. They get to pick their child's family. They get to determine how much contact they want. A lot of this is marketing and you'll see agencies that are in states that don't have legally binding post -adoption contact agreements making these same offers.
And so then it's hard to know whether this is just a sales pitch or whether they're able to actually for meaningful support for openness. And that's the other thing, is that open adoption is a very complicated relationship.
And it's somewhat of a cultural rarity. It's certainly the norm within domestic infant adoption to have some level of openness. But it's also a unusual relationship in our broader society and context.
- And it's a challenging relationship. - Yeah, it's a lot of work, yeah. - It can be. And sometimes it's not, but usually there are, you're coming from different socioeconomic, different cultural backgrounds,
you've got not a lot in common, you know? Yeah, and you'll also face logistical challenges, like, you know, some of the adopted families moved across the country, some of the mothers moved across the country to go to college,
right, or left the country to go to college. And a lot of the mothers changed, right? They, if, personally, women who were fairly young at the time of the option, if they went through school, they might come out with a different set of beliefs or ideologies or understandings of the world,
that they look back and they wouldn't necessarily have chosen the same parents or they're just very different people, people grow and change and that's hard. And, and there's also just a certain amount of busyness in people's lives,
right? There were some others who were like, I know my child's parents are like, well intentioned and they care about me, but they're also raising like four kids now and their lives are really busy and it's hard to travel and visit and they just don't make it a huge priority.
And so you have this sort of range. On the other end of the spectrum, there were mothers who were really abruptly cut off from their children or whose parents told them they weren't allowed to have ongoing contact with their child,
even though they had been assured that this was going to be an open adoption. openness as an attitude. And if you have that attitude, you are willing to work through. And there are definitely situations without a doubt where adoptive parents agree to anything because they want a baby.
And when the rubber meets the road and things get complicated, it's easy to change your mind even though you have promised that. And I can definitely see the power dynamics shift pretty dramatically once the adoption is finalized.
Absolutely. And I think a lot of adoptive families seem to have the sense that openness is a favor that they're doing for the birth parents. That this is just something nice that they are offering them rather than something that actually most benefits the child,
the adopted person as they grow up, that they are who benefits the most from this connection. Actually, some of the research would indicate that of the triad, the people who are most satisfied and find that they get the most out of it are the adoptive parents,
believe me. That comes from the M -TART study. - Yeah, and that's why I think that when we have this idea of openness as something that's only done for the benefit of birth parents, then you end up with these really weird asymmetrical relationships.
So one of the stories I tell in the book, a woman I call Kristen in the book, she had an open adoption. When I first spoke with her in 2010, she had an open adoption to seeing her son once a year.
They would meet at a McDonald's. It was like between their houses and they would get a happy meal and he would play on the playground. And that was sort of their visit. That was their tradition. And he didn't know who Kristen was. He didn't know Kristen was his birth mother,
right? He thought this was just a friend of his mom's that they happened to see once a year. And for her, these visits were painful, right? They were sad. They brought up a lot of feelings, right? She felt like it was this really sort of manufactured relationship.
They didn't have a lot of contact in between planning this one annual visit for one afternoon. And she said, I'm doing this for him so that he knows, you know, his family of origin and where he came from.
And if he doesn't know who I am, then why am I doing this? Right? It's hard for me. And at that point, she was married, she had her own daughter that she was parenting that she wanted to bring to meet her brother.
And she's like, my toddler knows that this is her brother, right? I can't trust her to say something. So she ended up cutting off those visits. And when I spoke with her in 2020,
she hadn't had contact with him and his adoptive family for years. And that's another thing that I'll hear from adoptive families is, Oh, our child's fourth mother doesn't want to have contact.
She doesn't want to be involved in the child's life. And I think that there is a small minority of mothers who really struggle to be child -centered in assessing what their obligations are to their child as they grow.
But I also think that a lot of this sort of half openness, semi -openness, moderated openness that doesn't really make space for what birth parents want or need out of these relationships is really unsatisfying and painful for a lot of them and the reason that they cut back on contact.
- It's also painful, not for everyone, but for many. The National Council for Adoption is in the midst of, I guess it kind of completed it now, doing adoption profiles of the members of the triad.
They, I don't actually know if they've done one on adoptive parents, but they did one on birth parent experiences, and they've just released one on adopting experiences. For the profile on birth parent experiences,
they had surveys, and I think they also did interviews, but the surveys were from 1 ,400 birth parents, so a large sample. One of the questions they asked, the birth moms, was how satisfied they were with their decision to place a child for adoption,
and the majority were mostly happy with their decision. How does that fit with what you've talked about in the book relinquished? A couple things. One is that I think you really need to go deeper than survey data to understand lived experiences as complex as this.
