Adoption, Abortion, and the Politics of Parenting

It's a supersized episode of Boom! Lawyered with special guest Gretchen Sisson, author of the recently released book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. Sisson is also a qualitative sociologist and friend of the pod who studies abortion and adoption at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health based at the University of California, San Francisco.

Jess and Imani talk to Sisson about the complicated politics of adoption and abortion. She explains why adoption isn’t the answer to winnowing abortion access and why the conversations around abortion and adoption are overly simplistic. The decision faced by relinquishing mothers is not whether to adopt or have an abortion but whether to parent or not.

And poverty, unsurprisingly, plays a large role in any decision a pregnant person makes regarding parenting. The anti-abortion movement wants adoption to be an alternative to abortion, but it’s not.

“The idea that women are choosing between abortion and adoption is not borne out by the data at all,” Sisson said.

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