Guest Episode: Gretchen Sisson, PhD

Twisted Sisterhood

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! :)