But also you have to look at a longer time frame. So these were women that I interviewed in 2010 and 2020. And there were many of them in 2010 who spoke really positively about the adoption,
right? They were very optimistic. These were women who were within just a few years of the adoption. And they were very optimistic, right? Their children were still quite little. So their own emotional needs were less complex around the adoption.
And they felt very positively about the adoption. There was one when I interviewed and I asked, what do you think adoption should look like? And she said, well, every adoption should look like mine, right?
She was felt really good about the adoption. When I went back and interviewed her 10 years later, she said this adoption never really needed to happen. And she had come to a much more critical place.
She was struggling with how her son was being raised with the ways that she saw him struggling with the adoption, with the fact that she felt she, in retrospect,
could have parented him. She was married, she felt that her husband would have been a great stepfather for her child. So you have this turn where the lack of support for ongoing openness,
the isolation that so many mothers feel, means that even relationships that have a strong footing or a lot of hope and optimism from the outset don't always serve people well in the long term.
But I will also say, I interviewed plenty of mothers who were pretty unhappy with their adoptions. And when I asked them, do you think this was the right decision,
they might still say yes, because they didn't feel like they had another option available to them. And they might say, you know, I know my 19,
22, 25 year old self did the best she could. So this was the right decision. This was really the only decision that I could have made at the time. So yes, if you're just having them do a survey,
like yes, they might say this is the right decision. But actually their feelings are much more complicated because what they want is to have been able to have enough control over the circumstances of their lives to have felt like something else was possible.
And so I think that any data that is looking deeply at the experiences of relinquishing parents is really valuable and all part of a broader conversation. But I think you need to have a much broader sense of how this impacts people's lives when you're doing data collection.
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You can check them out at bitlybit .ly /jbfsupport. There are one hour audio courses that you take at your own,
it's independent, and you can get a certificate of completion if you need it. If you don't, you can just take the course and be a better parent. I found the book very interesting.
A couple of things I took a little issue with, and one was it felt like in the stories of the moms, I think it was almost all moms, that you focused on or that you highlighted in the book.
The issue of substance abuse disorder, acute mental illness or extreme poverty, it felt like they were diminished. And these issues are real. And they do affect whether someone can or should parent at that time.
You quote, one woman is saying, if I just had $1 ,000, it would have made all the difference. And I thought, I mean, I don't know this woman and I don't know her situation, obviously. But I think 1 ,000 bucks,
no. A thousand bucks helps you in a very short term. That feels very dismissive of the reality. And it also feels like it's focusing on the rights of parents over the rights of children because people who are struggling with certainly substance abuse and acute mental illness talk to anyone who has been parented in that environment.
It is so far from ideal. We can also be dismissive of poverty and say it's just poverty. And I grant you that poverty alone in an ideal world should never be the reason that somebody is not parenting their kids.
But we don't live in that world and poverty does make a difference. So it felt like it was a little too easy to focus on the moms who didn't have it wouldn't have taken much for them to have pulled it together.
Yeah, well, a couple things. A lot of this feedback I've gotten before is well, how far does $1 ,000 really go when you're parenting a child? And the way I understand her story and having spoken with her is not,
I need $1 ,000 to raise this child. It's, I needed $1 ,000 to feel like I had another option available to me, right? - True, but we both know that's rent and food for one month.
It just feels naive to say that. But so families are going month needed was enough to come and have someone that woul about her story is she h within is that she was parenting with the same partner.
She had been working full -time during her first pregnancy but she just had a $9 an hour job and she got a little bit of a raise a year later and suddenly that made the difference and I'm not trying to be dismissive because I recognize that parenting and poverty is an acute challenge as well as a chronic challenge for millions of American families.
But to me, the broader question then is how we are supporting all of our families that are living in poverty, so that people actually have the autonomy and control to make these choices in their lives.
And I'm not dismissive of those challenges, but I do think that that is a broader call. If we live in a world where parenting and poverty is not serving children well,
we should try to build a different world, right? Then we should be thinking more broadly about-- - How do we support families? - How do we support families, right? - Yes, in general,
yes. You get no argument there from me. - And I think when it comes to the mental health issues, there's one woman I interviewed, and I include her story at length who had postpartum psychosis.
- Yeah, but that's a little different. That's a short term. That felt different to me. That doesn't feel like that captures the reality of someone who is struggling with severe bipolar,
or schizophrenia, or substance abuse disorder, which is very common. - I think that for a lot of these questions, I have chosen to think less about the individual cases and more about these chronic systemic inequities that we allow to exist that then contribute to family separation.
And I think that that doesn't mean that every person is going to be able to parent any child at any point in their lives, right? And I don't want any child in an unsafe home with an unsafe parent.
But I do think that we need to recognize that these gaps in our social safety net and our system are allowing these families to fall through.
And I also think part of this question is, why is a permanent legal separation from family of origin the only way that we really envision of caring for children long -term?
