Some conversations are worth trudging through a blizzard for. In early February, when New York City was buried under a Bomb Cyclone, I made my way to the Church of the Ascension in Greenwich Village for a conversation I’d been wanting to have for a long time, with Rev. Alissa Newton, Canon to the Ordinary of the Archdiocese of New York, adoptive mom, founder of the Adoptive Parents 4 Adoptees Fund, and Board Chair of the Adoptee Mentoring Society, the nonprofit I founded and lead.

I have a soft spot for rooms where people in positions of institutional power choose to reckon honestly with a history they didn’t personally create but nonetheless inherited. That kind of accountability is its own form of courage. I knew Alissa would bring it.

And she did. But this evening was bigger than any one institution. It was a live book talk and wide-ranging conversation about adoption itself — what it means to be adopted, to search, to reunite, to grieve, to belong. We talked about race, identity, and the gap between how adoption is publicly celebrated and privately experienced. The Episcopal Church’s history was one important thread, but the room was full of people hungry to talk honestly about all of it.

This episode is a recording of that night.

What makes Alissa such a compelling conversation partner is that she knows the Church from the inside, its rhythms, its contradictions, its capacity for both harm and healing. She doesn't flinch from any of it. And for a conversation that required someone willing to examine an institution she loves, that mattered enormously.

Historians call the years between 1945 and 1973 the Baby Scoop Era. This is a time when an estimated 1.5 to 4 million unmarried women surrendered children for adoption. That number alone should stop us. Then add the research: young women sent away to maternity homes, shamed from pulpits, pressured by social workers, told that surrender was the only moral choice. Faith-based institutions, including the Episcopal Church, were not peripheral to this story. They were central infrastructure.

There were many powerful moments that evening, but one has stayed with me the way certain moments do. It came during the Q&A. Francine Gurtler stood up and asked Alissa to offer an apology on behalf of the Church. Then she told us why. Francine was fifteen years old when she was sent to an unwed mothers home, where she sobbed on the ground begging to keep her baby. “They literally took him from my arms,” she said. She found her son in 2017 through a DNA test, but reunion, as any adoptee or first mother will tell you, doesn’t erase the wound. What Francine wants is both simple and enormous: for the Church to say, to her son and grandchildren, “We stole him from her.”

The room went still. That moment said everything.

Francine is part of a growing movement of mothers pushing for something historic — a formal Episcopal apology that would make the Church the first U.S. institution to take that step. Two Canadian denominations have already done so, with Vancouver going further by creating counseling resources, a hotline, and a Mother’s Day blessing for mothers who lost children through coercion. An Episcopal apology would break new ground on this side of the border.

I left feeling hopeful and proud. Proud that Francine came and was met with the grace she deserved, someone willing to sit in the discomfort of history without flinching. Because the Church cannot celebrate adoption on Sunday and archive its maternity home records on Monday. That's not repair. That's performance. Francine didn't come for performance. She came for the truth. And that night, at least, she got closer to it.

I hope you enjoy the episode.

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