Relinquished
The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
WINNER, THE 2026 ADELE CLARK BOOK AWARD
FINALIST, NONFICTION, NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS, 2024
FINALIST, 2024 GODDARD RIVERSIDE STEPHAN RUSSO BOOK PRIZE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE
"Essential reading." —NPR “Books We Love”
“Dares to imagine a different world where Americans treat adoption like the justice issue it is.” ―Washington Post
“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
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 features the in-depth testimonies of American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption. The voices of these women are powerful and heartrending; they deserve to be heard.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. As Sisson points out, adoption remains one of the few bipartisan areas of political agreement: the left supports it as a means of building chosen families, while the right views it as a means of maintaining the nuclear family and curtailing abortion rates. Yet the reality, Sisson argues, is that the adoption industry has historically been predicated on state-sanctioned family separation. She traces America's long history of child removal, including the sale of children born into slavery, the forced assimilation of Native American children, and the conscription as farm laborers of children born to poor white mothers in the 19th century. She pinpoints the emergence of the modern adoption industry in the post-WWII "baby scoop" era, when unmarried women were coerced into relinquishing their children, and shows that today's private adoption industry continues in the tradition of separating disadvantaged families. 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.
