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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.
“Adoption is often spoken of as an alternative to abortion, but is little examined for all its realities. Relinquished takes it on, and in so doing, contributes to our national understanding of what reproductive justice really means.”
— Gloria Steinem
“Meticulously and empathetically researched, Relinquished offers a close examination of motherhood in the United States by analyzing who is able to enjoy the privilege of mothering on their terms, who our society deems worthy of investment, as well as who continues to be excluded and marginalized. The stories of these women are gripping, intimate, and powerful.”
— Anna Malaika Tubbs, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation
“Sisson’s powerful, poignant research into the aftermath of adoption is a must-read in this era of staggering income inequality, escalating abortion bans and a non-existent social safety net. Relinquished confronts the question too many choose to ignore: “'What do ‘choice’ and ‘agency’ really mean, when the system has already whittled away all your options?’”
— Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
