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The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood
by Gretchen Sisson
A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, revealing the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real.
Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable. The stories of relinquishing mothers are stories about our country's refusal to care for families at the most basic level, and to instead embrace an individual, private solution to a large-scale, social problem.
With the recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization revoking abortion protections, we are in a political moment in which adoption is, increasingly, being revealed as an institution devoted to separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family-building. Rooted in a long-term study, Relinquished is an analysis of hundreds of in-depth interviews with American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption. The voices of these women are powerful and heartrending; they deserve to be heard.
"Sociologist Sisson's comprehensive and harrowing debut draws on a decade of interviews and archival research to argue that America's current discourse around adoption belies its insidious history of targeting vulnerable mothers and children....Throughout, Sisson foregrounds the stories of mothers who gave up their children for adoption, juxtaposing their personal monologues with sociological and historical research that highlights broader patterns in their testimonies. The result is a devastating and urgent condemnation of America's adoption industry." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Provocative, in-depth, and scholarly. For readers interested in the history of adoption." —Library Journal
"Impressively reported…[Sisson] uses her deep well of knowledge to make the case that adoption is no solution for Americans' reduced access to abortion." ―San Francisco Chronicle
"Contributes to our national understanding of what reproductive justice really means." —Gloria Steinem
"A compelling read, an important, thought-provoking book." —Arlie Hochschild, sociologist and author of Strangers In Their Own Land
"Meticulously and empathetically researched. The stories of these women are gripping, intimate, and powerful." —Anna Malaika Tubbs, sociologist and author of The Three Mothers
This information about Relinquished was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Gretchen Sisson, Ph.D., is a qualitative sociologist studying abortion and adoption at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at University of California, San Francisco. Her research was cited in the Supreme Court's dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and has been covered in the Washington Post, The Nation, All Things Considered and Consider This, New York Magazine, VOX, and other outlets.
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