Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood - Paperback

by Gretchen Sisson (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Gretchen Sisson, Ph.D., is a qualitative sociologist studying abortion and adoption at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at University of California, San Francisco. Her research was cited in the Supreme Court's dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and has been covered in The Washington Post, The Nation, All Things Considered and Consider This, New York Magazine, VOX, and other outlets.