- Well, it's not in the sense that the vast majority of children where a mom or dad is struggling with acute mental illness or substance abuse disorder, the child is being raised by relatives.
That is our social safety net, and it has been from time immemorial, and that's still the majority of how children in those situations are being raised. - Right,
and I think, well, we don't have ways of often supporting those families, right? So when you look at the ways that our foster care system differentially supports kinship and non -kinship placements,
who is able to access tax credits to support raising children that aren't their own, right? We've chosen to make deeper investments into private systems of adoption or public systems that are non -kinship placements,
right, that do remove children from their communities and fully from their families of origin. We have chosen to say that we are going to offer more support for families that take that path than families and communities that are trying to find places outside of immediate parents to care for children.
- Well, that's because the state then has not involved in fairness. On the other hand, I will say that the Family First Act, which passed in 2018, is supposed to address the issues between informal,
formal kinship care. Now it has not, and I've got a lot of beefs with how it's playing out because it requires licensure for foster care in order to get some of those. But nonetheless,
the last thing that I would say, taking a bit of umbrage against something, and this was not the focus of the book, it was when you talked about the adoption and safe families act, and it was passed way back in 1997,
and it's not the focus of your book because it's dealing with children in foster care and you were dealing with children who are not in foster care. However, you referred to it as fast -tracking termination of parental rights,
implying that that was the intent of the law, overlooking that if you'd researched the status and why that law came about, it's because kids were being raised in foster care,
period. It was almost impossible to terminate parental rights. And birth parents were given time and time again chances. That still happens now because when a child is reunified and then removed again because the reunification doesn't work,
the time clock starts again. However, and trust me, I have so many issues with adoption and say, Families Act. But the reality is it came into being because there needed to be,
birth parents could only be given so many chances. Again, I'm not sure that we've really succeeded in changing that, but in the interviews of kids who were being raised,
they had no chance of ever getting out. So it felt like rather than just talk about it as a fast track for terminating parental rights, again, it felt that that was a bit of a cheap shot.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but the problems it was trying to solve were huge and I guarantee in 25 years because we're shifting the other way substantially. Family First Prevention Act is doing that and I'm in favor of that but I guarantee in 25 years we will be back to realizing that kids are being raised in foster care and we've got to do something about it anyway.
Yeah I mean the intention of ASFA was to give children in stability faster, right? And the idea was that terminating parental rights was the best and really only way that that sort of stability could be achieved.
No, no, that's not true. They were trying to, there was some emphasis on reunification, but not enough and they weren't providing any financial supports to help for the reunification, which quite frankly continued,
which is one of my beasts with it. Yeah, but when I say it fast -tracked the termination of parental rights, I mean, it did narrow the window for the termination funnel, right? Supposedly around two years. Yeah.
So I think that the narrowing of that window without additional supports around reunification and with the simultaneous,
you know, the Clintonian welfare reform that sort of pulled the social safety net out for some of the more vulnerable families, like that was the impact that it had, was that parents who were losing children to foster care were not having the same amount of time.
Now, whether they were having too much time, but the effect was still the same that you did have more parents that were having their rights terminated faster. - True, but you have to weigh that too.
Again, it comes back to weighing child's rights and parents' rights. And I realized that Relinquish is focusing primarily on parents' rights. And that's fair. If for no other reason,
they're a demographic that we overlook. But I think we have to balance it with children's rights. And two years seems like a reasonable amount of time, not that in reality, two years is a very squishy.
- Yeah, I mean, I don't always see child's rights as usually exclusive from parents' rights. - I do, a world that never is. I see children as having the right to connection with their family of origin.
I see children as having the right to their own identity, right? And so the ongoing ceiling of birth certificates, the hiding of identities, the lack of openness.
I would agree with all of them. So I think that when you talk about this fast tracking, however we want to agree to refer to this process that enabled people to have their parental rights terminated on a quicker timeline,
whether or not that was a more appropriate timeline or not. I think that there are also violations that are encouraged by that. So when we talk about a child's right to stability and safety,
we also have to balance the child's right to that connection and identity to their family of origin that I don't think that ASFA accounted for sufficiently.
I would not disagree with you on that. Well, Dr. Gretchen Seisen, author of the book, "Relinquished the Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood," it is thought -provoking.
And those of us who care about children and care about adoptive parents and birth parents and foster and kinship parents, It's well worth the read and I thank you very much for your time and thank you for writing the book.
Thank you for having me. Before you leave, I want to tell you about a interactive training or support group curriculum that creating a family has developed for foster,
adoptive and kinship families. We have 25 curriculum. Each curriculum comes with a video, a facilitator guide, a handout, and an additional resource sheet.
It's ended to be turnkey, so you would have to do almost no prep. You can take it off of the digital shelf, run the video, and do a high quality training or support group.
So check it out at www .parentsupportgroups .org. That's parentsupportgroups .org.