Twisted Sisterhood

Erika Gonzales is a 30 year old birth mom from California. She is just over four years post-placement in an open adoption and she is here to be an ally for fellow birth moms and help normalize healthy, close relationships between birth parents & adoptive parents. In this episode we talk about the feeling of "not being in the club" when you have a healthy open adoption, classism in adoption, and what systems are in place that perpetuate the need for adoption to occur.

Our first ever non-birth mom guest is on this week! Stephie Predmore, an adoptive mom living in the middle of Illinois with her husband, daughter, and menagerie of cats and dogs. She is passionate about advocating for better adoption education and offers adoption advising for hopeful adoptive and adoptive parents. Stephie is a former ANLC client, the law center that was the focus of the TIME Magazine article that came out last week. Stephie came on this week to talk about what her process was while reading it and the days that followed, to come to terms with the ugly part of adoption and find her role in the fight for change.

Today, an article in TIME Magazine came out titled, "The Baby Brokers: Inside America’s Murky Private-Adoption Industry" and we took a deep dive into it. We go over the article top to bottom and help explain the ins and outs in a deep dive.

To read the article: https://time.com/6051811/private-adoption-america/

To watch the accompanying video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ijqNpSqswtM&feature=youtu.be

Today we are speaking to Chelsea Moore about the problems with how open adoption has been talked about and advertised. Chelsea is a birth mother, eight years post-placement in a semi open adoption. Her daughter is a transracial adoptee. She came to talk to us today to share what it's like to long for openness and her feelings about how agencies should be providing more transparency around the process, especially when it comes to creating openness plans that best suit the child. Chelsea hails from Texas, but now resides in Oregon.

We were thrilled to have the opportunity to interview Gretchen Sisson for today's episode. Gretchen Sisson is a sociologist who studies abortion and adoption in the United States. She is the author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with women who have relinquished infants for domestic adoption over the past 60 years. Gretchen is a researcher, a mom, an ally to birth mothers in the adoption community, and so much more. Posing challenging thoughts that society, and even our community, has long hesitated to ponder, we valued this conversation with Gretchen and of course, this incredible book. FIVE stars for Relinquished from the Twisted Sisterhood Podcast. We hope to keep this conversation rolling in our community!

More about Relinquished:

A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, Relinquished reveals 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.

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, qualitative sociological study, Relinquished is an analysis of hundreds of in-depth interviews with American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption collected over a decade. The voices of these women are powerful and heartrending; they deserve to be heard as a response to this moment.

You can purchase the book on Amazon, Bookshop, or your local bookseller! :)