What are your thoughts about that?

Yeah, there's not, and people have asked me like, to what extent adopt, adopted people are themselves more likely to relinquish, to become birth parents as well.

There's not good hard quantitative data on this, but I will say that within my sample, adopted people were dramatically overrepresented.

I think up to a third of the mothers that I interviewed were either private adoption adoptees, had spent time in foster care or foster care adoptions, A few step-parent adoptions, which I think is fairly qualitatively different, but at least had that experience.

A number of international, transnational adoptees in that group of mothers that I interviewed.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this.

One is that, you know, for adopted people, adoption is just more salient, right? They just sort of felt alone.

Is there anything you want to add to your writing process? Like how you go about it? Like you just mentioned getting up and...

But

click on that ad and you see this profile of this amazing couple that wants to adopt.

And you are struggling to find stable housing.

And here's a picture of their beautiful home.

And you don't really want to co-parent with this person because you don't think that they would be a safe co-parent or you don't think they'd be a reliable co-parent.

And here are the wedding pictures for this beautiful couple that wants to adopt.

And your own parents aren't really supportive.

I hate even talking about it just casually because it is so devastating.

What changes should adoptive parents or prospective adoptive parents advocate for to help make the system work better for them and make it more ethical?

I don't have a lot of clear answers for people who want to adopt, except that I think that you owe yourselves and you owe your potential future child your own willingness to engage deeply with these questions, because that's what parenthood is.

Part of addressing the injustices in the system is in reducing demand, 'cause you have these players that are incentivized to separate babies from their mothers.

Because most couples who adopt want to conceive, try to get pregnant before they turn to adoption, we should actually give them more paths to do so, right? To ena- you know, to make sure that infertility treatments are accessible, affordable, covered by insurance, to educate people more about their fertility and how it changes earlier in their lives.

Um, if we made sex education not just about, you know, scaring young people about pregnancy, if we made it about actually understanding how your body works, how fertility changes, um, how to be prepared for those things, then we could potentially reduce some of that demand.

And anything that reduces the demand for adoption is likely to then release some of the pressure and the profit incentives that, that follow.We always need more people to want to care for children, even if we don't necessarily need more people to adopt through the private system.

So if we could value types of caring for children, types of relationships with children that aren't necessarily about parenting, you know, now we're talking about a very broad cultural shift in how we think about the value of connections between children and their biological families.

There was one quote that I pulled from the book from, uh, one of the participants, Erica, and she said, "I just wish that adoptive families would understand that their happiness and their joy and their life in this child, there's another woman who has grief in that, and how do you balance that juxtaposition?" Um, I found her story to be really compelling, and I'm, I'm curious if there were any stories that were, that, like, stood out to you amongst the folks you talked to.

I know it is, yeah.

After...

So, so after Roe v.

Wade, um, and as the norms around parenting changed, uh, as I mentioned, you really saw a pretty significant drop in the numbers of domestic infant adoptions in the United States.

So those numbers dropped pretty dramatically.

Um, because adoption is really a demand-driven system, where you have more people who want to adopt privately than you have children available for private adoption, that meant that if the supply of children...

And I'm, I'm using these market terms intentionally, be-...

Um, what did they tell you about why they wanted to relinquish their children and did you talk to them 10 years later?

Mm-hmm.

... to the orphan trains which shipped children from East Coast cities towards the Midwest.

I think that you can see these patterns in why children are separated from families, and there are a lot of different historical reasons rooted in control, extraction of social obedience, genocide, assimilation, and poverty that have led to these family separations.

If you were a poor woman who had more children than you had capacity to care for in, say, the 1800s, you might send your child to what was called a baby farm where you would actually pay someone to care for your baby.

There was not a market demand for that baby in a specific way.

This would be just a way of providing sort of this very untenable level of care if, if you were not in a financial situation to raise another child.

It wasn't until the early 20th century that a real market demand for children developed that shaped the way we practice adoption today.

Uh, in your research, Gretchen, did you encounter people like Victoria?